This book is published as part of the Poets in the World series created
by The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. Ilya
Kaminsky, Series Editor.
In a century of mass migration and deportation, political exile and
casual tourism, being elsewhere was the common condition. For the
moderns, elsewhere was not merely physical location or dislocation, but
was intrinsic to the work. Victor Segalen, in China at the beginning of
the century, writes of the 'manifestation of Diversity, ' a 'spectacle
of Difference': everything that is 'foreign, strange, unexpected,
surprising, mysterious, amorous, superhuman, heroic, and even divine,
everything that is Other.' Picasso put it more bluntly: 'Strangeness is
what we wanted to make people think about because we were quite aware
that our world was becoming very strange.' After Guillaume Apollinaire's
'Zone'--perhaps the most influential poem of the century--collage, the
juxtaposition of disparate elements, the manifestation of diversity, the
making of the strange, became the primary new form of the new poetry.
From the countless examples, here are a few instances of the collage of
a poet pasted, physically or mentally, onto a specific unfamiliar
landscape.
So begins Eliot Weinberger's essayistic travels into the nature of
journey poetry. From Ko¯taro¯ Takamura's poem about Paris, to Fernando
Pessoa's At the wheel of the Chevrolet on the road to Sintra, to
Apollinaire's Ocean-Letter, Weinberger introduces fourteen poems
illustrating the contemporary situation of being elsewhere.
Eliot Weinberger is an essayist, poet, editor, and translator who
won the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism for his edition
of Jorge Luis Borges's Selected Non-Fictions. His translations of
Octavio Paz are highly regarded, as are his translations of Homero
Aridjis, Bei Dao, and others
Here is a complete list of contributors to this collection:
Kotaro Takamura
Vicente Huidobro
Jorge Carrera Andrade
Federico García Lorca
Léopold Sédar Senghor
Xavier Villaurrutia
Bertolt Brecht
Nâzim Hikmet
Fernando Pessoa
Joaquín Pasos
Jacques Roumain
Guillaume Apollinaire
Toriko Takarabe
Ingeborg Bachmann
