Review Short: Adam Aitken’s One Hundred Letters Home

One Hundred Letters Home by Adam Aitken
Vagabond Press, 2016

It has taken me more than a hundred days to read Adam Aitken’s One Hundred Letters Home. The book arrived in my letterbox in Sydney at the beginning of May. Autumn turned into winter, and the fragments of Aitken’s palimpsest-memoir started to unfold themselves to me.

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Review Short: Barry Hill’s Grass Hut Work

Grass Hut Work by Barry Hill
Shearsman Books, 2015

The poems in Grass Hut Work are a kind of coda to Barry Hill’s 2014 non-fiction epic Peacemongers, a book of self-discovery and intellectual journeying that took him to the heart of the East, to India and Japan.

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Documentation: Molten Upset’s Poetry & Noise

Explode
Hannah Earles reads from poems written on her bed sheets while Natasha Havir Smith plays electric violin.

Molten Upset is a collective name for us – Autumn Royal and Lisa Lerkenfeldt – and we were stimulated by a kind of silence to co-curate the candidly titled event: Poetry & Noise. The event was held at West Space on 30 June, 2016, and it was evening of sincere overcasts and contemporary performances intended to generate spaces for the intersections of poetry and noise. In order of performance the evening featured: Elena Gomez (audio work), Hana Earles and Natasha Rose Havir Smith, Aurelia Guo (performed by Anna Crews), Dawn Blood, Lisa Lerkenfeldt, Sophie Cassar, Autumn Royal, Spike Fuck, Katherine Botten, Papaphilia, Eleanor Weber (performed by Jessie Hall) and Natalie Harkin (performed by Tarneen Onus-Williams and Nayuka Gorrie).

When it comes to listening, an act that may arguably be synonymous with reading, we followed the philosophy of composer Pauline Oliveros: ‘Listen to everything all of the time and remind yourself when you are not listening.’ Like Oliveros, musicologist Susan McClary embraces a poetic approach when considering sound. While this method might seem intuitive to many, over the years it has been demanded that McClary ‘purge [her] prose of its images and metaphors’. It is this objection – and thankfully McClary’s dismissal of this demand – that highlights one of the many connections between sound – or noise music – and poetry.

The objections to McClary’s work evoke what Muriel Rukeyser writes in The Life of Poetry: ‘Anyone dealing with poetry and the love for poetry must deal, then, with the hatred of poetry.’ It is this loathing of poetry that Rukeyser explores which reminded us of the social rejection of emotions, specifically women’s emotions.

Whether it is about music – including noise – Oliveros, McClary and Rukeyser all refer to the importance of dedication, especially when it comes to non-heteronormative practices of these mediums. Such ‘sincerity’ prompted Molten Upset to place this concept at the forefront of our exploration and confrontation.

In continuing with the theme of ‘sincerity’, the poet Lisa Robertson concludes her essay ‘The Weather: A Report on Sincerity’ with the lines:

I need to be able to delude myself, for as long as it takes, as long as it takes to translate an emotion, a grievance, a politics, an intoxication, to a site, an outside. Sincerity says that identity is moral. I need it to be a tent, not a cave, a rhetoric, not a value. There’s also the fact that my sex is a problem within sincerity. I want to move on. I want a viable climate. I’ll make it in description.

Poetry & Noise hoped for artists to present their own descriptions, to make things up, to embrace the murkiness rather than rely on clarity for concealment. Fundamentally, we will never be pure because we are here and as Cherrie Moraga reminds us: ‘the passage is through, not over, not by, not around but through.’

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Translation of Jean-Baptiste Cabaud’s ‘The Shepherdesses Painted in Blue’

Jean-Baptiste Cabaud is a poet and writer who was born in 1970 in Savoy. He has lived in Lyons since 1993, working as a graphic designer for twelve years. From 2005 he has devoted his time to poetry, written, spoken, and illustrated. His first collection, Les Mécaniques, appeared in 2008 and his second, Fleurs, was published in 2014. He reads his work regularly in France and at international festivals and venues, conducts writing workshops for children and adults, and has been involved in many cross-discipline collaborations with musicians, dancers, graphic artists, photographers and cinematographers.

