Anarchy

The cold grips our skin. We run
around the football pitch in a field
at ten pm in the middle of winter-
it’s dark, and the dark is playful with us,
giving us shape and silhouette.
Some guy parks his car on the driveway
and we shout over;
he hurries inside his house and we figure
we’d better put some clothes on.
We could be made of ice. We don’t care-
as far as we’re concerned, if aliens land
this is where they will be landing,
and in all our glory, we dance.

She lives above an old launderette.
The gorgeous steam smell of the place gets
up our sensitive noses and in our hair.
Her mum plays Rush LP’s and wears
leather skirts and takes Prozac.
In the evening we can’t go into the living room
in case she’s skinning up.
One time her dad came into her room,
sat down talking to her guitar like it was a person.
We laugh, though I know her life is tragic.
I walk by her in school and my nipples hurt;
I just want to touch her all the time.

We try on sunglasses in a department store
on a day out by the sea.
We run out of the shop wearing them
streaming with tears of laughter-
it gives us a hunger; we buy greasy doughnuts
and walk the promenade, hand in hand.
Nobody stares.
We can do no wrong. We can get stoned
in the woods and make out, and no-one
stops us. We can sleep together like release doves.
At times we feel insane,

so we drink our tinnies and smoke our cigarettes,
talk about leaving school and working in telesales.
Talk about the flat we’ll have together
and the pets, and the music we will listen to all night-
we won’t need to sleep.
We’re of the darkness, our eyes need never shut-
and her mum falls asleep in the chair
in her dressing gown, or comes in pissed
and tripping and she carries her to bed-
we have found ways of hiding from this.
Vodka does the trick, and sex.
But it’s not the way they do it in the movies.

We’ve got hard hearts.
We share t-shirts, jeans, spit.
All the lads fancy her but she never even blinks.
I have her, like only I can turn her head
and I’m mad with it.
We drink wine through straws by the woods
in the dark. We are on a higher plane.
Her eyes are blue like a husky.
Her pupils are always tiny.
Her skin is so supple and firm-
she’s a wild creature, and I won’t tame her-
her heart beats double time when sleeping;
I don’t know what I’m doing with her.

She writes me letters, I read them in bed.
She says she’s crying, says she’s lonely.
Says she had to put her mum to bed again.
Says she’s not going to school anymore,
they’ll have to make her, and all that I see
are the highlighted words in the last paragraph-
please baby always love me.

Heart and Soul
For Ian Curtis

In your wife’s tired body, strange music accumulates,
a clawing of the bed-sheets,
one foot over the side of the bed and cold;
feeling for monsters while you sleep. You can’t
hold her now, the waxwork with too much make-up on-
a broken heart from waiting in the kitchen too long,
sweeping and mopping up. Inside, your blood
was slippery, black, lacking musicality. The thud
of your heart rocked your brain in your box room
where you wrote your best lyrics. In all that dark you wore
sunglasses in winter, nobody owned you.
You wanted the growl of cheap guitars
and a bassline to hang yourself on. You wanted to screw
the audience, all of them, and so you ripped it up-
carnal hysteria like death-throes
guitar strings searing like whips. And then pie and chips for tea
at a table with a chequered cloth. And the baby wants affection
for breakfast and you don’t want to wake up again.
The one you love is a thousand miles away
putting her earrings in at the mirror and smiling,
the thought of your naked body and sex that almost hurt,
holding onto herself. Everyone believes in you.
You’re an essential component. You’re Music.
You eat your wife’s meals and spit out pound coins.
Pennies slip through your fingers and the baby needs nappies-
Where will it end? You ask yourself that question each night;
you already know. For your true love you turn up your collar
and walk in the snow, push the pram to the park
where you want the world to end. You can’t give her what you promised,
you can’t give any of them what you promised.
The red brick house on the red brick road
with the draught under the back door that used to get into your bed at night,
stop your heart. She would wake next to you, or dream of waking next to you,
put a hand on your chest, (she’s smiling
and you’re repulsed by the smell of her breath, the curve of her hip)-
you want long black hair, not dirty blonde- you want guilt and envy,
surrender, and the pure psychology of being
in her supple skin. What will they do with your music?
What will they do with your songs? Eat you alive, they’ll
eat you alive. You’ll never have grey hair or loose teeth;
your dead skin and dust will stay in that house for a decade.
She’ll breathe you in and you’ll make her sneeze.
The new guy will choke on you and you will haunt him.
He has heard all your albums. He dreamed of you of late, he dreamt that you put your fist
through the bedroom window and he had to dress the lacerations,
your eyes rolling, singing from the grave holy and old-
one will burn…
Gravity is a son-of-a-bitch. I know manic depressives
that have suffered more and survived. I’ve known schizophrenics
and I have come back from the dead with a handful of your hair.
Down there, you’re a number. You’re still epileptic, that’s your punishment
that’s what they dished out for your abandoning them,
a mouth full of chewed glass and your hands bunched in fists
and your body hanging like a block of wood being beaten
and your soul still spilling out of the front door
and rolling down the street in a panic of her screams;
lucid, ugly, piercing screams until there’s no sound,
just mouthing help me-
Love dug your grave.
Love churned the soil, loosened the worms.
Love fed your baby.
Love sold your records.
You didn’t have enough love.
You didn’t have enough.

Play

I know the hunger will come
and it will break you. You have wet dreams
because I won’t play.
This is the fourth poem I have ever written in which I will
use the word sterile. We don’t need protection.
We just need faith,
some kind of angel.

In the room next door our children and playing with their food.
They are waiting for me to snap.
They don’t know that the real politics in this house
are going on right now
in an empty, dark room with a cold, empty bed
where poltergeists are howling noiselessly
swinging from the lampshades,
mad for us.

The hunger will come and it will
define you. It was there before, when we met,
when even forests weren’t too big for us.
I tell you I don’t care if they eat they won’t starve.
You, on the other hand, are dying in a way nobody can see,
forever. You’re losing all your best years.
It’s hard to bear witness to that, when in fact
I can’t, can’t be without you

and my soul is contemplating defeat-
I’m not worldly- I have been down on my knees for you,
I have begged.

There are no stars tonight, only rain.
I can’t tune into the way you make me feel.
I have no clue when you will tire of me holding your head at night
still as salt and mortar,
no clue when you will tire of me and
twist my arm-
and break.

Hunger Pangs

The girls try to cut into their arms with blunt knives-
Sunita is eating out of the food disposal.
They get up and run to the bathroom, scrambling
past each other to be the first.
I look at my plate and I feel guilty for my hunger pangs and
Sunita has clods of food in her soft, dumpy hands-
when they realise they have to drag her
on her behind, down the corridor, her big mammal laugh
booming. This madness in me, it is of a timbre
and a texture that leaves my emotions emaciated.
I can’t cry; these girls are beautiful and dying-
I can’t cry; nobody is going to save me. Not here.
The sunsets are like nothing else, they move me to tears-
though I watch from my reinforced window; no-one cares
about the fucking sun.
When it’s dark, no-one’s sorry-
trees lash the windows like we’re Wuthering Heights
and the gale force winds don’t mean nothing at all;
they’re no match for thirteen girls
who can handle the sight of blood
and can and will fly out into the night.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Melissa Lee-Houghton’s first collection A Body Made of You was released in April 2011 by Penned in the Margins. Her work has been published in many literary magazines, including Tears in the Fence, Magma, Poetry Salzburg Review and Succour, and has work upcoming in La Reata and The Reader. She writes regularly for The Short Review and has contributed to a number of anthologies, most recently Starry Rhymes by Read This Press.

Contemporary Turkish poetry looks confidently back upon the iconoclastic individuals who have constituted its genuinely remarkable tradition, and the current cohort of poets emerging from the 21st century possess the unique sensibility in language that marks them from their predecessors and stamps their entire generation with the influence of their work. As the light of poets like Ilhan Berk and Nazim Hikmet begins to fade from view, it is poets like Gonca Özmen who have come into their own. After just two collections and a variety of prizes, Gonca has become one of the most direct, concise and eloquent voices in Turkish poetry and one who has begun to grow a reputation far beyond the borders of her home nation, thanks to last year’s publication of the Sea Within, a collection of translated poems from Shearsman press. In our 85th edition, we are pleased to welcome, our second Turkish respondent, Gonca Özmen.

3:AM: With the publication of only two books in Turkey you seem to have gained a considerable reputation as a poet of formidable force and talent. How do you feel you have been received in the Turkish poetry community and by readers at large?

Gonca Özmen: I was very young (only 15) when my first poem was published in a well-known Turkish literary magazine called Varlık in 1997. My first book Kuytumda (In My Nook) was published when I was 18 years old. Beside my poetry, I guess my young age and my gender also drew attention. My second book Belki Sessiz (Maybe Quiet) was published after eight years by one of the primary publishing houses. I really worked a lot on it and I waited for a long time before publishing the poems. I read them again and again, I changed the words, added new ones erased lines and I even played with the form, tone and discourse. It is a book which is not only written but also made. It is constructed like a building. Some poets and important critics found it praiseworthy. Nearly 20 essays were published on my second book. All this has led to recognition. This gives one the urge to continue writing. I have been writing and publishing in several literary magazines, journals and newspapers since 1997. But of course there are the ones who do not like my poetry in the Turkish poetry community. It is inevitable.

By readers? I can only say that recently the third editions of my books are published. This is the real award for me. I have to say that I do not care for reputation. I am trying to enlarge and deepen the scope of my poetry. The crucial thing is the power of your work. You have to prove your worth with each new poem and book. The rest is meaningless. Poetry is a footpath and poets should be stubborn goats.

3:AM: Your work is marked by its fluidity of image, its apparent ease of construction, it’s versatility too, it’s ability to maintain darkness with light, and it’s clarity without reduction. What are your aiming to achieve with your poems?

GÖ: Thanks for your considerate comments. Virginia Woolf argues that “Nothing makes a whole unless I am writing… Nothing is real unless I write.” Beginning from my childhood, I always prefer textual reality to everyday reality. Luckily I was born in a house with a big library. It was the library of my father who is a philosophy teacher. I have been a hungry reader since my childhood. I believe that every writer has to be a good reader at first. Because being a true poetry reader is as difficult as writing poetry. Both reading and writing require an intensive effort, creative impulse, and poetic knowledge. It is really hard to get into a poem as you too know. A poem only reveals its nature as the reader tries to grasp it, delves into it. It creates its own strategy of insight and its own life with its own logic. There is not a fixed meaning. The readers who do not get accustomed to read poetry, who do not know the evolution of that particular poetry tradition or the readers who cannot appreciate the aesthetic beauty of the metaphors, the music and the images are incapable of getting into a poem. However more or less each reader finds her/his own meaning (or meaninglessness) according to her/his literary background, way of life and point of view. This process is like a communication between the reader and the poem itself.

I like Wallace Stevens and he stresses that “A poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words.” I also try to do the same thing. The impulse of writing is very complicated and the act of creativity cannot be understood precisely. But words, words, words… 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. World is always waiting a new meaning, a new perspective, a new connection. In other words, poetry has the power to change the world. Yes, I still believe in it. I should add that a poem is contemporary and also timeless, modern and also similar to all times.

Writing is an existential revolt for me. I think that poet is someone who always tries to reach what is beyond her/his reach and to write what is unwritten and to hear what is unheard, “to foresee the unforeseeable” (H. Cixous). The creative process is by its nature a kind of imaginative wandering within the mind and language. Poetry enables us to see behind the things that are shown to us, that are told to us. It adds a new eye to the individual. It is the stimulant for the individual.

