Poetry International 2014: "It's Important That Poets Be Awake In Their Times"

Carolyn Forché giving the Poetry Society Annual Lecture 2014 at Southbank, London. Photo © Clarissa Aykroyd, 2014


Poetry International, at London's Southbank, ran from Thursday 17 July to Monday 21 July. The festival was founded in 1967 by Ted Hughes and takes place every couple of years - in 2012 it was the amazing Poetry Parnassus.

On Thursday I went to the launch event, which featured the rather astonishing and diverse lineup of Nikola Madzirov (Macedonia), Anne Michaels (Canada), Kutti Revathi (India), Carolyn Forché (US), Mohammed El Deeb (Egypt), Robert Hass (US) and Ana Blandiana (Romania). Nikola Madzirov opened the reading and I was absolutely thrilled to see him: his collection of selected English translations, Remnants of Another Age, has left lines and images with me that I will never forget. (More on Madzirov in another blog post soon...) For the non-English language poets in this event, the translations were projected overhead while they read in their own language, and I found this worked well - you can absorb the meaning while also experiencing the sensory and emotional power of the original words. Madzirov reads beautifully with a kind of occasional tempo rubato and gestures which form an organic whole with the words. When he read 'Fast Is the Century', he went over to English for the last few (heart-stopping) lines. It was a thrill like a phone call from a country you've never visited.


Fast is the century.
Faster than the word.
If I were dead, everyone would have believed me
when I kept silent.


Anne Michaels read with heartfelt emotion from her Correspondences, which is an elegy for her father as well as remembrances of writers including Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs and Anna Akhmatova. It made me want to read more. Carolyn Forché was another poet who was really my reason for being at Poetry International and she read with a passion which I found both shy and forceful. Her poems included 'The Lightkeeper', 'The Ghost of Heaven' (about El Salvador, but a poem it took her decades to finally write) and another which I think was new. The other poets were also remarkable: Kutti Revathi read brave poems of the body, El Deeb brought us Arabic rap straight from the heart of the Arab Spring, Robert Hass read a lovely long poem in tribute to his friend Czeslaw Milosz, and Ana Blandiana's poems were both delicate and cutting. Afterwards I was able to meet Carolyn Forché, Nikola Madzirov and Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books - all were really gracious and interesting. I knew Nikola and Neil a little already from social media and they both remembered me when I introduced myself, which was very nice.

On Friday I went to the Poetry Translation Centre's event, which was the launch of the anthology My Voice, commemorating the PTC's first ten years. The PTC puts on some of my very favourite poetry events. In terms of diversity and vibrancy, their audiences are second to none. Theirs are the events where I am as likely to find myself sitting next to an Iranian woman or a Somali man as I am to see people as Western, white and middle-class as myself. Their readings really reflect London's communities, and as Sarah Maguire explained, she started the PTC partly because of her passion for poetry from Arabic, Somali and other languages and partly because she wanted to help make people from other cultures feel at home in the UK. The poets reading either originals or translations included Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi (Sudan), Reza Mohammadi (Afghanistan), Jo Shapcott and Mimi Khalvati, among others - an incredibly star-studded and international lineup. Like the anthology, the poems moved "from exile to ecstasy", and the former hit particularly hard - Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi's 'Lamps' had me in tears. It was a wonderful event, and the anthology (which I hope to review soon) looks amazing.

During the weekend I went to two events, the first of which was the launch of Modern Poetry In Translation's new issue. MPT was founded by Ted Hughes with Daniel Weissbort and its association with Poetry International has been particularly close on many occasions. We heard German poet Christine Marendon reading poems of nature and introspection including 'Evening Primrose' with translator Ken Cockburn, and Hubert Moore read his translations of the mysterious Iranian poet Bavar Rastin. Again I was there mainly for Nikola Madzirov, who was reading with his translator Peggy Reid. Poems such as 'The Perfection of the Forgotten Ones' suggested to me that his recent work may be even better than previous poems. Afterwards I saw a few poetry acquaintances, including MPT's own Sasha Dugdale, talked with Nikola about how his poetry has become a best-seller in Spanish-speaking countries, and also spoke with Peggy Reid (who, typically for those who know Nikola, prefaced her praise of his wonderful work with "He's such a lovely person".)

My last event was the Poetry Society Annual Lecture, this year by Carolyn Forché on 'The Poet as Witness'. This is, of course, her area of speciality, but I think that many in attendance weren't very familiar with her anthologies, her own poetry, and her championing of the idea of "poetry of witness". Forché is quite a big deal in North America but I have gathered she isn't that well known over here (even in poetry circles). She spoke of the international poetry reading she went to in Libya, in 2012, after the death of the dictator, where "the posters covered up the bullet holes". One of the poems Forché read there was 'The Colonel', probably her most famous poem - she said that she had been reluctant to read it in Libya, as it was about El Salvador, but she later realised that the Libyans had interpreted it as being about their own experiences under Gaddafi. When she read it for us, the auditorium went gradually into an absolute pin-drop silence which was eerie. In poetry of witness, she said, "the mark of experience is burned into the poem, and regardless of content, the mark remains legible." Speaking of the tragic life stories and extraordinary poems of Miklós Radnóti and Georg Trakl, she described "poetry of witness" as more a mode of reading, not of writing - writers don't set out to be poets of witness, but their experiences allow others to find that mark of extreme experiences. This poetry, said Forché, is frequently marked by (among others) characteristics such as: the experience of the self as fragmented; the past as another country; addressing the dead, War and Death as personified figures; and recognition of the failure of language and words. Speaking about her new anthology, Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001, she described how she had long thought poetry of witness to exist more in non-English traditions, but she found such marks of experience in many, if not most, English-language poets before the twentieth century, and in the war poets and others in the past hundred years. "It's important that poets be awake in their times," she said. I found the lecture very strong and moving, and I think it was particularly a revelation for those who didn't know her work.

