thresholds ESSAYS ON THE INTERNATIONAL

PRAGUE POETRY SCENE

edited by

DAVID VICHNAR

Prague 2011

Litteraria Pragensia Books www.litterariapragensia.com Copyright © David Vichnar, 2011 Copyright © of individual works remains with the authors Published 2011 by Univerzita Karlova v Praze Filozofická Fakulta Litteraria Pragensia Books Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory, DALC Náměstí Jana Palacha 2 116 38 Praha 1, Czech Republic All rights reserved. This book is copyright under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the copyright holders. Requests to publish work from this book should be directed to the publishers. The publication of this book has been supported by James H. Ottaway, Jr. and research grant MSM0021620824 “Foundations of the Modern World as Reflected in Literature and Philosophy” awarded to the Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University, Prague, by the Czech Ministry of Education.

Cataloguing in Publication Data Thresholds: Essays on the International Prague Poetry Scene, edited by David Vichnar. – 1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-80-7308-350-2 1. Poetics. 2.Literary Theory. 3. Contemporary Poetry. I. Vichnar, David. II. Title Printed in the Czech Republic by PB Tisk Cover, typeset & design © lazarus

CONTENTS David Vichnar INTRODUCTION: PRAHY PRAHY / THRESHOLDS OF TRANSLOCALITY & BEYOND 1 Ali Alizadeth THE POETICS OF UNPLACEMENT: DISAPPEARANCE OF SETTING IN THE POETRY OF LOUIS ARMAND 32 Jane Lewty IMPLIED OFFERINGS IN THIS UNIVERSE: THE POETRY OF LOUIS ARMAND 45 Vadim Erent REVOLUTIONS OF THE MINOR: KAFKA, TSVETAEVA, ARMAND 61 Jules Mann THE FARNSWORTH PROJECT 84 Louis Armand VINCENT FARNSWORTH & THE “RESISTANCE OF MEDIUM” 87 David Vichnar, Gwendolyn Albert & Vincent Farnsworth INTER-VIEW: “THRESHOLD” EXPERIENCES 100 Kateřina Piňosová THE ONE WHO SITS ON A HEDGE: THE POETRY OF LAURA CONWAY 116 David Vichnar & Laura Conway INTER-VIEW: MYTHMAKING AMONG EUROPEANS 132 Chris Crawford & Stephan Delbos STONES TO STEEPLES: AN ELECTRONIC CONVERSATION 136 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 155

1

INTRODUCTION

Prahy Prahy: Thresholds of Translocality & Beyond

Be alert to these invisible quotation marks,

even within a word: survivre, living on. Following the triumphal procession of an “on,” they trail more than one language behind them.

– Jacques Derrida, “Living On/Borderlines”

The title of this essay collection is meant to – via a pun on the Czech práh, meaning “threshold,” the popular etymology of the name of Praha – evoke a certain state of affairs significant for, if not defining of, the poets examined here. By the same token, it is also meant to refer to the status of the collection as a whole, poised as it is in between its sister-publications, Louis Armand’s monumental The Return of Král Majáles: Prague’s International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010, and Stephan Delbos’s comprehensive From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology.1

To speak of the “international Prague poetry scene” is to, indeed, deal with an in-between space: a space between languages, cultures, literary traditions – a space of trans-lation, of carrying-over, of metaphor. A space of boundaries, limits, borderlines: space of an opening and a closure, space of the threshold. With a tip of the hat to Henri Lefebvre, who famously observed that our space “remains qualified (and qualifying) beneath the sediments left behind by history, by accumulation, by quantification,” and emphasised that these qualities are much

1 The Return of Král Majáles: Prague’s International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010, ed. Louis

Armand (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2010); From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology, ed. Stephan Delbos (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2011).

2

more “of space” rather than “in space,”2 Armand’s 58-page comprehensive survey of the past 20 years in the Prague Anglophone literary scene ends by stressing the primarily linguistic nature of constructing the Prague, or indeed any other, literary space:

How such a space is imaginatively constituted in and by language is the question which is perhaps most pressing for any writer, and above all for the writer whose habitation is first and foremost that of a foreign space, over which no sovereign claim is possible [...] which is, of course, the space of language itself. Language, to paraphrase an often-evoked idea, establishes the realities for which history must seek explanation. [...] And it is the sense of living on a threshold – of performing in the gap between what history is able to measure and what its legislators seek to proscribe – that lends to this habitation its character of ostranenie – of strangeness and estrangement.3

1. The useful, however evident, reminder that springs from Delbos’s expansive collection, gathering 120 poems from 16 languages written between 1888 and 2010 and described as “the record of one city and the range of poetry it has inspired,”4 is that such construction of a “poetic space” takes place – in international poetic perception of any given place, and in the moved history of 20th-century Prague more than anywhere else – hand in hand with its “real-time” reconstructions in political history. All the more exceptional, in this case, yet equally significant for the future development of Prague poetry is already the earliest poem featuring the city as seen through foreign eyes: Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1912 “Zone,” which contains the memories of his 1902 visit to the city. In this poem, one can arguably see not only the direct forerunner to the strong attachment between Prague and Paris in the 1920s surrealist phase, but, more symbolically perhaps, already a foreboding to the frequent comparisons drawn between Prague and Paris with reference to Prague’s 1990s international scene.

Echoing André Breton’s famous pronouncement of Prague being “the magical capital of Europe [...], incubat[ing] all the

2 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell,

1991) 230. 3 Armand, The Return of Král Majáles, 58. 4 Delbos, From a Terrace in Prague, 6.

3

delights of the past for the imagination,”5 Delbos describes Prague’s power to inspire as consisting in the fact that “the city’s rulers, inhabitants and visitors have changed drastically, while its physical nature has remained much the same. This modern city with ancient architecture affords a glimpse into time.”6 The political dimension of the poetic perception of Prague is brought home, in Delbos’s anthology, in the way the events of 1938/39, 1968/69, and 1989/90, each time caused a dramatic resurgence of poets’ interest in capturing Prague’s contemporaneity. One can, for instance, draw a parallel between John Berryman’s “Prague” poem about the 1938 Nazi annexation and Anthony Blake’s 1968 impressionist poems capturing the city’s mood weeks before the Warsaw pact invasion, recording conversations and anti-Soviet graffiti he witnessed. Robert Lowell’s 1968 letter to Elizabeth Bishop (following his anti-communist public engagement), in which he writes “Dear, I can’t write anything serious (after this) about [the] Czech hideous business, or about myself,”7 bears testimony to the extent to which this incident impacted upon American poetic sensibility.

The Velvet Revolution in 1989 is the last and latest of the three historical milestones which has had implications for the political structure of Europe and the entire world and, among many other things, has also remarkably impacted upon Czech poetry. Delbos enumerates the three most marked changes in the post-1989 Czech poetry as follows: “a radical manipulation of setting, a tendency to make bold statements identifying the city, and marked compression.”8 Among the most revealing (for the purposes of the present collection) parts of the last section of Delbos’s anthology are the Beat poets: Allen Ginsberg, revisited Prague in 1991 (after his famous 1965 “Král Majáles” visit), followed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ed Sanders and Gary Snyder. Ferlinghetti’s enthusiastic reception not only showed how deep-rooted within the Czech sensibility was its 1960s fondness for the Beat poets, but perhaps also revealed how very much current the Beat poetics was for the writers and poets of the newly reborn democracy. Most pertinently, what the 1989 Velvet revolution brought about

5 André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1972) 255. 6 Delbos, From a Terrace in Prague, 7. 7 Qtd in Delbos, From a Terrace in Prague, 20. 8 Delbos, From a Terrace in Prague, 23.

4

was a re-occurrence of a phenomenon which had last flourished in Prague before the Nazi occupation with the so-called Prager Deutsche Schriftsteller – a self-substantial literary community inhabiting Prague, both in life and in literary output, through a language other than Czech: the Prague Anglophone scene.

It is precisely from Ginsberg’s 1991 revisitation of Prague that Armand’s anthology takes its cue in its own retrospection over the past twenty years of Prague Anglophone writing. Before proceeding further with Armand’s informative account, there are three publications of note that deserve to be mentioned and examined, as it has been largely these three collections that had shaped the Anglo-Czech poetic interaction in Prague until 2010.

2. Armand’s three touchstone references in his thorough documentation of the period, Description of a Struggle, the special issue of the New Orleans Review entitled Ten Years After the Velvet Revolution, and Six Czech Poets, edited by Michael March, Richard Katrovas, and Alexandra Büchler, respectively, rank among the most influential primary literary documents to map the field, though none without its troubles.9 The editor of the first collection, Michael March (who had, in 1991, founded the Prague Writers’ Festival that this year has seen the successful completion of the second decade of its existence), opened his cryptically provocative “Preface” by positioning Eastern Europe, rather anachronistically, “in the wake” of Patočka and Marx, and openly avowed that for him, this region “has appeared as a lost continent for over forty years” (xvii), despite the fact that these forty years in this region had gestated no fewer than six Nobel Prize laureates, out of whom two poets, the Polish Czeslaw Milosz in 1980 and the Czechoslovak Jaroslav Seifert in 1984, were awarded in the course of the 1980s only. In a more informed and topical “Introduction – Writing from the Empire behind the Wall,” the Czech writer Ivan Klíma changed March’s metaphor of terra incognita into the common one of a space behind the wall:

This anthology comes from a world habitually called Eastern Europe, though it would be more precise to call it the Soviet realm, the Empire of Stalinist tyranny, the Empire of great illusions, of

9 Description of a Struggle, ed. Michael March (London: Picador, 1994); New Orleans Review

26.1/2 (2000), ed. Richard Katrovas; Six Czech Poets, ed. Alexandra Büchler (Todmorden: Arc, 2007).

5

broken dreams for a better world. For me, it is the Empire behind the Wall. Reagan called it the Evil Empire, which might make one conclude it was the Empire of a single, basic struggle. For in few other places did the struggle between impersonal power and the individual, between tyranny and the desire for a worthwhile life, assume such visible form as here, where fear became a daily companion, where tragedies were played out with bloodshed.10

Klíma, then, goes on the elaborate on this common metaphor and put it in the right perspective. Having recounted the story of the multiple police investigation following the completion of his novel, Jungle on Trial, which wound up being smuggled into Switzerland, Klíma displays a peculiar nostalgia for the clearly defined binary power relation current in the literary ethics of the time: “the bipolarity of a world divided between two superpowers reinforced the view” according to which writers “should reach under the surface of things, their picture of the world should embrace more than the vision of politics.”11 The rather simplified binary of depth vs. surface re-emerges toward the end of Klíma’s introduction: “Deep experiences do not make a great writer, but I am convinced that great literature seldom arises without it. Even pure fantasy needs to draw on real life, otherwise it is lifeless and forced. I have often thought that what this Empire deprived us of in terms of freedom, it returned to us in the form of experience.”12

Revisiting the “Czech Poetry of the Nineties” for the special issue of the New Orleans Review, the leading Czech literary theorist and critic Petr A. Bílek articulates a similar sense of nostalgia in view of the issues with which Czech literature was unexpectedly faced as it experienced its first teething of a democratic political and literary regime. Whereas, during the Communist period, poetry was very much context-bound and poets held personally responsible for its ideological and ethical content, and thus literature had “a prestigious position in Czech culture,” with Seifert’s 1984 Nobel Prize boosting the sale of poetry books “to fifty thousand copies in a single day,” the fall of this establishment “created a completely new situation for poets and poetry.”13 Following the Velvet Revolution of 1989, “almost two thousand private publishers emerged,” instead of “two

10 Klíma, “Writing from the Empire behind the Wall,” Description of a Struggle, xix. 11 Klíma, “Writing from the Empire,” xx. 12 Klíma, “Writing from the Empire,” xxiv. 13 Bílek, “Czech Poetry of the Nineties: A Metamorphosis,” New Orleans Review, 20.

6

periodicals covering all of contemporary literature” suddenly emerged “dozens of monthlies and quarterlies appearing and disappearing” and “the number of new people publishing poetry immensely increased” – this was, however, also accompanied with what Bílek explicitly sees as devaluation:

But another change accompanied this one: no one cared anymore. Soon, almost all the big publishers stopped publishing poetry because no one was buying it. Under Communism, writers devoted to the regime had lived quite comfortably, but today there are only five or six writers who make a decent living from their books. None of them is a poet. Since 1993, except for books by a dozen big names, almost all Czech poetry has been self-published or produced by presses whose names appear only on one book.

More pertinently, the 1990s are also viewed by Bílek as a period of inherent anachronism: a time in which the voice of the present had to yield its place in the sun to many belated voices of the past – a time of “returns” and “discoveries”: “There is no common view any more. […] Poetry that dates as far back as the fifties is now being published for the first time.”14 This discontinuity, ultimately, gives rise to a twofold tendency in the poetry of the nineties: there is the “shock” felt by young Czech poets at “the sudden silence around them,” which somehow, in Bílek’s opinion, renders them “all the more ready to speak in new and radically different voices,” but also there is the older generation “coming to terms with the burdening legacy of what they wrote long ago,” and so “the impulse toward change” is always juxtaposed with “the impulse to stand still.”15

What is more, the new and radically different voices promised by Bílek are barely to be heard in the collection, as the polyphony of the “Czech voices ten years after the Velvet revolution” is composed of such matadors as Ivan Diviš, Viola Fischerová, Emil Juliš, Karel Šiktanc, Ivan M. Jirous, or Pavel Šrut, and the youngest proponents are Sylva Fischerová and Božena Správcová, both born in the 1960s already. Given this bizarre stasis in which Bílek, still in 2000, feels the post-1989 Czech poetry has stuck, it comes all the more as a disconcerting surprise that the whole collection makes no attempt at a crossover, at a dialogue, and is

14 Bílek, “Czech Poetry of the Nineties,” 21. 15 Bílek, “Czech Poetry of the Nineties,” 23.

7

sharply divided – here, the threshold separates – into two parts, that of English translations of Czech poetry, and of Anglophone poetry written in the Czech context (featuring, of the poets covered here, Gwendolyn Albert, Louis Armand, and Vincent Farnsworth). These two parts communicate so little that each is headed by its own introduction. The surprise is even deepened by the realisation how the other introduction, penned by Gwendolyn Albert and entitled “Allegiance to the Strange: Prague Expatriate Writing of the Nineties,” voices a similar, if also more personal and authentic, sentiment: the early-nineties literary scene of Prague was, even more so for expatriate poets, grouped together not so much by ethnicity, creed, aesthetic allegiance, or indeed nationality, but simply by the foreign space and time: “It is on this basis that people from all over the world have met and attempted to communicate with one another in post-1989 Prague.”16

This divisive treatment, then, comes full circle in Six Czech Poets and in the “strange case” that editor and translator Alexandra Büchler makes for the poetry of Miroslav Holub, a frequent contributor to British literary journals, described by Ted Hughes as “one of the half-dozen most important poets writing anywhere.”17 In explaining rather facetiously Holub’s status of the most translated Czech poet of his generation, Büchler considers it a symptom of “the ready acceptance of cerebral poetry of linear thought, ‘universal’ ideas and easy-to-decipher allegories on the one hand, and of a reluctance to engage with poetry referring to an unfamiliar cultural and literary context on the other.”18 This reduction of Holub’s poetry to a production of easily-consumed ready-mades for the Western taste is particularly striking in the case of a poet who, an accomplished immunologist by profession, revolutionised the Czech poetic diction by inventively transplanting the workings of medical discourse and vocabulary into the very tissue of his poems. And becomes all the more suspicious when Büchler describes the contrasting value against which to measure Holub’s relative popularity: “What the English-language literary milieu finds attractive about Holub’s poetry is also what makes his work stand in contrast to a strong current in Czech poetry which is far more representative of what is close to the heart of

16 Albert, “Allegiance to the Strange: Prague Expatriate Writing,” 161. 17 Qtd in Armand, “Introduction,” The Return of Král Majáles, 4. 18 Büchler, “Introduction,” Six Czech Poets, 10.

8

contemporary Czech readers.”19 Thus, Holub is found guilty of committing the crime of selling himself out for a ready consumption by the Western public, only to be pitted against the rest of Czech poetry, which in turn caters poetry fast-food easily digestible for the Czech stomach!

