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Editorial: July 2007

July 02, 2007
June was a rollercoaster month for us and we hope our readers enjoyed following coverage of this year’s Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam on the site. If you missed it, don’t worry. You’ll find audio and video files archived in the Festival section. In that section there are also photographs and our continuing weblog on Poetry and Performance (I urge you to add your own comments and enliven the debate: visit the link media.poetryinternational.org/weblog). During the festival I interviewed Nuno Júdice from Portugal, and Jules Mann interviewed Paul Bogaert from Belgium, the audio files of these will be added shortly. The Chinese Whispers project in which a poem by Rogi Wieg was translated into a new language daily is available on his poet’s page, along with an interview with Rogi about the chosen poem. But moving on to July, where you’ll find diverse and interesting poetry from Colombia, Japan, Italy and Croatia.
This month sees the final issue from Italy (for the time being - potential new sponsors please contact us!) and as his parting shot, editor Roberto Baronti Marchiò  reveals to us his own poetic talents which are not inconsiderable. Gabriele Poole’s skilful translations render his crystalline poetry into English versions which work in their own right. Indeed, thematically, they make interesting comparison with recent poets on the British and Australian pages whose use of nature gives a Romantic theme a contemporary twist. In ‘Foam’, he writes:

If only I could live like this
foam of the waves,
I would leave the stone
to wear away in the water.

Heavenly bound I would wallow
seaweeds and mollusks
and with crooked fingers cast myself
on the reeds that root on the shore.

On the poet page, Saverio Tomaiulo describes Roberto Baronti Marchiò as having a great capacity to absorb influence (from contemporary Italian poets and modern English classics such as Pound and Auden) but I don’t feel that this lessons the power of his verse. His meditations on mortality in ‘For a Dying Poet’ in which death has “a precise size” and “thin walls”, and in ‘Statistics’ in which he writes “I’ve always dreaded statistics…/ than mean with that absolute mean deviation/ we can calculate death” are fresh and tangible.

Baronti’s geometrising of existence is shared by Japanese poet Ryuichi Tamura, see the poem ‘A Visionary I’:

For the small bird to fall, there has to be some height
There must be something that is shut tight
for the scream to be heard

Just as there is the small dead bird in the field, death fills my mind
Just as death occupies my mind, no one is at any window in the world.

Ryuichi Tamura is regarded as one of the most important Japanese post-war poets and was at the forefront of a new generation called The Waste Land poets, “rising up out of the rubble” of the second world war, as Takako Lento puts it. In ‘The World With No Words’, this poem with 13 verses combines oriental precision and conciseness with a Modernist outlook. I’m reminded of his contemporary, Wallace Stevens.

Colombia invites us to read the works of three poets – Carlos Bedoya, Álvaro Marín and Maruja Vieira. As usual from this country, the three poets are wildy different in their style and preoccupations, from Bedoya’s witty titles such as ‘Mailbox of Death’ and ‘Email to the Infinite’, to Marín’s narrative poetry, to Vieira’s more traditional verse (see ‘Remembering a Grandfather’, one of my favourites here). There’s also an interview with Fernando Rendón about the Medellín Poetry Festival and it’s miraculous existence within a conflict zone.

The fourth country to feature is Croatia with the poet Krešimir Bagić, a well-published poet whom mid-career shows a great deal of humour and a collection of unusual thoughts (“Jacques Chirac and I enjoy the same yoghurt” for example).

Enjoy this summer reading.
© Michele Hutchison
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