A Report from Poetry International (London) 2017

Joy Harjo at Poetry International, October 2017


Ted Hughes founded the Poetry International festival in 1967, and its 50th anniversary celebration was on 14-15 October at Southbank Centre in London, where it all started.

I had hoped to attend more events at this year's Poetry International, but I've been very busy lately and couldn't manage to plan a whole weekend of poetry events; I still made it to a few, though. There was a particular focus this year on disappearing languages, and the first event I went to was called Seven Thousand Words for Human: Endangered Poetry. Translator and poet Stephen Watts asked "Is poetry an endangered language?" and pointed out that translation can either be colonising, or have a bringing-in effect. Joy Harjo, a Native American of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, read in her indigenous language and said "Part of coming home is the language." There were also wonderful readings by Nick Makoha and others from a variety of languages under threat, such as Luganda and Sardinian.

The Modern Poetry in Translation event on Saturday evening was partly to say goodbye to Sasha Dugdale as its editor - she is handing on the role to Clare Pollard. Sasha has done an incredible job in extending the reach of MPT during her years with the journal. There were amazing readings by the Syrian Kurdish poet Golan Haji, whose work I first discovered a few years ago now, and his translator Stephen Watts, who also read some of his own poetry.

On Sunday, the World Poetry Summit featured Joy Harjo (US), Sjón (Iceland), Yang Lian (China), Anne Carson (Canada), Claudia Rankine (US), Vahni Capildeo (Trinidad) and Arundhathi Subramaniam (India). Choman Hardi should have been there and at other events, but couldn't get out of Kurdistan due to the ongoing crisis there. We did hear recordings of her poems. All of the readers were excellent, but I was particularly moved by Joy Harjo singing her extraordinary poem 'Equinox' and by Claudia Rankine's contrasting readings from Citizen and Don't Let Me Be Lonely (the former sombre, the latter more hopeful.)

Coincidentally, at the World Poetry Summit I found myself sitting next to Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese, who I already knew a little and who is one of the world's foremost translators of contemporary Polish poetry. It was good to catch up, and after the readings we went to the Poetry Library's open day, which this year focused on the theme 'A Universal Language'.

Photos by Clarissa Aykroyd, 2017

Joy Harjo: 'She Had Some Horses'

Joy Harjo (photo by Joy Harjo - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23007154)


Mvskoke (Creek) Nation poet Joy Harjo recently won the Wallace Stevens Award, which is awarded by the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors for 'outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry'. I was pleased when I saw this news, because the famous poem 'She Had Some Horses' had made a great impression on me from the moment I read it.

I recommend the Poetry Foundation article on Joy Harjo, and the other fine poems by her that can be found there. Harjo writes out of a deep source of Native American identity, but 'She Had Some Horses' is also about female identity and it may have come to mind this week because of International Women's Day.

I am painfully aware that (as a woman and a writer) I read and write about a lot more male poets than female poets, and I would quite like to remedy that (although at the same time, I don't feel apologetic about who I do or don't read...) The fact that I'm aware of it indicates that I know there is a lack there. And 'She Had Some Horses' reminds me beautifully and painfully how disparate, but formative and profound, all the experiences and relationships are that are part of being a woman. It is one of those poems for which I would like to thank the poet.