Editorial: 1 June 2010

May 14, 2010 As you may have gathered from our festival blog and the official festival website, the theme of the festival this year is prose and its relationship to poetry. Explaining the difference between prose and poetry is not as easy as it might seem. We might associate rhyme, metre and verse forms with poetry; and yet most people acknowledge that these aren’t prerequisites of poetry. Do other factors, then, such as diction, tone, narrative, length and syntax differentiate between what is poetry and what is prose? Some may argue simply that prose is written in paragraphs and poetry line by line, but, as much of the writing in this issue proves, this observation can not be applied to prose poetry, a genre that has embraced the use of the paragraph, as Charles Simic notes in his essay ‘Prose poetry’. Written especially for Poetry International, his piece is an excellent starting-point for thinking about the interaction between the genres of prose and poetry, and their crossover point, prose poems, or, as Simic describes them, “flytraps for the imagination”.

Among the selection of work by our guest poets, you’ll find prose poems, such as Frisian poet Nyk de Vries’s short, quirky narrative pieces, and Lithuanian Eugenijus Ališanka’s punctuation-free, rhythmically tense ‘Godbone’ and ‘From the Case of Bones’. Extracts from Irish writer Thomas McCarthy’s The Last Geraldine Officer, a novel which combines poetry and prose, are also included. Poets including Antonio Gamoneda (Spain) and Kim Hyesoon (South Korea) write poems with long, prose-like lines, while guests such as Ewa Lipska (Poland), Erik Spinoy (Belgium), Hasso Krull (Estonia) and the prolific poet, prose-writer and playwright Jon Fosse (Norway), whose play I Am the Wind will be performed during the festival by the National Theatre Company of Oslo, favour shorter lines in their poetry.

The festival will also include an event ‘All in one breath: The influence of prose on poetry’, introduced here in an article by Janita Monna. The festival poets were asked to name a favourite novel, and by coincidence Kamran Mir Hazar (Afghanistan) and Carlos López Degregori (Peru) both chose Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. Ursula Andkjaer Olsen (Denmark) and Christian Hawkey (USA) also converged in their choice of Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett as their favorite trilogy. On the evening of Monday 14 June, in discussion with Toef Jaeger, the poets will elaborate on the ways these novels influenced their work.

In celebration of the launch of the USA domain on PIW this year, the festival also has a special focus on poetry from America. The festival kicks off on Friday 11 June with Rotterdam poets reminiscing about the Holland-America cruiseship line, and the American theme continues throughout the week. Several events will be focused on American poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), whom PIW Belgium editor Tom Van de Voorde discusses in his essay ‘Wallace Stevens, a Dutchman among the Americans’. The line-up of festival poets includes Katia Kapovich (Russian/USA), Christian Hawkey (USA),  C.K. Williams (USA) and Michael Palmer (USA), and Katharine Coles from our partner organisation, the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, will be talking about the PIW USA domain and contemporary American poetry in an afternoon talk. Her article ‘The state of American poetry is lively’ is published here, and provides a personal and passionate look at the diverse and multiple currents running through the USA poetry world today.

In this issue of PIW, you’ll also find interviews of five of the guest poets, an article by Maria Barnas introducing the artists’ film programme she has curated for the festival, and an essay on Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s bilingualism, which will be the focus of an event on Tuesday 15 June, featuring bilingual poets Katia Kapovich (who writes in Russian and English) and Nyk de Vries (who writes in Frisian and Dutch).

There are many more wonderful festival events to look forward to. A full schedule is available at www.poetry.nl. We hope to see many of you at the festival, but those of you who are far away from Rotterdam can still enjoy much of the festival online. We will be live-streaming selected international events, and we’ll be making Poetry Clip film portraits of the poets, as we’ve done in previous years. These will be added to PIW, along with audio recordings of interviews and poetry readings. We’ll keep you updated about new material on PIW, and all the other goings-on at the festival via our blog at www.poetryinternationalblog.org, so if you haven’t already, bookmark it now.

In the meantime, you have at your fingertips a plethora of fantastic poems from twenty-four international poets, many of which have been translated into English for the first time. Let the festival begin . . . Every reasonable effort has been made to contact and acknowledge copyright holders of the poems and translations in this issue. We would be pleased to hear from anyone who has been inadvertently omitted or incorrectly acknowledged.