News
‘Er is geen slotregel, maar die komt er wel’ – Zeyar Lynn (Myanmar)
dinsdag 5 juni 2018 10:06
We moesten er even van bijkomen, zo mooi. Poetry International kijkt terug op een in meerdere opzichten fantastische 49e editie van het Poetry International Festival Rotterdam. De dichters die de afgelopen week in Rotterdam de wereldomspannende Nation of Poetry bezielden brachten sterke en indringende poëzie waarin de actualiteit – die van dichtbij, van ver weg, die van overal - zichtbaar en hoorbaar aanwezig was en waaruit een pleidooi sprak voor vrijheid, verbeelding en inclusiviteit. Het publiek werd meegezogen door verhelderende gesprekken en interviews, door ingetogen en meeslepende voordrachten en bijzondere cross-overs en samenwerkingen tussen festivaldichters, dansers en muzikanten, en het deed dat in groten getale.
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alles wat zich liet zeggen bleef haken
'er is wat zich laat zeggen en blijft haken', zei Marie de Quatrebarbes en alles wat zich liet zeggen bleef haken. De krachtige woorden van Alí Calderon's 'Mexicaanse Democratie', van Danez Smiths 'Geacht wit Amerika' en Dolores Dorantes' chirurgisch precieze verwoording van hoe de werkelijkheid het kwetsbare individu bij de strot kan grijpen, ze kwamen aan en lieten niemand onberoerd. De muzikaliteit van Aurélia Lassaque, de expressiviteit van Nora Gomringer en Safiya Sinclair, de doorwrochte poëtische werkelijkheden van Miguel-Manso en Goran Čolakhodžić hielden de bezoekers op het puntje van hun stoel. De bijna serene maar zeer onverbiddelijke zinnen van Ida Börjel en Sonia Bueno en de spectaculaire taalbouwwerken van Christian Bök namen de zalen van Theater Rotterdam in bezit, net als de poëtische logica van Nachoem Wijnberg, de lucide poëtische werkelijkheid van Joost Baars en de lenige en speelse zinnen van Marlene van Niekerk. De politiek geladen lyriek van Maria Stepanova en Zeyar Lynn zette aan het denken en in de originele observaties en de tijdens het slotprogramma life getekende poëtische vergezichten van Lies Van Gasse werd opnieuw getoond hoe The Nation of Poetry de plek is waar we allemaal thuis horen.
Vanaf de opening van de Poetry + Art in de Kunsthal op zondag 27 mei tot en met het zonovergoten zondagochtendleesfeest in Arboretum Trompenburg op 3 juni ontspon zich een week van aangename en inspirerende ontmoetingen tussen de dichters, hun werk en de vele toeschouwers die eerst de Rotterdamse Schouwburg en daarna Theater Rotterdam Witte de With, maar ook de vele galeries en kunstinstellingen van de Poetry + Art Gallery Tour en andere locaties aandeden. Knallende hoogtepunten waren het openingsprogramma The Nation of Poetry - de bijzondere eerste kennismaking met de festivaldichters, ontroerende en schurende films, dans van Uri Eugenio en de muziek van Binkbeats –, De staat van de Poëzie, dat een weelderig en veranderend landschap toonde, verloren grootheden als Menno Wigman en F. Starik herdacht en waarin Radna Fabias de C. Buddingh'-prijs 2018 ontving, en Cross-over Closing op zaterdagavond waarin dichters onvermoede kanten van zichzelf lieten zien en zinderende samenwerkingen aangingen met dansers en muzikanten.
De rust is even neergedaald over de Nation of Poetry, maar nog nagloeiend van de dichterlijke warmte van deze week worden de eerste regels alweer gepreveld die de weg naar het 50ste Poetry International Festival in 2019 nog even nieuwsgierig verkennen. Wij danken de fantastische dichters van het 49e Poetry International Festival, alle partners die het festival financieel mogelijk hebben gemaakt, 010 Says it all, Woorden Worden Zinnen en Paginagroots, alle galeriehouders, kunstinstellingen, kunstenaars en gidsen van Poetry + Art 2018, alle mensen van techniek en catering, Theater Rotterdam Witte de With en last maar zeker not least alle VRIJWILLIGERS!
Tot het 50e Poetry International Festival Rotterdam
'What happened to the future'
Theater Rotterdam / 28 mei – 2 juni 2019
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49th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam
Wednesday 21 February 2018 12:02
Any meeting with a poem carries a certain danger, as those few lines just may stick with you for the rest of your life. Before you know it, you’ve got another goal. One you never even knew would suit you. Suddenly boundaries have to be moved, aspirations realised, visions expressed, and dreams chased. Yes, you need to watch out for those poets. For the 49th time they will convene in Rotterdam, their bags full of those kinds of astonishing, hope-inspiring, rage-inducing, uniting and disjointing lines. Every poem is a world unto itself. So there’s a lot to discover, meet, discuss and celebrate at the 49th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam. Let’s meet between the lines!