I can easily say that writing for me at first stems from a need to speak with the other, a need to touch the other and a need to share. I think that poetry is a form of interaction. I want to communicate with the reader. I am trying to make the reader participate in creating the poem. I want to force the reader to interact with the poems. Thus, I erase rather than narrate. I am putting many gaps between the lines, because I want from my readers to create the poem with me in these gaps. I want them to speak with the poem by these gaps and create their own meanings. I want them to collaborate with me in these silences. A poem endlessly reproduces itself within the perception of the reader. It is recreated again and again in every reading. Making the reader sense more with few words… The depth and profundity of austerity… The hidden meanings of the words…

3:AM: You have won Ali Rıza Ertan Prize, the Orhon Murat Arıburnu Prize, and the Berna Moran Poetry Prize, how have these awards helped your reputation?

GÖ: As far as I have answered above, I admit that awards help to increase your audience and reputation. They make poetry books more visible. Without the help of awards, many books of young poets wouldn’t get published. Without Orhon Murat Arıburnu Prize, I could not be able to publish my first book in 1997. It has opened my way in a sense. But nothing more.

3:AM: How did The Sea Within come to be published in the UK with Shearsman press?

GÖ: Thanks to George Messo. After the translations were finished, he sent the copy of the book to Shearsman Books. After some time, he sent me an email and wrote that Shearsman wanted to publish the book. Unfortunately I meet neither George nor Tony Frazer, the editor of Shearsman Books. I wish you could ask this question to Tony Frazer. Some of the translations in The Sea Within first appeared in the following magazines. Grateful acknowledgements are due to the editors of Absinthe: New European Poetry, Cerise Press, Conversation Poetry, and The Raconteur.

3:AM: What was the process of working with George Messo, a remarkable translator responsible for the incredible anthology “İkinci Yeni: The Turkish Avant-Garde”? Being a specialist in the English language yourself, were you closely involved and was it a fluid process?

GÖ: George Messo published another anthology called “From This Bridge: Contemporary Turkish Women Poets” two years ago. He also translated 3 books from İlhan Berk, one of Turkey’s most influential and innovative poets, who is called as “the bad boy of Turkish letters”. These books are A Leaf About to Fall: Selected Poems (Salt, 2006), Madrigals (Shearsman, 2008) and The Book of Things (Salt, 2009) He also made a selection of Birhan Keskin, who is a unique poet of Turkish. He spends great effort in introducing Turkish poetry to the foreign readers. He should certainly be appreciated. He is a poet himself too and it is very important for the hit of the translations.

However literary translation -poetry in particular- is an endless process. Each translator is a reader and the success of the translation depends on the ability of the translator to read the poem, the poet and the culture well. It should not be forgotten that you are also reading the translator when you read a Turkish poem in another language. For this reason there is not an ultimate translation of a poem. As a translator, George also stresses that “There are a huge number of recurring difficulties that arise for me when I’m translating a poem, many of them idiomatic and concerned with nuance and tone and how to reflect the more subtle shadings in a poem. There are no shortcuts. It isn’t something I find easy, ever. Whether choices are large or small, there is always a decision to be made which will carry the poem one way or another, and we know those choices can be enormously consequential for the translated poem.”

Even though I am writing my Ph.D. thesis in English at the time being, I cannot accept that I am a specialist in the English language. It also seems impossible to me. I do not live within that language and I cannot say that I feel English as my home. However there was inevitably a kind of collaboration between us. We exchanged our views on some decisions, tendencies, preferences, and attitudes. However I did not intervene. George makes them come alive in English.

3:AM: Could you talk about the role of Çevirmenin Notu as a journal of translation in Turkey?

GÖ: Beginning with Tercüme Dergisi, some journals of translation were published in Turkey such as Yazko Çeviri, Metis Çeviri, Tömer Çeviri. However a journal of translation had not been published in this country for fifteen years - from 1997 to 2007. First edition of Ç.N. was published in 2007. Tozan Alkan is editor in chief. Nur Peri, Şeref Bilsel, Oğuz Baykara, Başak Ergil and I are in the editorial board. Its fifteenth edition was published last month.

One can find translations of poems, short stories, interviews, essays, and literary letters from world literature in Ç.N. as well as academic writings on translation studies. Ç.N. fills an important gap. It is very useful for translation scholars and young translators. And everyone involved with literature.

3:AM: Who within the current Turkish poetry scene do you admire?

GÖ: Actually I prefer to recommend modern poets who are translated into English for readers of Turkish poetry in the English-speaking world. Otherwise it does not mean anything to mention the names of the poets who have not been translated yet. As one of the pioneers of modern poetry, Nazım Hikmet is unique in terms of his turbulent life, exquisite lyrics, and political verses. His fame spread further outside of Turkey. He has a world-wide readership. The leading poets of the modernist ‘First New’ of the 1930s, Orhan Veli (Corinth Books, 1971-Hanging Loose Press, 1989), Oktay Rifat (Rockingham Press, 1993-Anvil, 2007) and Melih Cevdet Anday (Geronimo Books, 1974-Charioteer Press, 1980) sought to eliminate ‘all artifice and convention from poetry and write for the growing masses’. Cemal Süreya (Indiana University Turkish Studies Series, 2010), Ece Ayhan (Sun and Moon Press, 1997), Edip Cansever (Talisman House, 2009), İlhan Berk, who belong to ‘The Second New’ poetry movement, had a groundbreaking effect in Turkish poetry tradition. The Second New has still been regarded as the greatest development in Turkish poetry. Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca (University of Pittsburg Press, 1969) can be called as a school on his own. One can also read Lale Müldür (Poetry Ireland, 1998), Hulki Aktunç (Poetry Ireland, 1998), Bejan Matur (Arc Publications, 2004), Cevat Çapan (Arc Publications, 2005), Enis Batur (Talisman House, 2006), Hilmi Yavuz (Syracuse University Press, 2007), Ataol Behramoğlu (The University of Texas, 2008), Seyhan Erözçelik (Talisman House, 2010) in English. Instead of anthologies, it will be better to follow Turkish poetry from individual books, though they are very limited. I also want to add with gratitude that we owe much to these translators: Talat Sait Halman, Nermin Menemencioğlu, Taner Baybars, Feyyaz Kayacan, Richard Mckane, Ruth Christie, Walter G. Andrews, Murat-Nemet Nejat, George Messo, Önder Otçu, Saliha Paker, Mel Kenne, Clifford and Selhan Endres and the others.

Unfortunately Turkish is still one of the few translated languages. At present the only funding available exclusively for the translation of Turkish literature comes from the Turkish government, through the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. TEDA project is one of the important examples of what can be done.

3:AM: And what are your thoughts on the health of contemporary poetry in Turkey?

GÖ: The Turkish language has a rich poetic tradition from past to present. Contemporary Turkish Poetry is a polyphonic one. It has many layers and subdivisions. We have a very rich panorama of poetry in Turkey. Personal outflows draw attention and self-dependence becomes the characteristic of the younger poets. Even the poetry manifestations become personal. For this reason I want to stress that each poet has to be evaluated uniquely in terms of her/his own poetry within the Turkish poetry tradition.

However if I try to epitomize some general attitudes, I can say that the predominant tendency is towards imagist poetry. The metropolitan city life becomes the focal point of the poems written by contemporary poets. Some poems convey romantic, avangard, expressionist, mystic or arabesque characteristics. The effects of popular culture and media-oriented tendencies can be seen in some. Some are only based on the artificial plays of the words and some on the romantic outpourings of the poets’ personal lives. Some poets use the coarse or pornographic slang, some use very old Arabic or Persian words which are not used in the daily language. One can see the influence of marginal beatnik poetry, techno virtual poetry and the concrete poetry as well. Some particular words which enter into our daily lives with the rapid technological development such as bonus, msn, google, gmail, sms, drugs, polaroid, keyboard, lipstick, lens, condom or z report are heavily used.

It is important to emphasize that the contemporary younger poets are widely influenced by the Second Movement poets such as Cemal Süreya, Edip Cansever, Turgut Uyar, Ece Ayhan, İlhan Berk. Haydar Ergülen and küçük iskender are the most contemporary ones who significantly influence the young poets. Some poets completely reject the poetry tradition whereas some are strictly attached to it. There are also very successful poets who are interested in the experimental, witty, striking, fragmented and new as opposed to the ordinary forms and traditional structures without wholly ignoring the tradition.

One of the most striking facts is the increase of the female poets both in quality and quantity. They can freely (!) write about their own bodies, their own erotic fantasies, sexual desires or frustrations as opposed to those who still imitate the male ideology in their poems by producing the same patriarchal discourse of the tradition. Even though I think that a poet should be an androgynous character in order to be able to adopt the discourse of a male, a female, a child, a tree, a plant, an object, or an animal, this new powerful discourse of the female poets are very much striking and impressive, especially when we consider the situation of the female in our culture. It is also important in that sense that this is the breaking of the dominant patriarchal discourse in the Turkish Poetry.

But still we need more blood in words…

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
SJ Fowler is the author of three poetry collections, Red Museum (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2011), Fights (Veer books 2011) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA 2011). He is the UK poetry editor of Lyrikline and 3:AM. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and a postgraduate student at the Contemporary Centre for Poetic Research, University of London.

Winds Like These

These things happen, winds like these
This autumn balcony calls me

Whatever your hands dispense at night
I gather up my hair and rivers too

Then I go and undress in front of a poem
I kiss a child its name becomes love

Everything is distant from us
When with us, nothing is alone

I accent a little sorrow to this presence

There’s a tree in your hands
I’m looking at a bustling tree in your hands

You sit, eating a peach
Grass is walking, I say, don’t you see

Oppressive rain passes the window
I call out to myself, there’s no reply

O my love, there’s a needle between us
Stitching me to you

Translated by George Messo

The Land Of Mulberry

Come to the land of mulberry
To the remoteness of dwellings

I’ll teach you quiet
And the branches’ concern

I’ll kiss where you’re waning
Where nature wanes

Cross the plain
Come to the land of mulberry
Into the grasses

I’ll make you listen to the storm
To the scream of the storm-god

A long while later
I’ll wait for you again
Beyond a stream

Cross the field
Come closer come
To the mulberry scent

I’ll show you the ants

Translated by Ruth Christie

Cross-Breed

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

I sat then I found a mouth that would be silent
We mixed together forlorn and white
My book, my sacred text, my mixed child
I reek because of you

I read Dante I knocked down a state black

Translated by Ruth Christie and Mel Kenne

Mustafa

I peeled the orange Mustafa
I placed you at my bedside

A bed, look, no wider than a grave
Just like that deep down I’d offered myself

Thin sword, thin blood, slim death
This condemnation I invented myself

Dumma dumma dum in every man a woman

The one romping inside me had black eyes
One, Mustafa, doesn’t call out my name any more

They think this one’s a love poem too, so let them
Their umbrellas are large
They’re not getting wet

These skies must be pulled down Mustafa, pulled down
In people deep down lies their boundlessness

Keep me cool Mustafa
Keep me cool
In being alive lies the word’s being

To return, those children in far off homes

Translated by Saliha Paker and Mel Kenne

Memet

Take these ratta-tats Memet
Take them to the ratta-tatta man

Take this me Memet
Take this me to the meadows

Do I know what to do with me?
To me, I’m always a seabattle Memet

Take this me to the birds
Drop this me to the poor suburbs

Battling’s a backpack anyway Memet

Besides can a wound get old
Just keep me waiting again on a pillow-bed

Even the apple awaits its time

Just … me in a big old urn…
Deeper even deeper Memet

Just watch what a carnival, the human race

Does the ratta-tatta man
Ever ratta-tat the ratta-tat Memet?

