Short reading: three poets

At this short reading you will see three poets in one hour: Athena Farrokhzad (Sweden/Iran), Aigerim Tazhi (Kazakhstan) and Cornelia Hülmbauer (Austria). They will read a selection of their poems. Host: Fiep van Bodegom. 

The work of poet, playwright, translator and literary critic Athena Farrokhzad (1983) boils with rage, but it also resonates with concern, as one constantly gives way to the other. She believes that stories are the only legacy that really matters. Family therefore plays a key role in her work, as in her extraordinary collection White Blight, in which a family confronts the past in conversations about memories, revenge and language. In the poem Letter to a Warrior, written to her unborn daughter, Farrokhzad considers what it means to create new life, to feel it in you and to contemplate the lives that went before. Rage is also a dominant emotion in Europe, Where Have You Misplaced Love?, a collection of poems that can be read as a call to action to take better care of each other. Above all, however, they remind us never to stop telling stories.

Aigerim Tazhi (1981) is a Kazakh poet whose poetry impresses and will move you. The profusion of images Tazhi conjures up makes her poetry a compelling call to reconsider the principles behind her world of magic. In her collection Paper-thin Skin she sketches a miraculous world that nonetheless seems to be completely watertight. However fictional characters, creatures and landscapes may be, they are photographically lifelike from head to toe, each with its own self-evident logic. Scenes of everyday domestic life metamorphose into almost unimaginable surrealism. Her poetry is thus one of twists and turns; her poems are portals to places that could be anywhere around us. Everywhere, and yet, always just out of reach. Tazhi's poetry is one of a reversal of roles, a depersonalized narrative where the author's perspective is often missing and has been exchanged for that of perception. 'Work of stunning originality' (John Butler).

Cornelia Hülmbauer (1982) writes poetry, short prose and radio plays. Her poems are emotionally charged, with sentences that seek the precise words to express something intangible, and generally ominous. Searching language, simple, featuring dialect and references to folk songs and counting rhymes; her sentences appear mainly to show how difficult it is to say things accurately. This is a serious task when it comes to the gulf between remembering and forgetting, or the harm people do to each other. Often, an ‘I’ will address a ‘you’ in a conversation that hints at wider engagement, like the imbalance in male-female relations. A fine example of this is the series Zyklus V, which is above all about the female body in the social space, and about the female voice in our society. Poems are often set in families, a context that is comforting, but is also infected by secrets and domestic violence. Threat combined with cool humour make for work that is multi-layered and full of surprises.