Darkness and thought invade the sky
And the cloud fields steal the gold of statues

The wind turns tempest and will not calm 
And it all quickens and it’s all cinema

A sand-covered bank a sweet fatigue
And to sleep an instant on closing your eyes

Here there is no nostalgia 
Half-blind windows look onto blank walls

Shepherdesses painted in blue will find their lovers
In the midst of the flock, at the foot of the swing

Too long a trip in an automobile
The radio broken my heart the replacement

There where sea charts indicate mountains
Carefree ships play at mountaineering

Needs must leave again space is so wide
To travel on further and time is so long

Then to bend the poets from their comet course 
And search out silence like a winter cloak

Shepherdesses painted in blue will find their lovers
In the midst of the flock, at the foot of the swing

This water is everywhere over frail earth
Ravaging healing and never ending    

But life teaches nothing and man is a dunce
a window spirit a heater body 

Three pennyworth of hope fifteen euros of hell
A moon ultra full on a bottle dead empty

This morning I bartered my soul of a giant
For the heart of a beggar an uncertain love

Shepherdesses painted in blue will find their lovers
In the midst of the flock, at the foot of the swing

Luminaries scintillate shifting invisible
As hooked on us as we on them

Then heroes march past in a glorious procession
But the sound of the trumpets is drowned in the void

And the swimming of sperm whales harmonious lovely
Hides mysteries from us which seem far too mundane

A fairy could certainly know of these questions
But fairies are earthly and have no replies

Shepherdesses painted in  blue will find their lovers
In the midst of the flock, at the foot of the swing

Rumbling assailing the great waves return
Searching out houses commanding the seasons

And the chessboard is set out at check and stalemate
But the two adversaries have not shaken hands

Soon I shall loiter behind on a bench
To wait for a meeting in the eerie light

A musing old man already resigned
A few grams of the past and a faraway glance

Shepherdesses painted in blue will find their lovers
In the midst of the flock, at the foot of the swing

The palm trees are simply stuck onto the sunset
the photo’s made child’s play of  imagination

We have cleaned out the breeches of our rifles
Kissed our wives goodbye and then left

Sailed over the ocean listened to sirens
And we have confused them with manatees

The mist is still lingering on today
Iridescing the light of strange aureolas 

Shepherdesses painted in blue will find their lovers
In the midst of the flock, at the foot of the swing

To love silence with all its charming vanity
Like a countryside crossed without choosing to stop

But to build ourselves strongholds of books and stones   
What damnable recklessness!  

The rain falls straight down onto straight blocks of flats
Man too is quite upright so much verticality

Chests swelling out are hazardous signs
Sigh-sacs of happiness and of ennui
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10 Works by Juan Ford


Juan Ford | The Reorientalist, 2013 | Oil on linen | 122 x 183 cm

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Written Land: A Lionel Fogarty Chapbook


Image courtesy of Lionel Fogarty


For Martinican poet and theorist Édouard Glissant, forced poetics exists ‘where a need for expression confronts an inability to achieve expression.’1 Glissant further clarifies this when he argues that ‘a forced poetics is created from the awareness of the oppositions between a language that one uses and a form of expression that one needs.’2 For Lionel Fogarty, the divide between what is said and what goes unsaid, between Indigenous life and non-Indigenous assertions, exemplifies this pressure, poetically and politically. The tension which exists in this collection is a continuance of the struggle for self-determination and for justice which have typified Fogarty’s writing for the last thirty-five years. These poems represent the struggle for the right to be able to tell one’s own stories, as the poem ‘Fuck Off’ argues:

Deep down in the black anthropological mind
lives an historical process
you all here never will re-write.3

In that the language of this collection is seen to contravene the grammatical and syntactical constraints of English language usage, speaks to the ‘forced transculturation’ of non-Indigenous language and culture in the telling of Indigenous history. That same tension underlies many of the poems contained here, where corporate and / or government words ‘Reinforce white dominance’ with a ‘syntax blotched (by) greed.’ The division between rurality and rusticism is played upon in the heart-breaking poem of post-mining boom small towns ‘SEE SEA OVER DEWS IN CEDUNA’, just as the divide between Aboriginal reality and labour and the saleability of Aboriginality is fiercely critiqued within the collection. Continuing from ‘Digger lion’s goal’, the line ‘Revitalizing extraction’ unfolds into ‘Sacred histories severed on impacted reclamation’. ‘Revitalizing extraction’ levels accusations at (foreign owned?) corporations for the extraction economies of resources and culture; at once a boutique multicultural project (with their Indigenous employment targets and job incentives) the devastating ecological and ontological effects which Indigenous communities are often left to bear. That ‘Sacred histories’ are ‘severed’ and ‘dispossessed’ speaks of derivations of value and labour, and sets up a dialectic between surplus value and surplus lives. Everyday language, especially that used for corporate control of Indigenous Country, is represented as corrupt and corrupting. This is language which needs to be broken, to be disseminated and retooled. What Fogarty presents in this collection is a language which has been recalibrated, which reflects the linguistic corruption it is exposed to and which speaks with historical horizons far longer than any market projections.

