Artikel
Editorial: October 2008
23 september 2008
I can see the gravity and tragedy
of every trip to the newsagent’s, to the baker’s
of the shaking of hands
a farewell that sends one person into an office block
and the other walking off to one side
which makes this morning worse
worse as in further away from what I’ve written
further as in finished speaking
and in need of the first glass of wine.
The appeal of many of Baeke’s poems lies in the fact that although his language may seem simple, the world it presents is unstable: the reader latches onto images, often without ever quite being able to grasp one cohesive narrative. Indeed, in the poem ‘To Have That’, the narrator seems to share the reader’s own struggle for meaning: “What the hell is going on here / I shout”. Of his own work, Baeke notes, “The various sentences and stanzas in my poems have transitions that resemble the cuts in films. As a reader, you yourself are responsible for making the link between the various images.”
The airiness created by cinematic ‘cuts’ is also extremely prominent in Mari Kashiwagi’s poem ‘Nectar’s root as far as its Resonance reaches’, which is composed of a series of thematically interlinked short poems, separated from each other by a lot of white space. ‘Nectar’s Root’ is a wonderful example of how verse can be sparse, abstract and elusive in meaning, yet also rich, sensual, and, of course, very visual. It’s exciting to publish this poem online, not only because we can include an audio file of Mari Kashiwagi reading the poem, but also because scrolling down the webpage to experience the combination of vertical text and space is very different to turning the pages of a book, and far more akin to the way of reading a Japanese emaki. The words disappear from our sight after we have read them, and the ‘breathing space’ between each fragment, which paradoxically serves to unify the organic, elemental imagery of the whole, is experienced temporally as well as visually.
Four Colombian poets are featured this month. Gonzalo Márquez Cristo’s verse fights through what Marco Antonio Campos in his introduction terms “the fatal fog”, searching for clarity in both inner and outer landscapes. In ‘The Earth’s Appointment’, the narrator reflects, “I don’t know how much more I must lose for the poem to be revealed to me”. In her poem ‘Abelard and Heloise’, Orietta Lozano also reflects on the way absence can bring clarity:
She said: do not give me anything,
just forget me,
because in oblivion
is the essence of memory,
of the beginning
Wayuu-language poet Vito Apüshana echoes this concept in his creation-myth poem ‘The Beginning’. It is from “a giant / and fertile silence” that sound, speech and thought flow – without the initial white space, nothing can be created.
One of my favourite poems this month is ‘Cherries and Hail’ by Ramón Cote Baraibar. Ostensibly a description of children gathering fallen, unripe cherries after a hailstorm, the poem bristles with political undertones and a subtle, violent beauty. Although the poem’s imagery is blood-spattered – the park looks like “the wedding dress of a stabbed bride”, the hail is “slowly stained with red”, “the glass snow” cuts the children’s lips, and the “frozen cherries” taste “of vengeance” – blood is directly mentioned only in the final line, and even then metaphorically: “their memory, bleeding, recalling all of that”. An accurate and insightful portrayal of the way memory works, the childhood recollection of the fallen cherries becomes a cipher for the unspoken events of that same week when “everything happened”.
In this month’s Zimbabwe issue, editor Irene Staunton presents work written by eight poets in response to the turbulent election period in the country earlier this year – a time of disappointed hopes, fear, sadness, anger and death. The device employed by Ramón Cote Baraibar in ‘Cherries and Hail’ – that of using a seemingly simple and peaceful image to express something much greater, more violent and far more difficult to interpret or articulate – is used in many of the most successful poems of the issue. I’ll leave you with the restrained and delicate observation of the first stanzas of ‘Time to Move On’ by Chirikure Chirikure:
Sitting in the white wintry sun
Watching birds winging in total peace
The mind switches to one’s bare feet:
In last month’s editorial, I touched upon the poet’s constant struggle to express the inarticulate and represent the world through language. In the course of editing this issue of PIW I have again noticed that what is left unspoken can be equally as important to the poem as the written words: the aching white space that surrounds a poem’s lines, whether literal or symbolic, is often what gives the piece its power.
