Artikel
Editorial: July 2009
29 juni 2009
The July issue of PIW welcomes back the China domain, which, after a period without publications, returns this month with work by Yao Feng, a Beijing-born poet who now resides in Macao. Several of his poems centre around the under- or unrepresented voices of history: the unphotographed porters “standing silently in a corner” who were crucial to the first successful ascent of Mount Everest; the “three thousand imperial concubines” of the Forbidden City, the details of whose daily lives both “before and after menopause” don’t make it into history books; the “survivors and victims of the Nanjing Massacre” who are happy talk to the narrator about “the Fatherland, poetry and women”, but never of their experiences of their own troubled recent history. Crucially, these poems are not reimaginings or appropriations of silenced voices. Yao Feng does not attempt to speak on behalf of history’s marginalised figures: rather, by drawing attention to the gaps in his own knowledge, he makes visible these silences and absences in recorded history.
The problematic representation and remembrance of the unheard voices of history is also taken up as a theme by Ali Alizadeh, featured this month on the Australian domain. Born in Iran, Alizadeh moved to Australia as a child, then, as an adult, to China for a time. He now lives in Dubai. As he writes in ‘Iran’, “I’ve been repulsed across the globe. I’ve been / made thoroughly homeless.” In his poem ‘My People’, the names and voices of the narrator’s family and people of his homeland are “a whimper // a history reduced to a sigh / beneath the mess of earthquakes, / revolutions and wars.” Although his remembering of these people will not “oppose / the sublime tyranny of time”, it will at least, the narrator reasons, act as a memorial to those whose memory would otherwise be annihilated. But Alizadeh’s relationship to Iran and his “people” is also complex due to his unstable “outsider” perspective, whether as exile, immigrant or ex-pat; his identity, perspective, and indeed his poems themselves negotiate different languages and cultures, dismantling binary oppositions such as East and West, oppressor and oppressed. “Why the pretentious reliance on // Italicised French words and Anglo / slang?” he asks, self-reflexively. “My mother-tongue // also terrifies.” The poem which perhaps most successfully articulates Alizadeh’s fractured identity and education, as well as lamenting the suffering and silencing of history’s victims, is his harrowing triptych ‘Incinerator’ – which begins bitterly, with a nod to William Blake’s ‘Tyger, Tyger’; takes up Jacques Derrida’s criticism of ‘The End of History?’, Francis Fukayama’s essay about the eventual universalisation of Western liberal democracy; and ends with the crisp recollection of a covert border-crosser watching their passport – representative of a whole personal identity – burn to cinders.
PIW Israel marks its return to PIW as an active domain with three very different, though all relatively young, Hebrew-language poets, as well as accompanying articles about their work. Nano Shabtai, a poet, editor, dramatist and director, writes boldly and candidly, frequently about her difficult relationships with her family members. Shai Dotan’s versatility and talent is evident in the selection of poems published here, which range from political laments of the violence in Israel to a Wallace Stevens homage about pears; from a tale of the poet’s wife turning into a bird to an ode to “thong underpants / red like Sexoman’s”. USA-born Ariel Zinder’s poems are sensitive and lyrical, yoking as editor Lisa Katz notes, “Jewish texts, narratives, concepts and holidays to contemporary lives”. These sit alongside beautiful translations into English by Jennie Feldman. I particularly like the final image of Zinder’s ‘Bricks’, a poem that employs the story of the Tower of Babel as a metaphor for the distances and divisions between two lovers:
You ask for my heart in its wholeness
and I know: once more we are scattered.
We’ll wander alone, one language between us
and our hearts divided, subdivided.
We also have a trio of poets from Colombia: Amparo Osorio, who is an editor and co-founder of several literary projects and organisations in Colombia, writes poems that are short in length but rich in elusive, nature-infused imagery. José Luis Díaz Granados’s ‘The Perpetual Feast’ takes up the theme of history, though that of a personal rather than a wider political history. “My history is full of hisses and tangles, / of voices and events, of bloody questions” he writes, challenging the view of history as a linear, chronological narrative. José Zuleta Ortiz’s poems, on the other hand, are seldom narrated in the first person. Rather, they focus often on the lives of other people or on the poet’s observations of the outside world: the doorkeeper of the ‘Santa Barbara Hotel’, a girl on a “conjugal visit”, a spider descending and ascending from its web.
The final two poets of this varied PIW issue hail from Ireland. In ‘Checkpoint’, a poem which so accurately conveys a contemplative, star-lit, post-pub mood, Michael Coady documents a walk home from “Maggie Dunne’s / in Carrick Beg”. The ritual walk acts as existential affirmation, the proof of the repeated act manifesting itself physically over time, even if it is only ever the poet and the stars that witness the night-time journey:
there is this measure of
the nitty-gritty impact
that I’ve made so far
upon the earth:
an unreckonable fraction
of a millimetre in
wear-down of polished
kerbstone . . .
