Focus: City and Poetry

Focus: City and Poetry

Can city inspire poetry? Traditionally, Nature is the first source of poetic inspiration: lakes, mountains and trees move the heart and the lips, and the music of the Earth becomes the one of our soul. However, city has become like a “second nature” to us, and its streets, its moods, its people and its scenery work on our emotions and our aesthetic sensibility as do waterfalls, pine trees and rocks.

When thinking about the poetic nature of cities, there is something that can strike even more our imagination: a city looks actually like an immense poems; its avenues, buildings or underground can be read as a giant network of rhymes, metaphors and verses. The city is like an elegy that men write, carve and erect on the surface of the...

Read more: City and Poetry

Focus: City and Poetry

When I think of poetry in the city, two films immediately spring to mind. The first is Sofia Coppola's 2003 film Lost in Translation, the other Wim Wenders 1987 film Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin). The first one is set in contemporary Japan, the other in post cold war Berlin (complete with the Wall). In both films, the city in question appears to be observed from the eyes of the outsider. In Lost in Translation, Charlotte and Bob's destinies cross paths in Tokyo. They both feel alienated and ill-fit in their surrogate society; they are both outsiders and loneliness brings them together. Their chance encounter takes place in multicoloured Tokyo, yet like two floating reeds passing by, Tokyo is also where they must...

Read more: Untranslatable poems: Codes scattered in the city

Focus: City and Poetry

December 2009 has been cold in Europe, and snow has been falling everywhere, something that is not seen every year. When I was a child, the spectacle of snow piling into the streets was rather common. It became more rare as the years passed by.

I had to travel this winter, going to Paris and Toulouse in France, Munich and Aachen in Germany, before crossing Holland to go back to France. I had to go to offices and universities, I had to hasten through the streets and the underground, but I had also time to wander through the parks and the squares, to dream when looking through the windows of trains slowed by the weather, and to let recollections come back to my mind. I was thinking of all the cities I had lived in, of their minds and...

Read more: Cities in winter: a wanderer in Europe

Focus: City and Poetry

“I love dream logic.  I just like the way dreams go.”David Lynch in “Catching the Big Fish: Mediation, Consciousness, and Creativity”


Growing up in Canberra, I never thought of it as being a particularly remarkable city.  It was just the place where I lived.  Then one day when I was about 13, I read an interview of some backpackers in the local newspaper.  When prompted for their views on Canberra, one suggested something along the lines of “it is like a David Lynch movie – everything is neat and tidy but you wonder what is really going on below the surface”.  Not having yet seen any movies by Lynch - America’s legendary surrealist chronicler of urban life - I was a bit puzzled by this comparison, but with time I...

Read more: Canberra: A David Lynch film come to life

Focus: City and Poetry

Chris Churcher shares his experiences as a film director in Taiwan: what does Taiwan need? To encourage its creative pool!

Read more: On the wire with Chris Churcher

Focus: City and Poetry

Being an outsider in the city can give rise to a poetry of sorts. Whether we are business ex-pats, exchange students or foreign workers, we all eventually face the same problem of our wandering impermanence. For this months Focus on poetry in the city, I look back at some written scraps and ramblings on my own impermanence and identity issues whilst I was a student of Mandarin in Taipei. Of Anglo-French descent, studying Chinese, for me it was fitting that I could find scrawlings in the three languages (and cultures) between which I’m torn:

Read more: Notes on impermanence

Focus: City and Poetry

Nat Niu introduces us to his two videos concepts: The Line and Postcard

Read more: A postcard of Taipei

Focus: City and Poetry

"How can such a beautiful thing can be so annoying??" Flavie says...

Read more: Bristol, a love of fire and ice