Best if you dump me in with the poor Memet
Take this me, throw this me off the minaret

Translated by Saliha Paker and Mel Kenne

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gonca Özmen was born in Burdur (southern Turkey) in 1982. She was awarded with Ali Rıza Ertan Poetry Prize in 1999. Her first poetry book Kuytumda (In My Nook) was published in 2000, winning Orhan Murat Arıburnu Poetry Prize. She won Berna Moran Poetry Prize given by Istanbul University in 2003. Her second book Belki Sessiz (Maybe Quiet) was published in February 2008. She edits the magazine of literary translation Ç.N. (Çevirmenin Notu). Her poems are translated into Spanish, French, English, German, Slovenian and Persian. The Sea Within (Selected Poems, translated by George Messo) was published by Shearsman Books in February 2011. She has been living in Istanbul since 2000.

Notes:
[But if-But when]
Sentences 1, 2, and 4: President Ronald Reagan, Presidential Debate, October 21, 1984 in Kansas City, Missouri. Public domain.
Sentence 3: From Dungeons and Dragons Companion Set: Volume One by Frank Mentzer, p9. Used with permission from Wizards of the Coast, LLC.

[By drawing-Challenging…step]
Sentences 2 and 3: From Dungeons and Dragons, p2 and 7.

[Each illustration-Elections with]
Sentences 2 and 5: From “A Rejection of Closure,” by Lyn Hejinian. Used with permission from the author.
Sentence 4: From The New Mutants #18, Vol. 1 by Chris Claremont. The New Mutants © and TM Marvel Entertainment, LLC, and used with permission.

[Feminism defined-For monster]
Sentence 2: From “ARK 34, Spire on the Death of L.Z.” by Ronald Johnson. Used with permission from Peter O’Leary, literary executor.
Sentence 4: Hejinian.
Sentence 5: From “ARK43, Lot’s Pillar III” by Ronald Johnson. Used with permission from Peter O’Leary, literary executor.

[Freezing rain-Geraldine Ferraro]
Sentence 1: About the March 18, 1984 Topeka ice storm, on the National Weather Service website, by Mike Akulow and Larry Schultz. Public domain.
Sentence 3: From “ARK37, Prospero’s Song to Ariel (constructed in the form of a quilt snipped from Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to Western Birds)” by Ronald Johnson. Used with permission from Peter O’Leary, literary executor.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dennis Etzel Jr. lives with his wife and two sons in Topeka, Kansas, where he teaches at Washburn University. He has an MFA from The University of Kansas and an MA in Lit and Creative Writing with a Graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies. Work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, BlazeVOX, Flint Hills Review, Poetry Midwest, and others.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Felino A. Soriano is a case manager and advocate for adults with developmental and physical disabilities. Recent poetry collections include Intentions of Aligned Demarcations (Desperanto, 2011), Pathos etched, recalled: (white sky books, 2011), and Divaricated, Spatial Aggregates (limit cycle press, 2011). He edits and publishes the online journal, Counterexample Poetics.

Over the last few decades it has become clear that the Baltic is one of the most prolific and energised sources of contemporary European poetry. Nor is this community of poets of a certain style or movement or form. The writers emerging from Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and the surrounding nations are radically individualistic, as innovative as they are classically powerful. Amongst them Maarja Kangro is quite clearly one of the most formidable voices of her generation - effortlessly intelligent, wry, considered, incisive, her relentless output of translations, librettos, prose, poetry and children’s stories have assured her place as a leading light in North Eastern Europe, with a reputation striking deep into Germany and Italy and we hope, as her brilliance continues unabated over the coming years, further into the UK and US. For our 84th edition, we welcome Estonia’s Maarja Kangro.

3:AM: Your conception of subjectivity in your poems is fascinating. It seems you often blur the lines between the ‘I’ in your work and an alter ego or invented persona that seems to speaking above or behind the scope of the poem itself. Is this a deliberate action?

Maarja Kangro: Sure. The “I” that speaks in my poems is often a persona, so I can observe her/him at a certain distance. Or I can at least indulge in the illusion of separating my own voice from that of a character and being thus more analytic. In this sense, I’m not a „master of the first person singular“, as Rita Dove said of Allen Ginsberg. When I write essays or reviews, it’s always me who speaks, so it is a relief to be someone else in poetry. Indeed, when speaking about my first-hand experience, my own reactions to a situation, I sometimes refer to the protagonist in the third person singular: at a distance it is easier to dissect my own attitudes and choices, to observe the paradoxes that most value systems finally tend to lead to.

Estonian, like Finno-Ugric languages in general, doesn’t have gender, so with translations into Indo-European languages it is often a problem for me to reveal the gender of the speaker. In some cases it seems to me an unnecessary and even misleading specification. It is sometimes just a human consciousness speaking or reflecting on itself, and that should be it, there is little gender-specific about it.

3:AM: Your work is beautifully structural, it seems to construct individual world’s around each poem, and it has the flowing gift of perhaps Francis Ponge or Rene Char, in its ability to make this seem a natural state of things…

MK: Thank you, I admire Ponge and Char very much. And “flowing gift” – what more could a poet desire!

Each of my poems is indeed meant to be an individual world, and sometimes every single poem is so definitely a separate entity that it hardly tolerates another entity beside it. So it is not always easy to arrange them into a collection. I do not tend to write texts that are fragments linked to each other and work best together in a cycle. Perhaps I like the old-fashioned (or Modernist, that for a while meant old-fashioned) idea of separate, finished artworks, rather than a constant open-ended process of retelling oneself or interactively recombining the material.

3:AM: There seems a remarkable level of intricacy and care in the construction of your poems. Are you someone who drafts often and continues to hone work before you deem it ready to be read?

MK: 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.

I admit that in the course of time I’ve become less and less spontaneous. I hope, though, that it is a U-turn-like route, so that after a while this conscientious drafting will reach its peak and will then be replaced by serene carelessness.

3:AM: I am interested in your work as a librettist. Have you always written for music alongside poetry?

MK: Actually I started as a librettist and as a writer and translator of lyrics of contemporary or classical music. I did that before I wrote “real” poetry. I have written librettos for Tõnu Kõrvits, my father Raimo Kangro, Tõnis Kaumann, Timo Steiner. Once also some texts for Gavin Bryars. While writing librettos or texts for, say, a cantata, I have enjoyed very much using the metre and rhyme which I do not use that often in my poetry. Even when some of my poems have a strict metre (usually a iambic or a trochaic foot), rhyme is something that I strictly reserve for translations or for the texts to be set to music. It’s a strangely schizoid situation, because in music and in translations of poetry I love combining and building rhymes, it is like solving mathematical puzzles. But my “real” poems are obviously afraid of sounding songlike, of being reduced to a verbal play. So they do not rhyme.

3:AM: You have written for children too, which seems to be the mark of many wonderful poets in Northern Europe (Martin Glaz Serup, Inger Christensen). Do you pursue similar concerns in this medium as in your poetry?

MK: So far I have written only one children’s book (perhaps I’ll write more if I finally succeed in having them), but in a way, yes. The book reflects the views of an ideal me who strongly supports democracy, even when it’s apparently inefficient and costly, and who is in favour of sustainable and non-violent solutions – for which you have to pay, of course. It’s a story about a huge dragon that eats only fruit, a rare and endangered species that in turn endangers the Earth’s food resources. Some world leaders decide to exterminate it, but then, all of a sudden a clever boy appears… On the last page, there is a check of dragon tax. Obviously I tried to create a good liberal citizen’s story for children, but couldn’t do it without irony.

3:AM: Your translation from the German are highly reputed. Are you drawn to German poets specifically and have the likes of Brecht, Celan, Enzensberger, Sachs, Trakl et al played an influence on your own work?

MK: In the recent years I have translated much more from Italian, but of the poets that you mention, Enzensberger is one of my “points of reference”, a source to turn to in the moments of poetic crises. I think every artist has some such strongholds in their field, and he is one of mine. I liked translating Brecht’s poetry, although it’s more difficult to trace down an influence. But in this line – from Brecht to Enzensberger – there is certainly something that I’m mentally attracted to. Irony, a certain terseness and sachlichkeit, and seriousness in concerns. I admire Enzensberger’s analytic distance to the poetic material which does not exclude compassion at all.

I have enjoyed translating the Austrian experimentalists and the Wiener Gruppe: Jandl, Rühm, Artmann. And I like to think that I share some black humour with them. However, on another level, I lack the lightness they have in some of their non-chalantly formal concerns. So in that sense some Germans might be closer. But in any case I usually choose to translate someone’s poetry when I sense a certain mental affinity with him/her. So there is always a predisposition to be influenced, because one already shares or imagines to share something with the author to be translated. Some have described translating other poet’s texts as a love affair, and I quite agree with that analogy. You have to be both respectful and bold enough.

3:AM: Estonia has a rich contemporary tradition of poetry, certainly it seems this way on the outside, its remarkable how many poets have come to the fore in the last ten to twenty years. Do you think this is directly connected to the independence of 91?

MK: Certainly there is a connection. If we consider the number of poetry books published in a year now, it has multiplied nearly ten times in comparison to the “annual production” in the Soviet times. This proliferation is undoubtedly linked to a general situation of liberal democracy and market economy: there is no censorship, no long-term central planning of a limited number of publishing houses, and the printing costs are not too high. As everywhere, a number of books are published at the authors’ expense, but leaving vanity publishing aside, poets with more field-conscious ambitions are to a significant extent supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment (Kultuurkapital). This foundation was (re)founded in 1994 and it receives its money from taxes on alcohol, tobacco and gambling. It is definitely one of our culture’s financial motors or power supply units. Among other things, Kultuurkapital pays “tax-free” fees to Estonian poets and authors. It also pays a monthly grant to approximately 45 writers (including translators and literary critics).

Then, there is also a grain of truth in the claim that the smaller the nation, the greater the percentage of those who write poetry and get it published. It is easier to gain nationwide significance as a poet in smaller countries, but of course, in these days, no one hardly has anymore the role of what the Italians call poeta vate.

3:AM: To close, on a promise, I must ask you about the poem Carrot Christ?

MK: It’s a poem about the tragicomic dialectics of compassion and violence.

I wrote this poem in a writers’ retreat in Hald Hovedgaard, Denmark. We were living in a biological farming area, and close to our house was a huge field of carrots. I saw schoolchildren thinning the carrots: pulling out and killing healthy young plants, just occasionally, as it is. So, the pathetic protagonist of my poem imagines how these plants imagined growing big and having roots, just like peoples and nations imagine their origins (and link their value or raison d’être to these „roots“). Then, some of these plants die, because the chance, a human hand, has decided so. Without any justice, as is often the case with the fatal and contingent, casual, innate differences between us. The character in my poem wants to become a Christ, a redeemer for these poor carrots. While imagining him/herself as an omnipotent Pantocrator, s/he is at the same time trying to kill the feeling of compassion, evoking Nietzsche’s idea that compassion is a virtue for the slaves and the weak (although Nietzsche himself was a sensitive person). Finally, the protagonist imagines him/herself as Death that brings about final equality: with this simple fantasy s/he tries to calm apparently the unfortunate ones, but it’s actually him/herself that the s/he is speaking to. You see how many words I needed to explain a poem!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
SJ Fowler is the author of three poetry collections, Red Museum (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2011), Fights (Veer books 2011) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA 2011). He is the UK poetry editor of Lyrikline and 3:AM. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and a postgraduate student at the Contemporary Centre for Poetic Research, University of London.

THE DONOR

In a small bookstore
under the roof of a shopping mall,
looking for a gift,
I resorted to the silly habit
of tearing off the cuticles
around my fingernails with my teeth.
When I took down an anthology
of Hungarian poetry from the shelf
my right thumb started bleeding.
I didn’t expect such a heavy flow:
over the photo of Sandor Weöres
a rich red mark was left.
Startled, I put the book back
and quickly took down another. A Hawk’s Winter Cry
by Mikhail Lotman. On a volume by Joseph Brodsky
I left a grateful plump stain.
I had some books at home:
Bourdieu, Geertz, Huizinga.
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.

