Article
Editorial: January 2005
January 18, 2006
Both poets coming from Colombia this month use prose poetry as part of their work. Contemporary writer {id="1270" title="Gabriel Jaime Franco"} incorporates them in his longer poem ‘The memorable earth’. Just like his other long poem published here, ‘The cleft voices’, it is a search for a poetic voice, at the same time expressing his doubts and questions about the poetic enterprise: "Every poetics excludes/ and endeavours to/ construct an onanist paradise." {id="1279" title="Luis Vidales"} on the other hand is part of a much earlier, less doubtful generation of poets. He wrote avant-gardistic verses as well as poems of social protest, sometimes in delightful prose fragments such as ‘Moving landscapes’:
Mr Wilde has said that sunsets are out of fashion. This defect could undoubtedly be covered up if landscapes constantly moved around. The fact of seeing a landscape in the same place – is necessarily boring. The contrary would be charming. And spectacular. A cluster of trees migrating under the sky. Or a tree going on its way to the jungle – alone – straight – on its countless little, white legs.
Portugal introduces us to two representatives of Neo-Realism, or Social Realism, the prevalent literary movement there from the late 1930s to the 1950s. Our two poets however, {id="4644" title="António Ramos Rosa"} and {id="4645" title="Carlos de Oliveira"}, refused to be limited by the sometimes programmatic tenets of this strongly political movement, and each went his own way, with Ramos Rosa pursuing what our Portuguese editor has dubbed ‘Ur-Realism’, Oliveira rather moving towards ‘micro-realism’, "meticulously wrought, minimalist verses that attempted to get under or into reality’s skin." As Ramos Rosa writes in ‘To grasp with words the most nocturnal substance’:
Perhaps in opacity we will find the initial vertebra
enabling us to coincide with a movement of the universe
and to be the culmination of density
Only in this way will words be fruit of the shade
and no longer of mirrors or of towers of smoke
and like fiery antennae in the rifts of oblivion
they will initially be matter faithful to matter
A harsher brand of realism, in keeping with a harsher reality, can be found in the fierce, tender, occasionally elegiac poems of Zimbabwean poet {id="5753" title="Chenjerai Hove"}. Hove, who was recently forced into exile because of his critical social and political commentary in the weekly newspaper The Standard, has written of the consquences of colonial oppression, the liberation war and subsequent disillusionment in Zimbabwe in poems, articles and prose. Although deeply concerned with his home country, his literary work has wider implications, as Maurice Vambe explains in an elucidating {id="5747" title="essay"} on Hove’s work: "Hove’s major thematic preoccupation is humanity. His poetry cries out against whatever attempts to diminish the personhood or humanity of ordinary men and women."
Finally, the playful, erudite and thoroughly post-modern verses of {id="2217" title="Monika Rinck"} represent the other extreme of the poetic spectrum. "A poeta docta of the post-modern overdrive, she confidently combines linguistic reflections, romanticism, and popular culture, Rilke, Johnny Cash and biking, along with a dash of applied biology," according to our German editor. Yet her very flippancy seems to shape the conditions for a certain emotional intensity, even leading to a sense of universal interconnectedness:
things today are somehow lonely
things are like vases without friends
like the sideboard here with its marble
slab stood against the wall and left there.
what we want to know is: don’t things
have other things to play with?
have things been given nothing, not the
slightest thing, to hold on to?
"Maybe Pasolini was right: prose is poetry that is not poetry," says our new Italian poet, Flavio Santi, in the Italian magazine this month. Flavio, who describes himself as a "fiction writer", calls his early work "lyric prose – and therefore, poetry". A surprising number of other poets published on the site this month would agree with him. Prose poetry seems to be the recurrent theme this month, with samples coming from countries as far apart as Colombia, Portugal and Morocco.
In fact, the entire Moroccan site is devoted to prose poetry this January. Prose poetry in Morocco, and in the Arab world in general, is a heatly debated genre, due to the specific literary conventions of Arabic poetry. Yet it has also "heightened the readers’ and poets’ consciousness of the poeticity of Arabic, regardless of metrical, rhythmical or rhetorical devices," writes our editor Norddine Zouitni. "For the first time the poet had to face the challenging nakedness of language." Two eminent Moroccan representatives of the genre, {id="3813" title="Ahmed Barakat"} and {id="3811" title="Abdel-ilah Salhi"} show us how.Both poets coming from Colombia this month use prose poetry as part of their work. Contemporary writer {id="1270" title="Gabriel Jaime Franco"} incorporates them in his longer poem ‘The memorable earth’. Just like his other long poem published here, ‘The cleft voices’, it is a search for a poetic voice, at the same time expressing his doubts and questions about the poetic enterprise: "Every poetics excludes/ and endeavours to/ construct an onanist paradise." {id="1279" title="Luis Vidales"} on the other hand is part of a much earlier, less doubtful generation of poets. He wrote avant-gardistic verses as well as poems of social protest, sometimes in delightful prose fragments such as ‘Moving landscapes’:
Mr Wilde has said that sunsets are out of fashion. This defect could undoubtedly be covered up if landscapes constantly moved around. The fact of seeing a landscape in the same place – is necessarily boring. The contrary would be charming. And spectacular. A cluster of trees migrating under the sky. Or a tree going on its way to the jungle – alone – straight – on its countless little, white legs.
Portugal introduces us to two representatives of Neo-Realism, or Social Realism, the prevalent literary movement there from the late 1930s to the 1950s. Our two poets however, {id="4644" title="António Ramos Rosa"} and {id="4645" title="Carlos de Oliveira"}, refused to be limited by the sometimes programmatic tenets of this strongly political movement, and each went his own way, with Ramos Rosa pursuing what our Portuguese editor has dubbed ‘Ur-Realism’, Oliveira rather moving towards ‘micro-realism’, "meticulously wrought, minimalist verses that attempted to get under or into reality’s skin." As Ramos Rosa writes in ‘To grasp with words the most nocturnal substance’:
Perhaps in opacity we will find the initial vertebra
enabling us to coincide with a movement of the universe
and to be the culmination of density
Only in this way will words be fruit of the shade
and no longer of mirrors or of towers of smoke
and like fiery antennae in the rifts of oblivion
they will initially be matter faithful to matter
A harsher brand of realism, in keeping with a harsher reality, can be found in the fierce, tender, occasionally elegiac poems of Zimbabwean poet {id="5753" title="Chenjerai Hove"}. Hove, who was recently forced into exile because of his critical social and political commentary in the weekly newspaper The Standard, has written of the consquences of colonial oppression, the liberation war and subsequent disillusionment in Zimbabwe in poems, articles and prose. Although deeply concerned with his home country, his literary work has wider implications, as Maurice Vambe explains in an elucidating {id="5747" title="essay"} on Hove’s work: "Hove’s major thematic preoccupation is humanity. His poetry cries out against whatever attempts to diminish the personhood or humanity of ordinary men and women."
Finally, the playful, erudite and thoroughly post-modern verses of {id="2217" title="Monika Rinck"} represent the other extreme of the poetic spectrum. "A poeta docta of the post-modern overdrive, she confidently combines linguistic reflections, romanticism, and popular culture, Rilke, Johnny Cash and biking, along with a dash of applied biology," according to our German editor. Yet her very flippancy seems to shape the conditions for a certain emotional intensity, even leading to a sense of universal interconnectedness:
things today are somehow lonely
things are like vases without friends
like the sideboard here with its marble
slab stood against the wall and left there.
what we want to know is: don’t things
have other things to play with?
have things been given nothing, not the
slightest thing, to hold on to?
© The central editors
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère