Charles Bernstein om vigtigste moderne udgivelse

Spørgsmål stillet af THE HUFFINGTON POST til en gruppe generelt anerkendte, amerikanske digtere:

Poetry's greatest asset may be its unimportance. Which means that what counts as important in poetry is, for much of the culture, unwanted, unwarranted, weirdness, what I call the pataque(e)rical. Even monkeys can do it, or so The London Review of Books, official organ of the Defenders of True Poetry against Barbarians (PAB) tells us in a pronouncement by UChicago supplicant, doctoral candidate Michael Robbins, who proclaims, from his uncontested pulpit (no letter protested) that what folks like me hold as the greatest importance for poetry is the work of nothing more than monkeys (Sept. 9, 2010). Us monkeys are on a roll: you hear it everywhere from LRB's England from Tom Raworth, Maggie O'Sullivan, Allen Fisher, and Caroline Bergvall to the New England of Susan Howe (whose forthcoming That This from New Directions is extraordinary) and Larry Eigner. Eigner, born "palsied from a hard birth," has a new Collected Poems, ed. Robert Grenier & Curtis Faville (Stanford) that is one of the most, well, important books of the decade. Eigner's work is miraculous, turning insurmountable odds into poetic gold while never losing the truths of insignificance. As he ends a 1953 poem, "I am, finally, an incompetent after all."

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

TRANSKRIPTION AF EN VENS ERINDRING
REDEGØRELSE ORD FOR ORD

Da jeg var ung, omkring fire eller fem
ejede mine forældre dette hus, og baghaven var stor.
Måske var den stor fordi jeg var lille.
Den ledte ned til en flod (Shiawasee)
den havde alle slags frugttræer og
centralt foran huset, var der et fuglebad
og omkring det var plantet mange tulipaner
alle forskellige farver i cirklen omkring
6 meter bred.
Og en dag, i løbet af sommeren, ved flodens udspring
fisk svømmede i vandoverfladen
hundrede af dem. Min ven Keithy og jeg vi løb
efter vores fiskestænger og prøvede at fange dem
men de ville ikke bide.

Fra Photoessay, overs. HMT