Translated by Richard Berengarten and the author

 
THE PIG

I heard it on the radio:
in ancient times, the pig strolled freely
around the house,
eating man’s shit.
It grew fat, had a litter.
The man then killed the pig and ate it.
After dinner, he went to a bush
somewhere behind the house.
The pig´s offspring knew the smell,
went to the bush to eat.
And so on.

Then it turned out that history was a spiral.
Returning to the roots,
the pig took along
many finer tools
and more articulate attitudes.

Translated by Mike Horwood and the author
 

THE DOGS OF ATHENS

In Pláka, around the Acropolis,
not to mention elsewhere,
multitudes stroll and sleep.
Big dogs. Gentle, polite.

With the enthusiasm of puppies
we translate the deepest language,
I take pictures of the dogs:
yellow, white, grey, black.

„There is not a single small one.“
You glow like a scientist:
„All the small ones died!“
Your blue eyes are bright with excitement.

The almond was once poisonous,
all peas tiny as grains of salt,
and man a bloodthirsty midget!
Or what?

We are bigger than our ancestors,
the two of us love courtesy.
“There is some kind of melancholy
in these surviving dogs.”

“The nice ones ate the others?”
We sit and eat our dinner
in memory of the cynics – the right ones –
and to the health of polite dogs.

Translated by the author and Brandon Lussier

 
KIND OF(,) A MIRACULOUS OPENING

He kind of wants it.
He kind of came.
He kind of said it.
He kind of thought
it could kind of do.
It kind of suits the present moment.
One could kind of see something there.
Kind of a miraculous opening.
‘Kind of’, a miraculous opening.

He kind of doesn’t want it.
It kind of doesn’t taste so good.
It kind of smells.
It kind of hurts.
It kind of bleeds.
He’s kind of screaming.
It kind of falls on his head.
And now there’s kind of nothing.
No ‘kind of’, and no miraculous opening.

Translated by Richard Berengarten and the author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maarja Kangro was born in Tallinn, on December 20, 1973, where she currently lives. She has published four collections of poetry: Kurat õrnal lumel (A Devil on Tender Snow, 2006), Tule mu koopasse, mateeria (Come into My Cave, Matter, 2007), Heureka (Eureka, 2008), Kunstiteadlase jõulupuu (The Christmas Tree of an Art Critic, 2010); and a collection of short stories, Ahvid ja solidaarsus (Monkeys and Solidarity, 2010). In 2011, a collection of her poems, La farfalla dell’irreversibilità (The Butterfly of No Return) was published in Italian by Superstripes Press. She has won the Estonian Cultural Endowment’s Literary Award for poetry and prose. She has received twice the Tallinn University Literary Award.

She also writes literary criticism and essays, and has published a children’s book Puuviljadraakon (Fruit Dragon, 2006), which received the Estonian Children’s Literature Centre’s Best Book of the Year Award. She has written five opera librettos, texts for cantatas and other works of music. She has translated fiction, philosophy (Giorgio Agamben, Umberto Eco, Gianni Vattimo) and poetry by more than 100 poets (e.g. Jacopone da Todi, Giacomo Leopardi, Andrea Zanzotto, Valerio Magrelli, Philip Larkin, Bertolt Brecht, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ernst Jandl). In 2003 she won the first prize in the Società Dante Alighieri competition for translations of Italian poetry. Her poems and short stories have been translated into English, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Italian, Slovenian, and Udmurt. She is currently a PhD student in cultural theory at Tallinn University.

(T)rust

Hanging darkened shroud
possibility jumps her then you
(s)he’s always there,
silent predator, bloodthirsty ( you / him / Her )

Don’t be so stupid : he loves you

Actions shout bolder than verbs,
but it doesn’t show, not yet
waiting for that romantic gesture
Still

; waiting.
Under(current)
you know it’s there you think you know you think
it’s there you think he knows it’s there it’s over

persuade yourself, calming, soothe the

Lurking garments : mind races anger paces

& he laughs & he shrugs

“you ask for reassurance too much”

But then there’s another sock

& he’s never seen it before you’re not so sure you’ve heard it before

past ghosting in the background

Fragility on edge
questioning trust.

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
shadows
somewhere
pass by
fear subside

torment
your insides

he turns on you :
torturous repentance of sin
sinister reflection from within

bleed while (s)creaming

(pre)positions

“i’ll do anything”

a dependency
on destruction can’t
survive this way

fear of : let go : blasphemous : murderous : take hold

chroni(c)ollision as he(s)mothers

souls rancid cries

words bound
wounds fade
steal away

his Silence
slipping
(th)rough
memory

pushing

two hours he skipped jail
somber & defeated
tactile emotion
his eyes flare explosion he’s broken :

it’s your fault

(un)chastened

fury flows chosen

music blare clatter out

impending bail itching your home
shiver with fear and try to get out

reassured it would be okay,
police numbers promised protection
heart hums faster rhythmic, unaware.

BANG! enforcing
revenge

cut the wire scream

Panic ON

the door shakes on its hinges under his weight fuelled with rage and

his fist coming through my page

“I don’t think he’s right for you, I think you should let it go”
not allowed to say that, irritation : it’s my mistake to hone
I try to protest but she’s having none, dismissing
one movement, alcohol absorbing rant and rave.

meditate ventilate subdue

symptomatically count to

temptation

de-stress : undress : manipulate : perforate

cyberspace > find all > embrace

evoke craft illusion
corporeal chosen
solidity darken.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jo Langton is a 23 year old poet who originates from Bristol, but currently lives and studies in Manchester. Jo has just embarked upon a full time Masters course in creative writing at the University of Salford, and had her first chapbook published in October 2011 with erbacce-press.

One of the leading poets of central Europe, a Swiss poet by all rights, is somehow is also one of its leading poets of exile. Daniele Pantano, vigorous, multifaceted, considered and cerebral in his poetry is one of the most active and highly regarded translators of modern Swiss poetry and prose, and has brought to light some of the finest authors of the 20th century in Walser, Dürrenmatt and Trakl. Moreover, he has a fine reputation as a critic, poet and teacher in both America and England. His is a story of living in more than one country, writing in more than one language, pursuing poetry in more than one facet, and anyone who has read his work will not be surprised by the breadth of his background and erudition of his account. Discussing the modern history of Swiss literature, his own journey from Switzerland to America to England and the work that is marking him out as one of the most remarkable talents of his generation, Maintenant presents its 83rd edition and it’s first Swiss poet, Daniele Pantano.

3:AM: I’d like to begin speaking about your work as a translator and how it seems to intersect with some of the most important figures in 20th century Swiss literature. Your translations of Friedrich Dürrenmatt are exceptional, do you feel his reception in the English speaking world is growing, and is it still smaller than it should be?

Daniele Pantano: Dürrenmatt has always been a well-known figure not only in the English-speaking world but in world literature in general. His plays and novels, especially, have a massive world-wide readership––think of The Visit, The Physicists, The Judge and His Executioner, or The Pledge, for example, which was adapted for the screen by Sean Penn, who’s a big Dürrenmatt fan, and starring Jack Nicholson. Many non-German readers are not aware, however, that Dürrenmatt was also a master of the essay¬¬––Brian Evenson sees him as “one of the few real innovators of the essayistic form”––a wonderful painter, and, most important, a fascinating poet.

3:AM: Though he died only 20 years or so ago it is hard to look past him as one of the greatest Swiss writers of the last century…

DP: I agree. Dürrenmatt is certainly the most prominent author of Swiss literature following the Second World War. And he’s also one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century, rivaled, perhaps, only by Beckett, Brecht, Camus, and Sartre. But we cannot forget Robert Walser, Max Frisch, Herman Hesse, or some of the more contemporary stars, such as Zoë Jenny, Urs Allemann (his book Babyfucker is an absolute masterpiece!), Raphael Urweider, Christian Uetz, Claire Genoux, and many others.

3:AM: Many have compared him, with his philosophical complexity and epic theatre forms (though without the same brand of political bombast) to Brecht, do you think there are similarities between the two as figures?

DP:Of course, but Dürrenmatt always rejected this comparison, so we shouldn’t spend too much time on this. Let’s see, Brecht was a Marxist, and Dürrenmatt was neither a nihilist nor an ironist. That should do.

3:AM: What do you think the importance is of Gruppe Olten?

DP: I’ve never been interested in literary groups or clubs or associations or schools. All I can say here is that I appreciate the GO’s original commitment to building a democratic-socialist society and the GO as an important “bridge” between the old Swiss Writers’ Club and the new Association of Swiss Authors, which offers a lot of support to Swiss writers, poets, playwrights, and literary translators.

3:AM: Max Frisch is another major Swiss figure who seemed to have a high repute in Britain during the 70s but is all but forgotten now…

DP: I do agree that Frisch needs a bit of a boost, though I know plenty of readers who still remember him!

3:AM: Robert Walser strikes many as one of the most important writers of modernism, how highly is he regarded in Switzerland and central Europe?

DP: Very highly, yes. Walser is now seen as one of the most influential authors of modern literature. As you may know, Walser was admired early on by Kafka, Benjamin, Hesse, Bernhard, and other modernists; we do need to remember, however, that Walser eventually died in almost complete obscurity in 1956. It took a couple of decades for his works to “reappear” on the bookshelves of German-speaking readers and scholars––and then on French, English, and other bookshelves around the world––but I doubt Walser will disappear again. Hesse once said that the world would be a better place if Walser had 100,000 readers. I agree.

3:AM: You left Switzerland for the US at a very young age, and this was because your ethnicity as half Sicilian half German prevented you from studying in Switzerland?

DP: It’s a long story. But, yes, it’s true that I wasn’t allowed to sit my Gymnasium entrance exams because I was considered a foreigner––even though I was born in Switzerland to parents who carried Swiss passports. I also applied for several apprenticeships, including one at a local bank, but again I was rejected on all fronts. I quickly realized that I had to fight hard to get a shot at higher education and create my own opportunities outside of Switzerland. I eventually got out by tricking a well-known tennis scout in Zurich into getting me a scholarship to attend one of the most prestigious tennis academies and preparatory schools in the US. I wasn’t talented enough to become a professional tennis player, though. Nevertheless, I did get my high school diploma, which allowed me to attend an American university, and, perhaps more important, offered me the opportunity to become a writer, a poet, someone who plays with language(s).

3:AM: And you began to write in America, you never wrote before living in an English language environment?

DP: Yes, I began writing––creatively––in the US (in German), mostly poems, stories, a couple of short plays, with a few embryonic experiments in English, French, and Italian thrown into the mix.

3:AM: When came the decision to write in English and not German? Or do you still maintain both?

DP: 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. At the same time, I was already aware of the fact that my decision to switch languages would result in an essential and inevitable change of who I was as a person and thinker, as well as the real possibility of being unable to create anything worth reading. George Santayana once said that “no poets can be great who do not use the language in which their mothers sang them lullabies.” On the other hand, I remember reading Arthur Koestler’s thoughts on switching languages: “Language serves not only to express thought, but to mold it; the adoption of a new language, particularly by a writer, means a gradual and unconscious transformation of his patterns of thinking, his style and his tastes, his attitudes and reactions. In short, he acquires not only a new medium of communication but a new cultural background.” Looking at the above list of writers and poets, Santayana was obviously wrong; Koestler, though, was absolutely right. I’ve become someone else. Furthermore, I’m now someone else stuck between languages, between cultures, someone “othered” and on the perpetual brink of linguistic and cultural nothingness. Gustavo Pérez Firmat says it best in the last few lines of his poem “Dedication”:

My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don’t belong to English
though I belong nowhere else.

3:AM: The role of translator of Swiss works must have an intriguing sense of irony for you, that you were fundamentally rejected by the Swiss system but have now become one of the most prominent supporters of Swiss poetry in the world…

DP: Very much so. And it’s nice to know that I’m doing my bit to promote Swiss poetry in English translation.

