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Editorial: 1 May 2011
21 april 2011
We’re kicking off May with poetry from the USA, Iran, Romania and Tunisia. On the USA domain, Sarah Lindsay, a poet who is sensitive to flux and attuned to the archaeological possibilities of poetry, contemplates and commemorates moments from the past that might otherwise be lost in history. In the beautiful ‘Elegy for the Quagga’, for instance, she juxtaposes the momentous eruption of Krakatau with the quiet passing of the last quagga (a South African zebra) “fifteen days before, in its cage in Amsterdam”.
Bob Hicok writes intense, humorous and moving poems representative of the back-and-forth workings of the human mind that probe how language might best express thought – his work is, according to the PIW USA domain editors, “focused on recording the passing moment, the birth of a thought and its connection to the next”. ‘Toward Accuracy’ is a playful and beautiful advocation of poetic language-use:
If we named things what they are,
our sentences would be monsoons, long rains of sound.
Morning is “the time I suspect I am a horse,” dusk
“the light which treats our shadows like taffy.”
The poignant ‘In the Loop’, on the other hand, expresses the inadequacy of language to describe emotion and console after tragedies such as the Virgina Tech shootings: “People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed / because they know I teach at Virginia Tech, / to say, there’s nothing to say.”
D.A. Powell’s poetry is innovative and crafted, alive to the auditory richness of the English language:
gone the steel span of that wrapped building
and another, one other, and: crumb scrap fizzle
art, you have the ephemerality I always wanted in a man
until I got it: kisskiss, firefly—you go out bruise yellow
then me
The title of the poem that extract is from is ‘The Expiration Date on the World is Not Quite the Same as the Expiration Date on My Prophylactic’ – the quirkiness of which belies the serious emotional and erotic drive of the poem. Powell excels at building intensity through vivid imagery, as in ‘Cruel, Cruel Summer’ or ‘Republic’, an anti-pastoral bristling with invective and lament in its contemplation of the modernisation of Western agriculture.
On the Iran domain, we present poems and audio recordings by Mehrdad Fallah, one of the key figures in the so-called ‘Fifth Generation’ of modern Persian poets. According to biographer and translator Abol Froushan, Fallah “believes the key characteristic of [his] poems [ . . . ] is the setting aside of the “I of the poem” which typically dominates in earlier Iranian poetry. In its place is a new “multiple I in crisis”. This is evident in poems such as ‘The Hitch’ – “years have passed since this story / and I have forgotten what Ego / wanted to achieve”. Elsewhere, the narrator of Fallah’s poems is lost or trapped, separated from a ‘you’. In its sparseness and distilled emotion, ‘Of this Bridge’ is a powerful representation of ruptured communication:
I collapse as I arrive
at the intersection of shadows
and my dishevelled voice
does not reach yours
2011 Poetry International Festival
We’re a month and a half away from the 42nd Poetry International Festival, and the PI office in Rotterdam is buy with preparations. In our last issue of PIW, we introduced two poets who are coming to festival this June, and in this issue, we present two more: Amina Saïd, a Tunisian poet and journalist now living in Paris who was brought up bilingual and writes in French, and Romanian poet Doina Ioanid, whose prose poems blend autobiography and surrealism.
Four of Saïd’s poems – which are contemplative of place, from Durban to “the place that is you” – appear alongside translations into English by Marilyn Hacker. We’ve also published four short untitled prose poems from Ioanid’s Book of Bellies and Solitude with Florin Bican’s English translations. More work by these two poets, as well as the full festival selections of all twenty poets invited to the festival, will be published in the PIW festival issue on 1 June. If you can’t make it to Rotterdam in June, you’ll still be able to follow the events on our 2011 festival blog (which we’ll launch a little later this month) and see these poets read on stage via our live-stream.
Bob Hicok writes intense, humorous and moving poems representative of the back-and-forth workings of the human mind that probe how language might best express thought – his work is, according to the PIW USA domain editors, “focused on recording the passing moment, the birth of a thought and its connection to the next”. ‘Toward Accuracy’ is a playful and beautiful advocation of poetic language-use:
If we named things what they are,
our sentences would be monsoons, long rains of sound.
Morning is “the time I suspect I am a horse,” dusk
“the light which treats our shadows like taffy.”
The poignant ‘In the Loop’, on the other hand, expresses the inadequacy of language to describe emotion and console after tragedies such as the Virgina Tech shootings: “People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed / because they know I teach at Virginia Tech, / to say, there’s nothing to say.”
D.A. Powell’s poetry is innovative and crafted, alive to the auditory richness of the English language:
gone the steel span of that wrapped building
and another, one other, and: crumb scrap fizzle
art, you have the ephemerality I always wanted in a man
until I got it: kisskiss, firefly—you go out bruise yellow
then me
The title of the poem that extract is from is ‘The Expiration Date on the World is Not Quite the Same as the Expiration Date on My Prophylactic’ – the quirkiness of which belies the serious emotional and erotic drive of the poem. Powell excels at building intensity through vivid imagery, as in ‘Cruel, Cruel Summer’ or ‘Republic’, an anti-pastoral bristling with invective and lament in its contemplation of the modernisation of Western agriculture.
On the Iran domain, we present poems and audio recordings by Mehrdad Fallah, one of the key figures in the so-called ‘Fifth Generation’ of modern Persian poets. According to biographer and translator Abol Froushan, Fallah “believes the key characteristic of [his] poems [ . . . ] is the setting aside of the “I of the poem” which typically dominates in earlier Iranian poetry. In its place is a new “multiple I in crisis”. This is evident in poems such as ‘The Hitch’ – “years have passed since this story / and I have forgotten what Ego / wanted to achieve”. Elsewhere, the narrator of Fallah’s poems is lost or trapped, separated from a ‘you’. In its sparseness and distilled emotion, ‘Of this Bridge’ is a powerful representation of ruptured communication:
I collapse as I arrive
at the intersection of shadows
and my dishevelled voice
does not reach yours
2011 Poetry International Festival
We’re a month and a half away from the 42nd Poetry International Festival, and the PI office in Rotterdam is buy with preparations. In our last issue of PIW, we introduced two poets who are coming to festival this June, and in this issue, we present two more: Amina Saïd, a Tunisian poet and journalist now living in Paris who was brought up bilingual and writes in French, and Romanian poet Doina Ioanid, whose prose poems blend autobiography and surrealism.
Four of Saïd’s poems – which are contemplative of place, from Durban to “the place that is you” – appear alongside translations into English by Marilyn Hacker. We’ve also published four short untitled prose poems from Ioanid’s Book of Bellies and Solitude with Florin Bican’s English translations. More work by these two poets, as well as the full festival selections of all twenty poets invited to the festival, will be published in the PIW festival issue on 1 June. If you can’t make it to Rotterdam in June, you’ll still be able to follow the events on our 2011 festival blog (which we’ll launch a little later this month) and see these poets read on stage via our live-stream.
© Sarah Ream
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