Interviews on “poetry & refugees” – 4 – Marie Silkeberg

Marie Silkeberg was born in Copenhagen in 1961 and spent most of her life in Sweden, a country that has a special role in refugee politics.  

 

Lyrikline Blog (LB): Topics like conflict, flight and refuge found their way into your poetry and poetry film making during the last years. Why’s that? Was there a crucial experience or encounter that made you work on these topics?

Marie Silkeberg (MS): I belong to a generation who have lived more than half of our lives in the 20th century. When I look back, I usually describe my books as divided according to this break in time. The end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century brought with them enormous changes in the world and in the cultural field. For a long period I couldn’t write at all. The aesthetics from the former century in this new world seemed so worn out. So I started to turn outwards, using listening, as a method, to understand and grasp the sound of the world. The first poems I wrote consisted of very few words, and searched for changes and shifts in the language. Haroun Farockis film Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges meant a lot to me while writing this book. His way of relating European history to the Algerian for instance, as well as his way of interpreting photos from the past in the light of the present, and his way of combining elements to create new meaning. The method of listening, to write the sound of the world I continued. I got the change to travel a lot, and took it. The fact of my grandfather being a Russian immigrant in Sweden, and his parents Greek immigrants in Odessa became a trace, a quest, an enigma, especially after the death of my father, and I felt I had to embrace this nomadic inheritance.

Interviews on “poetry & refugees” – 5 – Ghayath Almadhoun

Ghayath Almadhoun was born in Syria in 1979 and is a resident of Sweden today. 

 

Lyrikline Blog (LB): Where do you come from and why did you leave your country of origin?

Ghayath Almadhoun (GA): I came from Damascus, Syria, I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, my family was expelled from Ashkelon to Gaza by the Israeli army in 1948, and again expelled from Gaza in 1967. In 2008 I was invited to read my poetry in Stockholm, and I sought asylum. Why? Look what is happening in Syria and you will know what kind of dictatorships I fled from.

LB: In your view, is it the task of a poet also to be a chronicler or witness of his/her time?

GA: I do not think we should overload poetry , at the same time poetry should not be isolated from the poet.

LB: What impact on society or politics can a poem have? Do oppressive regimes have to fear poetry?

GA: Poetry will not change politics and society, poetry can change people, who are in turn changing politics and Society.

LB: In your view, is there a relation between the power of the words of a poet and that of a dictator, since they both work language?

GA: Language is a means used by everyone, Hitler spoke German,

Celebrate the new site with us – Relaunch Event on 1 Sept!

Dear friends of lyrikline,

be there on Sunday, 1 Sept at 7pm (CEST) when the new lyrikline will be going online! We cordially invite you to celebrate with us and watch the event live stream on www.lyrikline.org. Heiko Strunk, the lyrikline project manager, will give us a tour of the relaunched website and all its new features and functions, we will link to partners in Nigeria, Russia and Slovenia via video, publish many new poets on the site and we will have six great lyrikline poets on stage, two of them to be published on the relaunch day:

Simen Hagerup (Norway),  Els Moors (Belgium), Steffen Popp (Germany), Pedro Sena-Lino (Portugal), Helena Sinervo (Finland) and Jan Wagner (Berlin). The lyrikline network partners Joel Scott (Australia) and Per Bergström (Sweden) will present the event.

You are invited not only to watch the event but to comment on facebook, on twitter (seems #llrelaunch is a suitable hashtag) and hopefully (still working on making this possible) also chat with us and some of the poets of the event.
The event physically takes place at ‘c-base – ›Raumstation unter Berlin Mitte‹ (Space station beneath Berlin-Mitte)’, a friendly place for IT and open source people, who kindly took us in. The languages of the event will be English and German mainly, but we’ll hear a bit of Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Norwegian and Finnish too.

See you on Sunday!

We’re excited…

The relaunch of the website has been made possible by a grant from the German Lottery Foundation, Berlin.
The event is taking place with the kind support of: c-base, Institut Ramon Llull, Royal Norwegian Embassy Berlin, Rámus Förlag, Malmö and the Swedish Embassy

The place where I write: Ghayath Almadhoun [Palestine]

My room,
my chamber,
my compartment,
my cell,

a prison woven from freedom.

  

photo: Ghayath Almadhoun

Ghayath Almadhoun, Stockholm/Sweden

Ghayath Almadhoun on lyrikline

Advent Calendar – 13

Jenny Tunedal, photo: Sara Mac Key

December 13 is „Lucia“, St. Lucy’s Day. This festival of lights is a special day in Sweden, celebrated with candle light processions, traditional carols and typical Lucia buns. Girls in white dresses and candle crowns on their heads resemble Santa Lucia, bringing light to this dark season.

The poet behind Advent Calendar door number 13 is the Swedish poet

Jenny Tunedal

(with translations into German)

Born in 1973 in Malmö, Jenny Tunedal works a a poet, translator and literary critic. She was editor-in-chief of Lyrikvännen, Sweden’s oldest poetry magazine and the literary editor of the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet for many years.

New partner in Sweden / Neuer Partner in Schweden

We would like to welcome the Rámus publishing house as a new partner in the lyrikline.org network. Rámus is taking over from poetry journal OEI as lyrikline.org’s partner in Sweden. We would like to express our most heartfelt thanks to OEI for their long-term partnership and we look forward to a productive and creative co-operation with Rámus.

– – –

Wir begrüßen mit dem Rámus Verlag einen neuen Partner im Netzwerk von lyrikline.org. Der Verlag übernimmt  die Partnerschaft von der Poesiezeitschrift OEI. Wir bedanken uns bei OEI aufs herzlichste für die langjährige Zusammenarbeit und freuen uns auf eine produktive und kreative Kooperation mit dem Rámus Verlag.