In a prior issue, George
had been our first “teaching poet,” and had regaled
us with accounts of his youth as an “unabstracted reader,” a
student who responded to poetry by writing poetry, and who was
in love with hyperbole, much to the chagrin of his English professors.
As a professor himself
in the Creative Writing Department at the University of British
Columbia, George is remarkable. For
30 years, he has nurtured and mentored into literary life a generation
of writers. He is known by his students primarily for his wonderful
word wit, as a professor whose comments, inevitably, are more poetic
and beautiful than the work he comments upon, a teacher who cautions
students at the beginning of each term that he is always on the
side of the poem, not the poet.
Students
jot down “George-isms” and hang onto them for the
rest of their lives. Notebooks
are filled with beauties like these: “A six-syllable
word is like a pirate’s plank. It’s
both very long and very short and every step is filled with rising
anticipation”; “You only need one person to look
at another, and you've got a fourteen-part drama”; “Throw
out all the 'the's' if you like. There's a whole pile of them
outside every poetry workshop door.”
None
of us had expected we’d be taking notes the first day George
came to introduce himself to us at Poet’s Corner, but when
the topic sidetracked from specific editorial concerns to the
nature of haiku, magically, automatically, we reached for our
pens at
the same moment and began jotting.
But
George did not stop enlightening us. Besides
being a poet, a prose writer, and a teacher, he is also a traveler
and translator, and when he heard of our discontent with the
too-humble-sounding Poet’s Corner, he began to bring to
life for us the Granada of the 1930s, and the small Poet’s
Corner of the Alameda Café, El Rinconcillo,
where Federico García Lorca and his circle of friends
would gather. So taken were we with the image of this Poet’s
Corner that we determined to use a photograph of that old café and
the dashing figure of Lorca on our cover. He sits like a spirit
at a table, surrounded by contemporary student poets, a leap
in time and space, which is as seamless and effortless as the
story
George has included about El Rinconcillo in
this issue. El Rinconcillo,
a Poet’s Corner, this is what we wished to create, a space
that is as broad as it is long, one that is not confined by conventional
geographical borders or boundaries, a place that is not entrenched
in one culture or time. What
we hoped to create was a meeting place for all poetic souls.
And who better than a
translator-poet/poet-translator to facilitate the magic of this
creation.
In
literary harvests of every kind, themes tend to coalesce, and
in this issue of Poet’s Corner, the idea of translation,
of bridging worlds of words and thoughts, carried us into areas
of exploration where we have never ventured. This is the first
issue in which a section specifically for translation poets has
appeared. This is
an extremely important addition to a publication that conceptualizes
a world community of poets, and which values the beauty of all
languages and the diversity of all cultures.
As
fate would have it, just as we were finalizing the poets who would
contribute to our translation section in this issue, a poet/translator/teacher
arrived in our midst from England: the renowned editor of Modern
Poetry in Translation, Daniel Weissbort. He started the journal in the 1960s with Ted Hughes
and explains in the interview he gave us how at the time the
motivating impetus to bring other voices forward was a response
to the narrowness
he and Hughes found in English poetry. “English poets were
writing about hardly more than they could see in a room, and meanwhile
we were living in a world where enormous things were happening.”
All
our poets in this issue have some connection to translation,
and give us a sense of the enormity and vicissitudes of the poetic
world. In our featured poet’s section,
for example, George Bowering, the poet laureate of Canada, shares
space with the emerging Brazilian-Canadian
poet, Desirée Jung. Daniel Weissbort is our “teaching
poet” in
this issue. And Robert Bolton, a.k.a. arowbe, is
our first “hip-hop poet” translating the language
of the streets.
We are happy to be a Poet’s Corner,
an
El Rinconcillo, where all are invited to partake of the power and magic
inherent in a poetic community: “[An]
Athens of old, where there is a shrine for all the poetic gods,
and one always reserved for the unknown voice. Poetry, being primary
and elemental, fits every shape of verbal matter, vocally and visually,” as
George McWhirter reminds us. It is with this spirit that
we welcome you into this space.
Madeline Sonik
