Article
Saturday June 15th – Final Day
June 18, 2013
I have the tuna pasta at the Schouwburg – I should say, the tuna flavored pasta, because it does have a tuna flavor. I think to myself that the two boiled eggs I consumed each morning were my protein intake for the week. Fascinating.
The roads a cluttered with people, scantily clad carnival bachanalists are defying the chill, and if they are black, they are moving with that casual sensuality – faces dead serious – of the true Caribbean dancer. There is this way of being profoundly sexual while bearing a look that says, “You cannot touch this – in fact you can’t get anywhere near this.”
The Atlanta Hotel is worried. There are too many black people walking by their door, and the problem is that there are some black people staying in their hotel, but now, all of a sudden, they need to know for sure which one is which. They fear, apparently, freeloaders will come into the hotel and . . . When I get back to the hotel, there is a huge man who has clearly been brought in for security reasons, standing at the door. He wants to see our keys. “Dat is goed,” he says, nodding me in. The lobby is full of black people who clearly have their cards. And here is where you should stop reading if you think I am about to make a comment about racism that you won’t like. Skip to the next paragraph, it is actually quite good. Anyway, I am not sure that they would be asking for key cards if it were white people of the street and crowding the lobby.
The finale of the festival is a peculiar thing. Of course, it may be quite the norm for a show of unabashed experimentation – strangely off-kilter films, guitars, tap-dancing sound effects, computer sound makers, and poetry that while at times political seemed to flirt with an unorthodox verging towards dada – it is a very male session, and what is most striking about it for me is that it seems heavily choreographed and curated. It had to have been. The pieces are all set pieces, with various artists working with each and a most sophisticated video dimension to the whole thing. I would call it avant-garde, but I actually don’t think we are forging new directions here – we are retreading old ground, but it is ground that seems to want to assert its value and usefulness. Eclectic enough – the evening opens with a dj spinning and a bass player angling, stretching, rocking and prancing a vibe on Langston Hughes’ blues poems, and ends with a similar treatment of one of his blues poems and ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers.’ And in between Chinese political verse, an at times quite compelling theatrical rendering of a brilliant poem about Osip Mandelstan by Ilya Kaminsky, a whimsical catalogue of contemporary western television-filtered culture by James Byrne, a meditation on the letter X by the French scroll-unfolding experimental impresario and intellectual Michèle Métail, and much more.
The night moves as one seamless performance, and I am left with many emotions, the most dominant being a realization that framing is sometimes as important to how we receive and perceive poetry as anything else. And the framing here turns everything into a kind of experimental play on language and the idea of how art should come to us. I am not sure I like this. Actually, like has nothing to do it. It has to do with trust. There is something quite optimistic and comfortable about this kind of expression –the babel of voices have a quality of scatterings, the kind of washing down through ultimate democracy that haunts the efforts of liberal activists camping out in front of city halls all over the US last year. Everyone leaves happy, I suppose, but I leave strangely unsettled. This might be why it has been said that poetry is a luxury.
I have, though, talked to many of these poets, and my sense is that they don’t regard poetry as a luxury. Yet it is indisputable that what happens on stage is poetry. And this clarity is gratifying and compelling.
The audience must feel the same way. They stand and applaud the poets – all the poets – at the end of the evening.
It is, though, a small audience. It is a large theatre, and so the audience seems smaller for it.
I am leaving Rotterdam having had no fish. No fish at all. I leave Rotterdam pleased to have been here, to have met poets from all around the world, poets who are engaged with the same business to which I am committed.
Yet to say I leave Rotterdam is a falsehood. I leave the hotel Atlanta with its excellent breakfasts. I leave the eight-minute quick stroll along the main shopping street from the Atlanta to the Schouwburg. I leave the ten minutes quick walk in the other direction to the gym – the fitness center where I managed to work out every day but one. I leave the massive Schouwburg with its many glass doors and pass codes and buzzers. I leave the constant coffee, fruit and conversation in the Poets Foyer. I leave the occasional excursion away from this small space – the reading at Pauluskerk where an angry client of this service to the homeless interrupted my reading with his loud exit, restrained by several people before, outside, taking a pop at one of the staff of the center before the police, before the calm, before we returned to poetry. In other words, I know nothing of Rotterdam from being there.