Take for example the work of Dutch poet Jan Baeke. In the final stanzas of the extract from ‘The Dogs’, Baeke manages to convey so simply not only the difficulties of translating reality into language, but also the melancholy of separation from the world as a result of this:I can see the gravity and tragedy
of every trip to the newsagent’s, to the baker’s
of the shaking of hands
a farewell that sends one person into an office block
and the other walking off to one side
which makes this morning worse
worse as in further away from what I’ve written
further as in finished speaking
and in need of the first glass of wine.
The appeal of many of Baeke’s poems lies in the fact that although his language may seem simple, the world it presents is unstable: the reader latches onto images, often without ever quite being able to grasp one cohesive narrative. Indeed, in the poem ‘To Have That’, the narrator seems to share the reader’s own struggle for meaning: “What the hell is going on here / I shout”. Of his own work, Baeke notes, “The various sentences and stanzas in my poems have transitions that resemble the cuts in films. As a reader, you yourself are responsible for making the link between the various images.”
The airiness created by cinematic ‘cuts’ is also extremely prominent in Mari Kashiwagi’s poem ‘Nectar’s root as far as its Resonance reaches’, which is composed of a series of thematically interlinked short poems, separated from each other by a lot of white space. ‘Nectar’s Root’ is a wonderful example of how verse can be sparse, abstract and elusive in meaning, yet also rich, sensual, and, of course, very visual. It’s exciting to publish this poem online, not only because we can include an audio file of Mari Kashiwagi reading the poem, but also because scrolling down the webpage to experience the combination of vertical text and space is very different to turning the pages of a book, and far more akin to the way of reading a Japanese emaki. The words disappear from our sight after we have read them, and the ‘breathing space’ between each fragment, which paradoxically serves to unify the organic, elemental imagery of the whole, is experienced temporally as well as visually.
Four Colombian poets are featured this month. Gonzalo Márquez Cristo’s verse fights through what Marco Antonio Campos in his introduction terms “the fatal fog”, searching for clarity in both inner and outer landscapes. In ‘The Earth’s Appointment’, the narrator reflects, “I don’t know how much more I must lose for the poem to be revealed to me”. In her poem ‘Abelard and Heloise’, Orietta Lozano also reflects on the way absence can bring clarity:
She said: do not give me anything,
just forget me,
because in oblivion
is the essence of memory,
of the beginning
Wayuu-language poet Vito Apüshana echoes this concept in his creation-myth poem ‘The Beginning’. It is from “a giant / and fertile silence” that sound, speech and thought flow – without the initial white space, nothing can be created.
One of my favourite poems this month is ‘Cherries and Hail’ by Ramón Cote Baraibar. Ostensibly a description of children gathering fallen, unripe cherries after a hailstorm, the poem bristles with political undertones and a subtle, violent beauty. Although the poem’s imagery is blood-spattered – the park looks like “the wedding dress of a stabbed bride”, the hail is “slowly stained with red”, “the glass snow” cuts the children’s lips, and the “frozen cherries” taste “of vengeance” – blood is directly mentioned only in the final line, and even then metaphorically: “their memory, bleeding, recalling all of that”. An accurate and insightful portrayal of the way memory works, the childhood recollection of the fallen cherries becomes a cipher for the unspoken events of that same week when “everything happened”.
In this month’s Zimbabwe issue, editor Irene Staunton presents work written by eight poets in response to the turbulent election period in the country earlier this year – a time of disappointed hopes, fear, sadness, anger and death. The device employed by Ramón Cote Baraibar in ‘Cherries and Hail’ – that of using a seemingly simple and peaceful image to express something much greater, more violent and far more difficult to interpret or articulate – is used in many of the most successful poems of the issue. I’ll leave you with the restrained and delicate observation of the first stanzas of ‘Time to Move On’ by Chirikure Chirikure:
Sitting in the white wintry sun
Watching birds winging in total peace
The mind switches to one’s bare feet:
Two feet
Lucky to still have them both
Ten toes
Blessed to still have them all.
© Sarah Ream
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