Smita Agarwal, India

A poem performs a civilizing function, answering not only a human need for emotional expression but for rational control as well. Poetry does this by resolving warring forces. Through this exploration and control, both poet and reader find new ways of understanding themselves and life. My poems are frequently concerned with pain, but, in the tradition of impersonality it is expressed through the dramatized consciousness of other people, or other forms of life. Often, humour brightens up a weird or grim scenario. I also write poems that begin with observations of nature, and then move on to an insight about a person or situation, personal or social.
      Also, as music is an overwhelming part of my consciousness, rhythm and rhyme have a role to play in my poetry. In ‘Monsoon Cantata’, the violence of the rain “tattooing on the roof” increases till it brings in its wake “communal/ Conflagrations, scams, arms deals, a tribal/ Woman gang-raped, mute deaths in custody/ India in the nineteen nineties.”

Dorothy Alexander, Scotland

My present style relates to the specific project on which I am engaged for my PhD, i.e. an attempt to intuit and reveal the disease processes and states of being of a group of psychogeriatric patients who live in an outdated Victorian asylum. My interests lie in the experimental and avant-garde. I have found the language events and prosodic practice associated with experimental poetics correlative to the liminal and broken discourses of my subjects as their language tapers into silence and dislocated meaning. My main aim has been to give them a voice, to restore to them their dignity, and to do this without objectifying them or sentimentalising their situation while, at the same time, trying to write poetry that is technically rigorous and not compromised in terms of its artistic endeavour. I do acknowledge, however, how off-putting so called ‘difficult’ poetry can be. To this end I strive to write poems with enough emotional weight to engage readers who might otherwise shy away from them.

Rachel Tzvia Back, Israel

"The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray," writes Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay Self Reliance (1841). This quotation has echoed in my mind for many years, but only gradually have I come to understand what it really means, specifically to me as a poet. How is it that I, an English-language Israeli-American poet, live and produce in Israel – hundreds of miles away from my beloved sisters and brothers, raising my children in a dangerous place, in a land that is ruthless and among peoples that are so often driven by their own worst instincts – fear and hatred. Certainly the pull of land and the desire to belong – in a tribal sense – impacted on my life-choices, but that is only a piece of it. In the last years I've understood better that I was, in some unexplainable way, placed here – in this ravaged and ravishing landscape, among these ruins and these dreams – so that my singular poetic eye (the eye of a woman, a mother, a Jew and a peace activist), and my "I", might testify to this particular place. This poetic work is wholly mine – no one else can do it – and though I often despair because of the violence all around me, a violence that infiltrates my poetry, still I remain abundantly grateful for the clarity of purpose and place.

Cedric Barfoot, Netherlands

Cedric Barfoot has been writing poetry since his late teens, but he will have to call himself an “occasional poet” since he has never attempted to publish a volume of his poems, and they have only appeared in print when a contribution of some kind has been asked for. Perhaps the time has come to put them together as a collection – although whether anybody would want them on their shelves is another matter. He still feels that although too much poetry can never be written perhaps too much appears in print. He recognizes that in recent years much of his poetry is a different way of writing an article or giving a lecture, and when it works it is a much more succinct and engaging way of developing the kinds of arguments and making the points that might have appeared elsewhere in prose.

Lyn Barzilai, Israel

This will be my second appearance at a Stirling conference; I gave a reading at the last one, “Poetry and Sexuality.” I was, I think, the only unpublished poet, and I probably still am. I give poetry readings at university and college, have written a book on the poet George Oppen (hopefully published by the time of the conference) and have poems published on the net, but not yet in anthologies or my own book. This state of “unpublication” has both benefits and drawbacks for me: the disadvantages are obvious, since my poetry does not receive feedback from a wide reading audience. On the other hand, this same lack of exposure means that my poems are still my own personal offspring, and I do not fear for their misrepresentation in the vast world of the critic and public. They are very personal poems, not always in content but almost always in approach, and perhaps vulnerable as a result. Those I have chosen to read at the conference will look at the political dimension of our lives as it appears throughout history, from the mythic past to the science-fiction future.

Bron Bateman, Australia

Bron’s poetry has been widely published and her collection, People from Bones, was published by Ragged Raven Press (UK) in 2002.

No place for a heart that’s a whore, the title of my reading, is from Martha Wainwright’s (sister of Rufus and daughter of Louden) song about her father, entitled Bloody Motherfucking Asshole.
      In the last two years I have, among other things, left my husband of 22 years for a woman, been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and OCD, and begun, finally, to deal with the sexual abuse I survived as a child. My poetry is a reflection of all these things: eroticism and erotic love, abuse and mental illness. Poetry like this, resides, I think, in the silences and the margins where the best truths—and poems—are found.