3:AM: You must have visited Switzerland since your rise to prominence as an academic and poet? What is the feeling towards your work in that country now?

DP: I have given a few readings in Switzerland, my German translator Jürgen Brôcan has translated and published a number of my poems in German language magazines and journals, and there have also been several articles and reviews published about my work, and my journey as an “exiled” poet, in a couple of major Swiss newspapers. That’s really it. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung called me “one of the most interesting and versatile English-language poets of [my] generation,” but to be honest, I think I’m still fairly, if not completely, invisible in Switzerland.

3:AM: What reputation did you leave behind in America before taking your role at Edge Hill University in the UK?

DP: No idea. You would have to ask my friends, former students, and colleagues. If anything, I hope I have inspired some of my students to utilize the power of language to think critically about, and respond creatively to, the forces and authorities that shape their lives.

3:AM: The Oldest Hands in the World seems to call back upon the pre-occupations of poets who define the groundings of the modern tradition, that of exile, of a sort of battered romance, and yet I sense traces of anger, of a refusal to be too neat or lyrical. Do you think this is true?

DP: I think so, yes. It is, of course, very difficult, if not impossible, to read one’s own work and make sense of it, but the poems in The Oldest Hands in the World, at least on the surface, are attempts to decipher my American experience, my linguistic and cultural exile, understand my mother’s suicide, deal with the fact that my German grandfather was a Nazi, and, yes, romance, the experience of the other, etc. Some readers and critics see it as a collection of post-confessional and/or post-deep image poems, and I can certainly understand these readings of the book; however, to me the entire book is really a metaphor for my linguistic suicide, my life between languages/cultures. At the end of the day, anything I write represents a deeply rooted and insatiable desire to write my way back to a “home” that no longer exists; and you’re right, more often than not, this desire surfaces or manifests itself as a violent (natural) refusal to be too neat or lyrical. The American poet and translator James Reidel once said that “Pantano offers us a chance once again to see a poet live comparative literature the way Pound did–but without the frightening aspect of the extreme beard, the Roman broadcasts, or the open cage. His poetry and translations reveal that writing is different languages influencing each other at the most intimate and experienced level.” I’ll take it!

3:AM: How has your work evolved since the publication of The Oldest Hands in the World?

DP: I think I’ve returned to a more experimental mode of writing, back to the kind of writings and texts I produced during the early days of my American experience, back to my first chapbook, Panta Rhei, published by Alpha Beat Press in 2000, the same press that published works by Ginsberg, Kerouac, Berrigan, Snyder, Ferlinghetti, Corso, and Burroughs, for example––a writing that is much closer (linguistically, if not ontologically, even epistemologically) to the notion of “living comparative literature,” to the notion that “writing is different languages influencing each other at the most intimate and experienced level.” I’ve already had a few readers tell me that this new work feels less “personal” compared to the poems in The Oldest Hands in the World, which is quite strange, because to me these new texts feel more personal than anything I’ve ever written.

3:AM: Mass Graves is a remarkable work you published in the UK with Knives Forks and Spoons Press. The sense of erasure of fragmentation seems to be both microcosmic to the poems and to the collection, to the grouping of poems as a body of work. What were the pre-occupations of this book?

DP: Thank you, Steven. Yes, Mass Graves XIX-XXII is an excerpt from a new manuscript I’m working on, Mass Graves: A Confession. I’ve already discussed some of the main preoccupations above; however, I can tell you that, 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. It’s about moral provocation, an attempt to elicit some sort of moral agency . . . before the reader is, as Naomi Greene would say, “inexorably drawn into a web of complicity.” That’s all I’m willing to say at this point, I’m afraid.

3:AM: What place do you conceive for poetry? Is it entirely personal, or do you think it is a fundamentally important pursuit?

DP: Poetry is a fundamentally important pursuit to me, yes. But you and I know that this is not, and cannot be, the case for everyone. In the best of all possible worlds, however, poetry would be seen as supremely important and utterly superfluous; poetry would change everything and nothing at all.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
SJ Fowler is the author of three poetry collections, Red Museum (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2011), Fights (Veer books 2011) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA 2011). He is the UK poetry editor of Lyrikline and 3:AM. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and a postgraduate student at the Contemporary Centre for Poetic Research, University of London.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniele Pantano is a Swiss poet, translator, critic, and editor born of Sicilian and German parentage in Langenthal (Canton of Berne). His individual poems, essays, and reviews, as well as his translations from the German by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Georg Trakl, and Robert Walser, have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous magazines, journals, and anthologies, including Absinthe: New European Writing, The Baltimore Review, The Cortland Review, Gradiva: International Journal of Italian Poetry, Guernica Magazine, Italian Americana, Jacket, The Mailer Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Versal, Verse Daily, and 32 Poems Magazine. Pantano’s most recent works include In an Abandoned Room: Selected Poems by Georg Trakl (Erbacce Press, 2008), The Possible Is Monstrous: Selected Poems by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and The Oldest Hands in the World (both from Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books, 2010), and Mass Graves (XIX-XXII) (The Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2011). His forthcoming books include Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser and The Collected Works of Georg Trakl, both from Black Lawrence Press, New York. Pantano has taught at the University of South Florida and served as the Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Florida Southern College. He divides his time between Switzerland, the United States, and England, where he is Senior Lecturer and Director of Creative Writing at Edge Hill University.

COLLAGE OF LISTENING

Shall we share

Nobody’s interested in listening to me
I come from a hell of a mess flags of
St George / specialists in halal meat /
Live sports shown here anger builds up

Shall we share a few moments people
in their rooms just passing in corridors
how’s it going fine of silence
I come from faith no faith ethnic

where I’m coming from it’s so hard
to stand for that identity / this identity /
that identity and I’m invisible lines
you don’t cross you should know who
you are but I don’t passing in corridors
they don’t want to hear certain words

a few moments

Nobody’s interested in me how do I
talk to them whose voice is not heard
dog collar and headscarf walk together
down the same street Eyebrows raised

why do you keep driving planes into our
buildings shall we share I’m nosy
So easy to forget what it is not to be
listened to a few moments how do I talk

to them in a moment of lucidity let’s
share food together we are listening
really not being taken seriously but
we pass in corridors I come from here
there everywhere could we have conversation
of silence interested in listening to me

of silence

Not the same as agreeing we had to rock
the boat shall we live with the other
I’m interested in listening share to you
poetry actually happening moments my son

walking down the road Paki can even be
a positive word conversation of silence
come into the corridors let’s talk of
small steps big they present a natural

narrative will you share me your story
I come from a whole range of people
finding a place moments easy to forget
when you’re told not to talk of yourself
but there’s still a future let’s forget
urgency time interested in listening to

DOMESTICS

the firedoor is at the end of the corridor
but I always end up with domestic stuff
even if I start with the Bermuda Triangle

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 have you

all signed the register can you switch
off your mobiles we’re all just children
with bank accounts or turn them to silence

what do we contribute write about something
other than the preponderance of domestic scenes
are we working for change within then this

broadband is just right said Goldilocks
the washing-up and irony toilets opposite
the lifts what about communities we’re

not involved in have we all signed the
register then we’ll begin light through the kitchen
window writing CV’s from the big old moon

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Waling has published Travelator (Salt), Captured Yes (Knives, Forks & Spoons) and has poetry at Blackbox Manifold, and in many other magazines and e-zines. He is a member of Writer’s Forum North.

Donald Crowhust Poems 1-5

These sequence of poems based around the final voyage of Donald Crowhurst, produced as a collaboration with Rob Lye. The first, longer sequence is based around the imagined snippets of sound found by a short wave radio enthusiast twiddling the dial in 1969, including sections broadcast from Crowhurst’s yacht. The shorter sequences grew from sections of this longer piece, picked out for sonic, visual or thematic resonance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Greg Thomas lives in Edinburgh. He has had poems published in the journals Anything Anymore Anywhere, Dancehall & Scree, and in the 2011 Veer Books anthology Veer About. He also plays music, sometimes with the group Helhesten, and is completing a PhD on British concrete poetry.

With a precision and focus that seems to mirror the requirements of his profession, a surgeon, the poetry of João Luís Barreto Guimarães is representative of the finest work in contemporary Portuguese letters. Concise, eloquent and immediate, his work is concerned with phenomenological clarity and an engagement with a language of presence, of excavated intimation, and a wholly personal reality that hinges on a fundamental act of communication with the impersonal. For over two decades he has been a leading light in a poetry tradition often underappreciated outside of its borders, but from which giants of modern poetry like Fernando Pessoa and João Miguel Fernandes Jorge have emerged. In an extremely generous interview, we are pleased to present João Luís Barreto Guimarães as our first Portuguese edition of Maintenant.

3:AM: Let us first speak about your methodology. Your work seems often to possess a clarity that comes from an observational, sometimes minimalist, method. What is the importance of sight in your work? And the importance of images?

João Luís Barreto Guimarães: Well, usually I do not depart from words to ideas (i.e. from language to reality) but the other way around, from reality (what the sight sees) to language. This means, necessarily, the need for a greater work of transfiguration, to find the fulminant image. I’m primarily a poet of the Present (”I write from inside life”), not particularly from a memory or from the Past. I like to place an argument, a plot, a logical thought throughout the poem, like an internal architecture or a skeleton for the poem. Thus, I like that the poem has a subject even though I do not like poems that defend a message. Poetry is not for moralizing but to enrol oddities. Therefore, the path from sight to the hand (or from the pen to the paper) is mediated by reason (or unreason). It is not enough for me to hold on only to the beauty of diction or to the sound of the words, - important as they still may be to my work, - as was the use in Portuguese poetry before the 70’s, which depended mainly from the tension between words and images more or less surreal or abstract or symbolic or hermetic. I admire such poets as a reader, I respect their work (which I read), but that is not the poetry I want to do. In my work, I want to communicate with the reader, I want to force him to interact with the texts, placing him problems, challenging him and surprising him. As reality surprises me, by the way. Of course, I do not walk around with a pen at hand in search of oddities, faults, accidents, but I seem to have a trained eye to detect those details, absurdities and anomalies in things, in attitudes, in words and gestures, in art. My poetry family is a figurative one. The added difficulty of this kind of open and clear process is that this sort of poetry of the Present requires a revision work much more elaborated and detailed and refined than hermetic poetry that stands as it is by its own. But, as Mallarmé would say to Degas, it’s not enough to have ideas, it’s in the language that finally the poem is decided. And what for Valery was the line donnée, to me is the sight.

3:AM: You are a surgeon by trade, how does this profession present itself in your work?

JLBG: I don’t think it influences thematically. Only in one case or another I have written directly about my experience as a surgeon. But being a reconstructive surgeon, perhaps the exactness that I put in the search for symmetry, hiding a scar, removing excesses, in precision, drinks from the same well that influences meter, enjambement, the graphic shadow that fills the page, all the revision process. Perhaps writing and operating, like many other arts, both have a certain respect for tradition, with an eye on creativity and originality (at the shoulders of giants). Now that you made me think about it, maybe there is a greater similarity between a page of skin and a wrinkle of paper.

3:AM: Who are your influences, both in Portugal and outside of the Portuguese language?

JLBG: As I am a avid reader, I could risk running off the limit of characters for this interview with an endless list of names. But I’d say my literary family in Portugal would include poets like Cesário Verde (for his literary sense of physical space with streets and people as characters), Bernardo Soares, Pessoa’s prose heteronym (for his mental plot on those streets and people), Alexandre O’Neill (for his use of irony and humour), João Miguel Fernandes Jorge (for his modulation of individual subjectivism to collective mythology), Manuel António Pina (for his synthetic rationality on the poem) and Luís Quintais (for his intellection and diction). Those amongst others, I may add. In other languages, William Carlos Williams (for his purity and lyrical concept of perfection of the poem), Frank O’Hara (for his colloquial notion that everything that the eye sees or the ear hears can be poetry), Robert Lowell (for his fine walk over the edge of confessionalism), Philip Larkin (for his sense of time and his themes), Joseph Brodsky (for his creation of an image of a poetic persona), Wislawa Szymborka (for the internal logic of her poems) and, of course, Adam Zagajewsky (for his sense of deeper meanings of life dwelling over geography). For the last twenty years, I’ve been stealing and stealing from these excellent poets but building, I hope, my own voice.