So it was a lovely and inspiring few days of poetry events. And also, I got hugs from the finest Macedonian and Sudanese poets of their generations, and that's automatically a good weekend.

Poetry Parnassus on Sunday: Turkish 'Hawk In The Rain', Odessa to Kazakhstan, Translated Wonders and Word From Africa

The above picture is the 'World Record' desk in the Saison Poetry Library, where poets had in the course of the week signed their names and hand-written copies of their poems for posterity.

My first Poetry Parnassus event on Sunday was the Ted Hughes Celebration, featuring Christopher Reid, Simon Armitage, David Constantine, Helen Constantine and a Turkish translator whose name I have regrettably forgotten (anyone remember?). I especially loved hearing 'The Hawk in the Rain' in Turkish: the percussive syllables seemed to work really well for that poem. There was much discussion of Ted Hughes's work on Modern Poetry in Translation, which David and Helen Constantine have been editing, and this was a bit beyond my scope but translation was obviously a strong focus of Poetry Parnassus so it was all interesting. I enjoyed hearing Paul Eluard's poem 'Poisson' (Fish) in the original French and then in Hughes's translation. The discussion about Hughes's translation of Ferenc Juhász's 'The Boy Changed Into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets' was totally fascinating; he didn't know Hungarian, but somehow just knew that a previous translation was inadequate, and made his own (again...without knowledge of Hungarian!) which is considered masterful. (Is this hubris, or prophetic poetic vision? Given that we're talking about Ted Hughes, it could easily be either or both).

Before the start of this session, I spoke briefly with Akerke Mussabekova, who was Kazakhstan's poet at the festival and the youngest poetic delegate, and who I'd also met on Friday night when she arrived for Continental Shift with Carmela from Poet in the City, who had recognised me from Poet in the City events (Carmela, I'm very impressed that you remembered me!!). Akerke Mussabekova was a beautiful and tiny woman, a little shy but obviously happy to be there, and judging from her poem in the World Record anthology which accompanies the festival, she is a very talented poet.

After this, the Maintenant reading was drawing to a close in the Clore Ballroom just around when I got there, and I had just bought Ilya Kaminsky's Dancing In Odessa when I realised (completely by coincidence) that he was taking the stage. I sat in the audience and listened in wonder as he read like a wild-eyed sing-song Russo-Ukrainian-American Yeats x 1000. I looked around and saw quite a few others with eyes popping out of their heads and jaws slightly agape. Afterwards, Kaminsky signed the book for me. He had a very warm presence about him.

Subsequently, I caught some or more of the Banipal, Modern Poetry in Translation and Poetry Translation Centre readings. The latter, in particular, really amazed me. Sarah Maguire quite correctly and bravely stated that the white-middle-class-ivory-tower air of poetry in Britain doesn't reflect the vital nature of poetry around the world, and she and others with the Poetry Translation Centre have worked hard to bring African, Middle Eastern and Central Asian poets to a wider audience. Reza Mohammadi's poems totally transfixed me - he writes in Dari (modern Persian) and is originally from Afghanistan. His delivery transported me to somewhere much more remote and magical than the Clore Ballroom (although it was pretty good this past week) - he had the intense eyes and precise yet sweeping gestures of a prophet. It was thrilling to hear the Eritrean poet Ribka Sibhatu, and I was especially excited about the poems of Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi from Sudan, which are exquisitely beautiful. He was also kind enough to sign the chapbook of his poems after the session. We learned that due to current unrest in Sudan, many of his friends have been arrested and if he were in the country, he would probably be in prison as well. It was another sobering reminder of what poets and their ilk may go through in other countries.

Word From Africa was a wonderful conclusion to the festival. Earlier in the week, in the Saison Poetry Library, I had stood a few feet away while a distinguished older African poet recited his poem for a video recording, in French - it was a lovely moment. I found out on Sunday night that this was Paul Dakeyo, who read some more of his work, and who is an African poetic legend from Cameroon. His poems were incredibly beautiful and moving and it was wonderful that I could appreciate the French.

Paul Dakeyo reading during Word From Africa:

There were poets from various African countries, and the Bajan-British poet Dorothea Smartt (pictured above with Paul Dakeyo), and poets of African extraction who'd grown up in Britain, and so on - it gave a fantastic variety to the mix. I was joined by some friends and had a drink with them, so I'm afraid we were a bit distracted at this point, and later we went out to find a pub showing the Spain-Italy Euro 2012 final (which was good fun, though football is not my thing - how Canadian am I?). But we returned in the end for some Afro-Caribbean music by a funky little band (whose name also escapes me - anyone?). There were relatively few poetry/music survivors around at that point, and some of us were very bad dancers, but it was great fun. I longed to see Seamus Heaney suddenly appear and start grooving in front of the stage. I can imagine it happened...

There were too many highlights to name from Poetry Parnassus. As well as some of those I've mentioned, I was delighted to meet Simon Armitage on one of the staircases and to thank him for the hard work he'd done to get this event together. He seemed pleased and said that they were all planning to collapse at the end of the day. Simon, thank you again, and to everyone involved and especially the poets.

This was one of my cultural highlights of my London years and in terms of where my poetry appreciation is at, I don't think it could have come at a better time. I have lots of reading and writing to do!