This current, for Büchler, is represented by Zbyněk Hejda and Viola Fischerová (again, both born in the 1930s already), as well as some of the younger poets (Kateřina Rudčenková, Petr Borkovec), and has its sources in “the poetry of turn-of-the-century symbolism, surrealism and avant-garde movements.”20 What gets excluded from and disregarded in this perspective is the entire tradition of Czech phenomenological thought and the positivist slant of Czech realist fiction that have both formed lineages in their own right and influenced Holub and a number of Czech poets apart from him (most notably, Vladimír Holan). Armand, in reporting on this strange showcasing, is right to point out that treating Holub as an example of a failed attempt (on the poet’s part) at a transnational poetics and of vain effort (on the part of the Anglophone literary community) to accept and accommodate such an attempt, “masks, behind a facile ethnographic binary and an undeclared aesthetic ideology” (and Büchler has freely admitted that “[w]hat I was trying somehow to bring together in this collection were poets who have something in common”21), a set of “more fundamental issues that have continued to inform how the various cultural dialogues that make up the contemporary Prague scene are reported.” These fundamental issues are specified as follows:

The apparent ideological rift between a broadly “western” poetics and the national sensitivities of some Czech translators and academics – as made clear in the case of Holub – has arguably less to do with poetics as such than with a certain “resentment” which applies equally within the sphere of specifically “Czechoslovak” and later “Czech” literature of that period, in which dividing lines are often perceptible in terms of personal politics and political histories – between émigrés and non-émigrés; dissidents and non-

19 Büchler, “Introduction,” 10. 20 Büchler, “Introduction,” 11. 21 Büchler, interviewed by the Czech Radio (January 2008), ‘Six Czech Poets: A first post-

revolution anthology of contemporary Czech verse in English,’ www.radio.cz/en/section/books

9

dissidents; anti-communists, socialists, anarchists, democrats, capitalists, monarchists; and also inter-generationally.22

By the end of the second decade of the new era, these three pioneering and useful, if also sketchy, impressionistic, and biased, accounts of the chaotic inception of the modern-era Czech literature and the Anglophone community within it, had been – despite their shortcomings pointed out above – by and large the authoritative documents from the Czech-English threshold. The most poignant irony, and a paradox to be encountered throughout the past 20 years, is that none of these three features a single mention of an anthology that preceded all three of them: the 1993 Bohemian Verses anthology of English-language writing from Prague, edited by Scott Rogers, including work by Jeffrey Young (co-founder of the Trafika magazine), James Ragan (long-term director of the summer writing programme at Charles University), David Freeling (founder of the Beef Stew poetry readings), Daniela Dražanová (Czech émigré writer, among the first contributors to the inaugural issue of Yazzyk), and Kevin Blahut (translator from German, co-founder of the Twisted Spoon Press). It comes as little surprise, then, that given the almost non-existent dialogue and interaction between the two symbiotic scenes, Bohemian Verses had remained the only anthology of its sort; this, however, only until 2010, when Louis Armand’s Král Majáles marked a milestone in documenting and revisiting the 20 years of Prague literary scene as shaped by its newly-acquired international scene, containing both poetry and prose excerpts by over 100 authors, Czech, British, American, Australian, brought together by one thing only – their long- or short-term sojourn in Prague, which somehow affected their writing. 3. In the beginning, of course, there is Prague as a mythological – or “magical,” as tradition and tourist T-shirts would have it – space attractive to foreign imagination, an attraction dating far back before 1989, as Heinz Politzer acutely observed: “[Prague’s] uncanny atmosphere had impressed observers as early and as independent of one another as the American Longfellow and the

22 Armand, “Introduction,” The Return of Král Majáles, 4-5.

10

Northern German Wilhelm Raabe.”23 However, shows Armand, one indeed need not stop with 19th-century Romantics and trace this relationship of “fascination through imagination” further still all the way back to Anne of Bohemia, the patron of Anglo-Saxon poet Geoffrey Chaucer with whose “writings – on the model of Boccaccio – the long migration of a vernacular literary English is said to have begun, born – as it were – of translation.” The leap from Shakespeare’s imaginary “coasts of Bohemia” and the alchemists of his late romances, and the Rudolfine Prague of real-life alchemists John Dee and Edward Kelley, is “perhaps not [so] great,” nor would this comparison “appear entirely strange,” as the genealogies drawn by Armand are both relevant and intriguing to ponder:

The metamorphoses of Prague following the Velvet Revolution of November 1989 in part revived, in part invented, a pan-European and cosmopolitan tradition that forty years of communism never quite succeeded in snuffing out. From the Utraquists to the Plastic People of the Universe – from Hus, via Masaryk, to Havel – from Arcimboldo, via Kafka and the surrealists, to Klíma – the idea of Prague persists as a type of Xanadu of cultural resistance in which a poetry of universal ideas, contrary to Auden’s glib pronouncements, might indeed make something happen.24

Already the first four years of democratic changes – before the “Velvet Divorce” of 1993, which, for some while, threatened Prague’s restoration as an international city by means of a surge of national revivalism – saw a rapidly growing international community and a reading public hungry for news from the “other sides.”

Here is Armand’s lucid account of the years in fast-forward:

In November 1990, five Americans from Santa Barbara founded Prague’s first English-language newspaper, Prognosis, which published bi-weekly (and for a brief period weekly) until its closure in March 1995. [...] Less than a year later, The Prague Post – a weekly newspaper with ambitions more orientated towards the status quo – was founded [...]. By 1993, two further papers where briefly in print – Prague News (half in German) and the Bohemia

23 Heinz Politzer, “Prague and the Origins of Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Franz Werfel,”

Modern Language Quarterly 16.1 (1955): 49. Qtd in Armand, “Introduction,”The Return of Král Majáles, 11.

24 Armand, “Introduction,” The Return of Král Majáles, 11.

11

Daily Standard – representing the apogee of the early “left bank of the nineties” phenomenon. [...] In February of 1992, Howard Sidenberg – a former doctoral student in Russian politics at the University of California-Santa Barbara – founded Twisted Spoon Press out of a communal apartment in Smíchov. [...] Soon after Twisted Spoon published its inaugural titles, Prague’s first English-language literary journal appeared in print, in June 1992 [...] Deriving its name from a play upon the pan-Slavonic for “tongue” or “language,” Yazzyk was avowedly cross-cultural, publishing work both written in English and translated from Czech and Slovak. [...] Three months later saw the beginnings of the Beef Stew poetry readings. The first reading took place on the 13th of September at Rubín Theatre, in Malá Strana, and continued, two weeks later, at the original Ubiquity Club’s “Reggae Room.”25

In retrospect, the ten years of the weekly Beef Stew poetry readings (which came to an end in 2002) do seem to form the backbone of the Leviathan that was, and has been, the Prague Anglophone literary scene, as more than twenty of those writers active in Prague during the first decade after the revolution had embarked on noteworthy publishing careers, giving some substantiation to often-made parallels between the post-Velvet Prague scene development and the milieu of the rive gauche Paris of the 1920s and 30s.

Most famously, this parallel was drawn in Alan Levy’s October 1991 editorial to the inaugural issue of The Prague Post:

We are living in the Left Bank of the Nineties. For some of us, Prague is Second Chance City; for others, a New Frontier where anything goes, everything goes, and, often enough, nothing works. Yesterday is long gone, today is nebulous, and who knows about tomorrow, but somewhere within each of us here, we all know that we are living in a historic place at a historic time. Future historians will chronicle our course – and I have reason to believe that they’re already here – but even they will need to know the nuts and bolts of what it was like and how it felt to live and be in liberated Prague in the last decade of the 20th century.26

This identification, however tempting and wide-spread, begs some qualifications. Some appeared merely two years after, in Bruce Sterling’s article for the Wired magazine:

25 Armand, “Introduction,” The Return of Král Majáles, 16-20. 26 Alan Levy, Editorial, The Prague Post, 1 October, 1991.

12

Prague is very much like Paris in the ‘20s, but it’s also very much unlike Paris in the ‘20s. One main reason is that there is no André Breton here. People do sit and write – stop by The Globe, the crowded émigré bookstore on Janovského 14 in north Prague, and you’ll see a full third of the cappuccino-sipping black-clad Praguelodyte customers scribbling busily in their notebooks. There are many American wannabe writers here – even better, they actually manage to publish sometimes – but there is not a Prague literary movement, no Prague literary-isms. [...] There isn’t a Prague technique, or a Prague approach, or a Prague literary philosophy that will set a doubting world afire. There are people here sincerely trying to find a voice, but as yet there is no voice. There may well be a new Hemingway here (as The Prague Post once declared there must be). But if Prague writers want to do a kind of writing that is really as new and powerful as Hemingway’s was in Hemingway’s time, then they will have to teach themselves.27

Be that as it may, it is the many self-taught Prague writers (Louis Armand, Vincent Farnsworth, Ken Nash, Donna Stonecipher, Lukáš Tomin, Anthony Tognazzini, to name but a few) who looked less to literary precursors than at the current socio-cultural threshold situation in which they found themselves, who stand as the crucial substantiation to, and a much-needed continuation of, what in 1993, in a retrospective glance at the first four years, Scott Rogers, editor of Bohemian Verses: An Anthology of Contemporary English Language Writing from Prague, termed “the new Czech renaissance”:

Since the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the arts in the Czech Republic have flourished in a renewed atmosphere of freedom of expression. Prague has once again regained its former magnetic appeal as an international focal point for young artists, musicians, and writers, all of whom have come to this city to participate in the new Czech renaissance. Though the writers represented in Bohemian Verses differ in age, gender, motherland, and purpose, all for various lengths of time have called Prague home.28

Here, three genuinely Czech voices, both with considerable Anglophone exposure, can be called to bear witness to the “Czech

27 Bruce Sterling, “Triumph of the Plastic People,” Wired 3.01 (1993). 28 Bohemian Verses: An Anthology of Contemporary English Language Writing from Prague, ed.

