Editorial: March 2007

February 22, 2007 There’s an openly political flavour to the India pages; the first poet there, K.G. Sankara Pillai, has had his editorial work confiscated by the police, and his poems are accompanied by an essay that demonstrates how they “address the ethical problems of living in a turbulent society”. That society receives ironic thanks in ‘Deep Within’ – “Lucky indeed that I can be / locked within / by my near / and dear ones” – and in Basudev Sunani’s poems, those who live in that turbulence, in this case the Dalit community, are also given voice. In an interview with his translator, Rabindra Swain, the poet says that “It is a stupendous task to present [the Dalit consciousness] to those who do not have the experience of it, especially through poetry”, but his poems make significant headway in that task.

Italy is represented by Fabio Pusterla, and a sequence of deadpan ‘Stories of the Armadillo’. He ends this poem with a note that claims that it is the reader who may find – or build – the allegory in this poem, but adds ingenuously that “if this were to happen, could the author ever deny this possibility?” The armadillo comes into contact with a deserted tank, and enters a state in which “You may own / cars, costumed slaves, guns but armadillos, / oh no”; it sounds to me like there are places to start finding parallels, but to read it only in terms of those parallels would strip much of the joy from a poem that has already enchanted primary-school children in Italy.

There is a piglet in Vona Groarke’s ‘Family’ that seems almost to take her place as a child; this makes the fate of the pigs that nearly escape ‘The Slaughterhouse’ seem more disturbing. John McAuliffe, in the Irish pages, applauds her formal elegance and skills in shaping “dreamy, songlike lyrics” and “long stanzaic meditations on history”, both of which are represented here. Her work is joined by three new poems by Paul Muldoon, probably Ireland’s most formally gifted yet mischievous poet, and the aforementioned Colm Breathnach, in Irish and his own translations – his poem ‘Through the Speckled Land’ pictures him “between two tongues / between two worlds”.

In the Croatia pages, Gordana Benić is also presented as a poet between two worlds. She writes, in her poem ‘Isolation’, that “When I close my eyes the walls move apart, slant / into thin surfaces; so quickly do they change.” It’s probably naïve to assume an identity between the poet and the voice of the poem but even so, this is clearly poetry creating “a world that manifests itself on the borders of reverie about a non-existent reality, on the verge of vanishing”, in the words of Milos Ðurđević’s introduction. She also travels between free verse and prose poetry, and Ðurđević contributes an essay exploring this aspect of her work.

In contrast to Benić’s complex and sometimes enigmatic images, the poems of Nachoem M. Wijnberg presented here – several simply titled ‘Song’ – build their effects from the simplest language and structures. But those effects are far from simplistic, with readers in his native Netherlands able to agree only on the poems’ brilliance, not on their meaning; their ability to create a surface in which to read your own meanings is part of their power as well as their mystery. 
All poems, read by the poet himself, are also presented as audio files. This is part of the 'digital pioneers' project, introducing new technology on PIW to present audio as podcasts but also as an audio stream on the poem pages. The project starts with ten Dutch poets, but the technology opens the door to more intensive integration of audio on this site in the future. {link name="int-audio-list" title="On the All audio - podcast page"}  you'll find an overview of all audio files available on PIW.

Finally, I must thank the Poetry International Web staff for the opportunity to work on this issue, and particularly Michele for taking the maternity leave for me to cover.   Readers of the last issue's editorial will be delighted to know her daughter arrived, with perfect timing, on February 1, that instalment's publication date.  Michele will return for April’s instalment of PIW, with my renewed admiration for her ability to write this introduction every month, and until then I shall encourage readers to enjoy their reading, and building, of the new arrivals on the pages here.