Article
Editorial: August 2009
July 24, 2009
. . . I offer you a contradiction instead:
All words disrupt silence
But the only ones that echo
Are born in the silence they destroy.
(from ‘The Trade’, Jerry Pinto)
This month the India domain brings us an issue dedicated to the theme of words and poets’ attitudes towards the medium of their craft. At the same time, akin to the way in which a good graphic designer pays as much attention to negative or “white space” as to the text or images that it surrounds, the poems of PIW India, as well as others in this month’s publication, also examine the inverse of words: silence.
Words are of course used by all of us, with increasing abundance it seems in an age of digital communication, and therein lies the challenge for poets – out of what the narrator of Jerry Pinto’s poem ‘The Trade’ describes as “a thick sludgy militant flood” pouring “out of every profligate mouth”, poets have to create art; something that will ‘echo’. The poet’s duty is to treat words as precious objects to be used with careful consideration, borne out of a recognition of and respect for silence. A similar attitude is expressed at the end of Oriya poet Bharat Majhi’s ‘Some Words’:
I did not, in fact, need
these words.
They are, for me, too expensive.
In Majhi’s poem, the personification of ‘words’ emphasises the power of language to instigate real-world actions (whether positive or negative), while at the same time being evasive of human grasp and control. We are dependent on words, yet constantly struggle with them: “You say something / Another meaning unfolds. / The banter of words, you know”, writes Vaidehi in her Kannada poem ‘She, He and Language’, which emphasises the constantly shifting meaning of language and therefore the difficulties of verbal communication, while Assamese poet Jiban Narah “frantically tag[s] along the line of the floating words”, knowing that he will eventually lose himself, seemingly with a mix of relief and regret, in the tug of the eternal “silent land” – “One day as age weighs me down”, he writes, “I’ll be under words”.
Belgian poet Peter Verhelst also probes the “silent land” through his evocation of geological history and narratives that predate, and will outlive, humans and language. The selection of his work published here on PIW is from his most recent collection, Nieuwe sterrenbeelden (New Constellations; 2008), which includes a beautiful series of ‘Pine Tree’ poems depicting strange landscapes that defy linear time, where mammoths “leap from rock to rock” even though they are “extinct”, where constellations flare up in seconds, visible to someone standing in the same spot a thousand years later. In ‘When through the hotel room window we . . .’, a silent, expansive natural world infuses and informs the transient moments of human life as the tiniest movements of lovers are juxtaposed with the vast slowness of glaciers.
The interplay between time and silence, between historical events and words, is examined in Croatian poet Predrag Lucić’s ‘Simonides, King of Pentapolis’, in which the narrator reflects on, and longs to return to a moment nineteen years earlier when, halfway through a play, an actor forgot his lines. If that moment of silence, the wordlessness, the pause in all forward momentum of the plot, he postulates, had been allowed to continue for as long as was necessary, everything would have remained “in peace” − not only would the play have been in stasis, but none of the violent political events of the previous nineteen years would have occurred. Predrag Lucić knows firsthand how words can be tools of political action and of resistance: also a well-known satirist, he founded the Feral Tribune, a magazine which cast a critical eye on taboo topics such as corruption and the war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In ‘Filter Jugoslavija’, he shows how the change of a single word on a cigarette package can represent, and indeed contribute to, shifts in cultural identity and nationalistic ideologies.
The work of Cesário Verde, the final poet of this issue, also interrogates national identity. His long poem ‘The Feeling of a Westerner’, written in the nineteenth century, has only now been translated into English for the first time, although it considered to be one of the great modern poems in Portuguese. It was met with controversy at the time of its publication, because Verde’s depiction of the streets of an overcrowded, decaying and filthy Lisbon was considered unpatriotic. Translator Richard Zenith has risen to the challenges posed by the form and rhyme scheme of the poem, skilfully capturing the rapture, curiosity and pity experienced by Verde as he takes in Lisbon’s “assemblage of stunted bodies”, from “Herculean fishwives” to pale ladies “leaning and smiling at jewellers’ windows”; from immigrants playing dominoes to “lucky travellers in hired coaches” on their way to the railway station and onwards to dazzling faraway places. Verde’s Lisbon was certainly far from silent, but the words he summoned to grant the poor of the city a presence within Portuguese consciousness and literature echo with resonance today. Also on PIW
In late July, we launched our online Digital Poetry Laboratory, which features digital works from the Bits of Poetry programme of the 40th Poetry International Festival, including a digital interview with Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, as well as a showing of their work DAKOTA and their European premiere of SMASH THE GANG OF FOUR BILLION, which so far has only been shown in China (in Chinese). Other international poets featured include Olia Lialina (Russia), Brian Kim Stefans (USA), Noah Wardrip-Fruin (USA), Aya Karpinska (USA) and Mark Napier (USA).