Lionel Fogarty: No Cites like the Cites Hum In
Lionel Fogarty: Conquer Slaughter’s
Lionel Fogarty: Never Worked
Lionel Fogarty: See Sea Over Dews in Cenduna
Lionel Fogarty: Yo I Am the Man
Lionel Fogarty: Cops are poets on the looks sit hears cobs

Adding to the multifaceted attack on linguistic and cultural expression, is the status and functions of possessives within the collection. The challenge to definitions of ownership and the very constructs of personhood are contested within these agrammatical examples, ‘cities are built on times land.’ Here, time is given in identificatory language, as governing and possessive, but also as reflecting a plurality of temporal fields (mythopoeic, colonial and authorial times) and as possibly as establishing hierarchies of control and dominance, where ‘Homeland is earth’s lust’. The complications of personal identity and identifiers are as complex as antecedents we can trace to the Black Arts Movement.4 The criticism latent in a ‘Were are the many stars’ problematises historical categorisations of Indigenous Australians (‘were’) and doubly, or perhaps exponentially, problematises the relationship between those Aboriginal Australians being defined and their capacity for agency and decisive action given in the corruption of the verb ‘we’re’. In even this most subtle way – and Fogarty’s poems are not typified by their subtlety – the poems in this collection critique the concept that Indigenous lives are qualifiable, and stand against the impact of language in over-determining the confines and constructs of Indigenous life.

It is with this caustic approach that Fogarty contests the political future of reclamation, of sanctity and of self-determination. It is a position from where he determinedly stakes a claim on the stories that lie at the heart of the country.

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FUTURE MACHINES Editorial

The theme for this issue arose from a chance encounter with a flying machine and a Frenchman. The illustration above, by Jean-Marc Côté, is one of a series commissioned to be printed on cards for cigarette and cigar boxes at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris: the task of the illustrator was to imagine what life might be like in the year 2000. In 2016, Côté’s images are hardly more than quaint curiosities, sepia-tinted windows onto the past. Science fiction, we are reminded, is itself somewhat of a retrograde genre and the central paradox it speaks is that the future is always already retro; it, too, is subject to the effects of age.

Several months after this first encounter, on a long-distance flight across the Pacific, I read about another Frenchman and his flying machine. In Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes of the experience of being a pilot, thousands of feet in the air, delivering mail for Aéropostale and dreaming about the points of light below – each an island of human habitation in a dark wilderness, each an entire world, an enclosed capsule, yet yoked together precisely by the fact of a man in a plane delivering mail. Though we are a long way from Côté and Saint-Exupéry, we have perhaps not come so far: machines overwhelmingly remain, for the most part, tools and allies; helping to conquer distance, the weather, disease, tragedy; carrying signals and desires between points of light.

To think of future machines is to think about time, about the shifting and contested boundary between humans and machines, about the future as a collective hallucination – a region that perpetually recedes and advances like a mirage. The halls of science fiction are populated with novels and films, but these only take us only so far – as genres they are, by convention and more often than not, compelled to fill in the gaps between what we believe we know and what we imagine; they are bound by the need to make sense, to explain themselves. Poetry is a form that is eminently suited to leaving the gaps well alone, or allowing them to multiply: poems do not need to explain, or make (mechanical) sense to either their makers or readers; they follow neither the laws of cause and effect nor expectations of sequence. This is not to say that poetry is devoid of sense, only that it allows for the unaccounted and unforeseeable.

The title of Phillip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? asks us to consider the part that dreams play in the drama of being human. To dream is not only to imagine but also to desire, and to desire so intensely that we seek to turn the dreams of sleep into waking realities. One answer to the question of what, besides chemicals, besides electrical impulses, besides biology and evolution, makes us what we are, might very well reside in the space between the imaginable and the possible; a space that poets, and all artists, have traversed frequently and patiently over the course of centuries.

Another answer may be in the awareness and experience of loss and death. The heart, an organic engine, has a limited lifespan – it beats a certain number of times and then falls still. It is this inevitable loss, held in trust by the unique and perishable body, that seems to give human life its precariousness and its preciousness. Yet the problem of finitude is not ours alone: if we decompose and return to soil, then machines rust, crack, become scrap. Stars consume themselves or are consumed, galaxies collapse. In the very act of existing, of persisting through time, everything is wearing down, breaking down, day by day. Nothing is, in the end, eternal.

In the face of this knowledge, what can we do but persist? And how, today, can our persistence be separated from that of the machine? The future (and the present and the past) is filled with machines: counting machines, music machines, memory machines, war machines. They are not only parts of ourselves but also mirrors – if their successes are ours, their faults are, too. And if we fear what they might become, and the uses to which they might be put, it is because we know what we have been and are capable of. When we write of them, we are always also writing of us.

My intention with this issue of Cordite Poetry Review was to evoke, but not limit poets to, the realms of science fiction. The strength of this genre has always been in its emphasis on invention and imagination: I hoped for, and received, submissions that approached the theme obliquely. The poems here engage with fictional and real locales, some dialogue with the past, some treat with the language of code and others with language as code – for language is itself a machine and poets are particularly well placed to put it through its paces. In this issue are light thieves and ICU wards, crystal balls and mechanical hearts, ghosts, blazars, bodies in cars, retired terminators, white linen jumpsuits and factories in the sea. Collectively, they stand as a record of our dreams of future machines now – dreams that, at the moment of their dreaming, begin to decay.

