Article
Editorial: 15 November, 2003
January 18, 2006
That human wretch
With swollen legs,
Who sleeps in the street
Near my house.
Then, Australian poet {id="383" title="John Tranter"}, in addition to providing an amusing commentary on the literary life in New York, reveals to us in his Poets’ diary why New Yorkers are so "loudly unique" – and uniquely loud: "Like sugar in all the food, talking to strangers, and not bothering to vote, it comes with the territory."
There cannot be a big poem and total harmony. It is better
not to speak, but swim in silence when approaching total harmony.
Words are useless then.
The impossibility of language, and of poetry in particular, to convey what matters most, is a recurring theme in the work of {id="5046" title="Uros Zupan"}, the new Slovenian poet of the quarter. Especially in the face of love, one of Zupan’s main subjects, the poet finds himself reduced to babbling, or so he claims:
(-)With love
it is the same as with a catastrophe. It transcends speech. We
are left with babbling and hawking when we find ourselves
in the grip of its power.
Of course, Zupan is actually unusually eloquent when writing of love. Whether he talks about past loves, his house, the literary life or valium, he does so in the same intimate, casual, parlando tone of voice, which gives us the feeling, perhaps unwarranted, that we’ve come to know him quite well.
"I make mirrors:/ To horror I add more horror. / To beauty more beauty." Yet another apt description of the poet’s trade comes from Juan Manuel Roca this week, one of Colombia’s two exciting new poets of the quarter, and an award-winning journalist and short-story writer, as well as a much-lauded poet.
His colleague Nicolás Suescún describes the other face of the coin: "they taught me words/ and they advised me to close my mouth/ unless it were to repeat that already repeated", in {id="1637" title="‘The Things I Have Been Hiding’"}. If anything, however, underground cult hero Suescún appears to be doing just the opposite of this. The poet sees himself reflected in a {id="1641" title="man his own age"}, {id="1643" title="a bum"}, his {id="1631" title="father"}, in occasionally surreal poems that manage to raise deep questions about the progress of time, identity and just what separates him from That human wretch
With swollen legs,
Who sleeps in the street
Near my house.
Then, Australian poet {id="383" title="John Tranter"}, in addition to providing an amusing commentary on the literary life in New York, reveals to us in his Poets’ diary why New Yorkers are so "loudly unique" – and uniquely loud: "Like sugar in all the food, talking to strangers, and not bothering to vote, it comes with the territory."
There cannot be a big poem and total harmony. It is better
not to speak, but swim in silence when approaching total harmony.
Words are useless then.
The impossibility of language, and of poetry in particular, to convey what matters most, is a recurring theme in the work of {id="5046" title="Uros Zupan"}, the new Slovenian poet of the quarter. Especially in the face of love, one of Zupan’s main subjects, the poet finds himself reduced to babbling, or so he claims:
(-)With love
it is the same as with a catastrophe. It transcends speech. We
are left with babbling and hawking when we find ourselves
in the grip of its power.
Of course, Zupan is actually unusually eloquent when writing of love. Whether he talks about past loves, his house, the literary life or valium, he does so in the same intimate, casual, parlando tone of voice, which gives us the feeling, perhaps unwarranted, that we’ve come to know him quite well.
© Corine Vloet
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