Volgens die New York Tmes is dit gisteraand bekend gemaak dat vanjaar se Pulitzer-prys vir poësie aan die veelbekroonde Kaliforniese digteres Rae Armantrout toegeken word vir haar bundel “Versed“. Van haar vorige bundel, “Next life” het Stephen Burt reeds die volgende te sê gehad: “She is a poet of supreme concision. Her poetry is skeptical about almost every source of human confidence, trust, hope, joy, strength or belief.” Hy het ook haar digkuns aangeprys vir wat dit blootlê ten opsigte van “the invention, the wit and the force of a mind that contests all assumptions as much as it can.”
“Versed” is Rae Armantrout se tiende digbundel.
Die volgende neem ek by wyse van aanvulling vanaf die Poetry Foundation se webblad: “Rae Armantrout is one of the founding members of the West Coast group of Language poets. She stands apart from other Language poets in her lyrical voice and her commitment to the interior and the domestic. Her short-lined poems are often concerned with dismantling conventions of memory, pop culture, science, and mothering, and these unsparing interrogations are often streaked with wit. ‘You can hold the various elements of my poems in your mind at one time, but those elements may be hissing and spitting at one another,’ notes Armantrout. ‘I think my poetry involves an equal counterweight of assertion and doubt,” Armantrout has written. “It’s a Cheshire poetics, one that points two ways then vanishes in the blur of what is seen and what is seeing, what can be known and what it is to know. That double-bind.'”
Ter illustrasie plaas ek haar gedig “Upper world” onder aan vanoggend se Nuuswekker.
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Sedert gister het daar drie nuwe blogs op die webblad bygekom: Philip de Vos skryf al digtende oor ‘n nimmereindigende reis, Charl-Pierre Naudé waag sy hand aan ‘n Engelse vertaling van “Bitterbessie dagbreek” en Desmond Painter trakteer ons op ‘n gedig van Czeslaw Milosz.
Ten slotte fokus ek ook jou aandag op drie nuwe gedigte deur Marius Crous, asook Deel I van ‘n onderhoud wat met Danie Marais gevoer is na aanleiding van sy essay, “Stilte in die hof!“.
En daarmee eers weer groet.
Mooi bly.
LE
Upper world
If sadness
is akin to patience,
we're back!
Pattern recognition
was our first response
to loneliness.
Here and there were like
one place.
But we need to triangulate,
find someone to show.
*
There's a jolt, quasi-electric,
when one of our myths
reverts to abstraction.
Now we all know
every name's Eurydice,
briefly returned
from blankness
and the way back
won't bear scrutiny.
High voices
over rapid-pulsing synthesizers
intone, "without you" -
which is soothing.
We prefer meta-significance:
the way the clouds exchange
white scraps
in glory.
No more wishes.
No more bungalows
behind car-washes
painted the color of
swimming pools
(c) Rae Armantrout