3:AM Magazine

Memories: a palace trap leading you into a landscape, which won’t exist anymore,
which never was, we always do remember things wrong. It’s a land of Féerie, where you pass stiff sculptures on the green grass.
The land’s encircled by the Oceanos of Time. A time loop you can’t get out of.
One day, all that milled sugar-tit of looks, sounds, smells will create
amber, a creature trapped in luminous matter, a luminous
jail: there’re hot and cold
memories, all of them cooling down
in the amber,
dry sperm
injected into white sheets,
a reconciliation?

By Sylva Fischerová.

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Look, Kharms and his friends are the first Russian poetry group to take something akin to a linguistic turn. They are not after the Logos, as the Futurists and Mandelstam are. They distance themselves from language—by “language” they mean all cognitive frameworks, not just linguistic ones—emphasize its alterity, conventionality. Yes, their position is historically contingent. The Russian around them is Stalinizing, words move further and further away from their referents. But despite their historicity, Kharms and Vvedensky match our concerns very closely, infinitely more closely than the attitudes of their predecessors.

In the 87th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Russian poet Eugene Ostashevsky.

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And as he hung over the railings losing his insides like some kind of piñata,
The pirate didn’t know whether to curse or laugh and so was suddenly struck by a stupendous stutter,

And thereafter—like the old man of Alma-Ata who fell into a gutter after eating panna cotta while sexually molesting Harry Potter,
That Harry Potter who, with his spook tackles off, looked like an Eros—without errata

To the old man of Alma-Ata who, later lying in the gutter, got an urging to utter, “I feel so ashamed cause my wife, whose motto was Nothing in excess, has just died and I already forgot her!”

By Eugene Ostashevsky.

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All forms of “decoration,” be it verbal, intellectual or emotional can work as a distraction or a digression, it distances the reader from the essence of the poem. It is often superfluous. Some poets create work of aesthetic value with little or clichéd content. I prefer clarity to confusion, while so much contemporary poetry tries to make an effect on the reader by being vague and obscure, or even incomprehensible.

In the 86th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Hungarian poet András Gerevich.

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I was up to my knees in dead leaves,
The mulsh thick with ants, almost heaving
And crackling, as if the skulls of a whole flock
Of dead birds were crushed under the foliage –
I threw myself headlong although I was frightened.

Let darkness cover me, I could feel the damp earth
Beneath it, knew its raw stench. I was cold
And stood up, snow melted on my face and ran
Under my clothes. As it froze to my skin
It compressed me, snow covered me, my body was snow.

By András Gerevich.

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

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

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

By Gonca Özmen.

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

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

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

By Maarja Kangro.

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

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

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