Video messages from China

The Chinese lyrikline partner Mindy Zhang was on tour through China and shot some little video greetings with Chinese and international poets on the occasion of the website relaunch. Thanks to Mindy, the new lyrikline website can now be navigated in Chinese too! Doesn’t this look great?

This video shows Mindy together with Chinese Poet HU Xudong who she will contribute to lyrikline in the future and German poet Steffen Popp.

In the second video we see Xiao Kaiyu, who was the first Chinese poet on lyrikline together with American poet Ilya Kaminsky who will soon be available on lyrikline too and Mindy in Shanghai.

The place where I write: Edwin Torres [USA]

photo: Edwin Torres

I am currently living upstate, away from the city. I’ve been here for 4 years with my wife and boy after living in New York City my entire life. I commute almost everyday to my job and have found that my writing happens in between the places I land in. I am in a transition before and after I land, the kitchen table and the morning train are where I take my laptop. The city and the world have become my place to write. I used to have a more centered place, a desk and chair, when I lived in the city and didn’t have such a long commute. Now that it takes me awhile to get anywhere, my writing is sort of searching to find a place for me. My writing is telling me it’s okay to write wherever I can…like a constant companion, a nuisance, a lover, a muse. I am reminded of my transition every time I sit at my place of poetry, because that place has become the transition itself.

                                      Edwin Torres, USA

Edwin Torres on lyrikline

Advent Calendar – 24

Michael Palmer, photo: Chris Felver

Harvard Review regards him as “one of America’s most important poets”. He received, among other honours, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets and has published over a dozen books of poetry since the 1960s.

Door no. 24, the last window of our Advent Calendar with 24 new poets on lyrikline.org, reveals the US poet

Michael Palmer

(with translations into German)

Born in Manhattan, New York in 1943, Michael Palmer moved to San Francisco in 1969, where he still lives today. He is a multi-faceted writer, editor and translator from French, Russian and Portuguese, who has made a name for himself in cross-genre music and theatre projects. He frequently collaborates with musicians and performers; from 1974 he was involved in more than twelve dance theatre projects with Margaret Jenkins. But he has also collaborated with fine artists, including Gerhard Richter.

With these 24 poets’ voices, we say goodbye for this year. Happy Christmas and a Good New Year to all followers and friends of poetry, to all our partners, the poets and the translators, who make the project work.

Bei Ling on the importance of poetry

Reading English poets, Russia poets and German poets has been an important part of my literary life, though I have largely relied on translations in Chinese. In my original milieu, reading English-language poets was a gesture of independence. It was a formative experience for me. I was also avid to learn about the poets’ biographies. I read translations that recreated the works of modern masters in Chinese lines and phrases. I can still recite from Chinese versions of Paul Celan, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and Walt Whitman.

I am a Chinese poet living in exile, still committed to writing in my mother tongue. Certainly my experiences have been quite different from all of yours. But in literature, we all belong to a tribe that ranges across the territory of poetry. Literature is made to cross national and political boundaries. Literature has always pointed beyond divisions.
Bei Ling, Taiwan/USA

– – –

Englische Dichter, russische und deutsche Dichter zu lesen ist ein wichtiger Teil meines literarischen Lebens, auch wenn ich meist auf chinesische Übersetzungen angewiesen bin. In meiner ursprünglichen Umgebung war das Lesen von englischsprachigen Dichtern ein Zeichen von Unabhängigkeit. Für mich war es eine prägende Erfahrung. Ich war außerdem eifrig dabei, etwas über die Leben der Dichter zu lernen. Ich las Übersetzungen, welche die Werke moderner Meister in chinesischen Zeilen und Sätzen neu erschufen. Ich kann immer noch chinesische Übersetzungen von Paul Celan, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath und Walt Whitman zitieren.

Ich bin ein chinesischer Dichter im Exil und fühle mich immer noch dem Schreiben in meiner Muttersprache verpflichtet. Sicherlich, meine Erfahrungen sind ganz anders als die eurigen. Aber in der Literatur gehören wir alle einem Stamm, der sämtliche Spielarten der Poesie umfasst, an. Literatur wird dazu gemacht, nationale und politische Grenzen zu überschreiten. Literatur deutet immer auf etwas, was jenseits aller Unterschiede liegt.
Bei Ling, Taiwan/USA

[Übersetzt von Rebecca Bartusch]

Bei Ling on lyrikline.org

Christian Hawkey on describing the poetic

Why would I prefer to describe the poetic by inventing, like Gödel and his theorem, another language alongside this language? Wouldn’t this be, in fact, a poem — one definition of  how poems operate? Why would I rather point toward a photograph of someone standing in a flooded field, chest-high in water, holding a rescued Nigerian Dwarf goat! Why would I rather construct a diagram showing how poems that insist on language as a mode of experience (as opposed to being reports on or records of some “felt” experience in the past) are usually the poems where the most interesting thinking is taking place, where the discourses of power that traverse language and body are most effectively resisted, dismantled, defused, or re-fused in a way that extends new and more just conceptions of the human into the world? Why do I distrust every word in that sentence! Is it because the art of the revolution must never represent the revolution? Yes!

Christian Hawkey, USA

– – –
Warum erfände ich zur Beschreibung des Poetischen lieber eine andere Sprache neben dieser Sprache – siehe Gödel und sein Theorem? Wär das nicht im Grunde ein Gedicht: eine mögliche Definition dessen, was ein Gedicht ist? Warum deutete ich lieber auf das Foto eines Mannes, der bis zur Brust in einem überschwemmten Feld steht, im Arm eine gerette nigerianische Zwergziege! Warum zeichnete ich lieber ein Diagramm, das besagt: Gedichte, die auf Sprache als Ereignis und Erfahrung setzen (anstatt Berichte von “gefühlten” Ereignissen und Erfahrungen zu sein) sind meist die interessanteren Texte, weil ihr Denken anregend ist, weil sie die Machtdiskurse in  Sprachen und Körpern am wirkungsvollsten unterwandern, entschärfen, verweigern oder verzweigen, so dass neue und gerechtere Konzeptionen  des Menschlichen entstehen können? Warum traue ich keinem Wort in diesem Satz! Weil die Kunst der Revolution niemals eine Repräsentation der Revolution sein sollte? Genau!

Christian Hawkey, USA

[Übersetzt von Uljana Wolf]

Christian Hawkey on lyrikline.org

Video greetings from Bob Holman

Video greetings from Rita Dove

Rita Dove, United States of America