Poetry International Poetry International
Article

Editorial: August 2007

July 30, 2007
Publishing his first issue with us is Portugal’s new editor, Luis Miguel Quierós who takes over from Richard Zenith. He’s chosen to couple a young contemporary poet, Rui Pires Cabral, with a classic twentieth-century one, Jorge de Sena. Both poets bear witness to the world around them, reporting on daily life; in so doing, Sena’s work ran counter to the main movement of his day, which had built up around the Presença magazine and was concerned with the emerging discipline of psychology. Cabral, on the other hand, has swum with the current in his homeland, where poetry influenced by British, American and Spanish writing, drawing on urban existence and using registers more typically found in prose is becoming more and more popular. What I personally find most interesting in Cabral’s work is the way he hits on the intangible by observing how foreign cities affect the self. In ‘Polish Restaurant’ he writes, “there is something beyond words/ that resists deciphering” and ends with, “what we call reality/ heads off with us in the same direction.” Being in a strange place allows us to both see ourselves anew and to take measure of otherness, albeit an otherness that is forever escaping our grasp.
Perhaps  Jorge de Sena might have found some reassurance in Rui Pires Cabral’s work. A melancholic poet eternally worried about his own reception, he wrote:

Only very timidly, in the empty hours, will he read me,
in disguise from everyone and from himself,
curious, that fellow who dares suspect
how truly poetry is still a disguise for life.
(‘Postscript’)

One man’s “disguise for life” can be another man’s solace and inspiration. Australian poet, Bruce Beaver, paying homage to Adrienne Rich, writes:

Thank you for writing
out of your marrow. It has made
my own brittle bones respond
as words that keep the watches of your night.
(‘Poems for Adrienne Rich II’)

Bruce Beaver  and Peter Boyle are the new poet’s in this month’s massive Australian offering. Editor Michael Brennan gives the best introduction to the new material: “from knife fights to cross-dressing, travel notes to ancient prophecies, mythical lands to suburban fences, ruined cities of yore and last year, from Atlantis to Baghdad, Châtelet to Lovina, Manly to Alexandria. This issue draws from the antipodes of outer space and the ancient past and many elsewheres between, casting up a sense of the robust heart of the Australian sprawl.” There’s also a tribute to Noel Rowe who died last month, as well as additional poems on his poet page.

Michael Brennan mentions Australia’s “elsewheres” and this is a theme that has been picked up by Moniza Alvi for the new UK pages. Chosing three poets “from elsewhere” – born outside of the UK, specifically in Bangladesh, Iraqi Kurdistan and Poland, she explains, “their writing confidently explodes ideas about poetry we might entertain in Britain, for instance that it should necessarily be ironic and understated, or that it should avoid the overtly political”. These poets who import new flavours to the literary canon, all challenge the state, and describe social unrest in a multicultural Britain. In ‘Think About It” – “every one of us came here for a reason” says  Maria JastrzębskaMir Mahfuz Ali describes neighbourhood prejudice in ‘My Daughter Waits by the Door’ and in Nazand Begikhani’s ‘At a Happiness Symposium in Wales’ we read:

I am happy to be alive, my friend
After
Halabja and Anfal
I am happy to become the voice
of a land
that contains the mass graves of our brothers


Belgium features two (dead) poets born in the 1930s,  Paul Snoek and Hugues C. Pernath. Together with Gust Gils, they were the driving forces behind the magazine gard-sivik and pivotal figures in the second experimental generation in Flanders. The chosen feature from Pernath is one of his bleaker cycles, ‘The Ten Poems of Solitude’ which begins, “In the loveless landscape of my solitude,” and ends, “I will live on/ In the scourge of those sun-signs where I belong.” In ‘Memoirs’, Paul Snoek shares the mood but elsewhere he is cheerier, crafting beautiful metaphors like “the day broke open like an oyster shell”, arguing that swimming makes you a little bit holy and wondering why he “melts silver in his poems”.

The poetry in this issue offers escapes, disguises, solaces, political challenges, melancholy and a little bit of magic. Enjoy.
© Michele Hutchison
Sponsors
Gemeente Rotterdam
Nederlands Letterenfonds
Stichting Van Beuningen Peterich-fonds
Prins Bernhard cultuurfonds
Lira fonds
Versopolis
J.E. Jurriaanse
Gefinancierd door de Europese Unie
Elise Mathilde Fonds
Stichting Verzameling van Wijngaarden-Boot
Veerhuis
VDM
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère