Poetry Parnassus on Friday and Saturday: Lost Geographers, Shifting Continents, Poetic Emergencies and Revolution

Poetry Parnassus, this past week at London's Southbank Centre, was a really extraordinary experience and one which I wish hadn't come to an end quite so soon. I took in a good many events, but I wish that I could have somehow gone to even more, or all of them...

On Friday, I spent about half the day at the festival. My first event was the Geography For The Lost workshop with Bulgaria's Kapka Kassabova. I'd chosen this because poetry of travel and place is one of my chief enthusiasms and the prime inspiration for a lot of my own writing. I wanted to find different ways to approach this kind of writing, and the workshop was really stimulating. We read a variety of poems and approached travel poetry as descriptions of place, as reflections of relationships, and so on. It was encouraging to see what a variety of people had joined this small workshop, too - maybe unsurprisingly given its nature, between us we'd been born on or lived on virtually every continent.

The star event of Poetry Parnassus was in the evening - Continental Shift, featuring the following poets:

Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)
Seamus Heaney (Ireland)
Bill Manhire (New Zealand)
Kay Ryan (USA)
Jo Shapcott (UK)
Kim Hyesoon (South Korea)
Togara Muzanenhamo (Zimbabwe)

This was an incredible lineup. I had seen Seamus Heaney a couple of times before, but he is a delightful reader and he always seems to choose different poems. I found his reading of the Song of Amergin, and 'I Am Raftery' in Irish, really moving, as were his own 'Two Lorries' and 'A Peacock's Feather'. Wole Soyinka had an incredible presence and body of work, only disturbed by the fact that his own mobile phone went off during one of his poems; a pretty hilarious moment. (He muttered something like "Oh my God, if this is who I think it is...") Seeing two such elder statesmen of poetry (sorry for the cliche, but what else can you call these two Nobel Prize winners?) at the same event was very exciting. As well, I was totally disturbed and fascinated by Kim Hyesoon, especially 'The Sublime Kitchen'. Bill Manhire's 'Erebus Voices', about the Air New Zealand/Mt Erebus disaster, made me cry. Togara Muzanenhamo was, I think, a late addition, but superb. He had undergone an odyssey, as two years previously he'd not been able to get a visa for the UK, and for this event his visa had only come through at the last minute. Such experiences weren't uncommon for a good few of the poets at Poetry Parnassus, I think, and apparently some failed to get a visa, again.

Seamus Heaney at Continental Shift:

On Saturday morning I went to Bill Manhire's workshop about memory exercises, which was fruitful. A few meaningful coincidences, too; he made reference to Wallace Stevens's 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which I hadn't been very familiar with previously but had read just a couple of days before the festival. I then caught some of the free readings in the Clore Ballroom, sponsored by various publishers and journals. I loved the poem by Zambia's Kayo Chingonyi about cassette tapes - great for those of us over a certain age - and it was lovely to hear George Szirtes read 'Mapping the Delta', and to meet him briefly. (Another coincidence: on Sunday, at Poetry Review's stand where they had a free Lucky Dip, I picked up a copy of 'Mapping the Delta', to my delight.)

I also paid a visit to the Emergency Poet, which was so nice. Deborah Alma invites patients into her old ambulance, asks questions such as "Do you enjoy walking by the sea and how often do you get to do it?", "Are there any types of poetry you are allergic to?" and "What books would be on your desert island list?", and then makes suitable poetic prescriptions. I got an excerpt from T S Eliot's 'East Coker', and Wendell Berry's 'The Peace of Wild Things', both of which were quite spot-on to ease my nervous disposition. Deborah Alma also works with dementia patients using poetry, so I felt that there was a serious intent behind the fun.

The Emergency Poet's ambulance:

A little later, there was another amazing event, 'They Won't Take Me Alive: Women and Revolution'. This was a panel and reading, featuring Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua), Chiranan Pitpreecha (Thailand), and Farah Didi (Maldives). All have in one way or another been politically involved and used poetry to bring attention to the issues of their countries and the personal impact of oppression, war and loss. Again, I was really struck by how powerfully meaningful poetry is in such countries, and how even writing poetry can be a brave, dangerous act. Amanda Hopkinson read poetry by Alaide Foppa, who was "disappeared" in Guatemala in the 1980s. When 'Exile' was read, many people in the room were in tears, including myself.

I then had a quick drink with a friend, and we discussed Eliot and Pound while overlooking the Thames, and then I called it a day for poetry. I'll write about Sunday at Poetry Parnassus shortly, but must call it a night, now!

Poetry Parnassus, Katharine Kilalea and 'Hennecker's Ditch'

Poetry Parnassus is coming to London this summer, for a glorious week starting on 26 June, mostly at the Southbank Centre. It's all part of the Cultural Olympiad surrounding the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. I feel a bit like "forget the sports - bring on the culture." I'm a Canadian, so the Winter Olympics are more my cup of tea, and sport is frankly pretty disillusioning these days; will an entire weightlifting team or two get disqualified for steroid use? (As well as my disinterest in nationalism, which seems to be what it's mainly about, there is the fact that Canadians never quite recovered from the disgrace of Ben Johnson being stripped of his gold medal for 100 metres at the Seoul Olympics. I was eight or nine years old and like everyone else there, will never forget it...)

But an entire week of international poetry celebrations - now that is exciting. I've bought a few tickets for events and may buy more, and there are a lot of free events, too. Wole Soyinka and Seamus Heaney appearing at the same event; a Poetry Factory and Edible Poetry; Ted Hughes translated into French, Greek and Turkish; a Word From Africa event to finish off the festival with African poetry, music and performance; and that's only a few of the events. It is set to be the largest poetry festival ever staged in the UK, and I presume one of the largest ever in the world. I think that the presence of so many international poets, whose first language is not English, will be particularly important in proving that poetry is an incredibly living and powerful art form.

Poets from most of the Olympic countries will be represented at Poetry Parnassus, due to an unprecedented manifesto to bring poetic representatives from as many countries as possible. I was delighted to learn that Katharine Kilalea will be representing South Africa. She is a young poet (my age or a little younger, I think) who has lived in the UK for several years. I heard her read a few years ago at a Penned in the Margins event at Aubin & Wills in Notting Hill and she kindly signed her collection, One Eye'd Leigh, for me. I remember her as one of the most mesmerising poetry readers that I have heard. It's not quite accurate to say that she read, because if I remember correctly, she recited all of her poems by heart.

One of Kilalea's poems, 'Hennecker's Ditch', can be found on this link from a Carcanet Press blog (her publishers):


HENNECKER'S DITCH (Katharine Kilalea)


There is also an interesting commentary on the poem, which I remember as 'Dear Circus'. I won't attempt to add my own, as my analysis hat is not currently on (this is where I miss being a literature student). I do remember that it struck me as being very Waste Land, and when I asked her about this afterwards she confirmed the impression. I will never forget Kilalea's recital of the poem. She looked no more than 22, had her leg in a cast and kept her eyes fixed on her audience while leaning a little crazily on a crutch. It was pretty hypnotic. The poem itself is wonderful and evocative.