3:AM: Portuguese poetry of the last century (perhaps European poetry in general) is towered over by the spectre of Fernando Pessoa. How much has his legacy shaped Portuguese letters, and is his unique and powerful inheritance purely a blessing to contemporary Portuguese poets?

JLBG: I think Pessoa influenced each one of us who write poetry very differently because Pessoa is many persons (“pessoas”) in one. What amazes me mostly is the ability he had to literally invent a handful of poets, each one with his own biography, profession and geography so as to be able to express the dispersions of his intimate lyricism. Each with a different voice. Much of the poetry that has been written in Portugal until the end of the twentieth century, threw bridges to at least one his main heteronyms (Álvaro de Campos, the futuristic engineer; Alberto Caeiro, the lyrical shepherd; Ricardo Reis, the classicist doctor; Bernardo Soares, the cerebral flanêur). In my case, as I said, my preference goes to Fernando Pessoa’s Bernardo Soares, for the reason I mentioned.

3:AM: Is there a synthesised relationship between the Portuguese and the Brazilian poetry modern traditions? Does the shared language, and history, form exchanges in poetry?

JLBG: Not really. In fiction, the scenario is better. But in poetry, except for the usual suspects from this side of the Atlantic (Fernando Pessoa, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Ruy Belo, to name a few), or from the other side (João Cabral de Mello Neto, Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade), all of them from the early or mid-twentieth century, except for those, cultural exchange is inexplicably reduced for two countries who speak the same language. And this is a shame because there’s a whole market to explore who could create conditions that would allow other publishing opportunities to emerge. What we know about them today (rather short), and what they know about us, it is due to the internet.

3:AM: How has the poetry renewal of the 1970’s and of your own generation, in the 1990’s and beyond shaped and changed the Portuguese poetry scene?

JLBG: Regardless of other voices, equally remarkable, I would like to highlight the work of João Miguel Fernandes Jorge and the poetry (but especially the critical work) of his fellow Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, both revealed in the 70’s, who played a crucial influence on the Portuguese poetry of the 90’s and beyond. An influence that is expressed by the possibility and ability to write about everyday issues, returning to the reality rather than to a more abstract poetry of language and about language, which, in my opinion, could have played a role in pulling away public from poetry. Those two poets influenced my entire generation, the 90’s generation: poetry returned to storytelling, to micro narrative (e.g. Jorge Gomes Miranda and Rui Pires Cabral), often about insignificant aspects of everyday life that acquired a sudden power of revelation and epiphany (e.g. José Tolentino Mendonça and Pedro Mexia); mixing time and space with an eye on reason and tradition (e.g. Luís Quintais). In the 2000’s, poetry regained a strong social tone (e.g. José Miguel Silva and Manuel de Freitas), always with the stamp of subjectivity and individual voice. All in all, Portuguese poetry, despite the financial difficulties of publishing houses that reflect the country’s economical situation, lives interesting times with the emergence of a handful of new names (Daniel Jonas, Rui Lage, Rui Manuel Amaral, amongst many others).

3:AM: Ana Hudson’s work at Poems from the Portuguese http://www.poemsfromtheportuguese.org is truly remarkable, both as a project and as a service to readers of Portuguese poetry in English. How did you come to be involved in the project and what are your thoughts on what Ana is doing?

JLBG: The names of the poets presented and translated by Ana were suggested by other poets. The translation of my poems was suggested by Luís Quintais and I suggested Rui Lage. It works more or less in a chain. The poet should also write an entry on the poet he chose and Ana translates them. As there isn’t virtually no contemporary Portuguese poetry extensively published in English, I don’t know if it is due to lack of funds, to lack of translators or both, - the effort that Ana Hudson is placing in translating Portuguese poets of the last four decades to the English readership is really remarkable.

3:AM: You soon have a complete poems being published I believe, which includes work from seven books from 1987 to 2009. What was the experience of compiling this retrospective? Was it difficult to look back and have to make certain editorial decisions? Or was it a satisfying experience?

JLBG: My “Poesia Reunida” has just been released in Portugal by a very good editor house of Lisbon, Quetzal, which made me quite happy as you can imagine. I did not delete a single poem from the 225 poems included on the original seven books published up to now. It was hard to resist eliminating a handful of them from the first book, but the truth is that I do not think one can delete poems or eliminate books that still exist on the shelves of former readers, poems that once had a real existence. So I decided to keep them besides having been written more than 24 years ago, as part of a process, in order to draw a route, an evolution. It’s almost like visiting those museums dedicated to a single artist: in the first room there are some pencil drawings, still lives, more academic or less mature work. And then, in the last rooms, we find their legacy to the art they embraced. And I like to think that my best work until now is clearly in the last five books. Which isn’t bad, is it?

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
SJ Fowler is the author of three poetry collections, Red Museum (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2011), Fights (Veer books 2011) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA 2011). He is the UK poetry editor of Lyrikline and 3:AM. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and a postgraduate student at the Contemporary Centre for Poetic Research, University of London.

January sun

Never so much as today have I paid careful attention
to the
light of the january sun. Strong
but delicate. Elusive
but
lasting. It neither burns nor shivers.
It is neither dense nor clear. The
light
of the sun in january:
such is our enduring love
hidden by the ink of the days it just
peers in through a gap
(a distraction from the clouds)
to light up and to burst out
(never so much as today have I entreated
the wind to give it
a flying chance).
Our love is january:
even if I deem it forgotten
I know
it will always come forth.

Fresh Bread

to Pedro Mexia
Slave of what comes up I write it
because it happens (the poetry malaise:
I wish poetry on no one). What
do you scribble on paper when you are buying a pen?
Something like ‘the metaphor
resists the metonymy’ or
‘the day will come that simply talking
will be poetry’? This
(excuse me)
poem is one possibility:
poetry is in such things
(fresh bread)
uncover it.

Botox®

My hands are sought by a woman
in her forties
requesting the delay of autumn that falls on her tired
eyes: ‘only want to lose ten years’. And
I probe what bitter taste may have lingered
to have her wishing to punish
some ten years of her life -
and find myself regretting not being able to delete memories
only wrinkles
and fine lines (slightly
marked ruins). In the pitfalls of time
nobody falls by mistake:
skin can’t be purged by the decade but at best
line by
line.

An autumnal emergency

The colours of the baked open apple
in the last throes of summer anticipate in the palate
an autumnal emergency.
It’s an invitation for home
this apple I wounded and whose torso I sprinkled
with cézannes of cinnamon.
Underneath the tanned skin (its
colour a sinful-yellow) the
taste is perennial. See just
how naked they lie
the robes along the plate
(like the clothes of indecorous girls trailing
on the floor).

Deception to the rule

To sit down and see
others passing by is
my favourite exercise. It’s entertaining.
It’s not draining.
It’s for free. In this counter-game of mine
it’s for the others to pass
(I entrust to the others the task
of passing by). I wash my feet of it.
I write from the inside of life.
It may even seem that thus I
will be going nowhere but who
is willing to go
to the place where others go?

© Translation: Ana Hudson, 2010. These poems form part of Ana Hudson’s remarkable project http://www.poemsfromtheportuguese.org/ in which she has pioneered the translation and elucidation of a vast number of contemporary poets writing in the Portuguese language.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
João Luís Barreto Guimarães (1967) is a plastic surgeon and lives in Leça da Palmeira, north of Porto. His poetry books published since 2000: Lugares Comuns, 2000, 3 (Poesia 1987-1994), 2001, Rés-do-Chão, 2003, Luz Última, 2006, A Parte pelo Todo, 2009, Poesia Reunida, 2011.

For over thirty years Valerio Magrelli has represented Italian poetry to the world. Inarguably the most influential poet of his generation in Italy, the oeuvre he has thus far established has ensured his place as one of the few poets able to look eye to eye with his nation’s iconoclastic predecessors. And yet, this language of grandeur does not seem apropos in describing a work built on agility of thought, deftness of expression, a modest, good-natured gesturing to the immense power of poetry which, in and of itself, locates that very power. Valerio Magrelli is a poet whose work has the authority to wake his readers, to bring their focus back to the poem itself, as a thing, not as a product of a poet first and foremost. Consistently, it is this eloquent and energetic intellect which resonates through his work and reminds us of the heights that the Italian language and the Italian poetry tradition can reach. For the 81st edition of Maintenant, Valerio Magrelli.                 Thanks to Jan Wagner, Federico Italiano & Jamie McKendrick.

3:AM: It said your work has represented a generation in Italian poetry, and this is perhaps because you have strived to maintain an expansive exploration of what Italian as a poetic language, can achieve. Has this been a pre-occupation in your work?

Valerio Magrelli: I once answered the same question on a questionnaire claiming, “To discover why I write.” Someone else answered the same question by saying: “So as not to discover why I write.” Today, both hypotheses seem to miss the mark. In all honesty, I don’t know why I write; or better (and this is the only way for me to approximate an answer), “I think the reason becomes clear only while I’m actually writing”. It’s the same impression one has when gliding; it’s what intervenes between swimmer and wave, between an object and the force that moves it. Whoever writes is never alone. That is to say, I am convinced that writing “produces and reveals” a push that is not its own. Therefore we write to feel this force, to become conscious of this other, invisible energy, which permeates us, and which reveals itself solely in the performance that we are in the act of carrying out, quite alone, with pen in hand (at once the ham radio operators antenna and the diviner’s dowsing rod).

3:AM: You have expressed a passion for the concept of translation, of translation as a conception on the level of both thought to word, word to expression, language to language. Is this the case?

VM: I‘d like to answer quoting two different authors, a critic and a writer. The first one, I. A. Richards, affirmed that the translation “may very probably be the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos”. The second one, Jorge Luis Borges, stated: “No problem is deeply linked to literature and its modest mystery as the problem that a translation raises”. My position lies between these two points of view.

3:AM: The images that are so striking in your work always seem to me to be tempered by a sort of deference, an advocating of the image that will not be given as an afterthought. There is a clarity which might come across as purity, but what I find to be a sort of humility, as though the poem was the key, not the poet.

VM: What’s happened is that we are seeing an ever increasing number of texts based on a more or less radical refusal of a referent. However I believe that when significance and signifier come unstuck, writers risk creating not so much a greater expressive freedom as a night of the sign, in which all verses turn out to be one flat gray. Facing this fact, facing up to the evident historic corrosion of the expressive weave (and keeping clearly in mind that I have no wish to propose an anachronistic salvage of past forms) the single, individual solution is all that’s left to us. In my own work I like to stretch the thread of meaning. I want to see how long it resists, when it twists, to reach its breaking point. But what really interests me is the before, during and while, not the after. This “afterwards” the rejection of meaning, doesn’t carry us far out. It’s low water, where you touch right off. This, I believe, is the best answer to the last question above. I’m referring to the adolescent version of Kantian aesthetics in which it’s assumed that writing will almost automatically transcend to meaning: here’s a banal, mawkish dove, the sort of poetry that takes wing by exploiting the physical laws of language, the attrition between sound and sense, between verse and world, word and experience, grammar and truth.

3:AM: Wit and humour seem to be quiet fundamentals in your work too? Do you think they are necessary presences?

VM: Wit and humour are antidotes to the double tragedy that composes our lives: man against man, and man against nature.

