Editorial: 1 April 2012

March 20, 2012 Croatian artist and poet Vlado Martek, who first gained fame as part of the neo-conceptualist Group of Six Artists in the late 1970s, rejects traditional lyrical poetry, as well as the illusion of the poem as a finished work. To use a tautology, the point of Vlado Martek’s poetry is the point of his poetry. For this reason he has refused to have his poems published in book form. In answer to the question ‘Why do I need a family name?’, Martek writes “To familiarise and not to have a family”. He then asks, “Why do I need poetry?” For him, the printed, immovable word only gets in the way. In his lengthily titled poem ‘All of Poetry Could Be Reduced to the Preparations for Poetry (elementary processes in poetry lead to the PREPARATION phase)’, he goes so far as to “renounce” his own poem,  for “with this poem I demolish / the subject of torment that follows/ language”. Here he indicates the difficulties he sees in connecting language and meaning, and thus poetic intention with its end product. At the end of ‘In my hiatus and in my poem,’ we learn that really “it’s all about the reaction to writing about the question/ and about the answer to the reaction in question.”

Using poetry to point to its own futility seems paradoxical, and Martek often plays with this paradox, breaking the fourth wall to speak to his readers about poetry, drawing them into the action to show them the complexities of the poetic process. As we see in ‘I, pre-poet’ the narrator vows to “omit the shadow of my example/ from the illusion”, while also asking “what would have its meaning without me”? In ‘Lamenting Poetry’, Martek likens the poet to a criminal, hiding behind convention and tradition. “I’m protected / by the alibi of poetry”, he writes. Ultimately, however, there is nowhere to hide. In ‘So much ash in the heart, r, e, t, a, h’, we read that eventually, “we will be exactly like ourselves in poetry”.

Martek’s poems may deny the poetic tradition and lament the impossibility of connecting words to meaning, but they still express a yearning for ‘true’ poetry. In ‘Pre-Poetry (1978–1984)’, preparation “is a poem”, and “Every grasping / of a pen in hand / is an act of honesty”. Martek calls his readers to keep hungering for poetry, challenging them to find the truth behind it: “Know the hunger, oh reader”, he writes in ‘Where are the kitchens?’, “And read this flat writing”.

Belgian poet and essayist Jan de Roek is a very different kind of artist, though his work also resists the assumption that the poem must be something measured and artificial, a commercial product. He died in 1971, over forty years ago, and nearly a decade before his poems were made available to the greater public. Despite this, his words in ‘In Hoc Signo’ still speak directly to our age:

In this, the world of glasshouses, only the shares
and forget-me-nots flourish, not the poems,
and a poem is every necessary word that needs to be said
in this, the grim time.

In a world in which everything is calculated and quantified, De Roek’s poems are a race against time, beseeching the reader to take their words to heart before it is too late: “I want them to listen. I want to speak to someone/ in this soundproof time”.

De Roek’s masterwork is Jeunesse dorée (Gilded Youth), a collection of over a hundred pages that is essentially one long poem. One could argue that the central preoccupation of the work is the lifespan of poetry, and of the poet. “I will not survive this life intact”, reads the first fragment from Jeunesse dorée collected in this issue. “Like a stone I am skimmed across this water.” And like all stones, the poet must inevitably sink beneath the waters, having achieved but a brief moment of flight. What, then, is the point of living? Throughout much of Jeunesse dorée the narrator speaks tenderly to a beloved, a ‘you’. In the second of the two fragments, the poet renders his beloved immortal – the beloved’s body is made of clay, “in which my hands mould.” “You are just as red as I”, writes De Roek, “and as ancient Greek earthenware/ in this time of suspended animation/ and deterioration.” Though time is not on the side of the poet, on occasion time can be stopped, the poem and its subject suspended like archeological relics, lying in wait to be re-discovered.

Though this may well be an optimistic reading of Jeunesse dorée, it is not the only place in which De Roek discusses the power of poetry. In his poem ‘Don Juan’, we see the metaphor of the stone once again, this time not in reference to the poet, but to the poet’s words. The poem begins:

We will make this world
ever more artificial
as hearing and seeing pass away and nothing is left
but the most obstinate, stubborn
stone, the most sickly script,
the last unpronounceable hieroglyphic.

The narrator continues further on with a lament: “I am but a poet, beloved,/ I am of the weakest of people,/ I am the most vulnerable being on earth.” On his own, the poet can do nothing. He is not a soldier, a politician, or a judge. He is only an artist, working in the realm of the purely abstract. The only thing that gives him weight is his poetry: from his lips, falling "like slow stones”, come “precarious words”. Though the poet may die, the stones that are his poems have a chance of coming to settle stubbornly and solidly in this world, if only he can make them count. Image (c) Joana Croft on Stock.XCHNG. Reproduced under a Creative Commons License.