Scott Rogers (Prague: Modrá Músa, 1993) xvi-xvii.

13

renaissance” notion, however dubious and reserved. In 1994, Ivan Jirous remarked, in conversation with translator Alex Zucker and Armand, that “it was possible under the former regime for anyone to write poetry and go to prison for it, but this didn’t mean the poetry itself was of any worth, other than as a political provocation,”29 a perhaps more critical view on what Klíma and Bílek both seemed to idealise as oppression that for all its faults and crimes fostered writing of worth.

In a recent interview conducted with Michal Ajvaz, one of the most prolific Czech novelists of the past twenty years, for the second issue of the VLAK magazine, Ajvaz shared the following impressionistic memory:

Back in the 90s, I would spend plenty of time sitting around cafés, especially the Velryba (Whale) café – that’s where I would have met Doug Hajek and Tony Ozuna from the Yazzyk magazine, which also published a few translations of some of my short stories. Talks of the Prague Anglophone scene of the 90s bring to my mind the café hum, out of which emerge and into which disappear excerpts of English sentences…30

However, pressed for more specificity on his 1990s interaction with both the Czech and English-speaking literary community, Ajvaz, though one of the most outspokenly Pragocentric of contemporary writers, had little more to say on the subject:

Naturally, the fact that I could buy books and literary magazines according to my taste meant an enormous change in life – it felt as if I’d returned from a long journey after twenty years’ time. That said, as far as my relation to literature is concerned, the formative years were the 60s, a period of the most important literary encounters when I became acquainted with most of my favourite writers: Kafka, Hölderlin, Gracq, Mandiargues, Breton, Michaux, Benn a many others. Those were the crucial literary revelations of my life, the 90s saw only a few of these…31

Looking back upon the “renaissance of the 1990s,” one of its most direct participants from among the Czech writers, Jáchym

29 Qtd in Armand, “Introduction,” The Return of Král Majáles, 40. 30 David Vichnar, “Novels one can get lost in,” interview with Michal Ajvaz, VLAK 2 (May 2011):

169. 31 Vichnar, “Novels one can get lost in,” 169.

14

Topol, voiced another revision of the Parisian analogy, again with an important qualification:

What the international renaissance meant for me was mostly a series of wonderful binges, literary and other, with plenty of alcohol, weed and friends. Personally, I experienced the most important meeting and boozing with Alex Zucker, who rather inconspicuously became probably the most respected translator of Czech literature into English. I recall wanting to learn English from other friends, like Tomas Bridle or Farimah Daftari, but winding up teaching them Czech, instead. I also think this was the last period when the old “Hemingway/Miller/Kerouac” model of literature was in currency, that of living your literature first, then typing it down somewhere alone, hoping this activity would one day turn other people’s souls upside down... What I’m also reminded of while looking back at this wild era is the sentence of Czech-American writer Jan Novák, uttered sardonically after a common reading of U.S. and Czech poets at the Ženské domovy in Smíchov, sometime in the year 1992 – I think a new issue of Trafika had just come out then – contending that “they are still unaware of the huge difference between a writer who drinks and an alcoholic who writes.” For me, this period was a wonderful, continuous celebration, carnival, binge, while working for the literary-visual artistic Revolver Revue and the Respekt weekly. It is to my gladness and surprise that these magazines have survived till the present day, together with many of the participants of the international party of those years.32

Topol’s own work, particularly his 1994 epoch-embracing confessional novel Sestra, also deserves mention as a case in point of the troubled interaction between Czech writing and its Anglophone reception.33 Translated as City Sister Silver by the afore-mentioned Alex Zucker, the English publication in 2000 managed to win the attention and acclaim of international literary community. Caroline Kovtun writes about the Zucker translation in her review on Topol’s novel City Sister Silver:

Zucker’s translation merits praise not only for attempting to convey Sestra in all its complexity but also for largely succeeding at it. He has managed to preserve the speed of the narrative and kept the

32 Jáchym Topol, letter to the author, April 2011. 33 For the following account, I am grateful to Dana Soukupová’s graduate work on the

translations of post-1989 Czech writers, which she kindly made available in her letter to the author, July 2010.

15

translation faithful to the original’s eccentricity and modernity. In addition, Zucker provides valuable endnotes to the text, explaining the historical and linguistic references that Western eyes would otherwise not detect.34

However, the initial wave of positive reception toward ambitious experimental writing emerging from the heart of the Eastern European terra incognita, was immediately followed by unfavourable critical comparisons with various Anglo-American writers whom Topol’s work brought to the Anglophone sensibility, such as Anthony Burgess and Allen Ginsberg. Zucker himself aptly emphasised the absurdity of such unfruitful comparisons:

One of the reviews negatively compared [Topol] to Ginsberg. […] Why should a Czech, writing in the 1990s, be reminiscent of Ginsberg? There are still people in the United States who believe that everything new must have something common with the Beat Generation. The only substantiation for his comparison with Anthony Burgess springs from the fact that Jáchym uses the expression “Bratři moji,” [O my brothers], which is a reminiscent of Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.35

To come back to the issue of calling Prague “home” and to skip ahead toward the turn-of-the-millenium years of the late 90s and early 2000s, Armand points out how, as the 1990s receded from view and the communities it engendered disappeared or merged within less easily identifiable social networks and structures, “so too has the very conception of a contemporary Prague ‘scene’ become more difficult to reconcile with its fin-de-millénaire antecedents.” In this sense, it is understandable why no further anthologies appear after Bohemian Verses for the next seventeen years; to Armand’s mind, however tempting the Parisian analogies, the threshold space of the late 1990s Prague faced the “foreigners ‘at home’” with the necessity to experience and re-think it “differently from the post-Revolutionary romanticism that often confused the lived city with its mythological doppelgangers in Paris and elsewhere: imagined communities ranged in opposition, mutually evoked, invented and reinvented.”36

34 Caroline Kovtun, “City Sister Silver” (Central Europe Review Vol 3, No 4, January 2001): www.ce-review.org/01/4/books4_kovtun.html.

35 Jan Čulík, “Vypisuju se z něčeho východoevropskýho” (Britské listy, 18 June): www.blisty.cz/2004/6/18/ art18585.html

36 Armand, The Return of Král Majáles, 30.

16

3. The early 2000s, marked by increased socio-political tensions following the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, during which armoured vehicles appeared in the centre of Prague, largely around alongside concrete barricades manned by heavily armed militia – largely around the U.S. Embassy and the Radio Free Europe headquarters, were thus a period of searching, during which publicly visible activity was nowhere near its early-90s heyday. Armand’s hindsight, however, cannot share the skepsis of many literary practitioners who proclaimed the Prague renaissance a historically closed period: “While it is generally recognised that the turn of the millennium represented a difficult time for the international scene in Prague, news of its demise had been greatly exaggerated.”37 And Armand should know. Just as the 2002 closure of Beef Stew gave rise to the 2003 birth of the monthly open-mic readings called Alchemy (hosted first by Laura Conway and then Ken Nash), the 2004 death of Alan Levy, marking the definitive end of an era, coincided with the foundation of the Prague International Poetry Festival. Founded by Armand in cooperation with Kratochvila (of the Shakespeare & Sons bookstore), the Festival brought together over forty poets from over ten countries (including writers from abroad such as Charles Bernstein, Cristina Cirstea, Trevor Joyce, Sándor Kányádi, Andrzej Soznovski, or Vít Kremlička, Martin Reiner, Jaroslav Rudiš, Šimon Šafránek as Czech poetry representatives, and indeed, Gwendolyn Albert, Louis Armand, Laura Conway and Vincent Farnsworth, from poets dealt with in the present volume). Describing the situation, Farnsworth revisited and redefined the threshold situation of the 90s:

A recent death and a recent birth have made for a new reality in the creative scene of English-language poetry in Prague. The death was literal, that of Alan Levy [2 April, 2004], the local newspaperman who first called Prague the “Paris of the nineties.” The birth, metaphorical, was of the Prague International Poetry Festival, which has laid the groundwork of a new phase in expatriate poetry in the Czech Republic. Borrowing the term “deep poetics” from political scientist and poet Peter Dale Scott’s writings on the deepest machinations and impulses within world political crises, the death of Levy and the birth of the Poetry

37 Armand, The Return of Král Majáles, 49.

17

Festival coming closely together in time signal a shift in the strata of “deep poetics” in Prague.38

Or, still in the same article, reviewing Nancy Bishop’s satirical reappraisal of the ambitious post-revolutionary years, her 2004 film Rex-patriates (featuring a cameo of Alan Levy shortly before his demise), Farnsworth goes even further and buries the Paris-Prague stereotypical coupling together with its author:

If Levy’s passing marks the end of the (failed) Left Bank era, Rex-patriates is its cinematic epitaph. A farcical send-up of the expatriate in Prague stereotypes … the film takes its name from Levy’s phrase for Americans who spend time in Prague, experience reverse culture shock when they go back to the US, and then return to live in Prague as “re-expatriates.” By playing himself in a film that pokes fun at the expat art scene, Levy signalled that his prediction would no longer hold sway. In the Deep Poetics view, when he passed away this last April, Levy resolved the “Paris of the ‘90s” conundrum: he took it with him.39

However, this was no death without a re-birth. The years following the Prague International Poetry Festival saw a heightened activity on many fronts, first and foremost, on Armand’s part, both in terms of publishing – his own work with the international presses Salt, Textbase, or, most recently, Vagabond, as well as his editorial work with the Philosophy Faculty imprint, Litteraria Pragensia Books, culminating with the 2010 Král Majáles anthology – and in terms of event organisation.