But this is not what a poetry festival is about. A poetry festival is about each year creating the grand babel of voices, to see if somehow out of it there might be a moment in which tongues spoken might be interpreted and people will be transported emotionally and intellectually into the world of each other.
Ilya Kaminsky asks me a question while we are wandering fairly aimlessly, and as it happens, in the wrong direction, to a restaurant where lunch is to be served. The question will haunt me for a while. “Who are the great poets of your generation and ten years ahead?” I have many answers, and my answers are not the names of poets. My answers are about the question. He says that a couple of generations back it was possible to answer that question easily: Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, Octavio Paz, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney. This is his list. There are others, he is not trying to be comprehensive, just offering some examples.
So who would be the equivalent in my generation? Even as I push back, point to the calculation of that list, the poetry mafia of which those guys were in some ways a part, the absence of women, the absence of so many great poets, and even as I can tell I might be winning an argument, especially since I am not sure that this informal canon creation has any real value, I also know that Ilya’s question is also “who do you like, who do you admire of the poets of your generation?” I will continue to think about this.
And here is where I can end in praise of poetry festivals like this one. When poets make their personal lists, and especially if they have had a chance to attend such festivals, their lists may not be myopic, limited by geographies and cultures, but may at last begin to engage writers from around the world. For my part, after this week, Roland Jooris, Liu Waitong, Ester Naomi Perquin, Mustafa Stitou, and Yang Lian will occupy my interest for a while. Not bad, not bad at all.
Featured poet Kwame Dawes writes a final post in his daily blog series on his experiences at the 44th Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam.
I call Zeezout to find out what time their stoves are turned off. She says 9:30. I do the calculation. On foot it is forty minutes away. I could make it there at a solid clip and get in some more exercise to burn off what I plan to consume at Zeezout in a preemptive strike on calories. Then something occurs to me. There was a slight hesitation in her voice as she answered – a slight embarrassment, as if she can see that my fly is down. “You take reservations, of course, right?” “Oh yes.” “And you are booked tonight.” “Oh yes, fully booked.” No fish! No fish! No fish!I have the tuna pasta at the Schouwburg – I should say, the tuna flavored pasta, because it does have a tuna flavor. I think to myself that the two boiled eggs I consumed each morning were my protein intake for the week. Fascinating.
The roads a cluttered with people, scantily clad carnival bachanalists are defying the chill, and if they are black, they are moving with that casual sensuality – faces dead serious – of the true Caribbean dancer. There is this way of being profoundly sexual while bearing a look that says, “You cannot touch this – in fact you can’t get anywhere near this.”
The Atlanta Hotel is worried. There are too many black people walking by their door, and the problem is that there are some black people staying in their hotel, but now, all of a sudden, they need to know for sure which one is which. They fear, apparently, freeloaders will come into the hotel and . . . When I get back to the hotel, there is a huge man who has clearly been brought in for security reasons, standing at the door. He wants to see our keys. “Dat is goed,” he says, nodding me in. The lobby is full of black people who clearly have their cards. And here is where you should stop reading if you think I am about to make a comment about racism that you won’t like. Skip to the next paragraph, it is actually quite good. Anyway, I am not sure that they would be asking for key cards if it were white people of the street and crowding the lobby.
