3:AM Magazine

We have nothing apart from the words. There are still some words which do not stand side by side in a line. In the attic of language, there are still different facilities which are not used. I am trying to expand these facilities of Turkish by writing poetry. I also believe that poetry has an important capacity to alter, convert and beautify the daily reality that I do not like. The outer physical world is something to be written for me. The world is always waiting for a new meaning, a new perspective, a new connection. In other words, poetry has the power to change the world.

In the 85th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Turkish poet Gonca Özmen.

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I read Dante I stripped a man white
A good child I lay down and took stock
My losses great, my gains many, my sins sweet
See how I’m reduced to bushes and brambles
I asked about birds I delved in the forest white
I stripped myself bare and headed out
How great to stop between your shoulder and evening
I looked long at distant mallows
I read Dante I kissed a soldier white
Once like a whole town asleep
I came back the echo of a stone you threw
The world sometimes, sometimes the world is one blood only

By Gonca Özmen.

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Each illustration holds potential for intensity, for intensities that require several word balloons. Each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. Each superhero has an origin story for misunderstanding what makes a power. Each time, the image is more distinct. Each written text may act as a distinction, may be a distinction. Elections with margins.

By Dennis Etzel Jr.

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elongated within shadow deity. Warm when
fingers inherit cultural purpose
serenading
various methods of farthest-strain spectrum deliverance
analyzing trust in object
rejuvenation, definitional purpose supposed achromatic
certainty, bland as prose whose
purposeful relation

By Felino A. Soriano.

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It depends on a poem, some of them are born with their eyes open and their legs ready to walk. But generally, yes, I do a lot of drafting. I might agree with Allen Ginsberg’s “first thought, best thought” to the extent that it’s the first thought that is often the best, but not always the first wording. Of course, it is a common truth that in poetry form is content and word is thought. You’ve hit the meaning, if you’ve hit the signifier: you cannot really separate them. However, I often first come to an idea, or a connection of ideas, or an analogy between phenomena from different realms, and then I carefully have to find a right mold for it, to avoid dressing it in wrong-sized clothes.

In the 84th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Estonian poet Maarja Kangro.

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But I wanted to leave a souvenir on each of them.
Black, white and red. Red, white and black.
Like the flags of some Asian countries.
Then I thought, why not mark the romances,
crime stories, fantasy fiction, too? I had
plenty of blood to give and didn’t feel stingy.
All those intense faces with blood on them.
At one point the saleswoman seemed to mumble.
I remembered I still had to buy a gift,
and I left without asking for any recompense for my blood.
This is the bit of blood I’ve shed for culture.
Perhaps I would have shed more, though, if I had been asked.

By Maarja Kangro.

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Now you have a penetrating itch
‘the burning bush’
permanent scratch, swat that
peeled eye on the
window stain
cultivating
discipline

fl u ct u ant sin
Cauterizing:

(in)securities hide
glint / gleam
beam of the
casting

By Jo Langton.

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I no longer write in German, and according to my old notebooks, it was sometime in 1995 that I decided to write exclusively in English. What I remember vividly is the sheer excitement I felt of working with a new language, the elasticity of the English language and its linguistic opportunities. Reading other translingualists, too, gave me the confidence to turn my initial decision to write in English into a full-blown linguistic suicide or, at least, a complete translingual transformation: Conrad, Brodsky, Simic, Nabokov, and many others.

In the 83rd of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Swiss poet Daniele Pantano.

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Mass Graves XIX-XXII is an excerpt from a new manuscript I’m working on, Mass Graves: A Confession. At least superficially, the book is about the brutal murder of one of Egon Schiele’s girl models. More importantly, the book is an exercise in what I call “Überrogue,” a particularly dark, shocking, and at times perverse artistic response to voyeur culture and a society obsessed with violence and destruction.

By Daniele Pantano.

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what do we get from these various communities
I like Barry Manilow and if the fire alarm goes
off we’ll meet outside the Chinese Buffet

and I’ll tick your name off the register
how do they shape us and help us
it’s like a hand with eight fingers

what is the Bermuda Triangle
have you all signed the register
where people disappear

By Steven Waling.

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