3:AM: The Italian 20th century tradition is overwhelming, enormous in its figures that stand above poetry and as well as within it. Or at least it seems this way. Have the massively varied spectres of D’Annunzio, Marinetti, Montale, Ungaretti, Pasolini, Quasimodo et al stood over the poets writing in the last three decades in a way that has been detrimental?

VM: Not at all. Poetry generates itself from poetry: you just have to choose which kind of poetry you prefer. I believe that the best definition of poetry (and of all artistic work in general) is that which Alfred Jarry attributed to Pataphysics: “The Science of the exceptions.” Speculation and revelation, light and horror, invective and elegy, thought and lallation: everything and anything can become a poetic word, because a poetic word is the mirror of the infinite variety of the real. Too often we tend to forget that “Poetry” is just an abstraction, made up of that sum total of textual concretions which are the single poems. For this reason - keeping just to the 20th century - we should remember that Palazzeschi exists along with Celan, Valery Larbaud can stand next to Michaux, and Sandro Penna exists side by side with Dylan Thomas.

3:AM: So many Italian poets seem historically to be more than just poets, they are thinkers, politicians – their poetry seems an activism. Is this true do you think and has it been maintained?

VM: If writing is the bond that links author and reader, if every society is based on a shared language, the function of poetry is to carry communication to its ultimate limit. As has been said, it places language in a state of alert. In sum, it coincides with maximum states of freedom and alarm, since its freedom rests precisely in a continuous word alarm. Joseph Brodsky put it very well: “Poetry isn’t a branch of art, but something much more. If that which distinguishes us from other species is the use of words language - then poetry, the supreme linguistic operation, constitutes our anthropological and, de facto, genetic goal. So anyone who thinks of poetry as a mere pastime, a common reading, commits an anthropological crime, which is, first of all, against himself”.

3:AM: Is there a sense that the poet should be a voice of criticism, of awareness and responsibility in Italy? Is this a tradition of sorts?

VM: I’m stimulated to write by the inherently paradoxical and inexhaustible nature of this work. Poetry demands of the reader an active, re-active approach. Writing poetry is the equivalent of salvaging verbal material from the daily merchandising. And it is just that which makes it so complex, involving, purifying and “ethic.” Which explains why, like the Phoenix, it rises from its own ashes, with fire its cradle. In other words, and turning to a less lofty image, the more language deteriorates, the greater the need for its maintenance and repair in poetry. And of such repairs we’ve got a pretty big need today.

3:AM: I’m interested in your thoughts on new generations of Italian poets emerging now, since the millennium. Is it a time for optimism or pessimism?

VM: In Italy we have a very rich panorama of poetry. Authors such as Giulio Marzaioli or Marco Giovenale, Sara Ventroni or Maria Grazia Calandrone, Carlo Carabba or Laura Pugno, give me a sense of great optimism for the future of our literature.

3:AM: And beyond the poets to the readership, do Italians still possess a desire for poetry?

VM: Unfortunately not. We sometime have great public readings, but poetry books are always “worst-sellers”. We need to create a need for poetry beginning at school. There is a huge job to be done in order to accustom the Italian reader to discover the art of verse.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
SJ Fowler is the author of three poetry collections, Red Museum (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2011), Fights (Veer books 2011) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA 2011). He is the UK poetry editor of Lyrikline and 3:AM. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and a postgraduate student at the Contemporary Centre for Poetic Research, University of London.

I.
That matter engenders contagion

That matter engenders contagion
if interfered with in its deepest fibres
cut out from its mother like a veal calf
like the pig from its own heart
screaming at the sight of its torn entrails;

That this destruction generates
the same energy that blazes out
when society turns on itself, the temple’s veil torn
and the king’s head axed from the body of the state
until the faith healer becomes the wound;

That the hearth’s embrace is radiation
nature’s pyre which unravels
helplessly before the smiling company
so as to effect the slightest increase
of the surrounding temperature;

That the form of every production implies
breaking and entry, fission, a final leavetaking
and that history is the act of combustion
and the Earth a tender stockpile of firewood
left out to dry in the sun,

is hard to credit is it not?

From Esercizi di tiptologia (Exercises in Typtology), 1992

II.
The Embrace

As you lie beside me I edge closer
taking sleep from your lips
as one wick draws flame from another.
And two night-lights are lit
as the flame takes and sleep passes
between us. But as it passes
the boiler in the basement shudders:
down there a fossil nature burns,
down in the depths prehistory’s
sunken fermented peats blaze up
and slither through my radiator.
Wreathed in a dark halo of oil,
the bedroom is a close nest
heated by organic deposits,
by log pyres, leafmash, seething resins…
And we are the wicks, the two tongues
flickering on that single Palaeozoic torch.

From Esercizi di tiptologia (Exercises in Typtology), 1992

III.
Our City: Landscape with Skateboards

To play on monuments, to make them sound,
they turn stairways into keyboards,
from railings and ramps extracting
heraldic arpeggios
and gliding, glissando, at such length
they wear themselves out, this excluded
brotherhood of music
with their coded manners
and wounded integrity,
their tribal, adolescent dandyism.

From Didascalie per la lettura di un giornale
(Instructions for Reading a Newspaper),1999

IV.
The Shadow

Sunday morning
I’m woken by my daughter’s voice
who shouting
asks her brother
if it’s true the Bomb
when it explodes
leaves the shadow
of man on the wall.
(Not of “a man”
but “of man” she says.) He
agrees that it does.
I turn in my bed.

From Disturbi del sistema binario
(Disruptions of the Binary System), 2006

From Valerio Magrelli: The Embrace, Faber & Faber 2009, translated by Jamie McKendrick.
For this remarkable undertaking, McKendrick won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the John Florio Prize.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Valerio Magrelli (Rome, 1957) is the author of five poetry collections, for which he has won among other prizes the Mondello, the Viareggio, the Montale as well as the Premio Antonio Feltrinelli: Ora serrata retinae (Feltrinelli, 1980), Nature e venature (Mondadori, 1987), Esercizi di tiptologia (Mondadori, 1992), Didascalie per la lettura di un giornale (Einaudi, 1999), and Disturbi del sistema binario (Einaudi, 2006). He has published three books of prose: Nel condominio di carne (Einaudi 2002), La vicevita. Treni e viaggi in treno (Laterza 2009) and Addio al calcio (Einaudi 2010), as well as critical studies on Dadaism, Paul Valéry and Charles Baudelaire and notable translations of Mallarmé, Verlaine and Valéry.

A Professor of French literature at the University of Cassino, he is also a frequent contributor to the cultural pages of several Italian dailies. His poems have been translated into French, Spanish and a number of other languages. In English: Nearsights: Selected Poems (translated by A. Molino, Graywolf Press, 1991), The Contagion of Matter (translated by A. Molino, Holmes & Meyer, 2000), “Instructions on How to Read a Newspaper”, and Other Poems (translated by Anthony Molino, Riccardo Duranti and Annamaria Crowe Serrano, Chelsea Editions, New York, Chelsea Editions, 2008), and The Embrace (translated by Jamie McKendrick, Faber & Faber, 2009, which won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the John Florio Prize – Vanishing Points, the bilingual edition of this book, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

A poet whose inventiveness and incisiveness is architectural in its care - witty, adventurous, circuitous and at ease with its own intelligence, the work of Arnoud van Adrichem, one of the most remarkable poets and critics Holland has produced in the last decade, stands as an example of how international traditions, multiple languages and a shift in political culture, will not waylay a brilliant poet from writing brilliant poetry. If anything it will only add context to the work of a poet like van Adrichem, recognised across the Netherlands and beyond as one of the most considered and necessary agents for poetry currently at work, and with no sign of lagging. Editor of the international journal Parmentier and a specialist and translator of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, it is hard to look past Arnoud van Adrichem as a fundamental part of the future of Dutch letters. Another exceptional addition to the Maintenant series, edition #80, we are privileged to have his work translated into English for the very first time thanks to the generosity of the Nederlands Letterenfonds with thanks to Jan Pollet, Willem Groenewegen & Thomas Möhlmann

Picture by Jan Zandbergen.

3:AM: Without wishing to overly simplify, the political situation in Holland in the last decade can be seen as a marker for what might happen across Europe as conservative support swells against immigration, Muslim communities residing in Europe and so forth. Has the political change been reflected in the discussions and work of the literary community?

Arnoud van Adrichem: Your question ties in with a recent critique of contemporary literature which suggests that authors are going beyond postmodern irony in order to focus on moral or political dilemma’s. Some scholars and critics argue that after 9/11 there is a revival of notions like sincerity, authenticity and genuineness. Even if we are moving beyond postmodernism, its concepts are still present in discussions about literature. These questions were asked in two issues of literary magazine Parmentier: ‘Right’ and ‘Left’. Here we examined the extent of the connection between politics and literature. How do writers respond to the rise to power of a radical right-wing populist party like the Party for Freedom? Do they feel more or less obliged to protest in their writings, or do they hold to a strictly autonomous notion of literature? These questions yielded some interesting essays on the complex and ambivalent relationship between literature and society, of course without making definitive statements about the impact of the political change on our literature.

3:AM: Would you consider Holland a conservative country now?

AvA: It’s true that our country is led by a center-right or conservative minority cabinet of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy and the Christian Democratic Appeal, which is supported in parliament by the Party for Freedom to obtain a majority. But that doesn’t make Holland necessarily a conservative country. For instance, with 30 seats in the parliament – just one less than the Party for Freedom – the Dutch Labour Party is still the largest opposition party in the country, even though nowadays their popularity is decreasing. And according to even more recent exit polls the Socialist Party is the second largest party.

3:AM: This conservatism seems now to extend to the literary world as well. Is it true that all financial support for literary reviews will stop as from 2013 onwards?

AvA: Yes, I’m afraid so. This immediate cessation of all financial support means the end of most of the literary magazines in Holland, at least in their traditional printed form. The editors of literary magazines wrote a protest letter, co-signed by many Dutch authors and scholars, to the secretary of state Halbe Zijlstra – who strongly believes that his lack of knowledge of art helps him to make decisions. Hopefully the Dutch Foundation For Literature will find new ways of supporting at least some of the magazines. They are willing to make an effort and are exploring digital opportunities.

3:AM: Are these changes economic or ideologically motivated?

AvA: Probably both. Due to the ongoing financial crisis, cutbacks are inevitable and there’s no reason that the arts should be an exception. But the cutbacks on arts are disproportional. An act of ignorance and barbary. Some politicians consider art as to be a ‘leftwing hobby’, financed by hard working taxpayers. That point of view is of course strongly ideologically and strategically motivated.

3:AM: Could you outline your editorship of the literary review De Reactor?

AvA: I am one of the founders and editors of this digital platform for literary critics. We started this website mainly because we were a bit disappointed by the way traditional printed media review literature. De Reactor wants to give a new impulse to literary criticism for an audience of interested readers and critics. It’s essential that literary criticism once again becomes an important and authoritative component of our literature. Not just for criticism’s sake, but to warrant the vitality and liveliness of the literary system. In-depth criticism is a source of permanent reflection and renewal that reaches further than the sales talk and human interest stories that you often find in the traditional printed media. It’s also important that critics review books in the light of moral or political discussions.

3:AM: Your first collection Vis [Fish], was extremely well received. Could you outline its content?

AvA: One of the themes of Vis is the exploration of the impact of commerce and marketing on the human behavior. How do commercials and advertisements influence our thinking and acting? How are we are defined by the products that we buy? To which voices do we listen?

3:AM: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry seems to be a significant part of your expertise. How did this relationship begin for you?

AvA: With a mutual interest in theoretical concepts, politics, disjunction and the materiality of language. I’m not particularly interested in traditional expressive lyric sentiment, beautifully articulated by a ‘natural’ manifestation of a speaker behind the poem. I want to listen to language itself, which in a way functions as an organism. Second, for me it’s important that the reader plays an active role. I’m trying to make the reader participate in creating the meaning of the poem. For me reading poetry must be an event, a linguistic and rhythmic adventure which creates all kinds of new possibilities and opportunities.

