Preview of the 46th Poetry International Festival

March 12, 2015 A taste of happiness

This year, with poets, musicians and scientists, we will begin the festival by looking at the effect of poetry in and on the brain. Does poetry do what music does? Can poetry make us happy? With a lecture by Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter as our reference point, we will try to hear and to feel if listening to poetry activates the same brain region as listening to music. The poets of this year’s festival will bring their euphony into the experiment, to provide us with our evidence.

The force of anti-poetry

Poetry is no longer what it was – or it no longer wants to be what it was. Nowadays, it seems that every new poem wants to make all previous ones redundant. But the urge to innovate has always been a driving force in the arts. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, Dutch poets began emphatically to take reality as the basis for their poetry. And a lot happened in reality: new impetuses, new prosperity, an emerging youth culture and the discovery of America as the steering wheel of culture. The poets around Amsterdam’s Barbarber and Rotterdam’s Gard Sivik journals brought perspective and humor into poetry and expanded the boundaries of the poetic work. The surface of their poems has the familiarity of a shopping list or an advertising slogan, but there under lies the capacity to move or to unsettle the mind. An ordinary communication is not just an ordinary communication. This festival, we have planned an extensive program in honor of the years of Gard Sivik and Barbarber, and our hope is that, through it, the work of Hans Sleutelaar, Armando, Cornelis Bastiaan Vaandrager Bernlef, K. Schippers and Cees Buddingh' will be given new life.

Thus, after the ‘60s, the past was re-made. What must the present and the future do with this? The poet and essayist Kenneth Goldsmith – founder of the expansive Ubu Web, an archive of historical avant-garde texts, audio files and films – explores, in his book of the same name, the possibilities of Uncreative Writing. Should new text even be written? Can’t we just as well produce new poems from pre-existing texts? Goldsmith will fuel a debate on the status of poetry today with his call for a different kind of poetry.

Translation’s gains

The Poetry International Festival always pays a great deal of attention to the art of translation. Translators are crucial to bringing exceptional poetry written all over the world to the lovers, the curious, and the devoted readers. Although many of us are proficient enough in English to have a good conversation, in the case of poetry, it is truly thanks to the translators we can get close to the nuances and to the refinement of the originals. During the festival, we will enjoy their translations, but also the fascinating stories of struggle and dilemma surrounding their endeavor of translation, of translation’s losses and gains, and of the newfound agility of the Dutch language in the hands of a skilled translator. In honor of the labor of translation, we will circle the Tower of Babel on Thursday, 11 June, through short lectures by several poets and translators, and with a report from the Brockaway Workshop, in which several translators render the work of a Dutch poet (this year, most likely Tonnus Oosterhoff) into German. The biennial Brockaway Prize also will be awarded that day to a translator who has made exceptional contributions to the translation of Dutch poetry into German. And if that’s not enough to celebrate, Thursday also will feature the ceremony for the C. Buddingh’ Prize, for the best debut poetry collection in Dutch published in 2014.
    
Poetry can be learned

In the Netherlands, there is a remarkably vast number of people with poetic aspirations, people who might be interested in listening to how the professionals deal with the trade, what questions they ask themselves, and what type of thinking, deleting and editing they apply when working toward a poem’s completion. And this applies to the professionals as well – the desire and need to know how other poets work. Master classes in reading, master classes in writing, and the series “Craft Talks” provide exactly this kind of guidance and insight. In the Reading Master Class, one of the festival poets shows you how poetry can be read, and what you can learn and discover through reading poetry. In the Writing Master Class, a variety of tips and methods for writing poetry are discussed. And in the Craft Talks, festival poets clarify one specific aspect of poetry in a 30-minute session. This can cover the inexpressible, how to find the right word, how to deal with rhyme or meter, the use of adjectives, etc. A Craft Talk is a quick but in-depth immersion into a particular detail.

De VPRO Academy

This year, an extra dimension will be added to our collaboration with regular media partner, the VPRO. On Saturday afternoon, a special program filled with lectures, interviews and poets’ performances will be set up for members of the VPRO that would like to attend the last day of the festival. Wim Brands will be the host during this “VPRO Academy,” in which the world of poetry will be unfolded in a detailed, resonant, yet accessible manner.

Word and image

This year’s Poetry International Festival program returns to the crossroads where poetry and other disciplines collide, such as through the successful, ongoing project Language & Art. In collaboration with various art galleries, a route will be mapped out taking visitors/festival-goers past galleries and art institutions that showcase visual artists whose works engage the word, language and poetry. This year, the Kunsthal will also join our party; on 7 June, it will be the launching ground for the Language & Art Tour, featuring a celebratory opening program and the presentation of remarkable work that lives at the boundary between image and word. After the start of the Language & Art Tour, and right before the festival’s official opening on Tuesday, Poetry International is organizing an evening filled with film poems, films for reading and several incisive cinematic portraits of, among others, Herta Müller and Rogi Wieg. Film as poetry, poetry as film. The silver screen is a podium for the word.

Poetry in Rotterdam

Last year, hundreds of Rotterdam high school students attended a screening of the documentary film Louder than a Bomb, the story of a group of American high-school students and their journey to the national poetry slam championship. With sponsorship and support from the Poetry International team, Rotterdam students have worked at organizing slams at their own schools, and the standout performances from these will be brought together on stage at the 47th Poetry International Festival.

Poetry International and View with a Room, an artist-in-residence program in South Rotterdam, also have been working closely together since 2014. Aided by the Ludo Pieters Guest Writer’s Fund, we have invited Zimbabwean poet Tugara Muzanenhamo to spend a month visiting various different platforms, schools, debates and meetings via this residency. His visit to the city will lead to a number of different publications and productions, such as a box of photos and poems, a journal and a film portrait.

Central to the festival, of course, are the guest poets, both local and from abroad, such as Muzanenhamo. This year, we welcome:

Marion Poschmann from Germany; the Russian poet, currently residing in the U.S., Philip Nikolayev; the Basque poet Harkaitz Cano; the indigenous Australian poet Lionel Fogarty; the Zimbabwean poet Tugara Muzanenhamo; the Russian poet Lev Rubinstein; and the Chilean poet Yanko Gonzalez. From the Dutch and Flemish-speaking regions, we welcome the winner of the P.C. Hooft Prize, Tonnus Oosterhoff; the winner of the VSB Poetry Prize, Hester Knibbe; the winner of the Herman De Coninck Prize, Peter Verhelst; and young Flemish talent Els Moors. Further, we welcome the English poet Jen Hadfield; the Norwegian Nils Chr. Moe-Repstad; the Polish Justyna Bargielska; the French Pierre Alferi; and the American Kenneth Goldsmith. We expect 3-4 more poets to be added to this roster. The poets will not only perform on the stages of the Rotterdamse Schouwburg, but also at special locations such as the Arboretum Trompenburg and the Leeszaal West.