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*** I need to understand shit! I just need to engage! (Danez Smith)
From 29 May to 3 June, Poetry International will bring a choice selection of poetic voices to Rotterdam. The festival poets of the 49th PIFR are younger than ever and unafraid to wade into many a topical discussion with their poetry, whether it concerns the environment or sustainability, racism, diversity and gender, massively destabilising violence, or politics where madness sometimes seems to reign supreme. With their assertive, challenging poetry, American poets Patricia Lockwood and Danez Smith, the Spanish Sonia Bueno, the Mexican Alí Calderón and Dolores Dorantes or the Russian Maria Stepanova all speak out freely and incisively.
All poets will read at least once, with the readings always starting at 20:00. Beforehand, each night of the festival at 18:30, poets will be interviewed by Hassnae Bouazza, Daan Doesborgh, Janita Monna or Tsead Bruinja. For the special events later in the evening, festival poets join guest poets and speakers to explore exciting phenomena in contemporary poetry.
Every night from 21:00 onwards, the festival features stimulating special events in which festival poets tackle exciting themes along with special guests: Van tevoren bedacht (Conceived in Advance) focusses on writing or performing according to a specific concept; De staat van de poëzie showcases the vitality of contemporary Dutch-language poetry, crowning the night with the C. Buddingh' Prize ceremony; in Poetry of a Nation / A Nation of Poetry, poets discuss work that embraces or rejects national identity; and Cross-over Closing blends poetry with other arts like music, cinema, dance and visual media.
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Festival poem
anti-bird, mechanical american,
you, without a name in my tongue,
how come when I look at you I see myself
as a desert-dweller
whilst hovering above the city
where I live, you
reduce to sand,
powerful hand
taker of lives
where there is hardly any water,
from this water-land
I address you thirstily,
you don’t answer, extension
of what is less nameless
all the more undetectable
and therefore as monopolic as
death, where is your bzzzzzzz
when I close the curtains, turn off
the light tonight, which makes me sleep-
less, to all appearances recover
for yet another day
being of value in this desert-
economy, which you,
demiurge, high up
above us, grains, create and oversee?
Festival poem
“20.-Turn around and the sky opens its mouth. You have disappeared among us. This is a book that does not exist. We’ve got you surrounded. Sky and death. Sky and blood. Perfection and pain. We are yours when you believe you’re devouring us. We are yours with our mouths closed. Instruments of your phonation. We do not differentiate. We jump through the hoop of the sky. We are space and we are surface. The sky has a body that walks. The path has been covered in blood.”
Festival poem
SO LITTLE DEPENDS
you prefer the corner, the hidden place
the foliage, the shadow, the room, this
sack of wheat: textual gold
spread out on the old secretaire of the real
outside the blaze of the wood
the quick glazing of the fields
here inside, less leeway – another
panorama: simply the presence
uninhabited by a person, mystery without
attribute or function
always the undoing of a heart
the industrial cultivation of figures
and leftover sadness and days for the body that writes
in the calaboose of a vast morning
radiant with drops of honey
as the cats lick Saturday
and sitting, like a gold frog, you let yourself add to the world
(but why) another poem
Festival poem
Have forgotten
Have forgotten
The name like the horses
For the things on which the cups
On the shelf back there in the drive
Am standing naked
Hair loose am wearing your ring
A man coming each day
Like a what are they called
Wants to weigh me little one
Strokes across my cheek I think
Murderer you thief you leave that you
Please continue never stopping
Am smelling of arnica old woman
They call to me I ask them
who do you mean by that
Am standing naked in the driveway
Have forgotten
Festival poem
Center of the world
The meek inherit nothing.
God in his tattered coat
this morning, a quiet tongue
in my ear, begging for alms,
cold hands reaching up my skirt.
Little lamb, paupered flock,
bless my black tea with tears.
I have shorn your golden
fleece, worn vast spools
of white lace, glittering jacquard,
gilded fig leaves, jeweled dust
on my skin. Cornsilk hair
in my hems. I have milked
the stout beast of what you call America;
and wear your men across my chest
like furs. Stick-pin fox and snow-
blue chinchilla: They too came
to nibble at my door,
the soft pink tangles I trap
them in. Dear watchers in the shadows,
dear thick-thighed fiends. At ease,
please. Tell the hounds who undress
me with their eyes – I have nothing
to hide. I will spread myself
wide. Here, a flash of muscle. Here,
some blood in the hunt. Now the center
of the world: my incandescent cunt.
