Article
Editorial: June 2007
May 30, 2007
For latest news on the festival programme, audio and video recordings and discussion, see media.poetryinternational.net/weblog
The new issue from the Netherlands features Kreek Daey Ouwens, Anneke Brassinga and Rogi Wieg, as well as new work by K. Michel, all of whom will be performing. PIW will also be offering live coverage of the festival, weblogs on the subject of poetry and performance and a discussion forum about the festival itself. We’ll provide daily coverage of the Chinese Whispers translation project based on the poem ‘De Letters’ by Rogi Wieg and, thanks to Radio Netherlands Worldwide, we’ll also be broadcasting some interviews and performances.
Festival aside, there’s another smashing issue of PIW to enjoy. The Indian editors have been working their way through the many languages written and spoken in their country. In June, they bring us the seventeenth Indian language to feature on the site, Maithili.
This broad spectrum allows for an interesting debate on language and identity within the Indian pages.In ‘The Poetics of Othering’, Udaya Narayana Singh discusses the concept of roots: “Poets are always seen trying to erase the line of demarcation between the local and the global, between the roots and the ground above. These harbingers of change try out ‘othering’– changing one’s personal terminations from the first to third person.”
Oriya poet, Rajendra Kishore Panda, talks about roots in a linguistic sense, roots as the etymology of words. In his own poetry he mixes Sanskrit, the language from which most Indian languages derived, with colloquial expressions and self-coined phrases.
On the Irish pages, one of my personal favourites, Derek Mahon, is featured for the first time. Here is a poet who also allows the roots to show, in his case, Greek and Roman classics via the Elizabethan and Restoration intermediaries of Marlowe and Marston. As a translator of modern European classics such as Valery and Rilke, there’s also a continuation of a poetic tradition throughout the ages. In turn his own work has been influential on subsequent generations.
Thomas McCarthy completes the Irish entry. Concerned with politics and the family, he’s a quintessentially Irish poet and stringently critical to boot. What strikes me, though, as an apolitical reader is the pure skill and sheer beauty of his verse. Consider this last stanza of ‘The Sorrow Garden’, a poem in four parts which begins with the aftermath of the death of the poet’s father.
Like salmon through water, like virgin wood
disturbed into its form in art, his death
obfuscates words irrecoverably. Death plays
its own tune of vision and shadow. It has
attached itself as a vocabulary of change.
From Zimbabwe we introduce Paul Chidyausiku, one of the first Shona poets to be published over fifty years ago. In his introduction, Charles Mungoshi explains that many of this generation of Shona poets were effectively school teachers. In the absence of actual schools, oral poetry was a mainspring of education and had a very social content. The poems would offer advice on to live, on relationships, and on Shona traditions. Chidyausiku’s poetry is therefore very simple, and often adopts the form of a first person narrative, for example see ‘The Heart and the Mind’ or ‘Squatter’, quoted here.
I worked in an asbestos mine
I’ve lost count of the years.
My lungs are full of what they tell me cannot be dislodged
I emptied the bank of the earth
To fill the commercial banks in foreign lands.
That’s it for this month, but if you have time between 16th and 23nd do visit our pages for an inside view of the festival taking place.
June is an important month for us here in Rotterdam with the annual Poetry International Festival taking place from the 16th until the 22nd. If you go to the festival 2007 page (see the left-hand menu) you’ll find information on the programme and a list of poets performing. We’ve included mini biographies of all the poets attending this year.
Poetry International WEBlogFor latest news on the festival programme, audio and video recordings and discussion, see media.poetryinternational.net/weblog
The new issue from the Netherlands features Kreek Daey Ouwens, Anneke Brassinga and Rogi Wieg, as well as new work by K. Michel, all of whom will be performing. PIW will also be offering live coverage of the festival, weblogs on the subject of poetry and performance and a discussion forum about the festival itself. We’ll provide daily coverage of the Chinese Whispers translation project based on the poem ‘De Letters’ by Rogi Wieg and, thanks to Radio Netherlands Worldwide, we’ll also be broadcasting some interviews and performances.
Festival aside, there’s another smashing issue of PIW to enjoy. The Indian editors have been working their way through the many languages written and spoken in their country. In June, they bring us the seventeenth Indian language to feature on the site, Maithili.
This broad spectrum allows for an interesting debate on language and identity within the Indian pages.In ‘The Poetics of Othering’, Udaya Narayana Singh discusses the concept of roots: “Poets are always seen trying to erase the line of demarcation between the local and the global, between the roots and the ground above. These harbingers of change try out ‘othering’– changing one’s personal terminations from the first to third person.”
Oriya poet, Rajendra Kishore Panda, talks about roots in a linguistic sense, roots as the etymology of words. In his own poetry he mixes Sanskrit, the language from which most Indian languages derived, with colloquial expressions and self-coined phrases.
On the Irish pages, one of my personal favourites, Derek Mahon, is featured for the first time. Here is a poet who also allows the roots to show, in his case, Greek and Roman classics via the Elizabethan and Restoration intermediaries of Marlowe and Marston. As a translator of modern European classics such as Valery and Rilke, there’s also a continuation of a poetic tradition throughout the ages. In turn his own work has been influential on subsequent generations.
Thomas McCarthy completes the Irish entry. Concerned with politics and the family, he’s a quintessentially Irish poet and stringently critical to boot. What strikes me, though, as an apolitical reader is the pure skill and sheer beauty of his verse. Consider this last stanza of ‘The Sorrow Garden’, a poem in four parts which begins with the aftermath of the death of the poet’s father.
Like salmon through water, like virgin wood
disturbed into its form in art, his death
obfuscates words irrecoverably. Death plays
its own tune of vision and shadow. It has
attached itself as a vocabulary of change.
From Zimbabwe we introduce Paul Chidyausiku, one of the first Shona poets to be published over fifty years ago. In his introduction, Charles Mungoshi explains that many of this generation of Shona poets were effectively school teachers. In the absence of actual schools, oral poetry was a mainspring of education and had a very social content. The poems would offer advice on to live, on relationships, and on Shona traditions. Chidyausiku’s poetry is therefore very simple, and often adopts the form of a first person narrative, for example see ‘The Heart and the Mind’ or ‘Squatter’, quoted here.
I worked in an asbestos mine
I’ve lost count of the years.
My lungs are full of what they tell me cannot be dislodged
I emptied the bank of the earth
To fill the commercial banks in foreign lands.
That’s it for this month, but if you have time between 16th and 23nd do visit our pages for an inside view of the festival taking place.
© Michele Hutchison
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