All words disrupt silence
But the only ones that echo
Are born in the silence they destroy.
(from ‘The Trade’, Jerry Pinto)
This month the India domain brings us an issue dedicated to the theme of words and poets’ attitudes towards the medium of their craft. At the same time, akin to the way in which a good graphic designer pays as much attention to negative or “white space” as to the text or images that it surrounds, the poems of PIW India, as well as others in this month’s publication, also examine the inverse of words: silence.
Words are of course used by all of us, with increasing abundance it seems in an age of digital communication, and therein lies the challenge for poets – out of what the narrator of Jerry Pinto’s poem ‘The Trade’ describes as “a thick sludgy militant flood” pouring “out of every profligate mouth”, poets have to create art; something that will ‘echo’. The poet’s duty is to treat words as precious objects to be used with careful consideration, borne out of a recognition of and respect for silence. A similar attitude is expressed at the end of Oriya poet Bharat Majhi’s ‘Some Words’:
I did not, in fact, need
these words.
They are, for me, too expensive.
In Majhi’s poem, the personification of ‘words’ emphasises the power of language to instigate real-world actions (whether positive or negative), while at the same time being evasive of human grasp and control. We are dependent on words, yet constantly struggle with them: “You say something / Another meaning unfolds. / The banter of words, you know”, writes Vaidehi in her Kannada poem ‘She, He and Language’, which emphasises the constantly shifting meaning of language and therefore the difficulties of verbal communication, while Assamese poet Jiban Narah “frantically tag[s] along the line of the floating words”, knowing that he will eventually lose himself, seemingly with a mix of relief and regret, in the tug of the eternal “silent land” – “One day as age weighs me down”, he writes, “I’ll be under words”.
Belgian poet Peter Verhelst also probes the “silent land” through his evocation of geological history and narratives that predate, and will outlive, humans and language. The selection of his work published here on PIW is from his most recent collection, Nieuwe sterrenbeelden (New Constellations; 2008), which includes a beautiful series of ‘Pine Tree’ poems depicting strange landscapes that defy linear time, where mammoths “leap from rock to rock” even though they are “extinct”, where constellations flare up in seconds, visible to someone standing in the same spot a thousand years later. In ‘When through the hotel room window we . . .’, a silent, expansive natural world infuses and informs the transient moments of human life as the tiniest movements of lovers are juxtaposed with the vast slowness of glaciers.
The interplay between time and silence, between historical events and words, is examined in Croatian poet Predrag Lucić’s ‘Simonides, King of Pentapolis’, in which the narrator reflects on, and longs to return to a moment nineteen years earlier when, halfway through a play, an actor forgot his lines. If that moment of silence, the wordlessness, the pause in all forward momentum of the plot, he postulates, had been allowed to continue for as long as was necessary, everything would have remained “in peace” − not only would the play have been in stasis, but none of the violent political events of the previous nineteen years would have occurred. Predrag Lucić knows firsthand how words can be tools of political action and of resistance: also a well-known satirist, he founded the Feral Tribune, a magazine which cast a critical eye on taboo topics such as corruption and the war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In ‘Filter Jugoslavija’, he shows how the change of a single word on a cigarette package can represent, and indeed contribute to, shifts in cultural identity and nationalistic ideologies.
The work of Cesário Verde, the final poet of this issue, also interrogates national identity. His long poem ‘The Feeling of a Westerner’, written in the nineteenth century, has only now been translated into English for the first time, although it considered to be one of the great modern poems in Portuguese. It was met with controversy at the time of its publication, because Verde’s depiction of the streets of an overcrowded, decaying and filthy Lisbon was considered unpatriotic. Translator Richard Zenith has risen to the challenges posed by the form and rhyme scheme of the poem, skilfully capturing the rapture, curiosity and pity experienced by Verde as he takes in Lisbon’s “assemblage of stunted bodies”, from “Herculean fishwives” to pale ladies “leaning and smiling at jewellers’ windows”; from immigrants playing dominoes to “lucky travellers in hired coaches” on their way to the railway station and onwards to dazzling faraway places. Verde’s Lisbon was certainly far from silent, but the words he summoned to grant the poor of the city a presence within Portuguese consciousness and literature echo with resonance today. Also on PIW
In late July, we launched our online Digital Poetry Laboratory, which features digital works from the Bits of Poetry programme of the 40th Poetry International Festival, including a digital interview with Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, as well as a showing of their work DAKOTA and their European premiere of SMASH THE GANG OF FOUR BILLION, which so far has only been shown in China (in Chinese). Other international poets featured include Olia Lialina (Russia), Brian Kim Stefans (USA), Noah Wardrip-Fruin (USA), Aya Karpinska (USA) and Mark Napier (USA).
© Sarah Ream
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