Article
Editorial: October 2005
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January 18, 2006
In our Portuguese magazine, two poets from the 1961 Generation are featured. Nothing if not sensuous, {id="4651" title="Luiza Neto Jorge"}’s work can also be difficult. Eroticism is embodied in the language and structure of her poems. Regular rules of logic and propriety break down, indeed, are consciously and on principle rejected. Her poems ‘teach the art of falling’, as she writes in the eponymous poem:
If not a catholic poet, {id="4656" title="Ruy Belo"} can at the very least be called a spiritual one. His work is suffused with a longing for transcendence and a melancholy awareness of mortality:
Finally, both Israeli poets published this month, {id="3171" title="Liat Kaplan"} and {id="3178" title="Sharron Hass"}, are interested in the place of women, in literature as well as in society. Liat Kaplan is perhaps the more overtly political of the two, though perhaps not in terms of feminism. ‘I believe there is a women’s poetry, because there are women who write poetry and declare it to be women’s poetry, but in my eyes there isn’t so much difference between men and women, and to be honest, I don’t think this is such an interesting topic’, she states in an interview in this issue. Sharron Hass’s motivation to start writing was, she says, ‘to give the world a mythology of women’s relations’ - which she couldn’t find anywhere else in the literature of the day. Her work is inspired by myth, legend and dream, as dreamlike in its sequences as poetry can be:
‘Poetry can allow you to indulge in your own
idiosyncrasies more than any other genre’, says Croatian poet Damir Šodan, ‘the way in which the
mind of an avant-garde language poet works would elsewhere be proclaimed as
utter madness’. Elsewhere, Israeli poet Sharron Hass remarks: ‘I couldn’t read anywhere what I wanted to say. I had no choice but to write
it myself.’ In fact, all five new poets published on PIW this month show how, in the words of Šodan, ‘poetry
essentially remains in the domain of extreme individualism’.
To {id="1752" title="Damir Šodan"}, poetry represents ‘freedom of speech in the most elemental sense’. His work is influenced by his love for music and American literature, and firmly grounded in the real world: ‘The world should always be either the point of departure or the point of arrival.’ Šodan often keeps a somewhat ironic distance from his subject matter, as in ‘Durruti, 1936’, where at an anarchist’s funeral, ‘Even the Russian consul/ was deeply moved/ at the sight of that crowd with fists in the air’. A crowd, he adds damningly,
who believed that only generals rule by force
and that discipline always comes
like a spout of enlightenment
exclusively from within.
In our Portuguese magazine, two poets from the 1961 Generation are featured. Nothing if not sensuous, {id="4651" title="Luiza Neto Jorge"}’s work can also be difficult. Eroticism is embodied in the language and structure of her poems. Regular rules of logic and propriety break down, indeed, are consciously and on principle rejected. Her poems ‘teach the art of falling’, as she writes in the eponymous poem:
The poem teaches the art of falling
on various kinds of ground
from losing the sudden earth under our feet
as when a love collapses
and we lose our wits, to confronting
the promontory where the earth drops away
and the teeming absence overwhelms
to touching down after
a slowly sensuous fall,
our face reaching the ground
in a subtle delicate curve
a bow to no one particular
or to us in particular a posthumous
homage.
If not a catholic poet, {id="4656" title="Ruy Belo"} can at the very least be called a spiritual one. His work is suffused with a longing for transcendence and a melancholy awareness of mortality:
the taste of women the taste of girls
forever inaccessible like any absolute
forever impossible yet pursued as if possible
the taste of defeat or the taste of palpable
earth day by day running through my fingers
and one day bound to fill my mouth forever
I’ve aged I know and all I’ve gained
is what I lost. I’m a grown-up now.
Finally, both Israeli poets published this month, {id="3171" title="Liat Kaplan"} and {id="3178" title="Sharron Hass"}, are interested in the place of women, in literature as well as in society. Liat Kaplan is perhaps the more overtly political of the two, though perhaps not in terms of feminism. ‘I believe there is a women’s poetry, because there are women who write poetry and declare it to be women’s poetry, but in my eyes there isn’t so much difference between men and women, and to be honest, I don’t think this is such an interesting topic’, she states in an interview in this issue. Sharron Hass’s motivation to start writing was, she says, ‘to give the world a mythology of women’s relations’ - which she couldn’t find anywhere else in the literature of the day. Her work is inspired by myth, legend and dream, as dreamlike in its sequences as poetry can be:
I met you naked at midnight – at the edge of the hours,
where one body is exchanged for another,
pumpkins and kingdom rising from a chariot,
the orange-white stone daisies of the moon
burst into flames in our hands,
and the whisper of growth lends speech to the sea stars,
resembling the celestial bodies in their sweetness –
there, between ground and space,
all that the soul learns about itself will be Knowledge,
science eager to hurl metaphors at black holes
whose nothingness will spew overnight
an exact mathematical notation
of loss.
© Corine Vloet
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