Thanks to the poets for their arresting visions, and for being willing to move into what may have been unfamiliar territory. Thanks, too, to Kent MacCarter – a formidable poet himself – for his patience, good humour and support through the guest editing process, and his tireless work promoting Australian poetry over the years.

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We Need to Talk about Caste: Roanna Gonsalves Interviews S Anand


Image courtesy of S Anand

It was a cool inner west Sydney evening in May 2015, alive with families out to dinner and bookshops open late. It was also one week after four Dalits were sexually abused, murdered, and their homes set on fire in Rajasthan, India, and three weeks before a Dalit girl in a village in Madhya Pradesh, India was beaten up because her shadow fell on an upper caste man. It was with the knowledge of such a bloodscape rooted in systemic oppression, with the privilege of being innoculated from it, with the increasing awareness of its noxious roots and consequences, I began a conversation with the Indian publisher and writer S. Anand. He is the founder-publisher at Navayana, and co-author of Bhimayana and Finding My Way.

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Rilke, Cavafy, Hölderlin: Simeon Kronenberg Interviews Luke Fischer

Luke Fischer has been writing poetry since a relatively early age and has combined this deep engagement with ongoing academic studies in philosophy, along with an interest in music. His first collection of poetry Paths of Flight (Black Pepper, 2013) has been widely regarded as an outstanding debut and was commended in the FAW Anne Elder Award. In 2013, with his wife Dalia Nassar, Luke initiated the highly esteemed Poetry and Music Salon in North Bondi. The private salons have also led to public iterations, including: ‘Poetry and Music Salon: Do Poets Tell the Truth?’ at the 2014 Sydney Writers’ Festival and ‘Poetry and Music Salon: Poetry vs Prose’ at the 2015 Sydney Writers’ Festival.

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Unbidden: Settler Poetry in the Presence of Indigenous Sovereignty

Please be warned that this essay contains descriptions of deceased Aboriginal persons. It is developed from a paper delivered at Active Aesthetics: Innovation and Aesthetics in Contemporary Australian Poetry and Poetics, hosted by University of California, Berkeley in April 2016. I thank the convenors for the opportunity to present these ideas; and the many poets and readers who offered responses to the writing, presentation and further development of the paper.

Influenced and shaped by some fifty years of Indigenous poetry in English, the last couple of decades of Australian settler poetry have advanced prolific attempts to ‘write (oneself) into the country’ (Van Teeseling 209): producing varied and sometimes radical poetries of regionality, topography, climate, and the histories, narratives and landmarks running through and over them. I contend that such contemporary work by settler poets presents a continuum – varyingly compelling attempts to write in the presence not only of Indigenous poetry, but also colonisation’s ongoing effects and of un-ceded Indigenous sovereignty.

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3 Translated Péter Závada Poems


Image courtesy of Cool List Hungary 2012

Péter Závada (1982 —) is a poet and playwright born in Budapest. He holds degrees in English and Italian from ELTE University and a degree in Theatre Studies from the Károli Gáspár Protestant University. His plays have been performed in the Katona József, Belvárosi and Trafó theatres in Budapest. He has performed with rap and slam poetry group Akkezdet Phiai and is a member of the József Attila Circle Literary Association of Young Writers. His poetry has been published in the Hungarian literary journals Jelenkor, Élet és Irodalom and Műút. His first collection of poems, Ahol Megszakad, was published by Libri in 2012. His second collection, Mész, followed in 2015.

Translator’s note:

These three poems by Hungarian poet Péter Závada are taken from his second collection, Mész, published in 2015. The title itself is a play on words, as mész can mean either ‘limestone’ or ‘you are going.’ The significance of this duality becomes apparent in the emotional and symbolic power of the images evoked throughout the collection.

Both senses of the term mész have deep connections to the three poems presented here. The eponymous poem makes reference to a well-known Hungarian folk tale in which the central character – a stonemason named Kőműves Kelemen – finds that the castle he’s trying to build keeps falling down, and is forced to sacrifice his beloved wife and mix her remains into the mortar in order to make the castle stand. This is a reference familiar to almost any Hungarian reader, but clearly not obvious to the non-Hungarian. The second sense of the word mész evokes a sense of departure, perhaps even of abandonment, and is thus connected to the deep theme of loss represented in these poems. Závada lost his mother to clinical depression at a young age, and one gets the sense that these poems are an attempt to process that loss many years later. The title, then, represents both a sense of departure and a sense of loss, with the latter serving as a necessary impetus for the construction of a meaningful creative edifice.

