July 12, 2016 edition

We are familiar with this picture that seems to come from another continent: the poet, exiled from Kallipolis, threadbare, smelly, homeless, an insomniac, living with no schedule, and producing things whose function is unclear: poems. He rarely finds place within a structure. He is outside. Even if he wanted to return, Kallipolis would not take him back. Within the ideal city of Plato's imagination, the poet is an element whose function is only to praise the herowhich we know does not work because heroes are figures who freeze in obligatory odes. So there is some truth, albeit slightly exaggerated, in Alfred de Vigny's words of 1832, that poets are "the race always cursed by the powerful of the earth."
At the time he wrote this, the cities of Europe, and particularly Paris, were beginning to move with modern design that was streamlined and ordered. Poetry, with its unpredictability, was increasingly alien within it. Paul Verlaine compiled an anthology of poetry, les Potes maudits, which was published in 1884: the works of 'the cursed poets'. Included in this group were Verlaine himself, along with Rimbaud and Mallarmto mention only those who are best known outside of France. And at the forefront: Baudelaire.

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More Sidelines articles in other editions

July 5, 2016 edition

'The builder of Batavia' who is buried there was a man with a motto, as quoted in 1618: "Despair not, spare your enemies not, for God is with us."
He was certainly a strict Christian, an administrator who upheld discipline and of course pursued VOC (Dutch East India Company) ambitions to monopolize trade in Asia in the 17th century.

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June 28, 2016 edition

Attar lived in a time of slim hope, and died aged 76 in a massacre. He lived in Nishapur, in the province of Khorasan in Persia where he was born around 1145, and was relatively well off. Before he wrote poetry using the name Attar and travelled widely meeting prominent Sufis, he lived comfortably as a pharmacist. Patients thronged to him. From them, Attar earned his living-and from them, too, he got to know sad stories of people and the fragility of faith in life.
So he wrote the Mosibatnmeh or The Book of Strife, an epic poem challenging God.

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June 21, 2016 edition

His alias was 'Prapanca'. He depicted himself as a man the palace women disliked, someone uneasy with words, somewhat ugly. But he is the first writer of reportage in Indonesian history: the Desawarnana, which he completed in 1365, is a report on the travels of Hayam Wuruk, the king of Majapahit, to various territories of his realm.
Sadly, Prapanca was limited as a reporter. His kakawin is more like a record of impressions of the pleasures and sights from one place to another. The Desawarnana is a 14th-century travelogue. It is not a record of events.

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June 14, 2016 edition

Without being aware of it, in our heads there often arises something powerful, called Right. It is not moved by everything that changes, flows, blooms, shrivels or declines. It is steady. It might make us feel secure, yet it seems we cannot go on living with that.
A poem by Yehuda Amichai comes to mind:

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June 7, 2016 edition

The man in the army hat and black ski mask smoking a small pipe has disappeared. He is not in San Cristobal de las Casa, not in other towns, and not in the Mexican interior. That was where he once took up arms, fought, spoke, wrote, and mingled with the poor Chiapas framers who were fighting for their rights. Ten years later, Subcomandante Marcos, the most prominent figure in the Zapatista rebellion, vanished.
Maybe that is how is should be: fighters come, fighters win, fighters go. Ten years earlier, around 3,000 members of the armed Zapatista forces declared war on the Mexican army, occupied towns, and 150 people died. That was a bad setback for them at the time, but they were later acknowledged as one of the real political forces that succeeded in creating autonomous areas without official recognition. Over those 10 years, Marcos, with his unique style, became the icon of struggle, But then Zapatista made a public statement on March 24, 2014: Marcos was no more: "Marcos, the character is no longer necessary...His character was created and now his creators, the Zapatistas, are destroying him."

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May 31, 2016 edition

From his youth, Mayakovsky was an activist for the Bolsheviks, the outlawed communist organization. He once helped female political prisoners escape from prison. He was arrested and sentenced by the tsarist government to 11 months imprisonment. But this is where Mayakovsky the poet was born. In his cell, he wrote poems-and from then on he never stopped. Over time, his poems, as well as his works of graphic art, theater and film, became increasingly fascinating and brilliant.
After Mayakovsky's death, the now victorious Communist Party erected a statue of him, six meters high, in Triumphal Square in Moscow. "Indifference to his cultural heritage amounts to a crime," Stalin said.

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