Editorial: August 2005

January 18, 2006 Not only revered as Israel’s national poet and its foremost modern author, {id="3163" title="Chaim Nachman Bialik"} (1873-1934) is actually to this day also one of the most popular poets in Israel, still widely read and passionately discussed – a fate not always reserved for literary giants from the past. From his scathing attacks on traditionalist attitudes ("I’ll join you, old cronies!/ Together we’ll rot till we stink.") to his meditations on loneliness, love and pain ("Afterwards, terrible nights./ No respite, no sleep."), it is not difficult to see why. In the {id="3079" title="words"} of translator Ruth Nevo, "It is the personal Bialik who is admired today, the poet of the inner life, of tension and duality and loss, of ambivalent love-hate for self, people, God and love itself, of the alienated individual’s confrontation with a cosmic emptiness."

Belonging to the ‘younger generation’ of Italian poets, {id="3539" title="Andrea Inglese"} is grappling with a somewhat different concept of modernity. "The most difficult task today for those who have intellectual aspirations, even minimal ones," he writes, "is that of not being predictable in the form and content of one’s discourse. And the only way to emphasize this unpredictability seems to me to face up to one’s living, incarnated subjectivity (…) Try to stand up to one’s experience, see what it can tell us beyond intellectual, philosophical discourse." In his poetry, Inglese engages with key philosophical issues, like the tension between subjectivity and the ambiguous nature of perception and reality, yet never neglecting the particulars of everyday existence:

This I have understood. I have educated myself anew
to weigh everything and with increasingly precise
scales. And I also perceive a needle
of rosemary, now, on the palm of my hand.

Colombia presents three poets from three different generations this month. The youngest of these is {id="1278" title="Lucía Estrada"} (1980), a promising new voice. Although not formally experimental, her poetry is strongly inspired by surrealism, as well as by the great German romanticists Novalis and Hölderlin. {id="1269" title="Fernando Rendón"}, founder and director of the International Poetry Festival of Medellín and of poetry magazine Prometeo, and editor of the Colombian pages of PIW, writes to "rise against the call of gangrene" in his torn country. Novelist, poet and painter {id="1272" title="Héctor Rojas Herazo"} belongs to that generation of great Latin American writers that also produced Gabriel García Márquez. Addressing the great questions about man, solitude and death, Herazo’s work gives one the sense, wrote Márquez, "of having chewed rubble, of having seen the defeat before our eyes of the strengths that were made adverse to man by original sin".

In what regrettably might be the last issue of the Australian magazine for some time, editor Michael Brennan has chosen to update the existing pages of J.S. Harry, Chris Edwards, Noel Rowe, MTC Cronin and Vivian Smith, with a substantial selection from each poet. "Art might be the most beautiful lies as Mark Twain said, but some things are truer than others," {id="687" title="Vivian Smith"} once said about his endeavour to write poetry that is "absolutely true and genuine – written from the heart as they say". This uncompromising commitment to "truth and honesty in writing" speaks clearly from the work presented here, which includes a remarkable series of translations, ‘Poems After Paul Celan’: "It is time that the stone condescended to bloom,/ that unrest inspired a heart to beat./ It is time that it became time."

Varied as always, the new Australian issue also contains {id="667" title="Chris Edwards"}’ key ‘sci-fi’ poem ‘bio’, together with several other samples of his works of ‘(mis)quotation’; {id="682" title="MTC Cronin"} enlightens us on ‘The Specifics of Love’; and {id="683" title="Noel Rowe"} presents us with his elegiac view of "habits shaped/ for thirty-six years of marriage". And finally, we are delighted – in fact, positively cheered – to be able to bring you several more dispatches by {id="671" title="J.S. Harry"} from the rabbit-centered universe of Peter Henri Lepus:

The trunk is covered by the writing
which is on white paper and easy to read.
What it signifies he had no idea
but he likes to run questioningly to & fro
& nibble on a sentence’s
"possible meanings".
Some of it will sink in
in time he thinks . . .
He is older, now, than he was
when those poems were written.
It is later now than it was then, whenever then was.

Between one lines & another there is white


space, between one live trunk & another,
there is an opening . . .