| At
the very end of April this year, a meeting of Titans was
staged in San Francisco: some of the best European poets
met with resident counterparts for a five-day festival
dedicated to contemporary poetry in all its facets, languages
and voices. It was a feast for all poetry buffs with its
immense diversity, over thirty writers attending. Belgium,
France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden had gathered
their best forces to bring their native talents and their
native languages (and translations) to the readings, and
San Francisco countered with its local talents. Stefaan
van den Bremt (Belgium), Charles Dantzig and Marc Cholodenko
(France), Volker Braun, Lutz Seiler and Philipp Schiemann
(Germany), Dacia Maraini and Massimiliano Chiamento (Italy),
Tor Obrestad (Norway), Àngel González and Manuel Mantero
(Spain) and Katarina Frostenson and Johanna Ekström (Sweden)
faced up to their American counterparts Joanne Kyger, Barbara
Barrigan, André Baca, Taylor Brady, Bill Berkson, Norma
Cole, Denise Newman, Michael Rothenberg, Leslie Scalapino,
Cedar Sigo, Hugh Steinberg, Tarin Towers and Elizabeth
Treadwell.
Disparate
Voices
The
difference in approach to themes and writing between the
US and the European voices was apparent from the very first
reading. La Grande Dame of Italian poetry, Dacia Maraini
(also feminist, essayist, novelist, film-maker and playwright)
read her poems in her native Italian as well as in English
(translation by Genni Gunn), a juxtaposition of short, breathless
lines of colorful Italian splendor against the night-mares
of the serpents of war carried to the subconscious via television
images. The scents of jasmine waft through violent evenings,
the abundant evening meal is thoughtfully enjoyed while the
horror of an overseas war tears at corners of the mind. “Is
the war inside or outside?” With a typical new-generation
beat, Massimiliano Chiamenti writes in both Italian and English — sometimes
mixed together in the same poem, where the images from home
carry a complexity mixed with the media-lingo of the present
day.
Volker
Braun, born in Dresden a few months before the outbreak
of the Second World War, grew up in this totally devastated
city, finding jobs to survive, and finally ending up at
the Berliner Ensemble. He brought a disillusioned awareness
of fear and suffering, historic mementos from Roman gladiators
paired with the throw-away society of our times symbolized
by a media-famed beauty on a catwalk and Carl Lagerfeld.
We are all Barbarians, mortals set against “the Great In
Vain”. Braun, for obvious reasons, does not speak English
(translation by David Constantine), but his younger German
counterpart, the popular Lutz Seiler, does, even though
he was born and bred in East Germany. His poems, written
entirely in the lower case (translations by Jennifer Poehler)
carry echoes of Soviet characteristics, tattered surroundings
and children grown old prematurely by memories of what
preceded them.
More
light-hearted, even humorous, was Charles Dantzig, a young
Parisian who paired with Marc Cholodenko as France’s contribution.
Dantzig brought the house down with an extempore poem about
his impressions of the festival, elegant French descriptions
as a background to onomato-poetic outbursts of shuffling,
sneezing and coughing sounds. Cholodenko on the other hand
displayed an inner landscape of stringency and restraint
in carefully crafted vocabulary. Both urban and urbane.
Two “exiled” poets
represented Spain, Àngel González and Manuel Montero, two
peers residing in the US. González, in his mid-seventies
and as highly esteemed in Spain as in the Americas, is
a professor of contemporary Spanish literature at the University
of New Mexico, and Montero teaches as a professor of Romance
languages at the University of Georgia. Both bear the markings
of their different origins — rivers and bullfights respectively,
mirrors of the inner self. Both spend stretches of time
in Spain in order to revive both images and language, and
both are deeply revered and respected as exponents of a
living Spanish poetry tradition.
Stefaan
van den Bremt, poet, translator and essayist, prefers the
notion of Dutch as his language rather than Flemish. His
short, pithy, almost aphoristic lines contain a sharp poignancy,
superficially unemotional yet, in melancholy mood, holding
up poetry as a counter to death. His is a highly indi-vidualistic
European voice. His poems, translated into English by Yann
Lovelock, were dramatically read by Rita Bral, the Belgian
Consul.
Norway’s
Tor Obrestad brought another original voice to the podium — an
indomitable, sensuous, roaming and roaring male voice.
Obrestad was born on a farm, has traveled widely as a writer
and journalist to such places as Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia
and Yemen; but his language is that of a son of western
Norway. His poems were translated by Ren Powell.
The
Ice Maidens of Swedish poetry
Katarina
Frostenson and Johanna Ekström could be regarded as representatives
of two different generations and fields of interest. While
Frostenson, a member of the Swedish Academy, clearly has
a penchant for French literature (she is the translator of
Michaux, Duras and Bataille, among others) and music (she
wrote the libretto for the opera “City”), Ekström is a visual
artist (having created installations, photographs, dance
and sculpture) and treads easily in the land of contemporary
American technosociety. Yet there is common ground in their
very sensitive and mature symbols incorporating nature, water,
air, stones, grass; their aware-ness of color and colorlessness,
shapeless shapes. Powerful powerlessness. Both have amazing
stage presence, and performed admirably, reading their poems
translated by Joan Tate and Sarah Death respectively.
Frostenson
stunned the audience with the starkness of her images,
her grey hues, the white bones, the harrowing stillness
of the world, the ever-forgiving and engulfing presence
of the waters. The poem “Canal” from her collection “Thoughts” took
those themes to their utmost limits, also evoking parallels
with the libretto for “City” and its character, Sorl, a
non-person. The fragility of life itself, a life that has
been taken and disappeared, but nevertheless still there.
We are escorted by her through areas of dream-like consciousness,
feeling every bone in our weary bodies, like an eternal
November, grey and unforgiving, frozen; and yet we are
invited over thresholds into fluidity. We are the living
and the dead.
Johanna
Ekström moves somewhat closer to tangible reality with
images from the landscapes of childhood and pubity, entangled
in the “gelling of time”. A leopard moves along the railroad
tracks of her grandparents’ Västmanland as she enters the
lights from the jogging track next to her parents’ home,
and darker dreams lurk: the internal and external worlds
are intertwined. She is astonishingly mature for her young
years, multi-talented, aware — one looks forward to future
creations of visions and words by Johanna Ekström.
An
American conclusion
It
became increasingly obvious that there was a dividing line
between the Bay Area poets and the Europeans, both in approach
and subject matter. Although some US poets displayed both
depth and fervor, the lasting impression was of the exquisite
crafting of the European poetry, the melancholic voices echoing
hardships and historical tragedies. In contrast the abundance
of the sunlit Californian landscape seemed to shape and impregnate
the writings of the locals and gave them an almost prose-like,
prosaic feel. Even when images were loaned from foreign cultures
they were handed to us as a reality, rather than symbols.
In the aftermath the lack of fun and humour among the European
voices was picked out as the dividing line between the here
and the there. For all those of us who have grown up with
the richness of a multitude of languages and cultures this
was a feast, and a nostalgic, soul-searching journey back
to utter complexity. One culture mirrors the other. |