All hail the dark blooms of amaryllis
and the wild pink Damascus,
my sweet Aphrodite unfolding
in the kink. All hail hot jasmine
in the night; thick syrup
in your mouth, forked dagger
on my tongue. Legions at my heel.
Here at the world’s red mecca,
kneel. Here Eden, here Bethlehem,
here in the cradle of Thebes,
a towering sphinx roams the garden,
her wet dawn devouring.
Festival poem
We did everything in reverse order:
your legs fell like branches from the sky,
I drew your arms into my palms
and I took you by the elbows
like a guardian angel.
Then you shrank, breasts and hips disappearing,
your jawline sharpened, and you skipped around in gardens.
You splashed around in a paddling pool, spun around in too-wide a skirt,
walked on Mum’s high heels, your spoon ready to scrape out the cake bowl.
While your hair thinned and disappeared, finally your head grew,
until you became ever rounder and softer, your little eyes blue and new again,
but deeper in their sockets,
and back into me you disappeared.
Festival poem
Ulysses
Give you a name?
Give you a name when you dance in the dark with great hounds in empty streets?
Give you a name when you stroll to the river dressed for night in the glaring sun, spurning the men who were doomed the moment they thought they possessed you?
I’ll offer you oranges
and to peel them a knife no bigger than a thumb
an ivory knife I’ll steal when the battle is over
a dead man’s gift to another woman
and you’ll be bound to think of her, of her cold sheets, of the hole in her pocket
traded for the knife
I’ll offer you blades of grass that cling to the soles of my feet
from shoots that grow there, where the bodies lie
standing tall as sentinels at the precise point their retreat ended
Festival poem
While putting some things away, I recognized her dog's expression in Clint Eastwood’s
it was a jagged porcelain cup, in the Japanese cup that
first came the kids
then there was a parakeet she was telling: it's late, go home
she was afraid when I was alone and night was falling
the month prior, she remembers I called her one night, from the empty park; the lights were flickering but I was drunk
while the piece of furniture falls apart, the one where she keeps the Japanese cups that ‘granny’ gave her; preciously, I conserve my tears where I imagine them
Festival poem
The fat one, with the switch
stare so long they gotta growl
faggot to justify it. that f-sound
just an excuse to bite they lips.
dicks hard as consonants in dickies.
question mark thick, you fuck they head up.
damn desire that sneaks you into laundry rooms
strikes you in the street out of fear of itself.
they disrupt themselves with your body
& call it your fault, bury you in night
but darkness is temporary dirt.
with the sun comes the news of you.
another. another.
i wanted to write an ode. it still could be.
but first, a little silence for the ones
hurried into after cause some dude
felt his blood rush on sight
& it was the first time he knew he had blood.
not even the razor taught him that
not his daughter's birth
not his clotted mammy, not Christ.
just like a man. he saw god
& instinct told him kill it.
Festival poem
Nothing else, but just a wil to live
There’s my beloved cat, Ping Ping.
There’re dead lice, dead nits & dead arrows at the front line.
There’s a multitude of lives in a world of wounds.
There’re plasters to redress those wounds.
There’s an anti-mosquito repellent.
There’s a God, having always been delayed, who insists,
“Tell me in advance.”
There’re cellophane boxes for take-away.
There’s this-actor-for-this-role in life.
There’s shooting from the back.
There’s a toddler clinging to her mother’s chest in a bullet.
There’re those who have never heard of nation-states.
There’s a traditional spice that doesn’t go well with Ajinomoto.
There’s the media who knows the rights, but nothing else.
There’s you, of course.
There’s hunger.
There’s fumbling for the right characters on a computer keyboard.
There’s the will to survive. It doesn’t matter how.
My regal female cat Yomiya, Queen of the Household,
having had a spat with her last breath, screams,
“I will live on”
before she makes peace with the world & herself.
There’s no bottom line yet, but
it will be there.
Festival poem
The last songs are assembling,
Soldiers of a ghostly front:
Escaping from surrounded places
A refrain or two make a break for it
Appearing at the rendez-vous
Looking about them, like the hunted.
How stiffly unbending they are
Running water won’t soften them now!
How unused they are to company
The words don’t form as they ought.
But their elderly, skillful hands
Pass the cartridges round,
And until first light their seeing fingers
Reassemble Kalashnikovs,
They draw, with sharp intake of breath
From wounds, the deeply lodged letters –
And towards morning, avoiding checkpoints,
They enter the sleepless city.