May 2008 saw the first edition the Evropský sen/European Dream poetry, music, and fine arts festival, co-hosted by Delbos and featuring simultaneous Czech, German and English translations of all texts read by Catherine Hales, Alistair Noon, Mathias Trexler, from Berlin, Josef Hrubý from Pilsen, and Chris Crawford and Lucien Zell, from Prague. Readings were accompanied by real-time projections of animated art, and live music from international performers.

April 2009 saw the first edition of the week-long Micro-Festival Poetry Series, hosted by Armand, spread across four venues in Prague (Shakespeare & Sons, the Globe, Café Fra) and Brno

38 Vincent Farnsworth, “Paris/Prague?” Poetry News (Summer, 2004):

www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/publications/poetrynews/pn2004/pinprague/. 39 Farnsworth, “Paris/Prague?” Qtd in Armand, The Return of Král Majáles, 56.

18

(Skleněná Louka), which featured a medley of Czech writers (Petr Borkovec, Martin Reiner, and Tomáš Míka), English-speaking writers in residence (Armand himself, Stephan Delbos, Vincent Farnsworth, and Justin Quinn), and visiting authors from Australia (Pam Brown, Michael Farrell, Philip Hammial, Jill Jones) and Ireland (Trevor Joyce and Maurice Scully). A selection of the poetry presented at the festival appeared in Vichnar’s translation in the Babylon magazine. Rakish Angel, edited by Delbos, the first in a series of poetry pamphlets devoted to new Prague writing, appeared in November 2009, containing work by Gil Fleischman, Jason Mashak, Sarah Borufka and Kateřina Rudčenková (translated by Chris Crawford). 2009 saw the appearance of Ajvaz’s The Other City, translated by Gerald Turner, followed in 2010 by The Golden Age, translated by Andrew Oakland, both with Dalkey Archive Press, both meeting with considerable international acclaim. By the end of 2009, a loose grouping of poets had begun to emerge, appearing regularly at the Alchemy reading series and, from February 2010, at Poezie Suterén – a nomadic weekly forum for poetic research and new writing in English and Czech, featuring Joshua Mensch, Chris Crawford, Louis Armand, Stephan Delbos, Sylva Fischerová, Jaromír Typlt and Anne Brechin. Fischerová read from her newly co-translated (with Stuart Friebert) poetry selection, The Swing in the Middle of Chaos, Typlt in cooperation with Vichnar – the translations would later on appear in the inaugural issue of VLAK magazine, a vast 300-page curatorial project, co-edited by Armand, Delbos, Vichnar, Eddie Berrigan, Carol Watts, and Clare Wallace, appearing simultaneously in Prague, London, and New York. The Typlt translations appeared with their visual component in the graphic art of Jan Měřička. The second edition of the Prague Micro-Festival Poetry Series, in October 2010, followed in the footsteps of the venues of its previous edition, with some notable additions (such as Café Sladkovský in Vršovice or the Library of the Anglo-American Institute in Malá Strana), and featured readings by visiting poets (Richard Tipping, Marcus Slease, Donna Stonecipher, Alistair Noon, Catherine Hales), new acquisitions among Anglophone locals (Holly Tavel) as well as Czech poets (Hana Androniková, Sylva Fischerová, Jakub Zahradník in cooperation with Vichnar).

As this is written, the second issue of the VLAK magazine is in preparation, due to appear in May 2011, featuring translations of

19

Ajvaz, Adam Borzič, Ondřej Buddeus, Jonáš Hájek, Pavel Novotný (all by Vichnar), Kamil Bouška (by Stephan Delbos) the concrete poetry by Michal Šanda, the visual work of young artist Lucie Skřivánková in the hope of furthering international awareness of a new-generation experimental writing taking place in the Czech Republic, but inherently in a dialogue with foreign literary traditions. VLAK 2 will be launched at the 3rd Prague Microfestival, hosted at the legendary Krásný ztráty bar by Armand and Vichnar in co-operation with the Psí víno magazine, run by Jan Těsnohlídek and Buddeus. This event will feature the readings of a wide array of poets, some well-established within the experimental traditions in the cultures of their origin (Keston Sutherland from the U.K., Carla Harryman and Barret Watten from the U.S., among others), some personally involved with the experience of “translocality,” of living outside of their native linguistic environments and literary establishments: Megan M. Garr and Jane Lewty from Amsterdam, Catherine Hales, Uli Freer, Alistair Noon, and Donna Stonecipher from Berlin, Karla Kelsey from Budapest, all hosted by Louis Armand, Laura Conway, and Stephan Delbos (for the Prague Anglophone community), with Czech poetry in translation undertaken specifically for the event, represented by Lenka Daňhelová, Sylva Fischerová, Dagmar Pokorná, Martin Skýpala, Josef Straka, and Jan Těsnohlídek. Vichnar’s book translation of Armand’s latest poetry collection, Letters from Ausland, specially revised to include many of his Prague-based poems excluded from the Australian edition of the original, will be launched at the Festival, under the title Pohlednice z Auslandu and with the Psí Víno Petr Štengl Publishing, marking the first book-length poetry translation of Armand’s work into Czech ever since his arrival in Prague seventeen years ago.

Which brings us back to the concerns of this collection, aiming to complement Armand’s epoch-mapping work by evaluating the current threshold experience and perhaps divining things to come. The flurry of activity witnessed in Prague over the past few years, and in the foreseeable future, is also one of the topics covered in this collection’s interview between two of its major witnesses and agents: Chris Crawford and Stephan Delbos. Crawford, for his part, voices his reservations as regards the legitimacy of the “scene” grouping as follows:

20

To give some perspective, I’d like to say that while it’s important that a city like Prague has a literary scene that nurtures and encourages the creation of poetry and of audiences for that poetry, the most important thing, in my opinion, is that the individual artists actually stay up in their lofts or wherever and do the work. That’s the kind of thing that’s a personal and solitary activity and makes the scene greater than the sum of its parts and, paradoxically, allows the individual poets to rise above any “scene” and become known on their own terms. And I may add, hard to do in a city with a nightlife and beer as good as Prague’s.

To Crawford’s mind, if there is to be a genuine Prague scene, it must combine the talents and assets of both the Czech- and the English-speaking groups:

To summarise, my vision of a strong “Prague Literary Culture” would encapsulate commerce between the different generations of Prague writers, between the Czechs and the English native speakers, would feature an increase in translations from both Czech and English – these translations would appear in the city’s magazines and journals, and lastly I would like to see an increase in regular bilingual readings.

Delbos provides a telling comparison between the state of affairs merely four years ago, and where the Anglophone community stands now:

When we had our first Karlák Summit, in August 2007, what was happening in Prague poetry? I think Alchemy had been on hiatus and was just coming back, I was starting work with The Prague Revue, and there were occasional scattered readings, most of which were organized by you and I. And now in 2010, we’ve got Alchemy in a new venue, Rakish Angel, GRASP, VLAK, The Majáles Anthology, the Prague poetry piece featured in the Clare Market Review, this very book we’re working on now, my Prague anthology in preparation, poets like Josh Mensch coming zapping out of the woodwork, other poets like Anne Brechin coming to town, the Poetry Micro-Fest returning with a second incarnation, Czech poets being translated and published in English, English-language poets being published in Czech in Psí Víno, and more. That’s nothing to shake a stick at.

