POETRY & POETICS
FROM THE
MARGINS
Sanja Garic-Komnenic idden Agendas. Unreported Poetics is a collection of essays about unrepresented literature that challenges the “normal” critical representation of works of poetry. Contributors were invited to focus on marginal, overlooked authors of their choice, and in this manner defy the established patterns of the critical reception of poetry. The editorial intention is to present works that escape “normalization” by mainstream criticism and academia; however, the fact that the collection is published by the Arts Department of the University of Prague, brings more ambiguity in the discussion about the marginal and demonstrates the everpresent intention of the mainstream to appropriate the innovative, the uncodified. The editor, Louis Armand, emphasizes that the marginal is complex, difficult to define and concludes that “there is no objective margin- Hidden Agendas. Unreported Poetics ality.” Hidden Agendas contains only works of English-lan- Ed. Louis Armand guage poetics, which itself testifies that there are many Univerziteta Karlova v ways of being marginal. Referring to some “double unre- Praze, Filozofická ported” works, Armand’s introduction names a list of Fakulta poets not addressed in the book. He also reminds us that . pp accident, circumstances, not only the paths of distribution or a too-radical content could also be causes of the marginalization of artworks. The selections cover a wide range of topic: reflections on the alternative London poetry scene of the ’s, especially Sound Poetry (Robert Sheppard); the “art brut” of underground British poet Mark Hyatt (John Wilkinson); Edwin Denby, a New York Poet absent from major American poetry anthologies (Vincent Katz); William Bronk, a largely unrepresented U.S. poet (Stephan Delbos); Gilbert Sorrentino, marginalized in American Lit due to “the increasing commercialization of publishing industry” (Jeremy M. Davies); Lukas Tomin, a writer of Prague’s “post-revolution scene “[o]verlooked by the Czech literary establishment and ignored by publishers in the UK and the US” (Louis Armand); John Kinsella, who subverted Dante’s Divine Comedy (Ali Alizadeh); Robbie Walker, an Australian Aboriginal poet, “killed in Fremantle Prison in at the age of twenty-five” (Michael Ferrell); found poetry of Bern Porter (Jena Osman); digital poetry (Stephanie Strickland); and Flarf poetry composed of pieces of text taken from the internet (D.J. Huppatz). This unusual collection confirms the fundamental status of marginal art—that which escapes codification, “cultural centrality” or appropriation by literary authorities in remaining elusive, indefinable, and constantly emerging. Concluding the volume is Allen Fisher’s “Complexity Manifold : hypertext”, a brilliant reflection on “decoherence”, that necessary condition of poetry which refuses to comply with the public demand for “complete meanings.” It confirms that the condition of contemporary relevant poetry is its marginality. Imperfect Penance, a collection of poems and Mitchell Parry prose works by Michell Parry is, as the author calls it, “A Failed Biography.” Perry’s work represents the marginal at its best. A fictional biography written as a personal response to the life of Georg Trakl, an Austrian writer born in the late ’s, it avoids specific categorizations. Parry’s collection is superb, exploring the space of ever-evolving and genre-crossing forms. Rather than facts, intuition and supposition provide a more fruitful interpretation of Trakl’s life. The book itdelf crosses the boundaries of conventional biography. Perry’s literary intuition brings together fragments of the deeply disturbed Austrian poet’s life, and thus places the biographer himself in Georg Trakl the focus of the work. At the same time Parry recon-
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PRRB Fall
Imperfect Penance Mitchell Parry Goose Lane Editions . pp.
Do Not Write This Ibrahim Honjo. Trans. from Serbo-Croatian by the author. Ed. Biljana Knezevic. . pp.
Roots in the Stone Ibrahim Honjo Trans. by the author Ed. Biljana Knezevic. Back Yard Publishing . pp.
structs fragments of life in the decaying Austrian-Hungarian Empire—the artistic circles of Vienna, the horrors of the World War I, the repressive state of the empire’s family and social relations. The biographer utilizes narrative techniques from painting: in one scene he follows a stream of light as it enters a shabby room to light upon the face of a sleeping, drunken Trakl. Additionally, he focuses on the missing in Trakl family photographs, filling in the blanks with fragments from the poet’s biography, mixing what he knows with what he imagines. This reveals a shifting, undefined, everevolving position of the speaker. At times, Parry is an outside observer deeply interested in the life of the poet; then suddenly he becomes the poet, transcending the distance that separates the experience of the observed and that of the observer. Traditional biography would prove a failed form for such a dynamic approach. Do not Write This Down and Roots in the Stone are further cases of the marginal destined to isolation from the mainstream by the circumstances of the author’s biography. Ibrahim Honjo, a Bosnian poet, lives in English-speaking Vancouver and writes in his native tongue. Suffering from such unfavorable circumstances, he overcomes his isolation through translation and self-publishing. His two collections of poetry with accompanying illustrations—photographs of his own metal sculptures—are both self-translated and self-published. Subversive irony is Honjo’s dominant mode of address, an inheritance from his EasternEuropean experience. He appropriates the tone of political pamphlets from the ex-Yugoslav socialist era, and mocks those who Ibrahim Honjo have dollars instead of eyes, thus creating an equal ironical distance from both socialist propaganda and western consumerism. The Homo Novus of his poems is a magician’s trick, another ideological “hocus pocus,” a new man who “brought democracy as a gift / and in return…wants us / to become members of his party/” Ironical distance is also prevalent in the poems referring to the war in his native country. It is bitter and deeply disturbing: the war is presented as a boy’s game with plenty of “bang bang bang.” It is a game with no heroes: “for what purpose my heroes fall / why they are not in poetry any more / why did they fall /” A sense of the uselessness of war and anger at the loss of lives dominates the poems of this cycle. Honjo’s second collection Roots in the Stone, offers central poetical references (continued on page 39)
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