In times of war, they fall silent.
When the muses roar, they fall silent.
Festival poem
SOMEONE who is not me
and who is entirely identical to myself
dogs my heels and trots behind me.
It’s someone else who speaks my words
and ratifies my actions
my memories are recalled by another
and someone else looks out through my eyes.
Someone whose alternative I am
lurks in the mirror
and mimics one by one
my every imperceptible expression.
I am not the image and precise reflection
of myself but an image of the other.
Festival poem
the word
knows that over
wrought by use it threads
in the factor y it is more
a hermetic seal and
spools lie
inside each
tin delicacies for such sweet tongues
it knows that now and
then one knows a
hard stone
feels
Festival poem
The stick and the drum
You can turn your soul
into a stick.
You can stretch out your skin
till it’s tight as a drum.
You strike slowly at first
until the rhythm takes on
a will of its own.
As for us,
we’ll dance before you, utterly naked,
until our sweat becomes
a swimmable river.
We’ll pull you out at the last moment
– just before drowning –
but we can’t turn you back
into what you once were:
sound skin
and an invisible soul.
Festival poem
First time
Saying you are what I have
because you will never again
have anything else.
The first time you have to behave
as if it is the first time.
Good advice you give
to the one you only
have one of.
Or a stranger to you
who asks on the street if you can spare
five minutes,
like a thousand times
before.
The joy of suddenly being able
to see more deeply
is lightness.
That becomes free fall when
it no longer matters what
you do not see or hear, what
becoming on your own
is.
Festival poem
WHAT IS THE ZOO FOR WHAT
The word ‘zoo’ is a zoo for the zoo.
A fountain is a zoo for water, the song
is a zoo for sound, the harmonica
is a zoo for the hot breath of Neil Young,
vagina is a zoo for baby.
Baby, girl baby, is a zoo for vagina.
The rose is a zoo for the smell of the rose,
the smell of the rose rattles its cage,
the zookeeper throws something bleeding
to it, the something bleeding is not enough,
a toddler fell into the cage of the rose,
the toddler was entirely eaten. His name
was Rilke, it was in all the papers.
A Little Pine Box is a zoo for him now,
it said in all the papers.
Then all the kids started doing it. Falling
into the violet’s cage, approaching the cave
where the smell of violets slept, getting
their whole head clawed off by it.
Neil Young did it to a buttercup
and his face got absolutely mauled.
The music that was piped into the zoo
let all the longing escape from it
and it ran riot over the earth, full
of the sight of the smell of a buttercup
rearranging the face of Neil Young,
attacking pets at random, attacking
me in my bed as I slept, attacking
the happy wagging ends of my poems.
Can I put Neil Young in a poem.
Will he get trapped in there forever.
My voice is a zoo right now for this,
and this paces very much inside it,
it would like very much to escape
and eat hot blood again and go home,
and right down to the restless way
I walk I am an argument against zoos.
Zoo is very cruel. Let everything out
and live in the wild. Let it hunt for itself
again. Get the stink of human hand off it.
But the hand is a zoo for hold.
Festival poem
Arks and zoos now harbour the remnants of our refrains. What poetry can we imagine, when poetry itself has gone extinct? Must we look for it in the soot of our burnt books? Must we decipher it in the trampled pastures of rapeseed near Barbury Castle? Must we discover it by calculating pi to a googol of binary digits? Must we extract its requiem from the iambic pulses of the Cepheids? We have heard its flutter and wow but once, emanating from the precincts of Tau Sagittarii. We have dialed our radios to the appointed frequency in megahertz, but never again does the call-sign chime; instead, we hear a dark roar, as if from a spectre, trapped inside a Claude mirror at the edge of the universe. We look for this ghost, but the blind glass reflects back at us only a blank stare, made from the most durable isotope of nothingness. It ignores us, like a sphinx of black quartz.
Festival poem
mountain ranges were, the mountains’ quiet
quiet echo; flag on Mount Everest
over the frozen corpses, over tons
of garbage left behind along
the trails on the streets of Berlin
right-wing extremists’ twenty-two-thousand placards
two weeks after the elections
still especially dense near the Jewish Museum
and the party leader’s manner of straddling
the motorcycle beneath the headline Gas geben
where brown leads blue
in the shadow of the Hungarian mob; over
the majority of German civilians who
were forced by the Allies to see Die Todesmühlen’s
film sequences from Dachau, Bergen-Belsen
Nordhausen, Auschwitz afterwards
denied responsibility, did not
know of any death camps; there were: echoes
echo was, echo from Budapest’s silenced
National Theatre towards The Freedom Theatre Jenin