21

Delbos’s conclusion to his Anthology (itself a massive accomplishment of translational work) voices as much belief in the importance to translation in the cross-cultural dialogue to come:

The wave of expatriates that hit Prague in the early 1990s has crested, and those who remain in the city have developer a second order observation of their own literary achievements as a community. One can only hope that further cooperation and translation between Czech and foreign poets will take place, and that poets from both cultures will benefit from their unique coexistence.40

These, and possibly many other, statements give credibility and substantiation to the conclusion of Armand’s Král Majáles introduction, in which the question of yet a “third” (following those of the early and mid-90s) renaissance in Prague’s international letters is broached:

From a perspective of twenty years, the lure of periodisation, of identifying different groupings and tendencies, presents itself in ways that it did not in the past. The textual record, however, remains uneven and incomplete, rendering an historical view opaque at best, even when from time to time broad outlines appear to present themselves or defining traits seem to recur. It is of course no more possible to define such a thing as a Prague “poetics,” as it would be for any other geographical location. And yet, like communities of writers intimately identified with other cities around the world and at different times, it may be that a “Prague School” (or schools) exists.41

If there is one certainty that gestated over the year separating this from Armand’s introduction, it is that a continuation of the early 90s crossovers of the Prague thresholds is well under way, now represented by poetry reading series (Alchemy), festivals (Micro-Festival Poetry Series), journalistic activity (VLAK, Psí víno, GRASP, Rakish Angel pamphlet series), and publication output (in 2011, Litteraria Pragensia Books alone is publishing Tund, the collection of short fiction by Garcia, Theremin, Farnsworth’s selected poems, and 1982-2010: The Collected poems of Conway). And that seldom over the past twenty years has there

40 Delbos, From a Terrace in Prague, 28. 41 Armand, The Return of Král Majáles, 58.

22

been more sustained effort and eager willingness to step over the threshold than now. The threshold that, instead of separating and hampering, seems to unite and invite exploration. 4. It follows from the above that this collection finds itself, yet again, on a threshold – years after most of the flurries of activity of some of its protagonists (especially Albert, Conway and Farnsworth), and months before what is expected to be their important comeback (publication-wise) and a significant effort to, first, bring Prague back on the map of contemporary poetic theory and praxis, and second, to launch a systematic reflection of the cross-fertilisation between its domestic literary scene and its most vibrant minority literary platform (event-wise).

The essays of this collection could be grouped into two halves: the first one, theoretically-exegetical, comprising three essays by Ali Alizadeh, Jane Lewty and Vadim Erent, dealing with the poetry of Louis Armand, and one by Armand himself on Vincent Farnsworth. Armand’s work has been widely published, anthologised and reflected in the Anglophone world, thus it makes good sense to take it as a case study for how poetry from the threshold or a translocal (more below) perspective can be written and examined. The second half, then, consists of two essays on poets Laura Conway and Vincent Farnsworth – engaging in both a direct critical treatment of the text (Kateřina Piňosová’s article is, then, relevant particularly in that it partly deals with material hitherto extant in manuscript form only) and affording a brief glimpse of the atmosphere and tenor of mid-90s Prague (Jules Mann) – and of three email conversations undertaken among some of the proponents of the poetic activities undertaken in post-1989 Prague, both the earliest (Conway, Albert and Farnsworth) and the latest (Crawford and Delbos).

The essays and interviews collected here each aim to give one of the proponents of Prague literary scene their due, both in terms of theorising their work in original contexts, as well as evaluating their contributions to the scene, both past and present. Together, they provide some fresh insights into the concerns of an ongoing international discussion on the locus and locality in contemporary poetry written from outside the poets’ homelands, across the borders – what has come to be termed translocality. By way of conclusion to these introductory remarks, then, let me briefly outline the crucial arguments, stake out the crucial points of

23

connection, and adumbrate the possible relevance of all this for our understanding of the present. For brevity sake, I shall base the discussion of the term upon two key sources – articles by two expatriate poets/magazine editors, the one an Englishman living in Berlin, the other an American woman living in Amsterdam: Alistair Noon of Bordercrossing Berlin and Megan M. Garr of Versal.

For Noon, who first coined the term “translocality” in his article entitled “Translocal Underground: Anglophone Poetry and Globalization,”42 the need of this term springs from the fact that despite all the mobility that has entered into the lives of poets today, “there’s still a tendency to view the art first and foremost through a national gaze. In the phrase ‘one of our leading poets’ […] that ‘our’ refers, implicitly, to the nation.”43 Reasons for this explicit nationalism of the literary establishment are legion: from linguistic ones (translation as a delay in dissemination, major languages vs. minor languages) to financial aspects (most poetry and arts funding being organised around cultural institutes whose interest is to support writers and artists from their particular nation-states) to institutional underpinnings of literature as a part of pedagogy (the origins of national literature as a subject of study in schools). It is as a result of the joint influence of these processes that

the category of the nation has partially eclipsed other possible ways of typologizing poetry: poetry written by those with or without a university education, poetry written by women and by men, and also, increasingly, poetry written by those for whom, whatever national identity they may feel, their daily experience is shaped by a place and a state whose national norm is not their own.44

Why “translocal,” then? Noon makes a convincing case for the usefulness of this originally anthropological notion for the situation of some poets writing and some poetry written today by excluding other labels commonly attached. For instance, the overused term “expat” is not exact because “it defines its subject negatively: you’re outside of your patria,” which is “only half the story: you’re also, to a greater or lesser extent, inside somewhere else.”

42 Alistair Noon, “Translocal Underground: Anglophone Poetry and Globalization,” Bordercrossing

Berlin 3: 110-9. 43 Noon, “Translocal Underground,” 110. 44 Noon, “Translocal Underground,” 111.

24

“Cosmopolitan,” on the other hand, entails a rootlessness which cannot be reconciled with “the felt reality of those who live abroad for a longer period of time.” “Intercultural poetry” might be useable, as long as “culture” clearly refers to “something whose borders are blurred and whose shape is constantly changing,” which is often not the case. Moreover, Noon voices a problem with the prefix “inter-” too: “can anybody really be ‘between’ cultures?”45

Now, a positive definition – translocality, in poetry, can be best defined by means of a series of the following common concerns shared by translocal poets in question: audience, reception, and publication. The first concern can be rephrased together with Noon as the basic question of literary communication: “Who am I writing for? What background knowledge do I expect my readers to have, what can I take for granted?” A poetry practitioner himself, Noon immediately illustrates this by a practical compositional problem every translocal poet inherently faces. As metonymy becomes more restricted together with complications posed by the poet’s own translocality for the reader’s capability of linking a foreign topographical name with its conceptual associations, a tension arises between “the idea of poetry as compressed language and the probable cultural knowledge of its probable audience.” The challenge faced by any poet to transform his/her local and particular knowledge or insight into a larger, more generalisable idea poses additional difficulty for a translocal poet: “to be able to name and use their local, everyday, physical experience, without exoticizing it.”46

As far as reception goes, Noon feels there being, in the British poetry scene at least, “some residual prejudices against and/or lack of sympathy for writing that comes from ‘foreign’ experience, at least if the poet is marked as being ‘one of us’” and quotes Philip Larkin’s extreme statement to the extent that “nobody wants any more poems about foreign cities.” Since reception goes hand in hand with publication, Noon notes that without a detailled quantitative study comparing the insider and outsider camps, nothing categorical can be said on the subject. One partial answer to these joint problems might be the internet, which “might not have turned out to be quite the democratic, levelling forum it was

45 Noon, “Translocal Underground,” 112. 46 Noon, “Translocal Underground,” 114.

25

once hyped up to be,” but it is for a fact that “web-based magazines tend to break through national barriers more frequently than print magazines do.” Still, Noon doesn’t fail to mention a telling detail: “The Eric Gregory Award, one route into publication for young British poets, stipulates ‘ordinary British residency’ as a condition, begging the question of what ‘ordinary’ might mean.”47

The situation described by Noon here is one very close to what Delbos in a conversation with Crawford refers to as an impossibility of being “a purely Prague-based poet”:

Despite everything that’s happening here, one must realize – as I’ve recently been forced to – that, if you want to publish a book of poetry, there’s simply nowhere to publish it in Prague, or anywhere nearby. The closest publishers are really in the U.K. That automatically tends to negate the prospect of being a purely Prague-based poet; not only is there no real standard of publishing greatness in Prague, but there’s very little publishing of English books at all, and none really for contemporary poets.