These poems are more personal, if formally freer, than those of Závada’s first collection, published in 2012. They come close to the heart of the poet, possessing an honesty and a power that draws the reader close, while keeping us at arm’s length linguistically – one imagines that the poet, too, feels this distance. The economy and gorgeous precision of Závada’s language results in a raw, melancholy tone that I feel privileged to bring to an English-speaking audience for the first time.


But nothing

It is not grief, diffusing through me, 
but emptiness; and what the blind see
isn’t darkness, but nothing. 
But we can’t imagine nothing, 
and in fact even a vacuum 
is never completely empty. Just think:
for years they thought there was nothing 
around the moon but a vacuum 
yet it, too, has
a thin, rare atmosphere. The lighter atoms
are blown away by the solar wind 
but some of the heavier ones remain 
near the surface.
In dreams, I look for you in the bustling street
but it’s like searching the cosmos for signs of life. 
What if you’re one of those civilisations that 
destroy themselves before we even know they exist? 
But if we did meet, I would tell you 
what’s been on my mind:
that the night is nothing but the shadow that our planet casts on us
and that your memory, mother, is like
a thin atmosphere – 
just substantial enough to suffocate in.
Vákuum

Nem a gyász terjed szét bennem,
inkább üresség ez, mint ahogy
a vakok sem a sötétet látják,
hanem a semmit. A semmit persze
nem tudjuk elképzelni, az üresség-
értelemben vett vákuum voltaképp
nincsen. Gondolj csak bele, sokáig
azt hitték, légüres tér veszi körül,
pedig a Holdnak is van egy egészen
vékony és ritka légköre. A könnyebb
atomokat magával sodorja a napszél,
de néhány nehezebb a felszín
közelében marad. Álmomban megtalálni
téged az utca forgatagában: mintha
az univerzumban egy idegen élet
nyomait kutatnám. Félek, hogy olyan
vagy, mint egy civilizáció, ami azelőtt
elpusztítja magát, hogy hírt adhatna
létezéséről. Ha mégis találkoznánk,
elmondanám, ami egy ideje foglalkoztat:
hogy az éjszaka csak a bolygó ránk
vetülő árnyéka, hogy az emléked is,
mint a ritka légkör: még bőven
meg lehet fulladni benne.
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‘The birds of paradise sing without a needing a supple branch’: Joseph Brodsky and the Poetics of Exile

A poet versus empire

During his lifetime, Joseph Brodsky – political prisoner, exile, Nobel Prize winner – was virtually unknown in his native, Soviet-era Russia. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the early 1990s Brodsky’s poetry became officially available to the public for the first time in the country, which had hitherto so furiously rejected him. By then already an established poet and essayist in the West, his quick (albeit posthumous) homecoming fame shortly followed, positioning Brodsky firmly in the minds of first-time Russian readers as a political martyr, poet-iconoclast and a major symbol of the Russian dissident literary world.

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Translingualism, Home, Ambivalence: The Poet Dimitris Tsaloumas

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
Catullus

The death of Dimitris Tsaloumas (1921-2016) invites us to revisit and re-evaluate his poetry without the critical anxiety to place him within the historical taxonomies of Australian literature or the hermeneutical suspicion about its belonging. The task of situating his poetry will take time as the canon of Australian literature is still fluid and its main parameters are not yet finalised. Continue reading

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3 Translated Mardonio Carballo Poems


Image by Francisco Cañedo, courtesy of SinEmbargo

Mardonio Carballo (1974 —) is a Mexican poet, actor and journalist from Chicontepec, Veracruz. He writes in both Nahuatl and Spanish. His published works include Tlajpiajketl o la Canción del Maíz (2015), Las Horas Perdidas (2014), Las Plumas de la Serpiente (2013), Xolo (2012), Piloe, Canciones para Asustar (2012) and Xantolo (2010). In 2014 he curated the Festival Estruendo Multilingüe, an event underwritten by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He regularly collaborates with preeminent Mexican musicians, artists and journalists such as Eugenia León, Regina Orozco, Guita Shyftter, Jorge Fons, Salvador Aguirre and Carmen Aristegui.


HUITZ-THORN
				
Take a thorn and hold me
cut my neck once and for all
paint the house with my blood
cut off my legs
polish the floor with sea salt
open the windows and throw me out
only then will I leave
turned into a bird 
Icarus with palm-straw wings
look up at the sky
take a thorn and hold me …
HUITZTLIESPINA

Xijkui ze uitzli xnech najnaua
xi nech kechteki xi mo yolchicaua
xij pa mo chan ika no ezo
xij teki no mets
xtlachpana mo chan ika achi puyekatl
xij mo kajlapo xi nech kuatopeua
xij chiua pampa na nij nekis ni mo kuepas
ken ze piltotol
Icaro petlatltatatzin
xij tlachia kaajko
xijkui ze uitzli xi mo najnaua …
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3 Translated Rajathi Salma Poems