3:AM: You have undertaken translations of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets too. How has this process affected your own work?

AvA: Yes, I translated work of poets like Ron Silliman, Leslie Scalapino, Tina Darragh, Lisa Robertson, sometimes in cooperation with the Dutch poet and translator Han van der Vegt. I don’t think these translations have a direct influence on my work, but making them sharpens me as a reader and hopefully as a writer as well.

3:AM: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry seems still to be determined in the US, in no way a sealed off movement. Is this true in Holland too, and Europe in general? Certainly its resonance in the UK continues, through the influence of the work of Tom Raworth and Allen Fisher.

AvA: There are some traces of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry in Europe. But let me focus on Dutch literature. You can find some bits and pieces of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in the poems of Samuel Vriezen, Jeroen Mettes, Alfred Schaffer and Ton van ‘t Hof. But it’s important to realize that there is no such thing as a typical or characteristic L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-poem.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
SJ Fowler is the author of three poetry collections, Red Museum (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2011), Fights (Veer books 2011) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA 2011). He is the UK poetry editor of Lyrikline and 3:AM. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and a postgraduate student at the Contemporary Centre for Poetic Research, University of London.

Corner

Imagine.
The worst is yet to come. You belch a negation.
We look on with slightly more than average interest. The way you
regard an apple that lights up suddenly in your hand. (Don’t drop it.)
Bodies burn fat. Bet the pounds will just fly off?
It’s the experience as a whole. Also: the cash girl as an allegory
of the cash desk. It’s just too much to put into words.
The idea arises, drops its tail and crawls outside from someone’s mouth:
as coarse and oily as the world – a wide audience
applauds. It worked! Our comparison learnt to walk but
what do these images mean to you? The light stares deep into your eyes.
It is a matter of time. Our rhythm expands and doubles up.
Resistance is futile: a fish has to swim. Ideas remain
afloat. We saw you go under in the city canal.
Water opens, water closes. The dark dived in after you.
We don’t know the world as we know it. You look like us.
(Against better judgment: keep practising one’s own signature.)
A great O escapes. Your impatience drove you out of paradise,
a fruity flavour, a metaphor, the heat of the moment.
Yes or no? The date on the carton of milk is getting ever closer.
Air bubbles well up from the deep. The water spits you out.

Too late!
The ultimatum passed. You slept right through the alarm.
The rest is history, is that it? It’s the idea that counts. Splendid.
Normal skin, combination skin. Imagine: we would vanish
forever from your life. (We’re just saying imagine.) All that light!
It hurtles into your home, smashes windows, sows shards.
The abject of sublimity: that will give you ample pause for thought.
Sometimes you fail to find the words. Do not ask us why:
the rhythm comes first. Your shopping slides past the scanner.
The cash girl keeps smiling and smiling. She looks like you in a way.
We stand there panting in the wind, for all the good it does us.
Call this an impasse: we push all your buttons at once.
A couple of jokers painted your mirror black. We
will take your call for help into consideration, but much later,
when the machine halts and you’re ready for the laughing gas.
Something keeps on going wrong. A rush job comes in between,
coffee stains render a name illegible, the telephone rings.
Or even: someone fakes an infarction. You vanish from view but
for a brief moment two bright bulbs light up.

By the full light?
Just act like we’re not there. (Ignore the camera’s.)
What matters is that you behave as naturally as possible.
The signs of impure skin. Teenagers suck hold.
Men break in, the woman is crack. The light is panting.
(You’re into that, aren’t you?) Those chains are props.
It’s important to create the right atmosphere, a rhythm.
Breath defines the room, the roses get drunk in their vase.
Real people are a trend. We need to capitalise on that, sometime.
Imagine: a man and a woman. Imagine: a child. Imagine: a little rip.
This is an immeasurable talent – freshly plucked from the corner shop.
Our crew has been recording for days, but you’ll survive.
It could be anybody’s child. Our concept: flatter than the earth.
You bleach your skin and grab a sun bed. Each hue counts.
What happened to you could happen to anybody.

Warning:
some scenes may be disturbing to young viewers.
It’s just another moment in time, of course. It just won’t
turn into a story. What does the opening scene show us?
A housebroken woman: we could consider liberating her.
With brute force! With utter lies! With exclamation marks!
Her braces glisten. She bleeds a little between her legs.
All money is politic. (Jingling.) Who will ring your till?
Dollar signs as signifiers? Just burn those notes.
It doesn’t really stink. Catastrophes consist of noughts.
We are beginning to equal the image quality of films.
I shall not repeat others’ comments about me (John Ashbery).
Children copy children – a greater need for light, not
insensible to mutation. And that’s on national television…
Who knows where the contingency plan is? Smoke lifts, the mist
in the mountains of Europe.

Nobody in sight
Grab yourself together. While you still can. The sun as the sun.
You don’t have the heart. We’ll come back to this later.
The images hardly sink in. No man will evoke anything.
All possible meanings are possible, in principle.
We’re disgusted by that healthy blush on your rosy cheeks.
Poor old question mark? Sometimes miracles do happen.
Kenneth Goldsmith copies out The New York Times.
It’s moving, it’s not moving. Play with your feelings?
Plagiarism is the nicest word you know. (A word
with character.) Quick question: how much irony can your heart bear?
We suspect more than you think. And it’s good for a laugh.
The noise goes up, dies down. Add names between parentheses.
Each detail is crucial, a displacement on the level, a vibration.
Welcome in our midst. You were a lovely audience.

Translations by Willem Groenewegen, 2011. http://www.willem-groenewegen.nl/

This is the first time Arnoud van Adrichem’s poetry has been translated into English and was only made possible by the generous support of the Nederlands Letterenfonds (the Dutch Foundation for Literature) and of Thomas Möhlmann, and Willem Groenewegen himself.

Picture by Roeland Fossen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Arnoud van Adrichem (Delft, 1978) is a poet, chief editor of literary magazine Parmentier, co-founder and editor of the literary review De Reactor, member of the editorial advisory board of the Flemish literary magazine DW B and publisher at Perdu. He published three volumes of poetry: Vis (2008), Buiten (2008) and Een veelvoud ervan (2010). Together with Jan Lauwereyns he wrote Stemvork (2010), a collection of essays, poems and translations. In cooperation with Han van der Vegt he is working on the translation of one of the founding works of Language Poetry, The Age of Huts (compleat), written by Ron Silliman. Van Adrichem won several important literary prizes such as the Hugues C. Pernathprijs 2009 and the Charlotte Köhler Stipendium 2009.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christine Herzer is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of the chapbooks ‘I cheated on Chanel N°5′ [Dancing Girlpress, 2012] and ‘I wanted to be a pirate’ [h_ngm_n Books]. Recent publications include Drunken Boat, RealPoetik, Blackbox Manifold, nether and boo journal. Christine is the 2012 Recipient of the Balmoral International Residence Scholarship at La Cité des Arts, Paris.

UNDER CASTLE

Some daydreams are prettier in words than the object itself.
Font-types are types of attitudes.

I’m browsing for abandoned castles in “luxury real estate” to occupy a small castle to convert it into the Hologram Lover Hotel somewhere in obvious France. I can already smell the place. It smells of old stone, rose, pomegranate, jasmine, sunflower seeds, geranium. Purple and red butterflies get caught on a chandelier, bees wax drips on a stone staircase leading down toward the wine cellar. A lover keeps tying and untying a cravat back into an ampersand. I am on the dining room table wedged between a pair of legs laughing hysterically about my Bank of America account being empty. A door slams. A lover jumped out the window into someone else’s daydream. The sun is still out. It’s 7:41pm. The sky turns a pale orange sorbet ice cream that goes on for acres and heartaches. You’re so happy because there’s no Internet inside this castle and run around barefoot through the wireless pear trees. I keep laughing at my own broke-ness. It is something I keep giving birth to. Negative. Decline. Overdraft. Everything is beautiful. We don’t have jobs. We haven’t worked in years and haven’t written a poem for hours. The castle is bugged with sensors that play music depending on how we walk. The backyard is filled with holographic lovers from the past and future. The present disappears every time I think about it. It disappears before I even get to see it. A future lover hologram motions toward the swings by the pond dotted with black and white swans. You shuffle through every lover from the past and future like songs on your iTunes. I am lazy and shuffle through sentences, hardly whole books. We fall asleep on the laps of those holographic lovers.

The following morning I ask you to order more holographic lovers from the internet. I make you orange juice. I can make you anything.

PETCO

In Petco I held a small guinea pig
and stared into its eyes as far as it would allow

It had no conscience and I dropped it
poor thing

has to exist during a financial crisis
like the rest of us though this animal

Is more cute and more vulnerable
gets away with being those things

And has a home the rest of us fight to keep.

LOVING THE SUNDAY OUT OF YOU

Keith Haring was real caring about AIDS but not aging and I’m returning to so many things while thinking about you its reasonable to wonder what you’re doing far far away, so far away while I lay in bed not crying over so many things we could be dying about but basically remembering little faces of Brooklyn brunches when we went broke from too much buying of god knows what and Giorgios at the bodega ATM machine laughing, just laughing about being negative beyond nothing and how he went throwing money at us on the street walking home and how we couldn’t see from all the pouring of tequila Patron shots, yes, yes, that’s it, that’s what he was doing: making us drink so much in the patio of Maggie Brown’s and remember how day it was, how day and bright, how happy the lighting was, how we sat on the concrete staring through eggs and space, sharing cigarettes and smiling at everything, everything, and we stopped believing, for once, for once we stopped believing in anything and how light we felt, how everything was floating, how we made it to the bathroom laughing, how we laughed at ourselves crying we could have laughed straight into dying we could have died straight into flying we could have flown straight into the bar television, but Giorgios, Giorgios kept us on the ground, he was piloting the day that day, he was the drunkest of all and I was probably bleeding somewhere from my cunt or thumb; I must have been biting myself without knowing, must have been praying for the fun of it far in me, and we drank so much we started praying, we prayed so hard those fucking angels came and we laughed so sweetly we, we went to peeing from all the angels stuffed in our shot glasses that Giorgios kept buying, and oh how we kept forgetting we had cell phones that kept ringing for we couldn’t hear a damn thing or see a damn thing while puking and climbing the fire escape thing and someone came into the apartment: It was Joe from days of painting, it was Joe after weeks of texting, it was a good thing Joe came by while we sat on the couch hair flipping, we needed some food after hours of shit talking, we needed more quiet after doors of knock knocking, and what happened to Giorgios, poor poor thing, he got locked outside for hours watching kids double-dutching and we missed all his calls with our phones vibrating, because where were you, where were you in the bedroom fingering and loving, fingering and hugging, and I paced around the apartment looking for something to eat, not wanting another pizza, not wanting to watch a movie, for we had it all right there, that Sunday had it all there while we did nothing nothing nothing.

VIDEO GAME

I pushed the bold button to make the character move
Something shuffled overseas and shuffled hard

a body cycled forward successfully

Sonic the Hedgehog,
a blue tumbling punctum

where do I live what should I love who is with me

Or its enough to say all uncertain hearts are hedgehogs
moving recklessly outside the body

Who is the Patron Saint of video games—
of the invisible wall; left arrow / right arrow

Silvery navigation will have its way—
while memory slides from either end
in a frame that feels unforgiving.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Feliz Lucia Molina has appeared in Dark Sky Magazine, Shampoo, Titular Journal, Corrugated Press: Digital Hamper, and elsewhere. She sometimes contributes to Continent.journal and Huffington Post. She holds an MFA in Literary Arts (poetry) from Brown University and is a MacDowell Colony fellow for poetry. She lives in California with a lion head rabbit.