The finale of the festival is a peculiar thing. Of course, it may be quite the norm for a show of unabashed experimentation – strangely off-kilter films, guitars, tap-dancing sound effects, computer sound makers, and poetry that while at times political seemed to flirt with an unorthodox verging towards dada – it is a very male session, and what is most striking about it for me is that it seems heavily choreographed and curated. It had to have been. The pieces are all set pieces, with various artists working with each and a most sophisticated video dimension to the whole thing. I would call it avant-garde, but I actually don’t think we are forging new directions here – we are retreading old ground, but it is ground that seems to want to assert its value and usefulness. Eclectic enough – the evening opens with a dj spinning and a bass player angling, stretching, rocking and prancing a vibe on Langston Hughes’ blues poems, and ends with a similar treatment of one of his blues poems and ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers.’ And in between Chinese political verse, an at times quite compelling theatrical rendering of a brilliant poem about Osip Mandelstan by Ilya Kaminsky, a whimsical catalogue of contemporary western television-filtered culture by James Byrne, a meditation on the letter X by the French scroll-unfolding experimental impresario and intellectual Michèle Métail, and much more.
The night moves as one seamless performance, and I am left with many emotions, the most dominant being a realization that framing is sometimes as important to how we receive and perceive poetry as anything else. And the framing here turns everything into a kind of experimental play on language and the idea of how art should come to us. I am not sure I like this. Actually, like has nothing to do it. It has to do with trust. There is something quite optimistic and comfortable about this kind of expression –the babel of voices have a quality of scatterings, the kind of washing down through ultimate democracy that haunts the efforts of liberal activists camping out in front of city halls all over the US last year. Everyone leaves happy, I suppose, but I leave strangely unsettled. This might be why it has been said that poetry is a luxury.
I have, though, talked to many of these poets, and my sense is that they don’t regard poetry as a luxury. Yet it is indisputable that what happens on stage is poetry. And this clarity is gratifying and compelling.
The audience must feel the same way. They stand and applaud the poets – all the poets – at the end of the evening.
It is, though, a small audience. It is a large theatre, and so the audience seems smaller for it.
I am leaving Rotterdam having had no fish. No fish at all. I leave Rotterdam pleased to have been here, to have met poets from all around the world, poets who are engaged with the same business to which I am committed.
Yet to say I leave Rotterdam is a falsehood. I leave the hotel Atlanta with its excellent breakfasts. I leave the eight-minute quick stroll along the main shopping street from the Atlanta to the Schouwburg. I leave the ten minutes quick walk in the other direction to the gym – the fitness center where I managed to work out every day but one. I leave the massive Schouwburg with its many glass doors and pass codes and buzzers. I leave the constant coffee, fruit and conversation in the Poets Foyer. I leave the occasional excursion away from this small space – the reading at Pauluskerk where an angry client of this service to the homeless interrupted my reading with his loud exit, restrained by several people before, outside, taking a pop at one of the staff of the center before the police, before the calm, before we returned to poetry. In other words, I know nothing of Rotterdam from being there.
But this is not what a poetry festival is about. A poetry festival is about each year creating the grand babel of voices, to see if somehow out of it there might be a moment in which tongues spoken might be interpreted and people will be transported emotionally and intellectually into the world of each other.
Ilya Kaminsky asks me a question while we are wandering fairly aimlessly, and as it happens, in the wrong direction, to a restaurant where lunch is to be served. The question will haunt me for a while. “Who are the great poets of your generation and ten years ahead?” I have many answers, and my answers are not the names of poets. My answers are about the question. He says that a couple of generations back it was possible to answer that question easily: Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, Octavio Paz, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney. This is his list. There are others, he is not trying to be comprehensive, just offering some examples.
So who would be the equivalent in my generation? Even as I push back, point to the calculation of that list, the poetry mafia of which those guys were in some ways a part, the absence of women, the absence of so many great poets, and even as I can tell I might be winning an argument, especially since I am not sure that this informal canon creation has any real value, I also know that Ilya’s question is also “who do you like, who do you admire of the poets of your generation?” I will continue to think about this.
And here is where I can end in praise of poetry festivals like this one. When poets make their personal lists, and especially if they have had a chance to attend such festivals, their lists may not be myopic, limited by geographies and cultures, but may at last begin to engage writers from around the world. For my part, after this week, Roland Jooris, Liu Waitong, Ester Naomi Perquin, Mustafa Stitou, and Yang Lian will occupy my interest for a while. Not bad, not bad at all.
© Kwame Dawes
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