Noon then goes on to talk about translocality, in its physical (involving the experience of exile, whether forced or self-willed, and including examples ranging from Ovid to Joyce), imaginative (producing poems so that more than one locality is involved, usually on the basis of an encounter with another text) and linguistic (making use of more than one linguistic variety in poetry) aspects – one need not follow his argument to understand that these often coincide, that they date back as far as Dante, if not further, and that, finally, translation ranks high in translocal literary activities:

Translation is poetic translocality par excellence: linguistic in its method, imaginative in its transference of a new set of ideas, and physical in the likelihood that the translated texts will be read in a different geographical setting to that in which the source texts were produced.48

It is here that Noon’s argument, that is, at its least specific, is picked up and criticised by Megan Garr in her editorial to the seventh issue of the Versal editorial:

47 Noon, “Translocal Underground,” 116. 48 Noon, “Translocal Underground,” 118.

26

Up to now, most of the monologue I’ve seen about translocal literature is restricted to the relationship between author and his (yes, his) narrative text: observations of a street scene in Prague by a long-time foreign resident (the author) – the locality itself becoming protagonist to the poem. This either reduces the self-sufficiency of a piece alone on the page – i.e. it is the author’s biography that makes a piece translocal or not – or it limits it to narrative surveillance. Certainly not all poetry is traceable to a particular mise en scène, nor is all prose a story. The very pivot of translocality would indicate that there are many, many kinds of localities, and we need not focus solely on where our (or the author’s) feet are standing.

Instead of tying the concept of translocality to geography and the functioning of literary establishment, Garr proposes to open up the definition of the translocal to apply to the understanding of literary production and reception as a whole:

What our relocated writers can offer us, if not manifestos and hundreds of poems about foreign street markets, is insight into the inner workings of the translocal line that can then be applied everywhere. How do they invite (or force) interdependence between a string of vocabularies from two (or more) languages within a single stanza? How is the distance of a line of poetry crossed in a translocal sensibility? How is this distance ever crossed? […] Why does any of this matter? Because on some basic level, I think most writers seek commune between their work and the reader on the other side of it – some measure of familiarity, understanding, anagnorisis. And after editing Versal for seven years and writing poetry outside of my homeland for nine, I’ve come to see the translocal line as bearer of the familiar and the unfamiliar at the same time. […] This is why I don’t see translocality as necessarily connected to geography, and why I propose we open the definition (and discussion) up. 49

In the following editorial, Garr works out her broader conception. Her problem with interrogating the term translocality is two-fold. First, it still employs spatial imagery and conceptual framework: “these are words still defined with borders; they haven’t caught up to what’s really going on.” So in defining translocality, the definitions of many other things widen or even collapse. Second, translocality as sketched out by Noon, appears “not so much a

49 Megan M. Garr, editorial to Versal 7 (2009).

27

way of reading text, but a way in which text itself occurs,” positing translocation as the principle of “any act of art” in that it entails “moving something from one place to another.” The escape, for Garr, is to rid the concept of as much geographical and cultural baggage as possible:

The more geography and culture lose their grips on locality, the more the poles of discourse I’m used to holding become useless. And this is where translocality departs from dogmatic political, linguistic, or sociological artifices: it frustrates not only definition and literary explication but also the enclosures of manifesto and branding. We are all translocal, now. We can’t help but be. What is local and global in a given experience is becoming more and more difficult to discern. Who is left untouched by the world?50

In a nutshell, these seem to be the basic concerns of the ongoing debate that surrounds translocality today. 5. It is relevant, then, to consider some points raised by the essays in this collection: in particular, by Ali Alizadeh’s, Jane Lewty’s, Vadim Erent’s and Louis Armand’s articles. In the light of the Noon-Garr exchanged reported on above, it is particularly intriguing to view Alizadeh’s piece on Armand’s “poetics of unplacement,” especially since its author has previously attempted to view Armand’s work in its native – Australian – context. But here, Armand is ranked among “poets who do not possess an emotional/sentimental attachment to the environments in which they live,” and who “practice a poetics radically different to what is apparent in the work of the majority of modern and contemporary poets.” How, in view of the troubles which local naming presents to translocal poets identified by Noon, does one achieve such “poetics of unplacement”? Chiefly by means of a “transformation of the geographical signifier from a geological referent to a mental, metaphysical notion,” performing “a negation of a descriptive, picturesque (or unsightly) depiction of the poet’s surrounds.” Paradoxically, the Prague context is an important and ultimately beneficial for a development of such poetics, since “cultural milieus such as the amorphous and fungible communities of migrant, diaspora, peripatetic and expat artists” have existed in the Czech capital “since the end of the Cold War.” Drawing on the

50 Garr, editorial to Versal 8 (2010).

28

work of philosopher Alan Badiou in his reading of Armand’s Land Partition, Alizadeh notes how this unplacement is accompanied by a refusal of, or at least a resistance toward, Romantic imagism of nature restoration: “Instead of attempting to resuscitate the land from the scene of its vanishing by resorting to mawkish, Romantic images (of natural, pre-industrial, primitive beauty, serenity, etc.) Armand ruptures the very tropes of such imagism to disclose nature as that which [...] possesses a singularity that no poetic, semantic or systemic human hegemony could ever obliterate.” In conclusion, Alizadeh charts out what in this context seems a viable strategy employed by Armand which escapes from the quandaries posed by translocal poetics:

by refusing to verbally depict and represent place and the environment in his work, he has written poems that are entirely for a conceptualization of the environment as an unnamable, inestimable and therefore entirely singular being. As such, by refusing to speak about place, Armand’s poetry functions as the language by which place can come into being qua being, as an utterly non-human, unspeakable entity, not sequestered by the poet’s semantic, symbolic and metaphoric demands and compulsions, but open “to what it may become, to its possibility, to its invention.”

If, for Noon, the internet was a viable form or medium for translocal poetry, Jane Lewty’s close reading of the gist of Armand’s oeuvre shows that the internet and other communication channels themselves can become its theme or content: “Many poems inhabit a space where technological tropes are needed to enhance the central idea – topically, tonally, metaphorically. A poem will often replicate the uncertainties of communication devices, the chasm between transmitter and receiver that paradoxically opens up whenever a technology is considered.” Another aspect of language use to add to Noon’s list above would be the experimental one, where, as Lewty notes, linguistic economy conjures up a condensation or expansion of space, both real and imaginary: “In using compound words, elisions, erasures, mere scratches, cumulative, graphemic and synaethesic motifs, Land Partition shows the infinitesimal (that which is “encamped at the end of visibility”) and at the same time sweeps over vast aquatic reaches, miles of country and “barely

29

tonal regions.” In Armand’s latest collection, this also occurs at the level of the title itself. Notes Lewty:

If Prague is the present “otherstate,” then Australia is the place from where all is spoken: the outback, outcountry, a netherland, an underland. Its first syllable: “Aus” may be read as a pun – the translation into “from” in German – ”from the Fromland.” Its definitions and implications are many. Agent or instrument, cause or reason, removal, separation, starting point, something distinct from others.

One can look for alternatives within philosophical paradigms – a search undertaken by Vadim Erent’s essay, which approaches two Prague émigrés (Marina Tsvetaeva and Louis Armand) from the theoretical perspective developed from an engagement with Prague’s most famous “minor-language” writer: Deleuze and Guattari’s book on Kafka. Again, the leading trope has to do with spatial transfer – detteritorialization, a movement within the major language toward what has been suppressed within it, toward its margins and thresholds where its grammatical and syntactical rules are undermined. Kafka, according to Deleuze and Guattari, performs this movement by “writing in his Prager Deutsch,” and deploying “a dialect of a major language already tainted by its limited, bureaucratic use within an imperial suburb,” and further more using “an impoverished, ‘paper’ German” further exacerbated “with inflections from both Kuchelböhmisch (a mixture of German and Czech) and what was pejoratively called Mauscheldeutsch (a Yiddish-inflected German spoken by his parents).” Tsvetaeva and Armand, according to Erent, move along similar lines by exploring the limits of the sonic and visual potential of their language, respectively. If Tsvetaeva subjects “the Russian language to a Czechization, minoritizing and deterritorializing it to the sonic core,” then Armand exploits saturated graphic texture in his poetry whose effect is a high degree of optical disorientation: “The punctuating marks defy their standard function of organizing and clarifying linguistically generated meaning, reverting to their etymological logic of puncturing, pricking [...],” turning Armand’s poetic project into “an enduring experiment in purging poetry of phoneticism, hushing the sonic aspect of the signifier, disavowing the phone and valorizing the mark.” Armand’s latest collection also turns out a fertile ground for examining political/historical dimensions of his poetic experiment:

30

Armand’s revisitation of Australia returns us to the issue of emigration, real deterritorialization and its linguistic manifestations. What does it mean to be born in the country founded as a penal colony whose Anglophone origin is the language of convicts, a convict language? Is the convict Cockney a minor Anglophone? Is it comparable to the minoritarian status of the Prague Czech-Jewish-German of Kafka?

