Poetry International, 39ste editie
The theme of the 39th Poetry International Festival 2008 (7th-13th June 2008) has now been announced: *City and Country*. Recently, the United Nations reported that in 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the human population will live in cities, and the balance is set to tip still further away from rural living and towards urban life. Urbanisation will fundamentally transform the relationship between the city and the countryside and have implications for both individuals and society as a whole. These implications and their potential impact on poetry will be explored during the festival through programmes, lectures, interviews and discussions dedicated to the subject.
The UK entry has been put together by guest editor Helen Mort whose introduction “Sparks” is well worth a look. She has picked poets who draw inspiration from the quotidian, most particulary from their local environments. Naturally this results in some fortuitous links to the festival theme. On a country theme, Andrew Greig’s ‘Nine Steps to the Shed’ contributes a vision of the primitive in the country – mammoths, fossils, the remnants of a previous age adding layers of depth to the
landscape, reminding us of the short time mankind has been on earth. In Kathryn Daszkiewicz’s ‘Tiger in Waiting’ there’s a contrast of inside with outside, home with external environment and the point the two coincide.
Clare Pollard’s ‘The City-dwellers lament’ conforms to the most distopian visions of urban life and the call of the wild:
/Baby screams twist through the block of flats,
then shattering sounds, domestic rows,
TVs saying: lines are open now.
The grey roads swill with rain,
and advertising hoardings turn,
then turn again,
as pizza heats through in my oven./
//
/Something wild calls in me, but no thing calls back.
Can’t stop these stupid, manic fantasies
of deep and pathless forests —
dells awash with bluebells, needles,
rabbit-flesh and pear-flesh;
bats cover the face of the moon
like carnival masks…/
And then there’s Michael Laskey’s intriguing poem, ‘Terminus’, in which the poet charmingly threatens to come back as a “faded floral curtain” overlooking an urban view of buildings which trap and enclose the viewer. In ‘Size of Southwell’ he shares his own intimate stretch of countryside, the views, the pollution. What’s noticeable about all of these ‘environmental’ poets is that their works explore both urban and
rural settings, it’s not that they’ve chosen for one or the other.
Australia
Philip Hammial
Belgium
Eddy Van Vliet
Portugal
José Miguel Silva
United Kingdom
Andrew Greig
Zimbabwe
Togara Muzanenhamo
Poem of the Week:
Philip Hammial: PREY
Clip of the Month:
Mark Boog: OUR ABSENCE
(bron: persbericht Poetry international“)
