3:AM Magazine

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.

» Read more...

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

By Daniele Pantano.

» Read more...

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.

In the 82nd of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Portuguese poet João Luís Barreto Guimarães.

» Read more...

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.

By João Luís Barreto Guimarães.

» Read more...

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, 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, the during, not the after.

In the 81st of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Italian poet Valerio Magrelli.

» Read more...

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.

By Valerio Magrelli.

» Read more...

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?

In the 80th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Dutch poet Arnoud van Adrichem.

» Read more...

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.

By Arnoud van Adrichem.

» Read more...

I find that poetic forms exist in many different art forms: theatre, dance, film, photography and more. It could be a shot in a movie, or the way a dancer is moving, the way a light falls on a body on stage etc … It is a bit difficult to explain exactly what a poetic form is and there is no clear answer, I think, but I would say it has something to do with showing or hinting towards the invisible, visualizing the invisible, even the metaphysical.

In the 79th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Israeli video-poet Emanuella Amichai.

» Read more...

The poems had something very visual and concrete and at the same time very open to visual interpretation and were inspiring for me. The poems had a sense of visual sensibility in them, like a very precise and clean detailed photograph. At times I felt I could literally see and feel them both visually and emotionally. And they had a sense of compassion and humor which I found very inviting.

By Emanuella Amichai.

» Read more...