SJ Fowler

Maintenant #74: Ailbhe Darcy

Already considered one of the finest poets of Ireland’s new generation, Ailbhe Darcy has gained international recognition for her vibrant poetry and rapidly growing body of work. Being at the forefront of a tradition as considerable as Ireland’s has required her to maintain the idiosyncracy of her own taste and voice, and though undoubtedly, the lilt of her work, it’s care for being read and for being rhymtical, resounds with the narrative tradition of Irish poetry, it is also true her idiom can be disjunctive, unpretentious and colloquial. More vitally she creates poems that are conceptually often unresolved, an act of humility that sits apart from neat lyricism.

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Maintenant #66: Valzhyna Mort

Winner of the Crystal of Vilenica poetry award, lauded on both sides of the continent, Mort is a resolute and dexterous presence in contemporary East coast American poetry circles. A native of Belarus, her poetry is remarkable for its elegance and fluidity, and its ability to maintain an idiom both utterly modern and somehow enduring.

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Maintenant #65: Marco Giovenale

The literate and artistic world has always been something falling out of rigid borders and definitions, but the positive growth in schooling in the West and the spreading of that strange kind of mirrored collective conscience/unconscious known as the world wide web, make the situation more and more undecipherable.

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Maintenant #63: Colin Herd

Inarguably symbolic of the dexterity and erudition of a new generation of Scottish poets, Colin Herd is an instantly memorable presence in the contemporary poetry scene north of the border. Deft, at times demure, urbane and insightful, his poetry is effusive in its grace and ease of motion.

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Maintenant #62: Pekko Käppi

The Jouhikko playing tradition was practically dead at the beginning 20th century. There were only a handful of players left in remote villages. So its overall importance in the world isn’t that significant, I mean statistically. However to me Jouhikko is one of the dearest things I am dealing with, almost to the point of being a nuisance. For me Jouhikko is an elemental tool and companion, but at the same time I have been thinking that I should some distance from it too. My history with it started roughly fourteen years ago. After finishing high school and trying to figure out what to do I found myself reading an article about the history of Finnish Folk music and there was a few lines written about this strange instrument I had never heard of.

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Maintenant #61: Marcus Slease

Though the Maintenant series tries not to overstate the importance of the poet’s origin, practicality alone demands an attempt to show the range of European poetries with a representative range of nations. However in actually seeking out those poets creating exciting, original, genuinely evolutionary work, we find many cannot be tied to one single nation – they are migratory, multi-lingual – pan-European if not pan-global. Marcus Slease fits this archetype more than most.

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Maintenant #57: Tomas S. Butkus

Sometimes seen as an irreverent and idiosyncratic poet, due perhaps his use of many mediums (text, video, sonic art, collage), his membership in an experimental art performance collective or his distinctive use of surrealist imagery – his work in fact continues the revolutionary underground spirit of creativity that underpinned some of the greatest poetry Europe produced while Lithuania was under Soviet occupation.

An interview with Tomas S. Butkus ( Lithuania ) by SJ Fowler

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Maintenant #55: Scott Thurston

An inevitable locus of poetic discourse through the education and development of young poets is the figure of the poet-academic, the poet who takes upon himself the development of others as well as the development of his own methodologies.

An interview with Scott Thurston ( England ) by SJ Fowler

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Maintenant #54: Tomica Bajsić

Tomica inhabits a wider archetype, of which his war experiences are just one element of a much grander ideal. He is a poet of exploration, of challenge. He is a poet who makes his primary medium a full and unrelenting exaltation of experience, and his poetry follows from this worldview.

An interview with Tomica Bajsić ( Croatia ) by SJ Fowler

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