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THIS WEEK POETRY maltatoday | SUNDAY • 18 AUGUST 2019 4 Both your poetic and editorial work leans strongly – at least in part – to the melding of poetry and science, particularly on fundamental elements such as ice and light. What is it about this tendency that you find attractive, and would you say it's particularly urgent now that climate change is an active global threat? The sciences, and scientific instru- ments in particular, have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. Science explores and interrogates reality. For me that's an invitation to distrust and play with the familiar. I am drawn to areas of distrust, of what I might discover. As a poet this ex- cites me. As do building sites. You can read my fascination with science in my early work: in 'The Saddest Tree in Kew', for example, an MRI of the spine works as a meta- phor for long telephone calls and a string of DNA resembles, "all things /broken and struggling to mansize and being there." These references to science can be used as new ways of expressing a human emotion. On reflection, science hadn't made me think about poetry in a new or different way. It hadn't helped me en- gage with the central question: what makes a verbal message a work of art? Using new technologies and scien- tific discoveries as metaphors in my poems wasn't enough for me to en- gage with the art form in a way that taught me something new about it, or about myself. To be honest, using these scientific metaphors made me feel a bit of an imposter. Like serv- ing instant noodles instead of making your own. Artists and scientists are curious by nature, wanting to under- stand how things work. Poetry is a voice but it is also a tech- nique. I wanted to strip it back to the basic building blocks, in a similar way that physics strives to strip natural phenomena back to its basic build- ing blocks. The more you can hear beyond the rhythms and the melo- dy of poetry, the more variations in structure manifest, almost like math- ematical shifts. These variations in- trigued me and I started experiment- ing: "High up in atmosphere vertigo intact inside vodka & lime / stashed lifejacket under front seat checked foot underneath / me spins planet Earth." (Vodka & Lime, Plainspeak) My interest shifted from scientific discoveries to scientific methodol- ogy. I became less interested in linear narrative and mesmerised, obsessed you could say, by the textures and layers that poetic language offers, in the way that the shifting daylight re- lates to architecture. I began to look at syntax as the science of poetry. Without the rule of syntax over lan- guage nothing we say has any mean- ing. The things we say, the emotions we express, and the messages we want to convey would be gibberish. How far can I stretch syntax without my poems slipping into nonsense? This sense, this idea of stretching things, meanings and ideas to their breaking point, it's where we are in many respects with the world – the gap between the haves and haves not, man's industry and climate change, religious (in)tolerance… In your poetry the recurring persona of – indeed – the 'Poet' features quite regularly. Is this figure more of an interlocutor or an avatar, and how does this convention help you shape your desired confluence of ideas, images and rhythmic propulsion? Yes, especially in my new collection, Plainspeak, where I have given my al- ter ego a free rein. My alter ego 'Poet', helped to shape the ideas and images of the poems, which deal with place, ancestral ties, solitude, flight, insom- nia and the embattled absurdities of daily life. 'Poet' also helps propel the rhythm and allows me to play around with different arrangements and in- tonations. Alter egos have always fas- cinated me – Zbigniew Herbert's Mr Cogito, Henri Michaux's Plume, Paul Valéry's Mr Teste, Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms, among others – like a cat recognising its own image in the mirror for the first time. Alter egos allow you to sidestep the limitations of the self in favour of the possibili- ties encapsulated in the promise of the other. The alter ego is a breaka- way from the self, yet perversely also an acceptance of the self. It was La- can who said that, "The unconscious is the discourse of the Other," and these poems do this. My alter ego emerged when I was young, around six years old, when I told my father I wanted to be a boy when I grew up. This boy I never got to be grew up alongside me and even though I called him 'Poet' he's an irri- tant, more dramatic and braver than me. It is through my dialogue with him (or is it through his dialogue with me?) that I can play with formal boundaries, linguistic identity and the lyrical poetic voice. The presence of 'Poet' allows me to tell multiple narratives while retaining the free- dom of abstraction. Ahead of her participation at this year's edition of the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, poet Astrid Alben speaks to TEODOR RELJIC about both the potentialities and pitfalls of welding poetry to scientific discourse, the increasingly fraught role of the artist in an economically challenged society, and the crucial role of translation in disseminating cultural diversity 'The role of the artist is under threat' "Alter egos allow you to sidestep the limitations of the self in favour of the possibilities encapsulated in the promise of the other" Teodor Reljic