If tweets and blog postings are anything to go by, Poetry Parnassus will be largely remembered for Wole Soyinka – not so much for his poetry as for his mobile, which began to ring during his own reading in the Royal Festival Hall. The PA system magnified the moment, so that it sounded like a smoke alarm, or something even more frightening, high above the heads of the 2,000-strong audience. While we shifted anxiously in our seats, the poet finished his poem, took out his phone, inspected it closely, and said something like, “If that's who I think it is...” Then he defused a second phone in another pocket.
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| Wole Soyinka |
That was at Continental Shift, the festival's big Friday-night shop-window reading. Poetry Parnassus, one of the cultural warm-up acts for the Olympics, had already been running since the Tuesday, and wouldn’t finish until Sunday. There was lots going on, far more than you could hope to take in – which is what you should expect when 204 poets are invited to a single event that names itself in a Parnassian way but doesn’t feel trapped inside some high Apollonian sense of function.
In fact, things were pretty carnivalesque. The bank of the Thames had become a sort of amusement park. There was a poetry takeaway cart, which always had a queue for made-to-order verses. Parked a little along from it was an emergency ambulance (1960s model), where you could lie down and be prescribed something poetic that might make you feel better. There was the Rain of Poems and there was also an inflatable tube carriage inspired by Poems on the Underground, which even acquired its own graffiti as the week went on.
Up in the Saison Poetry Library, it was sometimes so crowded that it really did feel like rush hour on the underground. Poets were writing out (on hand-made paper) their poems from the anthology The World Record, recording them and being interviewed. They also were also signing (in gold) a writing desk that Chris McCabe talks about in the video below. Just before the Continental Shift reading, the desk was carried into the Festival Hall’s green room and placed before Seamus Heaney for signing. Sometimes the mountain does come to Mohammed.
Up in the Saison Poetry Library, it was sometimes so crowded that it really did feel like rush hour on the underground. Poets were writing out (on hand-made paper) their poems from the anthology The World Record, recording them and being interviewed. They also were also signing (in gold) a writing desk that Chris McCabe talks about in the video below. Just before the Continental Shift reading, the desk was carried into the Festival Hall’s green room and placed before Seamus Heaney for signing. Sometimes the mountain does come to Mohammed.
The main business of the festival was even more frenetic. There always seemed to be four or five parallel sessions at any one time. Some of them were focussed and themed, others were nifty ideas being developed on the spot – poetry karaoke; translation slams. Simon Armitage, the festival’s original begetter, must have spent half his time writing introductions and thank-you speeches, and running from event to event until everything became a great blur.
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| Sasha Dugdale edits Modern Poetry in Translation |
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| Togara Muzanenhamo's first collection is Spirit Brides |
Some of the poets must have been particularly happy to be in London. Sarah McGuire, introducing the Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, explained that several of his colleagues had just been arrested. “If he wasn't here he would probably now be in prison.” The Eritrean poet Ribka Sibhatu, domiciled in Rome and writing in Tigrynia and Italian, told me – matter-of-factly, cheerfully – that she didn't publish her work. "It is best to be underground. Already two of my friends have been murdered."
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| Mimi Khalvati, who represented Iran at Poetry Parnassus, grew up on the Isle of Wight. |
Perhaps the poet in exile has become the new normal? If so, Parnassus was just another stop-over on the global network. The last time I had seen the Sierra Leone poet Syl Cheney-Coker was at a festival in Las Vegas, where he was the writer in the Cities of Asylum program there. At the Waterloo Travelodge Syl gestured with his pipe in an Oxbridge manner and told me that after Poetry Parnassus he would be heading up to Scotland to take up an international writer residency at Cove Park.
Several times, I found myself wondering about how best to present translated poetry on a public platform. Which should come first – the poem in the original language or the translated version? My impression is that most of the Parnassus presenters settled for the original language first, followed by English, the aural equivalent of a facing-page translation in a book. I suppose this asserts the primacy of the original, with meaning swimming into view after a not-so-prolonged hesitation between sound and sense. But a poem sung, more or less, in Vietnamese can sound extraordinary in the original, and then, alas, pretty banal in English translation. I found myself preferring things the other way about – being given the content first, and then sitting back to concentrate on the music. Maybe best of all would be to mix it up.
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| Kay Ryan has also won the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur 'genius' award, and is a former US laureate. |
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| John Ashbery has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and a MacArthur 'genius' award. His latest book, Quick Question, will be published in November. |
Poetry Parnassus was an audacious, remarkable project, and if the organising team aren’t now taking well-earned holidays, then there’s no justice in the world. It all took place against a background of flooding in the north of England and a fresh round of banking scandals. From the Parnassian perspective, the mysterious word LIBOR (the London Inter-Bank Offer Rate) sounded like the capital of some exotic country that one of the poets might have travelled from. I went on to spend a week as poet in residence at the Ledbury Poetry Festival. During the workshops I led, we played one of those Exquisite Corpse games – an arbitrary, chance-led juxtaposing of questions and answers. The resulting poem is posted online, but amid some lyrical (and other) passages, I was especially struck by these two zeitgeistian moments:
What do the letters LIBOR stand for?
It means you've been telling lies.
Will the bankers let us join in their picnic?
I think that is highly unlikely.
Bill Manhire was his country's inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He holds a personal chair at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he directs the celebrated creative writing programme and the International Institute of Modern Letters. His Collected Poems was published by Carcanet in 2001. His volume of short fiction, South Pacific, was published by Carcanet in 1994.
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Bill Manhire was his country's inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He holds a personal chair at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he directs the celebrated creative writing programme and the International Institute of Modern Letters. His Collected Poems was published by Carcanet in 2001. His volume of short fiction, South Pacific, was published by Carcanet in 1994.