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Editorial: November 2006

October 30, 2006

Continuing our ambition to expand on extras, November’s magazine features some fascinating essays and an audio file as well as new poets and poetry. For the Australian pages, Michael Brennan has chosen an essay by Chris Edwards whose poems are already on the site. The poet explains his (deliberate) mis-translation or rewriting of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Des. Edwards says, “translation, even in the hands of a master, never abolishes shipwreck. I decided to go with the flow. I decided to celebrate shipwreck, and found myself embarking on a mish-mash of approaches, or, to put it in pseudo-technical terms, engaging in a variety of transformational logics.” There is also an interview with the previously featured Vivian Smith, an obituary of Lisa Bellear and new poetry from the brilliant David Brooks, co-editor of Australia’s oldest literary journal, Southerly.

The editor of the Indian pages, poet Arundhathi Subramanian, spent October touring the UK at the invitation of the Poetry Society. On 18th October, there was a special event about PIW magazine in which Jules Mann, Andrew Bailey, Arundhathi, translator Anne Born and myself discussed the issues surrounding the best representation of national poetry in this international forum. The discussion was recorded and will be available to download from the UK pages shortly. Meanwhile, there is an audio file of Arundhathi reading one of her poems, the striking ‘To The Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian’.

The new UK issue features four prose poets and an introductory essay by guest editor, Nikki Santilli. Alan Halsey, Andy Brown, Cecil Helman, and Vahni Capildeo demonstrate how versatile and exciting the sub-genre can be. Santilli’s essay, “The Prose Poem in Great Britain” helpfully surveys the field and its historical antecedents.

We also meet two new poets from Belgium: pig farmer, Charles Ducal, and classic poet, Richard Minne (1891-1965). Short poems seem to be enjoying a revival at the moment, there is a fashion for snapshot views of the world (as demonstrated by the Chinese poetry from our last issue) but Minne also enjoyed employing the impact of brevity. Here is his poem ‘Melancholy’:

A fool or a genius I wanted to be
Now I’m something in between.
Hence the eternal hopeful waiting
and the outcome : melancholy.

I hope in due time we can add more of Minne’s poems to the short selection here, his range is quite wide, from his agricultural “Gardener’s Poems” to sonnets and traditional rhyming verse. Ducal’s modern poems, ostensibly about swine but, like Animal Farm, more about mankind, contrast rather nicely.

The fourth and final country in this issue is Israel. The three new poets are Ayman Agbaria, Dorit Weisman, Nawal Naffaa', and the accompanying material comprises of an essay on the anthology accompanying the 7th Jerusalem poetry festival which has taken place over the last few days; two articles on Dorit Weisman, and a short piece about Agbaria’s poem ‘Why Did They Select Us To Be Their Victims?’ which I quote from here:

Yet we will write our story as we wish
Half the truth is for us
And half the lie is for them.
We will elaborate where nature permits
And we will curtail where there is grass to cover
We will tell their story as we would like to remember ourselves:
Victims facing ascendancy

Enjoy!