Street/Life Issue

Foreword:

In 2004, I traveled to Bali for the inaugural Ubud Readers and Writers Festival. It was a life changing experience for me. A question that has resonated deep in the cavity of my chest since returning from that trip was asked of me at the airport as I waited to board the plane home: “Why in your country do you not see people out talking on the street?”

I can’t remember how I answered, but after four incredible weeks in Ubud, where the streets are literally alive with social activity and it seems there is precious little kept behind closed doors, the truth of this question weighed heavily upon me. I had lived in the same street for 4 years and knew hardly a soul and at best, talked occasionally to my neighbours. I returned, hungry to engage with the life our streets had to offer and 6 years later, that hunger is still there…

So when I was asked to grab the editing reigns for issue #37 of Stylus Poetry Journal, I wanted to open up the streets of towns and cities across the world and invite you all in. The brief was a simple one:

I was looking, not for faux, ‘on the street’ poems, but poems that stepped out from behind the eyes of the onlooker and inhabited the street, poems that blended the high and low cultural registers that the street has to offer, poems that captured the voice of street life.

And each poet has answered the call…

In these poems we are lead down infernal avenue (Steve Kilbey), where some guy from the council grimly hacks at the only tree on the street, bump into the William St Brigade (Jeremy Balius) who are concerned with matters/ of the heart & roots/ Eden & iron/ dreams, being fearless/ but don’t know why/ & don’t know what/ it means, visit Chinatown, where everything has its soundtrack: dragon drumming chopsticks / the fortune cookie & its flour thin wisdom (Suzanne Jones), ride the Yellowhead Highway past the Skeena River, bubbled into a carnage of colours/ Not even Caravaggio or his Flemish disciple/ Could have captured completely (Matt Rader) and take a detour through the streets of Kolkata, Siliguri and Kalimpong with Cows asleep on the median strip, twenty men sweating in a jeep, defecating kids waving hello, mandirs of dusty mandarins, kerosene wafting through a frayed curtain… all of life’s undisguised perfumes (Andy Jackson).

These streets are living, breathing organisms possessed by a spirit of their own. I welcome you to suspend reality for a while and take a walk with me, to open yourself to Street/Life, to experience the elegance and decay, the beauty and the slaughter… you never know, you might come back changed.

                                                                                                                 – Graham Nunn