Article
Editorial: April 2007
March 26, 2007
This month’s material from Zimbabwe features three promising young female poets, Joyce Chigiya, Ethel Irine Kabwato and Zvisinei Sandi. In her excellent accompanying essay, Megan Allardice contrasts the life of these women who have professional careers alongside writing poetry and are confronted with violence and extreme poverty on a daily basis, with that of Emily Dickinson, a poet who chose to confine herself to her room. I was intrigued by Joyce Chigiya’s poem ‘Knock Knock’:
Come what may, I will not open that window
to see who desires my company, so desperately
they have to pound continually at the fragile glass pane
I’d rather blow out the candle, seek solace in darkness
give myself temporary invisibility
save for the tiny ember of the sandalwood-scented repellent
glowing like a laser beam, a red eye on this black giant
keeping the winged parasites in check, silencing them mid-song
they have been humming all the way to their blood bank
I think I am going to faint
if only I could use the machete.
Dickinson’s room was somewhat safer, you’ll find no machetes in her verses and I imagine her mosquitoes would be less threatening.
The Japanese poet, Masayo Koike’s works do recall Emily Dickinson by focussing on the experience of the smallest details of the outside world and their effect upon the observer. Leith Morton writes of translating her, “To translate these poems into English has required creation of a voice that is no less compact, no less powerful in its slow deliberate rhythms than Koike’s own Japanese voice.”
Finally from the end of the alley in which I find myself
The cry of a newborn baby as if a lid has been removed
A hot July day
The day on which I was born
Sprinkled water glistens on the road
(‘Alley’)
Whether you chose to confine yourself to your room or not, you can visit all four corners of the globe in April's PIW. Enjoy the trip. N.B. Portugal are not publishing in this issue as country editor, Richard Zenith, has left due to family commitments. A new editor is currently being sought.
In this issue, discover three new poets from Colombia – the young Giovanny Gómez, and two elder statesmen (or in the latter case, stateswoman), Henry Luque and Meira Delmar. It is worth making a special trip to those pages for Delmar’s beautiful ‘Ten Winged Haikus’ alone, it begins:
1. White handkerchiefs –
four seagulls say
goodbye to the sky.
2. To see the dawn
by the scale of the song
the lark ascends.
Twenty-eight year-old Gómez is a brilliant young talent. In his introductory piece, William Ospina writes that for this poet, “language is a device to modify the world” (as opposed to reflect or replicate it). I was struck by the way in which the poet struggles to tame language and mould it to his purposes, seeking for example, “a word that has the shape of a ship” and in which he can set out to explore. Despite its slipperiness, and in a way because of its slipperiness, he uses language to create possible new worlds – skilfully using personification and inversion in such lines as: “There are days that wake up too early for me,”(‘A Yellow Noise at Dawn’), “The times the river left its shores/ and ran naked after the wind” (‘Habit’).
A young contemporary of Gómez’s is Dmytro Lazutkin from Ukraine. Also manifesting as a performance poet named Lazutchyk, he has conquered the hearts of his countrymen. Bohdana Matiash writes an accompanying essay, ‘Lazutkin as Lazutkin as Lazutkin - Traces Remain’ which takes a post-structuralist approach to his work. She describes his work as “poetry of quick love and untamable desire”. She also places Lazutkin as a provocateur, the function of his poetry being to question other poetry rather than have aesthetic value. A second lively article by Artem Antoniuk looks at the poet as a performer and slam artist.This month’s material from Zimbabwe features three promising young female poets, Joyce Chigiya, Ethel Irine Kabwato and Zvisinei Sandi. In her excellent accompanying essay, Megan Allardice contrasts the life of these women who have professional careers alongside writing poetry and are confronted with violence and extreme poverty on a daily basis, with that of Emily Dickinson, a poet who chose to confine herself to her room. I was intrigued by Joyce Chigiya’s poem ‘Knock Knock’:
Come what may, I will not open that window
to see who desires my company, so desperately
they have to pound continually at the fragile glass pane
I’d rather blow out the candle, seek solace in darkness
give myself temporary invisibility
save for the tiny ember of the sandalwood-scented repellent
glowing like a laser beam, a red eye on this black giant
keeping the winged parasites in check, silencing them mid-song
they have been humming all the way to their blood bank
I think I am going to faint
if only I could use the machete.
Dickinson’s room was somewhat safer, you’ll find no machetes in her verses and I imagine her mosquitoes would be less threatening.
The Japanese poet, Masayo Koike’s works do recall Emily Dickinson by focussing on the experience of the smallest details of the outside world and their effect upon the observer. Leith Morton writes of translating her, “To translate these poems into English has required creation of a voice that is no less compact, no less powerful in its slow deliberate rhythms than Koike’s own Japanese voice.”
Finally from the end of the alley in which I find myself
The cry of a newborn baby as if a lid has been removed
A hot July day
The day on which I was born
Sprinkled water glistens on the road
(‘Alley’)
Whether you chose to confine yourself to your room or not, you can visit all four corners of the globe in April's PIW. Enjoy the trip. N.B. Portugal are not publishing in this issue as country editor, Richard Zenith, has left due to family commitments. A new editor is currently being sought.
© Michele Hutchison
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