Editorial: 19 February, 2003

January 18, 2006 Until now, no substantial selection of Lü De’an’s work has appeared in English, or in any other Western language, for that matter. {id="969" title="Lü De’an"}, who describes himself as "a happy poet", and who started writing after falling in love, is a challenging yet rewarding author. Poetry, he said in a recent {id="949" title="interview"}, is "that form of writing most capable of providing a motion internal to language", and fluidity, both in terms of water imagery and the flow of his ideas, characterizes his work. Lü De’an’s lines, "(...) like/ the being fallen raindrop-wise from the heavens" turn into poems "(...) both lean and lengthened, now bright, now dark,/ every interval in it/ resembling the tiny conclusions in the meanings of language."

Well-established German poet {id="2213" title="Gerhard Falkner"} has steadily been building an impressive poetic oeuvre since his highly acclaimed debut, so beginnen am körper die tage. Being concerned in his work with the estrangement and disappearance of the poet, he took this preoccupation to its logical conclusion in 1989, and announced he would write no more poetry. Luckily for us, he revoked this decision in 1995, so that the German magazine of PIW can now present a selection containing several recent poems.

Furthermore, we are proud to announce that on March 17, a new magazine for Israel will be added to PIW.

Meanwhile, what started off as a few individual, disconnected voices using poetry to speak out against war in Iraq has grown into a deafening chorus of poetic protest. Initiatives like {id="254" title="100 Poets against the war"} or {id="281" title="Poets Against the War"} have mushroomed beyond their founders’ wildest expectations. Yet, as if to show that not all poets share the same political views, sites like {id="324" title="Poets for the war"} have also sprung up. Not since the 1960s have we seen such an active and vociferous poetic engagement with current issues and politics. Poetry has once again descended from its ivory tower – if it was ever up there in the first place.