Poetry International roundup—celebrating, remembering, creating

If the imagined ‘peace’ of Poetry International were a place, it would have Kristiina Ehin as its ‘Faerie Queene.’ On day three, this Estonian folklorist wore a stunning dress embroidered with the names of her “fore-mothers,” keeping her ancestral family tree alive and “free from cobwebs.” Celebrating a world of mythology and the bond between man and nature, the audience was offered an imaginative escape from events such as the Russian bombing of Tallinn in the second world war. One tender poem related a Boeing 757 falling in love with a heron: it wishes to “leave its everyday tedious work” and join the bird, with its feathers “the colourless colour of dreams.”

Elaine Feinstein’s latest collection focuses on a different landscape. In Cities, she imagines her ancestors in the capitals that “beckon stories from me,” such as Budapest or Paris. Imagination has its foundations in memory. Like Ehin, her poetry sought to eschew “bland everyday disorder” for something more creative and affirmative: a “wild carnival of poetry.”

The Southbank Centre's artist-in-residence, Simon Armitage, introduced his Poetry Parnassus Project on day four. Inspired by the upcoming London Olympics, he hopes to hold a giant gala event including poets from every Olympic country. That’s currently 205. Armitage is aware of the boldness of his “crazy ambition,” joking about the danger of creating some bonanza where “the Tower of Babel meets the Eurovision Song contest.” However, judging by the entertaining richness of the night’s sampler event, in which poets from six continents participated, the project seems set to triumph.

On the evening of day four, Canadian Anne Carson read exclusively from her latest work Nox. The concertina-style book is Carson’s masterful epitaph for her recently deceased brother, mixing media from phone conversations, dictionary extracts, poems, and everyday tidbits. Here is the ultimate in personal, domestic loss. A word-for-word translation of 'Catullus 101,' an elegy written for his dead brother, is strung along the left-hand pages. In a way, Carson conquers the problems of translation; she focuses on the full life of each word, its etymology and uses, thereby sharing its “passionate, slow surface.”

Wednesday saw tribute to Scotland’s first national poet or ‘Makar’: Edwin Morgan who passed away in August, aged 90. Speaking an astonishing number of languages, from Russian to Hungarian, Morgan was a true internationalist—a fitting figure to be remembered at the festival. Scottish pals such as Roddy Lumsden, Richard Price and Jackie Kay spoke affectionately of “Eddie,” and read some of his innovative and inimitable work. Lumsden courageously declaimed some of the more difficult poems, such as ‘Canedolia’, a “concrete Scotch fantasia.” It exists as a rambunctious mix of place-names, puns and coinages—pure delight in the verbal:

what is it like there? och it's freuchie, it's faifley, it's wamphray, it's frandy, it's sliddery.

Later Benno Plassmann performed some of Morgan’s poetic reconstructions of ‘Tales from Munchausen,’ the “grandest of storytellers.” The evening ended with the sound of a saxophone—Tommy Smith’s melodious “lament to Morgan's memory and genius.” As the night drew to a close it was impossible not to feel how much is possible with words, their power to cherish and heal, mourn and immortalise.

The weekend began early on day seven with a unique collaboration between Suheir Hammad and the audio-visual group Tashweesh. Spontaneity reigned as Hammad called upon the audience to pick poem numbers, her readings embellished by live-streaming multimedia projections and sound. The thrilling performance enacted her assertion: “Poetry is the experience of it.”

The final event of the festival brought together four European voices. Antonella Anedda asked whether language can be innocent, and questioned its power during catastrophes such as the Gulf war or conflict in Kosovo:

a few dry stumps of phrase boxed in humdrum language

It is the morning silence that actually becomes a “sign of peace,” when “dawn nudges us into life.”

After the expansive explorations and incessant journeying of the past nine days, there was a kind of peace to be had in settling down. Yolanda Castano Pereira’s poem ‘Apples from Tolstoy’s Garden’ related her widespread travels, but ended with a simple wish: “I want to go back home.” Home for the poet and audience is perhaps as the poet-philosopher Adonis described, “an internal peace,” which can be found in anything from a place, person or experience. Haris Vlavianos described writing poetry as “building a house,” creating a “familiar, intimate place.” As the festival has witnessed, poetry can not only explore and unite other worlds and cultures, but also provide the home, the peace we have been searching for.

To read other reports from Poetry International 2010, click here and here