Maintentant

Maintenant #44 – Tadeusz Dąbrowski

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Simply one of the most substantial and powerful poets emerging from Europe as a whole, Tadeusz Dąbrowski is a figure who is climbing toward worldwide prominence. An essayist, critic and editor (of the literary magazine Topos) he has authored five poetry collections and won the Hubert Burda Prize and, from Tadeusz Różewicz himself, the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Culture. His poetry has been translated into thirteen languages. Maintenant, as a series, hopes to be a platform in which readers will be able to come across poets who might grow into the stature of their most reputed and iconoclastic forebears. Perhaps with Tadeusz Dąbrowski we have arrived too late. Fundamentally a product of his generation, and quite definitively, the literary culture of Poland in general, Dabrowski’s is a voice both singular and alert, both wry and contemporary. He is a poet who should, and does, speak for himself.

Accompanying the interview are seven of his poems.
Special thanks to Izabela Banasik for her assistance with this interview.

http://soundcloud.com/maintenant

Maintenant #35 – Ragnhildur Jóhanns

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Celebrating the third Maintenant reading of 2010 we introduce Ragnhildur Jóhanns, one of four innovative Icelandic poets to read at the Rich Mix arts centre in London on November 27th, and one of the most exciting and elastic poetic talents to emerge in Europe over the last few years. A unique craftswoman, she is a sculptural, visual and physical poet, unhindered by convention. She works with text, with performance but seeks to create poetic objects, pure concrete poems, that is literally fashioning books out of her work and embodying the text. Fulfilling our remit to introduce poets who will undoubtedly rise to prominence in the next few decades and who refuse to be limited by what has come before, for the 35th Maintenant interview, Ragnhildur Jóhanns.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-35-ragnhildur-johanns/

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/ten-poems-ragnhildur-johanns/

Maintenant – new site

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The 3am magazine Maintenant series aims to evidence, through discussion with Europe ’s most exceptional young poets, the continued pertinence of poetry for a new generation of talent from a diverse selection of European poetic traditions. The interviews, and the poetry that accompanies them, have shown the slow dissolution of stylistic recalcitrance, internal bias to gender and race, methodological snobbery and poetical jingoism. The fusion of poetic expression inevitable in a world of increased communication, access and political freedom is remarkable and cause for optimism where so often there is pessimism in poetry circles. The range and depth of poetry on display, and it’s standard, is a small representation of what each nation is producing.

The Maintenant dictum is to introduce poets that might lie outside of the Anglo-American scene, or be overlooked until they have reached the prominence of middle age. More at the new Maintenant site here.