In another poem about a walk, ‘Eccles Street’, Gerald Smyth, the history and heritage of whose native Dublin underpins many of his poems, retraces “the epic route” made through the streets of the city by James Joyce’s Ulysses protagonist, Leopold Bloom, on 16 June 1904. It’s not just a simple retracing of an actual stroll, however: Bloom and his wanderings were fictional, though Joyce’s own perambulations around Dublin informed them; furthermore Bloom’s meanderings were a Dublin-based reimagining of another literary character’s journey: that of Odysseus. The poet actualises this “day of small detours” through physically enacting it, then adds to it yet another layer of literary history by commemorating it in a poem: a reminder that imagined stories are no less a part of collective memory than real-life historical events.
The problematic representation and remembrance of the unheard voices of history is also taken up as a theme by Ali Alizadeh, featured this month on the Australian domain. Born in Iran, Alizadeh moved to Australia as a child, then, as an adult, to China for a time. He now lives in Dubai. As he writes in ‘Iran’, “I’ve been repulsed across the globe. I’ve been / made thoroughly homeless.” In his poem ‘My People’, the names and voices of the narrator’s family and people of his homeland are “a whimper // a history reduced to a sigh / beneath the mess of earthquakes, / revolutions and wars.” Although his remembering of these people will not “oppose / the sublime tyranny of time”, it will at least, the narrator reasons, act as a memorial to those whose memory would otherwise be annihilated. But Alizadeh’s relationship to Iran and his “people” is also complex due to his unstable “outsider” perspective, whether as exile, immigrant or ex-pat; his identity, perspective, and indeed his poems themselves negotiate different languages and cultures, dismantling binary oppositions such as East and West, oppressor and oppressed. “Why the pretentious reliance on // Italicised French words and Anglo / slang?” he asks, self-reflexively. “My mother-tongue // also terrifies.” The poem which perhaps most successfully articulates Alizadeh’s fractured identity and education, as well as lamenting the suffering and silencing of history’s victims, is his harrowing triptych ‘Incinerator’ – which begins bitterly, with a nod to William Blake’s ‘Tyger, Tyger’; takes up Jacques Derrida’s criticism of ‘The End of History?’, Francis Fukayama’s essay about the eventual universalisation of Western liberal democracy; and ends with the crisp recollection of a covert border-crosser watching their passport – representative of a whole personal identity – burn to cinders.
PIW Israel marks its return to PIW as an active domain with three very different, though all relatively young, Hebrew-language poets, as well as accompanying articles about their work. Nano Shabtai, a poet, editor, dramatist and director, writes boldly and candidly, frequently about her difficult relationships with her family members. Shai Dotan’s versatility and talent is evident in the selection of poems published here, which range from political laments of the violence in Israel to a Wallace Stevens homage about pears; from a tale of the poet’s wife turning into a bird to an ode to “thong underpants / red like Sexoman’s”. USA-born Ariel Zinder’s poems are sensitive and lyrical, yoking as editor Lisa Katz notes, “Jewish texts, narratives, concepts and holidays to contemporary lives”. These sit alongside beautiful translations into English by Jennie Feldman. I particularly like the final image of Zinder’s ‘Bricks’, a poem that employs the story of the Tower of Babel as a metaphor for the distances and divisions between two lovers:
You ask for my heart in its wholeness
and I know: once more we are scattered.
We’ll wander alone, one language between us
and our hearts divided, subdivided.
We also have a trio of poets from Colombia: Amparo Osorio, who is an editor and co-founder of several literary projects and organisations in Colombia, writes poems that are short in length but rich in elusive, nature-infused imagery. José Luis Díaz Granados’s ‘The Perpetual Feast’ takes up the theme of history, though that of a personal rather than a wider political history. “My history is full of hisses and tangles, / of voices and events, of bloody questions” he writes, challenging the view of history as a linear, chronological narrative. José Zuleta Ortiz’s poems, on the other hand, are seldom narrated in the first person. Rather, they focus often on the lives of other people or on the poet’s observations of the outside world: the doorkeeper of the ‘Santa Barbara Hotel’, a girl on a “conjugal visit”, a spider descending and ascending from its web.
The final two poets of this varied PIW issue hail from Ireland. In ‘Checkpoint’, a poem which so accurately conveys a contemplative, star-lit, post-pub mood, Michael Coady documents a walk home from “Maggie Dunne’s / in Carrick Beg”. The ritual walk acts as existential affirmation, the proof of the repeated act manifesting itself physically over time, even if it is only ever the poet and the stars that witness the night-time journey:
there is this measure of
the nitty-gritty impact
that I’ve made so far
upon the earth:
an unreckonable fraction
of a millimetre in
wear-down of polished
kerbstone . . .
In another poem about a walk, ‘Eccles Street’, Gerald Smyth, the history and heritage of whose native Dublin underpins many of his poems, retraces “the epic route” made through the streets of the city by James Joyce’s Ulysses protagonist, Leopold Bloom, on 16 June 1904. It’s not just a simple retracing of an actual stroll, however: Bloom and his wanderings were fictional, though Joyce’s own perambulations around Dublin informed them; furthermore Bloom’s meanderings were a Dublin-based reimagining of another literary character’s journey: that of Odysseus. The poet actualises this “day of small detours” through physically enacting it, then adds to it yet another layer of literary history by commemorating it in a poem: a reminder that imagined stories are no less a part of collective memory than real-life historical events.
© Sarah Ream
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