Article
Editorial: 9 April, 2003
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January 18, 2006
As the introduction to his life and work puts it:
"What Kocbek asks is what we must ask of our technology: are we giving up wisdom for facts? Culture for paraphernalia? -- And so immediacy for detachment? Responsibility for excitement? a sense of ethics for a sense of triumph?"
Kocbek’s poetry never ceases to ask questions like this. Yet his all-pervading sense of irony, and the depth of his thinking about politics and religion, ensure that both dogmatism and easy answers are conspicuously absent from his poems. It makes this relatively unknown but wonderfully original writer a real discovery, deserving of a far wider audience. Kocbek’s poetry has lost none of its urgency in the last few decades, and is today perhaps more relevant than ever.
Another poet who has inexplicably not found the wide recognition he deserves is {id="5758" title="Julius Chingono"}, this quarter’s choice from Zimbabwe. Although he published poems in various Shona, Zimbabwean and South-African poetry anthologies, as well as a novel and an award-winning play, his work is still little known in his own country and abroad. A possible reason for this is his own humility; Chingono currently works in a mine. But, as fellow-poet Charles Mungoshi writes in a {id="5732" title="reflection"} on Chingono, another factor may have been "his refusal to bend to the winds of rhetoric or to engage with the great transitory winds of political change." Chingono’s poetry is characterized by sincerity, clarity and a deep feeling for humanity, put in deceptively simple, spare words. We hope that outstanding poems like {id="5883" title="Grapes"} or {id="5881" title="A silhouette"} – the first a near-metaphysical meditation, the second a cutting social commentary – will be read and savoured by all visitors to PIW, as indeed all of Chingono’s poems deserve to be.
The Croatian domain of PIW presents a selection from the work of {id="1756" title="Ivan Slamnig"}, one of Croatia’s "most innovative and unpredictable poets of the eighties", as well as one of the most influential. "In his best work robust comic energy and elements of pathos work alongside each other in a creative partnership," writes our Croatian editor Sibila Petlevski. One only needs to look at a poem like {id="1924" title="My friends are growing on a tree"} to see evidence of this. Lines like "some of them are hanging like apples, or like pears,/ some like oranges, all others like grapes" are followed by
I shake the tree and my friends fall down
and, by God, they kill themselves
but – I must be stupid – for the moment it seems to be
the only way to communicate with them.
New Colombian poet of the quarter {id="1286" title="Samuel Jaramillo"} possesses that rare combination of talents, being both an acclaimed scientist and a celebrated poet. An economist and urban planner, he is also capable of describing the surroundings of his home town in his poem {id="1706" title="On the brink of tears"} like this:
We could say
that this is the Savannah
of Bogotá, with its cold sun
wrapped in translucid gauze
and its horizon line of sluggish cows,
glassy eyes sweeping
the plain, which is broken perhaps
by a bridge.
Finally, after a holiday break of a month, the central domain has resumed reporting on poetry news. We have found a new format for this, the {id="293" title="Poetry newslog"}, always found under "Latest additions" to the left, which we think will lead visitors more quickly to the original news source for further reading.
Four new Poets of the quarter, and one new country, have been added to PIW in the last month. We are very happy to introduce readers to the new Israeli domain on PIW. Like the other country domains it will concentrate on contemporary writers, yet it also intends to publish works by influential poets from the past, like the poetry of eleventh-century Hebrew writer Solomon Ibn Gabirol, to provide a historical context. The first Israeli magazine on PIW thus combines a selection from the work of Gabirol with poetry by modern Israeli writer Dahlia Ravikovitch.
"One of the true witnesses of our new dark ages", is how Charles Simic described {id="5040" title="new Slovenian poet of the quarter Edvard Kocbek"}. Born in 1904, Kocbek was nevertheless more of a contemporary of poets like Zbigniew Herbert than of his own generation, publishing most of his work in the 1960s.As the introduction to his life and work puts it:
"What Kocbek asks is what we must ask of our technology: are we giving up wisdom for facts? Culture for paraphernalia? -- And so immediacy for detachment? Responsibility for excitement? a sense of ethics for a sense of triumph?"
Kocbek’s poetry never ceases to ask questions like this. Yet his all-pervading sense of irony, and the depth of his thinking about politics and religion, ensure that both dogmatism and easy answers are conspicuously absent from his poems. It makes this relatively unknown but wonderfully original writer a real discovery, deserving of a far wider audience. Kocbek’s poetry has lost none of its urgency in the last few decades, and is today perhaps more relevant than ever.
Another poet who has inexplicably not found the wide recognition he deserves is {id="5758" title="Julius Chingono"}, this quarter’s choice from Zimbabwe. Although he published poems in various Shona, Zimbabwean and South-African poetry anthologies, as well as a novel and an award-winning play, his work is still little known in his own country and abroad. A possible reason for this is his own humility; Chingono currently works in a mine. But, as fellow-poet Charles Mungoshi writes in a {id="5732" title="reflection"} on Chingono, another factor may have been "his refusal to bend to the winds of rhetoric or to engage with the great transitory winds of political change." Chingono’s poetry is characterized by sincerity, clarity and a deep feeling for humanity, put in deceptively simple, spare words. We hope that outstanding poems like {id="5883" title="Grapes"} or {id="5881" title="A silhouette"} – the first a near-metaphysical meditation, the second a cutting social commentary – will be read and savoured by all visitors to PIW, as indeed all of Chingono’s poems deserve to be.
The Croatian domain of PIW presents a selection from the work of {id="1756" title="Ivan Slamnig"}, one of Croatia’s "most innovative and unpredictable poets of the eighties", as well as one of the most influential. "In his best work robust comic energy and elements of pathos work alongside each other in a creative partnership," writes our Croatian editor Sibila Petlevski. One only needs to look at a poem like {id="1924" title="My friends are growing on a tree"} to see evidence of this. Lines like "some of them are hanging like apples, or like pears,/ some like oranges, all others like grapes" are followed by
I shake the tree and my friends fall down
and, by God, they kill themselves
but – I must be stupid – for the moment it seems to be
the only way to communicate with them.
New Colombian poet of the quarter {id="1286" title="Samuel Jaramillo"} possesses that rare combination of talents, being both an acclaimed scientist and a celebrated poet. An economist and urban planner, he is also capable of describing the surroundings of his home town in his poem {id="1706" title="On the brink of tears"} like this:
We could say
that this is the Savannah
of Bogotá, with its cold sun
wrapped in translucid gauze
and its horizon line of sluggish cows,
glassy eyes sweeping
the plain, which is broken perhaps
by a bridge.
Finally, after a holiday break of a month, the central domain has resumed reporting on poetry news. We have found a new format for this, the {id="293" title="Poetry newslog"}, always found under "Latest additions" to the left, which we think will lead visitors more quickly to the original news source for further reading.
© Corine Vloet
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