Image courtesy of The Hindu

Rajathi Salma (1982 —) is one of Tamil’s most important contemporary poets. Overcoming orthodoxy, marital violence and imprisonment in her own home, Salma has become an international literary figure and spokesperson for women’s rights. Her work articulates the nuances of repressed desire and sexuality, as well as bringing life to the often invisible domestic space inhabited by many Indian women. With two volumes of poetry, one novel and a collection of short stories, Salma has made her mark as a distinctive Indian literary voice. The late Lakshmi Holmstrom’s English translation of her novel The Hour Past Midnight was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Prize and long-listed for the Man Asian Prize. As well as being a woman of letters, Salma is a committed public servant and activist, running an organization for the promotion of women’s rights and education in rural India. She is the subject of a multi-award winning documentary film, Salma, by British filmmaker Kim Longinotto, and is currently working on a new novel, Toilet, dealing with sanitation issues faced by rural women.

Translator’s note:

Salma’s language contains a primal boldness that she wishes the many worlds of the marginalised could possess. It is her courage of conviction and starkness of expression that make Salma one of the most influential Indian writers of our time. Her story has inspired women across the world, encouraging her sisters – modern-day Tamil women – to explore a new place of freedom and creative articulation.

As we see in the poem Perspective, Salma’s idiom often breaks with convention, offering a fresh view of everyday things and thus empowering the subject with a multi-dynamic awareness of herself as a presence rather than an absence. Profoundly influenced by the bleak circumstances of her early life, Evil and Tonight present us with the terror and tedium that often limit the possibility of beauty in romantic and sexual relationships. Salma’s poetic voice reveals several hidden worlds of violence and exploitation, beckoning the reader to partake in her dream of creating a world of equality and a future of joy.


Perspective

I stand upside down
and comb my hair.
I cook topsy-turvy,
and eat thus, too.
I squat inverted
to feed my child;
heels upward, 
I read my books.
Upside down,
I gaze at myself.

Terrified, stunned, and staring at me,
a bat,
hanging ripe on the tree in the garden.
கோணம்

--

நான் 
தலைகீழாகத் தலைவாரிக் கொண்டிருப்பதை 

தலைகீழாக  சமைப்பதை
தலைகீழாக  உணவருந்துவதை 
தலைகீழாக அமர்ந்து  குழைந்தைக்குப் 
பாலூட்டுவதை 

தலைக்கீழாக ப்  புத்தகம்  வாசிப்பதை 

தலைகீழாகவே நின்று 
தன்னை  உற்றுப்பார்ப்பதை 
அச்சத்துடன்  வியந்து  பார்த்தபடியிருக்கிறது 
தோட்டத்து  விருட்சத்தில்  
காய்த்துக்கிடக்கும் 
வௌவால்
Posted in TRANSLATIONS | Tagged ,

See Sea Over Dews in Cenduna

Garment government town sea dunes sea front loot.

See new in Ceduna nah school fish for sea news.

A long the great bitten beach bright open shores,

Sea over dews sees sea of jewels.

Mining town know for worker on the mine, sands for the calls,

Now most are old or tow the young to contracts the works.

The first look, oh they natives rumi a rum run this places, we’ll see who pays the town bills and rates.

Town camp people rush by every day yarning away as if there past people’s fished walked swim worked in theses parts.

People on foot, some in wanting shoes looking for a bit of drink just to keep cool from heat away and let cold drink in give the strength to walk another K or to home camp sleeps. At nights sad seam’s Ceduna awaits a new light moon on morning afternoon sights.

The polices are as cheep as dogs looses in a rubbish heap.

Every face knows a face and if the bodies different then it’s sussed for a much they got, for tomorrow living.

The native tidies are coming to see dews new sea town sure shores, so clean up wear your best wear be common on the hello bro? So the business is in the higher market more mauls trails and buggers to eat and make the blacks fat as fat.

Ceduna reminds a blackfella wipe apart as a small mission but with still white controls.

Past by travelling fork up the money to a fake crossing, yet the painting caves big in notes, while centre links is line is like second home for a cup of papers in your mouths.

There are family’s back in the old land right duck pound beach holding house now, the one’s who fought for little lands, that belong to there parents spiritual, yet the rates or rents are still no payed to the right full owners, the big say so of the bills are bigger than ever.

Health to who will give a jobs to those not of progress,

Some Indigenous cultures draws significants in needs of Ceduna,

Some speak lounges, most speak English are down an out by voices.

Arts are about in a shop, same as spots is about as balls are kicked up and down the street in towns ways, so the cops get the balls and up sets the parents, skins names are heard then touch in the poorest senses.

From town to town their history is many parallels over stories of movements life and dying of family’s, yes but6 the race lives’.

