Editorial: February 2005

January 18, 2006 Australian poet {id="684" title="Ouyang Yu"}, according to his ‘Identity CV’ a “cross-cultural fucker” and “a stateless and statusless poet;/ downward mobile; upward wayward;/ edgewise, always edgewise;” writes about his adopted country in two languages, English and Chinese. In both, he addresses questions of place and identity with the same wry, sarcastic humour and, occasionally, barely suppressed rage:

You expect me to speak English and write English
Which I can do but not so that you think I am English

But to do just what I am doing here
Writing poems that do not sit comfortably with your
Another day another dollar mentality and nationality

You think that because I came to and live in Australia
I should be grateful for the rest of my life
But you don’t know that I already regret that I’ve made an irreversible mistake

By way of contrast, in the work of his colleague {id="686" title="Robert Adamson"}, we get a palpable sense of the territory around Hawkesbury River, New South Wales, described by an insider: the poet grew up here. The river, the central metaphor running through his poetry, is turned into a place of myth: “I am writing about the internalised landscape,” Adamson has said. In addition to the work of these two remarkable poets, the Australian magazine offers a sample of the poetry of {id="676" title="Judith Beveridge"} and a large number of extra poems by {id="675" title="John Tranter"}, including seminal pieces like ‘Lufthansa’ and ‘Rimbaud and the Modernist Heresy’.

Croatia, as it appears from the work of {id="1750" title="Bojan Radasinović"}, seems primarily a place to leave:

regardless of who I spoke to  
I always repeated the same answers
when they told me
that they would go too
if only there was an opportunity
that the situation here is awful
that in a year or two it would be like Chile here
I lifted up my glass or my cup
and started to roll it slowly on the table
then we went quiet for a while
waiting for something to happen

In a colloquial tone, the characters in Radasinović’s poems are forever talking about leaving, trying their luck in the West, finding work, but also about “love, solitude, longing, lifestyle and the rest of the predicament we usually call living,” as our Croatian editor puts it. His fellow Croatian poet {id="1751" title="Borben Vladović"} is a more established, though no less original voice. Starting of in the late sixties writing neo-avantgarde and concrete poetry, he is represented here with samples from his later, lyrical work.

Finally, our two Israeli poets, {id="3166" title="Efrat Mishori"} and {id="3158" title="Aharon Shabtai"}, are ‘simply’ trying to live in the country that they were born in. It proves a hard enough task:

I pronounce

life
an act
   of suicide

writes Shabtai in his longer poem ‘Love’. Iconoclasts, the pair of them, Shabtai is nevertheless one of the more respected and established contemporary Israeli poets, whereas Mishori, the self-proclaimed ‘Model of Poetry’, remains as yet firmly outside the poetic mainstream – even in spite of being awarded the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature in 2001. Mishori is renowned for her wild poetry performances, influenced by pop music, dada, surrealism and rap. “Probably the only poet in the world who shaves her legs in order to read her poetry aloud,” writes Galia Yahav in a {id="3086" title="review"}of Mishori’s show. “Finally there is someone who insists on being larger than life, unashamed of the ambition to total art, and not separating the sublime from mockery, holiness from the banal.”

Shabtai, in his turn, has created a stir for nearly forty years now, with uncompromising, sharp poetry on just about any political or social phenomenon, his explicit sexual imagery and ruthlessly honest descriptions of depression and an unhappy marriage.

Perhaps the last words on the complex relationship between place, individual and poetry are best left to Ouyang Yu, who concludes his poem ‘The Wanderer’:

wherever you go it comes back to you
you are yourself and the loss of you
hovering around the border and dreaming of the freedom on the other shore
you have walked for a long time in the territory of the heart