Editorial: August 2004

January 18, 2006 The new batch of {id="141" title="Camera Poetica"} films, short poetry clips of poets reading their work, has finally been digitalised! Thirteen clips from the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam 2003 have now been made available on PIW, and in the coming months we intend to bring you more footage from the 2004 festival.

One of the poets now available on film also happens to be one of the new poets in the Indian Magazine this month, renowned Hindi poet {id="2724" title="Kedarnath Singh"}. In view of this happy coincidence, we’ve chosen the footage of Singh reading ‘Words Don’t Die of Cold’ as the first short film to be featured on PIW as poetry clip of the month.

But Singh is not the only poet published in the Indian Magazine this month. Poetry from Keralan writer {id="2723" title="K. Satchidanandan"}, one of the pioneers of the New Poetry in Malayalam, and the work of {id="2720" title="Imtiaz Dharker"}, who was born in Lahore, grew up in Glasgow, lives in London and Mumbai and writes in English, can also be found in the new issue. The work of each poet is accompanied by several essays, interviews and background articles.

I’m the voice of the one
shouting at concerts
who wants to overcome the loud quietness
of the slow-motion idiots, of the dust in the making.
I know, the fight against dust is useless
but my area is the impossible.

These lines, from {id="1965" title="Sentimental Voice of the Prophet"}, characterize new Croatian poet {id="1758" title="Milko Valent"}. Provocation is a constant theme in the work of Valent, a prolific author who has published 21 volumes in many genres since 1976. As is usual in the Croatian magazine on PIW, the work of this established author is contrasted with another voice entirely from the Croatian literary scene, that of young poet and playwright {id="1754" title="Dorta Jagic´"}, who represents a new sensibility in Croatian poetry.

“A woman of Renaissance-scope talent,” is what critic Vitaly Chernetsky calls the new Ukrainian poet this month, {id="5524" title="Oksana Zabuzhko"}. A philosopher, novelist and poet, she was once considered the enfant terrible or femme fatale of contemporary Ukrainian letters, but is now widely hailed as an unusually versatile and accomplished writer. Single- handedly drawing wide public attention to literature in the Ukraine, she is also “responsible (…) for an unparalleled revitalization of feminist consciousness in Ukraine and a recognition of the close ties between the personal and the political traumas and struggles of Ukrainians, both men and women,” writes Chernetsky. And, although he is not new to our site, Ukrainian poet {id="5528" title="Yuri Andrukhovych"}provides us with a special première this month: the advance publication of five poems from his forthcoming collection Songs For the Dead Rooster, scheduled for publication in Ukrainian in 2005.

Last but not least, two new poets also from Israel, and even more articles, reviews and essays than usual, including a recent article on a {id="3075" title="Hebrew-Arabic poetry workshop"}, and a background piece on why {id="3117" title="Palestinian Literature Vanished on the Way to the Classroom"}.

New Israeli poet {id="3165" title="Dvora Amir"} once said about her own work: “It is difficult to describe the poems. They write themselves and are simple, I hope.” That seems to be an understatement for the “lifesaving act" she performs:

What creates poetry, you ask
and I, like the coal man in the Basque movie,
run to brace the tumbling stack of coal.
We’re talking about a lifesaving act, I say,
the courage to touch the heat collapsing.

As Maya Bejerano writes in her {id="3077" title="essay"} on the poet, her work is “a brave effort to deal with the ethical problem of maintaining our humanity in a cruel world without losing faith in poetry and in words, and moreover, without losing faith that words and poetry have a role in defending that humanity, as well as defending existential reality.”

Let us conclude with the words of Arab-Israeli poet, scholar and critic {id="3177" title="Salman Masalha"} who, having written five books of poetry in Arabic, published his first volume of poetry written in Hebrew towards the end of last year, to huge critical acclaim. In his poem {id="3456" title="I Write Hebrew"} he states:

I write in the Hebrew language
which is not my mother tongue, to
lose myself in the world. He who doesn’t
get lost, will never find the whole.