Up and down the coast reconnects are happening when attention is the issues.

But why must a people work for a land sea killing shills.

The manner of convenience is modern,

Yet bush believes is still fortunate,

Self-owning an addressed stay is like up today new wave walkabout.

Access is there, but how to anticipate is the spear for keys futures.

Most unable agreement is make by low cost then queries those off permission.

A author go on to ask for a story, but get told no some one took my story and never gave me nothing back in return.

Delay by due changes always happen here sitting and looking at Ceduna.

But the installation of kind way is felted.

But pains tame the wild,

If you know then good advise is solely in the sea you soon of take a trip to Ceduna seeing the dawn and how the days meet the people’s.

Its once was the community they wanted it to be, may the creator help their futures by sea sand sky and no more lies for the Ceduna town ship

We wait by the day care place for our turn to talk art and walk with each other now time as no sea sky day or night to our gathering, we get free food tea anything needed for our day to day life always, see you all around Ceduna nah mate S.A

Posted in FOGARTY | Tagged

The Sydney Opera

When poetry is the condition of ordinary speech, all speech is poetry, every breath is metaphor.

The stars no longer dock in the Sydney sky, they have dropped anchor at some unseeable harbour.

The stars are crossing the night unseen: the sea is slurring: it’s too drunk on history.

Here, on this earth, the white man has set light on fire; he has made it dance to his darkness, and called it Vivid.

The moon has been summoned to earth: it’s an installation that even wears a fucking halo, it’s worth only a selfie.

Says Lionel: It’s not that I don’t know how to behave among white people, they don’t know how to behave with me.

What was taken from water was given to earth: once from this land rainbows soared out of the heart of Biami.

But what the white man took can never be returned: in greed, he surrendered his own humanity.

Lionel surprises Anna Bligh—former premier of Queensland, Labor too—at the Sebel Pier One hotel:

Hey Anna, this is Lionel. Me, Lionel. Remember? I demonstrated against you. Now I’m sipping beer at the pier.

Yes, thank you. I seem to have arrived. You’ve not seen me in days? Oh I’ve not seen myself in days.

What’s a black man doing in this part of town? is a question decent white folk do not now ask in words so many.

They’re proper, law-abiding people. They take country and are nice about giving us a little earth under our own sun.

For those of us to whom all speech is poetry, there’s always a place: in the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. But then you see:

The sun is aboriginal. Moon is aboriginal. White is aboriginal too. There ain’t black without white, no day without night.

I want to put two hands on this yellowing evening sun: one yours, one mine. I want to trap light in time.

I want to take you on a walk to country: to see that the stars are not all dead: I want you to eat my mother’s heart: Come:


(For Lionel Fogarty and Ali Cobby Eckermann who threw some light on Sydney and me. 2.57 a.m., 24 May 2015. To be read with, or after, ‘Richard Green tells a story of the loss of Country’ where poetry is the condition of ordinary speech)

Posted in 75: FUTURE MACHINES | Tagged

Cops are poets on the looks sit hears cobs


Lionel Fogarty | on pigs skpies

(COMMON COPS COBS AND CODES)
He the poetry fee mans says yes greater idea,
To have cops who done wrong to first Australians’
Get out a books in personal poloidal postconiel poems.
Well it will sell as pigs fights pigs ,piss on shit
P=process I interdents G guts Sorting .
Police pleasant in laws,outars your home poet lawless.
She says polices literatures’ will be ripe,
Cliveing palms hands four leafs climp
Wagon as if protest writers stood ,
Over 10 cops associated at a paddy the wagon
Poets don’t honk a yakka don’t know your smell ,
Nah never buys polices poetry yet ,out of the uniformed where,
Is your formed words.
He’s saves the David an lion,log an log writings invitee’s
Frontlines offices writers to be pub wished dead launches;
Officers do lit bug literatures’.
He rights wings appeared to show alines to cop of the enfroces
That killed took cizten lifers aways.
To have equality siting talking with authors protest challenges’ poets
Now’s for the fee;
Sell us these class fall for unity turn bull sorter literatures’.
(So the cops can’t write this seeks peep weeps by their morning
Honking honest ,nights drians officers writers,
Mad pig days sleep to arisen ciztens to ,
honk