Yves-Marie Bouillon, Brittany, France

The Barzhaz Brest is a collection of 81 poems written between november 1998 and october 1999 in Brest (Brittany). The title ironically refers to Barzaz Breizh, a book of popular Breton songs which La Villemarqué collected from singers in Britanny in the XIXth century, then translated in french and published in Paris during the romantic revival of celtic studies. The present collection, Barzhaz Brest, takes place in a modern military harbour, Brest, both Breton and French as its heraldic picture defines it, completely destroyed in 1944, and where the French navy has now its nuclear forces. Love poems, but also poems about war in the former Yugoslavia and French politics, take place among others where amnesia, alcoholism and suicide depict a harbour of extreme occident at the very end of the XXth century. Not finding any local editor of poetry ready to listen to something else than usual stereotypes about the celtic soul and so on, I decided to publish it by my own and have been reading poems of this collection in bars and festivals for six years. A reading of those poems with a guitar player is prepared for autumn 2006. The first time an american jazz band played on the european continent was in Brest, 1917. Quite difficult to forget wars in such a town : why poetry and music are so vital.

Jules Boykoff, USA

Jules Boykoff is a member of the editorial collective for the Tangent: a zine of politics and the arts; a reading series; a chapbook and pamphlet press, and a radio program. He is the author of Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge (Edge Books, 2006) and The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements (Routledge 2006). He has also written a multi-media poetry chapbook, Philosophical Investigations Inna Neo-Con Roots-Dub Styley (Interrupting Cow Press, 2004) and Exit, a collaborative chapbook with Kaia Sand (The Tangent Press, 2002). He lives in Portland, Oregon, USA, and teaches political science at Pacific University.

Zoe Brigley, Wales

Ac yna goddiweddodd Gwydion hithau ac y dywedodd wrthi, 'Ni'th laddaf di. Fe wnaf iti rywbeth sy'n waeth. Dyna yw hynny', meddaf ef, 'dy ollwng di yn rhith aderyn. Ac oherwydd y cywilwydda wnaethost ti I Leu Llaw Gyffes, na feiddia dithau dangos dy wyneb fyth liw dydd'.

Gwydyon overtook her and said, 'I will not kill you, but I will do what is worse: I will let you go in the form of a bird. Because of the shame you have brought Lleu Skilful Hand, you are never to show your face to the light of day'. —The Mabinogion

My poetry emerges from silence and secrets. It is also a journey in marginal poetics. Some of these poems are a mirror and shine a light on the exigencies of my own culture, my own country, Wales, but I remember Julia Kristeva's description of her ironist in Strangers to Ourselves. The ironist who 'welcomes the foreigner without tying him down, opening the host to his visitor without committing him' is my ideal of the poet. For marginal writers, new nefarious strategies dictate a kind of exile (in my case an exile from Welsh culture). As Kristeva states, 'How can one avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by becoming a stranger to one's own country, language, sex, and identity?' In later poems, I have explored my feelings about living on the margin through estrangement from my own culture. The example of the city of Baucis in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is useful here; the residents of Baucis marginalise themselves allowing no part of the city to touch the earth's surface. Calvino describes the people who 'with their spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward [...] never tire of examining it, tirelessly observing it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence'.

Tony Brinkley (with Raina Kostova), USA

We began to translate Mandelshtam’s poetry in order to discover poetry that his poetry might create in English. We wanted the translations to be as accurate as possible. We also wanted poetry that could work in English. Given the translations of Mandelshtam that already exist, what we hoped we would find would be new possibilities. In the process Mandelshtam taught us about possibilities for poetry in English that we would not otherwise have been able to discover. In this way—and despite his own reservations about translation—he has come to seem to us to be a wonderfully generous teacher.

Mary Lynn Broe, USA

Descended from Judy Grahn’s word-wyf
Mixed and stirred with Yeats’ Crazy Jane,
I write heartbreak torch songs, full of
unabashed yearning. Also
Celtic rants,
hard-palate swipes at academics’
primp and pomp.

A brutal insouciance for graying boomers,
My poems stuff Kong toys with
lowdown elegaic strains,
Alix Olsen’s armpit hair,
A few belts of Nina Simone, and
Moral Attention.

No one hearing my poetry
Would ever mistake
Improvisation
For metric calisthenics.