Trivia Kampung Sawah

IRZI localizes the urban landscape and its gestures within poetry through a somewhat different articulation—if poetry has long been merely textual. Rooted in orality, IRZI’s poetic practice possesses a rhetorical movement that is problematic in relation to its ethnographic character: moving from site to site, from event to event, from memory to memory, stitched together and layered until Jakarta becomes identifiable as a real city only when it is truly experienced. One might say that something called Jakarta becomes empirical precisely because it is presented through the perspective of an insider.

With what may be described as a Betawi accent, Trivia Kampung Sawah distills a distinctive conversational language that entertains amid the congestion of mass communication. IRZI responds to a city that is perpetually changing while its people are unable to do much more in response. The poems in Trivia Kampung Sawah reach from address to address and name as many names as possible so that the reader may live alongside them.

Such is Jakarta—though it remains difficult to embrace intimately. Jakarta offers no solutions, much like poetry; yet this is how IRZI persistently and intensely introduces it.