Firstly, I am proud to host Twenty One Iraqi Poets, the Masthead Feature for this issue.  At very short notice, Guest Editor Margaret Obank, Editor of Banipal magazine, has gathered a stunning array of Iraqi poets in translation.  At a time when Iraq mainly exists in the popular Western imagination as a war zone of inscrutable violence, it seems apt to showcase some of the complexity, sophistication and humanity of contemporary Iraqi culture. 

I am always surprised by how each issue evolves its own conversation.  This seems to occur despite me, rather than with deliberate intent.  This issue's abiding themes seem to be eroticism and translation, the pleasures of exchange between languages and bodies.  And here the manifold and contradictory pleasures of writing and sex emerge as profoundly political.  "Pleasure cannot, and does not, mitigate anger," says Sophie Mayer in her essay on the eroticism of Native American poetry. "The lived experience of genocide, racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia find their voices too - ... pleasure becomes a protest against the dominant forces that would ignore or destroy it." 

For your pleasure, then, this issue has translations from Chinese, Spanish, Persian and German as well as the broad selection from Arabic.  We have an extract from Yang Lian's forthcoming book length poem, Concentric Circles, soon to be released by Bloodaxe, as well as essays on the poem by Yang Lian and his translator, Brian Holton.  Michael Smith has translations of two of the most important South American poets of the 20th century  - a hypnotically powerful long poem by  Vicente Huidobro and selections from a forthcoming translation of César Vallejo's Trilce,  co-translated with Valentino Gianuzzi, due out soon with Shearsman Books.  James Graham and Barbara Sauermann offer us a fresh perspective on Bertolt Brecht, with some new translations of his erotic poetry.   And check out Richard Jeffrey Newman's superb translations of the 13th century Sufi poet Saadi, also just released by Global Scholarly Publications.

Prose includes two fascinating essays on sexuality.  As well as Sophie Mayer's essay,  Richard Jeffrey Newman looks at desire, fear, Jewishness, identity, racism, misogyny, masculinity - well, practically everything - in the extract from his book My Son's Penis.  Fiction includes a selection from Valerie Kirwan's new novel, Taking a Fool to Paradise, and a punchy short story by Jesse Glass, and theatre is represented by Vespers, a new play of Beckettian lyricism, and a bracing lecture on the life and work of the playwright, by Daniel Keene.

And, as always, there's a rich feast of contemporary poetry from around the world. Masthead 9 also features poetry from Michael Ayres, Alan Halsey, Jeff Harrison, Matt Hetherington, Pierre Joris, Trevor Joyce, Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawer, Sally Ann McIntyre, Peter Minter, Geraldine Monk, Simon Perchik, Colin Reeves and Stephen Vincent. 

Terry Rentzepis's lugubriously comic, strangely innocent work is on show in the Gallery. Masthead 9 also features work by visual artists Douglas Kirwan and Sadradeen. 

Issue 9 is dedicated to Árni Ibsen, a great friend of Masthead whose recent serious illness has meant that our proposed feature on Icelandic writing in translation has been postponed for a future time.  But as they say, anticipation merely increases later pleasure. 

Masthead is tested on Explorer, Netscape, Safari and Opera.  Please note that magnifying text can destroy the lineation of some poems; if you have problems with this issue, check the text zoom under the "view" command on the browser menu and reduce the size of the text.  The magazine is best viewed at 90 per cent on Explorer and 100 per cent on most other browsers.  Unfortunately, due to the size of each issue, downloadable files of the whole magazine are impracticable at this point, but the pages are designed to be print-friendly.

I hope you enjoy Issue 9 as much as I've enjoyed putting it together.

Alison Croggon
Editor
March 14, 2005