Posted in FOGARTY | Tagged

No Cites like the Cites Hum In

This cities are builted on times land.
Whites made a date to root their women’s
Season flow in times of hardship
winds live below the feets that walk
the flower smell on the mouth we smell.
Fields desires passion for workers pays are hard yacaring
Bend on back,send to spend never expect lended.
All towns don’t twin cities cos your unemloyments
tongus are adanceing over number
(who want to work for an opperssioner anger)
The mountain kiss a ever-lasting love,stop houses being made in mountain.
Let the cave below the seas be our beds
Have the ray shine by ground skies giving a path-way over lands recratives.
This cities don’t remind me of the countries once was.
Hate hidden by white man calendar in 800 years,
one big museum ,as even eyes await rain drops in the dry light off days.
Were are the many stars
Were are the so much clounds
May space stop the travel by sit down and lazzy out people’s ;
(Make no bills for the billi’s) Soil is a toil needing all to recoil).
Your cities are not our living life
but you all live not shared and must have grassroot rights.
Homeland is earth’s lust ,High class shall fall as shatted grass.
They dust tail in details for a cause spend on the big notes.
Written land can now till the cities where they are going.
Fields of face,give all flowers lit lifes
Fields of body gave all work greater words.
It’s times for the poets of real justice in
all sence to take over resigons polaltic ,(also the Mac book ”funny hands on faces”
It’s stop time for all to care to kick war out of extines .
This is a timeless cities musised by tunes told and untold, Hey yet to be written .
Remmber the gun wespon are them?
800 TO ONE

Posted in FOGARTY | Tagged

Never Worked

He wave his fingers saying he’s a worker
Work to the breeze off pride,
Word winner made heat powers run.
Work together in sunshine machine society,
Brings version over our sensuality.
Harvest highways for the drivers find,
Safe life living eyes on the ears.
Boiling to top my feet seems weak
Being down on the ride arm out of reach
Pride every day must not astray.
The breeze that never air inner gave,
Non-powers was un-kind.
The cities around worlds unknown,
Saw the hurt before it caused bloods to flow.
The flowers a brighten a morning dew passing,
By bodies not yet entwine.
Work what to day no numbered as if dogs and cats are priceless.
Man wanting space of séance to be the last forest,
Man using our minds for rich around speaker’s words.
Working in silence brings not the thing wants on needs.
Boil now the tea; boil now the wind on rains we and I needs.

Posted in FOGARTY | Tagged

Yo I Am the Man

Who gave you woman
don’t know who us is ha ha
Vioce the name black babe
Not our son ,not our Daughters
Yo who your name means
What voice give’s sound to the works off a poet writers
Yo who your word name gave to the creative perforers.
Hey voice’s of no meaning singuling on vioce over
box stand over makes no unity;
Pure voice,pure poet’s .
Your name voice man made no childrens art word
life long stories .
Where the name span by White man name up
a black man useing the name for message .
What gave the name rights man right to rewrite history
by given change to the land names.
Cities name made us blame
Ideninty live on name’s by cultures rename the voice
emity by a lies call.

Posted in FOGARTY | Tagged

Conquer Slaughter’s

Digger lion’s goal

have to =====$$
No warrior’s cult threats invisible vibes
Dumb bounded by digging a lions genocide
Syntax blotched greed;
Let the frontiers frontline wise surface non greed
A destruction end when poison tongues gave
Honouring obligations.
‘’Tablespoons off set futures sip dip lips
Reinforce white dominance makes,
Mind set by create divisions

Negative gate mouth where always
Titled by question of how too
Boardrooms perspective.
Syntax text of battles honour
Will give repression modern
Ancient engaged fights.
To show history one sided “shines no’’
Tow stories echo as designed Oh.
Capitulation stole spiritual origin
Madden disadvage discrimination.
No conversation are needed on
Who knows?
No common mutualists’ occupants
Rich order governance supremacy
Measures apply by bestow devils.
Live no reoccupy every sites are taken
Revitalizing extraction
Dispossessed continuation by connection
Sacred histories, well severed on impacted reclamation;
Unique face living being present off grandfathers lived
Being vital resource pride reoccupy truth shield,
Museum treating history declaration
Debates be activity movements in highest
Attempters conquer slaughters

Lionel G Fogarty 2015 16 11 time 8’22 am tried on these day.
Sat day time wrote 3.29 14 /11/20`15

Posted in FOGARTY | Tagged

affirmation of becoming

common idiotic ibis
observing vertigo
picnics on the dunes
sloping long weekends
for trends in decomposition
an aerial shot:

three-eyed houses infused
with tendrils grasping
busy silence
chanted goaded
plastic still lives
into persons or
personhood

Posted in 75: FUTURE MACHINES | Tagged

How to Save a Life

(start terminal session)
uploading file: “mark.wbe”
time to complete upload: 56.2 hours
> uploadFolder: “Mark_family_photos_1985to2025”
> uploadFolder: “Mark_personalDocs”
> uploadFolder: “Mark_audiofiles”
> uploadFolder: “Mark_family_videofiles”
> uploadFolder: “Face_recognition”
> uploadFolder: “voice_recognition”
> uploadFolder: “personalitySim”
> uploadFolder: “randomQuirkexpressions”
> save selected files to “mark”
> run diagnostics
> associate emotions + prioritise intensity: high>low
> Test: “Hello?”

Posted in 75: FUTURE MACHINES | Tagged