Artikel
Editorial: 1 January 2012
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13 december 2011
With global focus now on Burma, the publication later this year of Bones Will Crow, an anthology of Burmese poetry translated into English by editors ko ko thett and James Byrne, is timely. Readers may be surprised to see that, despite the country’s isolation and the censorship that its writers have faced, avant-garde and postmodern poetics have characterised the poetry written by Burmese poetry in the past decades. In this issue, we feature a selection of poems from the anthology by six contemporary Burmese poets, including champions of the 1970s Moe Wei poetry movement Aung Cheimt and Maung Cha Nwe, as well as Ma Ei, Maung Pyiyt Min, Maung Yu Py and Zeyar Lynn, whom ko ko thett calls “the Burmese answer to [Charles] Bernstein”. Learn more about the history and development of Burmese poetry in ko ko thett’s introductory article From panegyrics to the end of poetry.
These Burmese poets are featured alongside Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng, who was born in Vietnam and has lived in Australia since 1974. He writes in both Vietnamese and English, with the context and content of the poem determining his choice of language. “It seems like one language is watching the other when I write,” notes Nguyễn. “The choice of words; the sounds, the effects caused by the invocation of a word often reverberate through an imaginary membrane.” This can be felt in the linguistic exuberance, syntactic fluidity and ellipsis of his work, which draws on memory and invocations of place, from the skipping film reels watched as a child in the “theatre at Con Market” to the poet’s “first trip back to Saigon”. Read more about Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng’s influences and his thoughts on Australian poetry and identity in the latest of the interviews that Michael Brennan has been conducting with the PIW Australia poets. We will return later this month with new poems written by Joke van Leeuwen for the Dutch and Flanders Poetry Day celebrations on 26 January.
Image © Timo Virtala
Happy New Year to all of our readers! We begin 2012 with a special issue of poetry from Burma, alongside work by Vietnamese-Australian poet Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng.
Isolated from the rest of the world during decades of military rule, Burma has, in the past year or so, received increased international press attention following Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest, while Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to Burma marked a renewed relationship of the country with the west. In November of last year, Robert Lieberman’s excellent documentary, They Call It Myanmar, premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival. It paints a beguiling yet troubling portrait of contemporary Burma, an impoverished country grappling with issues such as health, education, politics, development and identity.With global focus now on Burma, the publication later this year of Bones Will Crow, an anthology of Burmese poetry translated into English by editors ko ko thett and James Byrne, is timely. Readers may be surprised to see that, despite the country’s isolation and the censorship that its writers have faced, avant-garde and postmodern poetics have characterised the poetry written by Burmese poetry in the past decades. In this issue, we feature a selection of poems from the anthology by six contemporary Burmese poets, including champions of the 1970s Moe Wei poetry movement Aung Cheimt and Maung Cha Nwe, as well as Ma Ei, Maung Pyiyt Min, Maung Yu Py and Zeyar Lynn, whom ko ko thett calls “the Burmese answer to [Charles] Bernstein”. Learn more about the history and development of Burmese poetry in ko ko thett’s introductory article From panegyrics to the end of poetry.
These Burmese poets are featured alongside Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng, who was born in Vietnam and has lived in Australia since 1974. He writes in both Vietnamese and English, with the context and content of the poem determining his choice of language. “It seems like one language is watching the other when I write,” notes Nguyễn. “The choice of words; the sounds, the effects caused by the invocation of a word often reverberate through an imaginary membrane.” This can be felt in the linguistic exuberance, syntactic fluidity and ellipsis of his work, which draws on memory and invocations of place, from the skipping film reels watched as a child in the “theatre at Con Market” to the poet’s “first trip back to Saigon”. Read more about Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng’s influences and his thoughts on Australian poetry and identity in the latest of the interviews that Michael Brennan has been conducting with the PIW Australia poets. We will return later this month with new poems written by Joke van Leeuwen for the Dutch and Flanders Poetry Day celebrations on 26 January.
Image © Timo Virtala
© Sarah Ream
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