Wednesday 25 March 2020

Ilona Martonfi : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

To wed the “political” with the “personal” the pathos of my poetry is plain. Poems call out and talk back. Expose truths, raise consciousness, one clipping at a time. My book The Tempest, does collage but makes deliberate choices when I put the pieces together. Each item, cut out, becomes one more word, one more symbol.

Offering free verse, prose poems, haibun, and haiku, I use poetry to build on my activism as a tool for achieving goals, taking a stand. My book is composed of poetry of  witness, ekphrastic poems, resistance poems, erasure poems, dream poems, persona poems, elegies. Witness-bearing poetry often comes out of great social tragedies. Exile from place, displacement, the refugee, immigrant. To disappear into a place. The dispossessed. The personal is political.

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