War and peace at Poetry International 2010

In 1967, Ted Hughes and Patrick Garland sought to bring out the poets behind the iron curtain with the inaugural Poetry International festival. Now, in 2010, this same festival focuses closely, although by no means exclusively, upon the conflict and strife in the middle east. Saturday’s opening night event “Times they are a-changing: the middle east meets the UK” commingled east and west, as eight poets read together. Throughout the evening, we journeyed widely through Damascus, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Serbia, Jerusalem and the former Yugoslavia.

Who delved into my homeIn my absence?Saw the blood on the curtains,Touched the door,Roamed the rooms.

- ‘Letters from Odysseus’, Nouri al-Jarrah

There was a preoccupation with surveillance and the invasion of privacy. Hyam Yared lamented, in a sultry French inflection, “very soon, the UN will be inspecting our orifices.” Her poetry uses the female body to depict the physicality and horrendous intimacy of the violence:

The sperm of history fecundates no tree. There are women like cities. Burnt. Their ovaries charred in each act of abandon.

The urgency and bitterness of violence emphasises the festival’s political dimension. There is no shying away from the gory and grotesque, as in Najwan Darwish’s chilling poem "The Nightmare Bus to Sabra and Shatila":

I saw them stuff my aunts into plastic sacksTheir hot blood pooled in the corners of the bags

The poem shifts from statement to negation—“(But I have no aunts)” —playing with our perception of truth and falsehood in order to reflect a situation where nightmares so easily become reality. Darwish’s prose-poem "Fabrication" addresses similar themes:

The whole thing is fabricated. Never have I believed the story that says you were slaughtered, and that your blood poured all the way to the Mediterranean only to be consumed by the sea. I’m sure the whole thing is fabricated.

It wasn’s not all the stuff of nightmares, however. After all, this year’s festival is hopefully named, "Imagining Peace." In response to Darwish, Seamus Cashman declaratively asserted, “Peace is not fabricated.” Believing we should “speak out,” Cashman’s poetry is Keatsian in spirit—if we “deal with Truth, Beauty will follow.”

Beauty abounded. Fiona Sampson’s mellifluous mood-piece "Night Fugue" began strikingly with the image of a barn owl with its “wide human face” and “body like music.” The poem ends with a movement out of the darkness: the “hundreds of small warm creatures” which “go intently through you towards daylight.”

Day two offered a pleasing balance: two Arab-American poets, Elnaz Abinader and Lisa Suhair Majaj, with two Irish, Paul Durcan and Paul Muldoon; two women with two men. Humour was a common palliative to the horrors of war and pain. Durcan opened the afternoon with the comical ‘Diarrhoea Attack at Party Headquarters in Leningrad.’ Yet by the poem’s end, the light-hearted tone collapses into a solemn message: in the face of the atrocities of Afghanistan, there can be no “ignominy,” no room for such superfluous social mores as shame at bodily functions.

Suhair Majaj joked about how in a war-stricken country, there are “military-invasion days,” not snow days, whilst Abinader’s poem ‘This House My Bones’ was introduced casually as a guide on “How to invade a country.” However, its simple, poignant lines were felt to the core: “How can we pack anything if not everything?” picking up the themes of exile and dislocation of the previous evening.

Poetry International is an occasion for learning, sharing and understanding. The life of contemporary poetry is vibrantly celebrated and its everyday importance confirmed. As Hughes himself asserted in 1967 at the very first festival, “it is in poetry that we can refresh our hope.”

Poetry International 2010 runs at the Southbank Centre, London, until Sun 7 Nov. Click here for more information.