Ultimately, for Erent, Armand’s deterritorialization goes further than that of Kafka and Tsvetaeva, for “Armand dislocates the very materiality of the signifier, creating an inter-invaginating imagetext, a sign language perpetually struggling to keep its word.”

A last example of developing a poetics that eludes national denominations while not falling prey to geographical or cultural restrictions would be Farnsworth’s “deep poetics,” read by Armand’s own reading of Farnsworth’s “deep poetics” as “not an illusionism, and consequently not a mimēsis in any simplistic sense,” but rather as “the sensation, the ‘intonality,’ of language” which goes hand in hand with Farnsworth’s “strong resistance [...] to the seductions of national identity and the prescriptions of an ‘American’ poetics.” Farnsworth’s poetics, and to some extent the poetics of all other authors covered here, appears, in Armand’s original perspective, as an “undisclosed dynamism,” as the contrary to all that can be systematised, as that which includes what fits nowhere else:

Poiēsis, in its fullest sense, is an undisclosed dynamism; counterpart of that entropic movement which is on the one hand called Literature and on the other Politics. It is the work of generative idiosyncrasy, iteration and permutation: it is the originary inassimilable element, the contrary of all that claims to be definitive or once-and-for-all, or what O’Hara called “downright forgery” [“Les Luths”]. It exceeds and contradicts the petty tyrannies of both the academies and the avant-gardes, as if (but of course only as if) it alone were the “conscience of our time”: not the voice of a moral rectitude society periodically avows belief in, but of everything at odds with a desire to impose-upon, like an imp of the perverse. It is the unruliness of the polis. It is the programme that succeeds only by failing…

A dynamism between Literature and Politics, two spheres separated by a threshold of poiēsis... If this collection might aspire

31

to being a collective statement composed of personal testimonies on the state of past and present things poetic in the now-again international Prague, it also hopes to contribute to contemporary debates surrounding poetic production as against the categories of nationality vs. locality, opening up new thresholds across which to set out.

David Vichnar Prague – Paris, April 2011

155

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

GWEN ALBERT is a human rights activist and researcher, currently living in Middletown, Connecticut, USA with her husband, Vincent Farnsworth (aka Reverend Feedback). In 1989 she was awarded a Fulbright grant to visit Czechoslovakia, where she participated in the Velvet Revolution as a translator. Her first collection of poetry, Dogs, was published by Norton Coker in 1991. Other publications include Der Fährmann (1996) and Going in Circles (with Vincent Farnsworth; 2000). In 1993, while living in the Bay Area, she founded the magazine JEJUNE: america eats its young with Vincent Farnsworth, with whom she returned to the Czech Republic in 1994. In addition to her own writing, she has translated Eva Švankmajerová’s novella Baradla Cave (Twisted Spoon, 2000). She is currently an independent consultant to the Council of Europe, the European Roma Rights Center, and is a translator into English of material published by the ROMEA news server (http//:romea.cz/english/). She is also a student of Ayurveda and flamenco. ALI ALIZADEH holds a PhD from Deakin University, Melbourne, where he also teaches. His most recent books include collections of poetry Ashes in the Air (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2011) and Evental (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2011), and the creative memoir Iran: My Grandfather (Melbourne: Transit Lounge Publishing, 2010). He is reviews editor of Cordite and a co-editor of VLAK magazine. LOUIS ARMAND has lived in Prague since 1994. His work has been anthologised in the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry and Calyx: 30 Australian Poets. He has published two volumes of prose fiction: The Garden (Salt, 2001) and Menudo (Antigen, 2006). His collections of poetry include Séances (Twisted Spoon, 1998), Inexorable Weather (Arc, 2001), Land Partition (Textbase,

156

2001), Strange Attractors (Salt, 2003), Malice in Underland (Textbase, 2003), Picture Primitive (Antigen, 2006), and most recently, Letters from Ausland (Vagabond, 2011), which is due to appear in the Czech translation as Pohlednice z Auslandu in May 2011. He is founder of the Prague International Poetry Festival and Prague Microfestival (2005; 2009-). He co-edits VLAK magazine. LAURA CONWAY is a writer, editor and publisher who has lived in Prague since 1994. Her collections of poetry include To Knock Something Hard in the Dark (Bench, 1981), My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me (Red Flower Ink, 1986), The Cities of Madame Curie (Zeitgeist, 1989), The Ministry of Strange Obsessions (2000), and The Alphabet of Trees (with Kateřina Piňosová; Concordia, 2001). She edited Optimism Monthly from 1999-2000 and was the founder of Prague’s “Alchemy” reading series. In 2005 her work was anthologised in The New American Underground: Vol. 1. San Fransisco – Poets from Hell (edited by David Lerner, Julia Vinograd and Alan Allen). CHRISTOPHER CRAWFORD was born in Glasgow, Scotland and has lived in the Czech Republic since 2002. He co-hosted the Prague reading series Poezie a Provokace from 2006-2008. In the 2008 he participated in the Evropský Sen festival, Prague. His poems, fiction and translations have most recently appeared in Now Culture, Evergreen Review, RATTLE, The Cortland Review, Agenda, Envoi, Ekleksographia, and in Prague: The Prague Revue, Rakish Angel#1, BLATT, Provokator, Psí víno, The Return of Král Majáles and From a Terrace in Prague. He is currently travelling through Asia.

STEPHAN DELBOS is a New England-born poet living in Prague, where he teaches at Charles University and Anglo-American University, and works as Culture Editor for the Prague Post. He currently edits the Rakish Angel poetry pamphlet series and co-edits VLAK: Contemporary Poetics and the Arts, and was managing editor of The Prague Revue. His poetry, essays and translations have appeared in Absinthe: New European Writing, Agni, Atlanta Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, and The Return of Král Majáles. He is currently editing an Prague poetry anthology entitled From a Terrace in Prague (forthcoming with Litteraria Pragensia in 2011).

157

VADIM ERENT is a photographer and translator. He graduated from the University of California at Irvine with a degree in Postmodern Studies. His publications include translations of Marina Tsvetaeva, articles on Czech and Russian art, and a monograph on the artist, Oleg Tselkov. He is currently co-editing a book of essays on the Yugoslav filmmaker, Dušan Makavejev, for Litteraria Pragensia.

VINCENT FARNSWORTH was born in rural Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, and moved to the Czech Republic in 1994. With Gwendolyn Albert he founded the magazine Jejune: amerika eats its young in 1993. His poetry has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, RealPoetik, the Prague Literary Review, Room Temperature, and Big Bridge. His books include Little Twirly Things (Norton Coker, 1992) and Immortal Whistleblower (Lavender Ink, 2001). Farnsworth also performs as “Reverend Feedback” in the band Blaq Mummy. He has been active in anti-war and human rights activities in Central and Eastern Europe. Due to deaths in his family he has temporarily moved back to the USA. His selected poems, Theremin, will be published by Litteraria Pragensia in 2011. JANE LEWTY is assistant professor of English Literature and creative writing at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow (2003) and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2009). Her poetry can be found in Versal, Word For/Word, Upstairs at Duroc, Moria, Dear Sir, Cricket Online Review, Volt, Blazevox, and others. She has also co-edited two essay collections: Broadcasting Modernism (University Press of Florida, 2009) and Pornotopias: Image, Apocalypse, Desire from Litteraria Pragensia. She is currently an editor of VLAK magazine and lives in Amsterdam.

JULES MANN has published several books and pamphlets, including TRIAD (with Karen Newcombe and Gini Savage, Norton Coker Press, 1997) and the chapbook Pluck (Slow Dancer Press, 1999) Her work has appeared in magazines throughout the U.K., the U.S. and in the Czech Republic. She is former director of the Poetry Society and currently runs a small publishing company, Chi Chi Press, devoted to poetry.

158

KATEŘINA PIŇOSOVÁ, a painter, sculptor and poet, is a native of the Czech Republic. She has participated in many collective shows of the Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group whose member she has been since 1996. She has had solo exhibitions in Europe, Mexico, Canada and the U.S. Her work has appeared in a number of literary magazines, anthologies and collections of poetry. A unique collaboration between Laura Conway (poetry) and Piňosová (drawings) was published as The Alphabet of Trees (Concordia, 2000). DAVID VICHNAR, born in the Czech Republic, is author of Joyce Against Theory (Litteraria Pragensia, 2010), co-editor of Hypermedia Joyce (Litteraria Pragensia, 2010) and editor of Hypermedia Joyce Studies magazine. He is currently a co-editor of VLAK magazine, for which he translates from Czech, French, and German. His poetry translations have also appeared in Babylon and Psí víno, his critical essays, interviews and reviews in VLAK, Vital Poetics, Big Bridge and Lungful! He currently lives in Paris.