Correen Dekker

As a programmer, I have the chance to invite my favourite poets to the festival and I’m free to come up with fabulous plans for festival programmes. I’m responsible for turning these plans into realistic plans and then into real programmes. It’s the perfect job for someone like me, who loves poetry and enjoys being an organiser. Fortunately, I haven’t been doing this alone. Together with my fellow programmer, Liesbeth Huijer, and festival director Bas Kwakman, we made the important decisions about which programme should be when and where, and what the main topic would be. We also owe a lot to Poetry International Web editors, festival friends, poets and others, who came up with advice and suggestions, gave hints on good poetry and helped us along the way.

While devising events, my personal ambition is to acquaint the audience with poetry that’s ‘new’, to bring on stage poets they haven’t heard of yet. I’d like to programme both poetry that has been written long ago, and contemporary poetry. And in my opinion, moving borders, crossing borders, and focusing on both western as well as non-western poetry and poetic traditions is one of the most interesting parts of programming the Poetry International Festival. Bringing on stage beautiful unknown poems, whether from Kazakhstan or from Europe, from the sixth century or the twentieth, that’s what thrills me.

You can understand I’m exited about the participation of someone like the Peruvian poet, Carlos López Degregori, whose colourful poems I really admire, or having the opportunity to listen to the almost claustrophobic and questioning poetry of South-Korean poetess Kim Hyesoon. I’m really glad to have the Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi between us. He’s quite young and not yet well-known in Europe, but reads in his own land for audiences of 3,000 people – something we almost can’t imagine in the Netherlands. I also hope to gain some insight into the poetry scene in Krakow on Friday, and am much looking forward to the programme on the widespread (but in the Netherlands quite unknown) Persian-Arabic love-duo Layla and Madjnun tomorrow.

At this 41st Poetry International Festival, my work is actually done. I just have to be aware of sudden changes in programmes and sudden problems to be solved. (I’m still waiting for the first hectic and unsolvable problem to come, in fact everything has gone really smoothly so far). I’m keeping an eye on the poets, seeing if they know where to be at a certain time, helping them to be there and checking if they’re enjoying themselves.  If most things go as planned, I’ll be really enjoying myself, and I really hope everyone who visits the festival does too.

All day I’ve wandered around the complex and perfectly beautiful foyers of Rotterdam’s City Theatre, the home of Poetry International 2010. We poets, a happy few, are contented with the day’s work. We have also scored a series of little victories in the first round of our Translation challenge. We’ve succeeded in translating three of the poems of Tomas Lieske. Admittedly, we’ve been spoon-fed with brilliant literal translations. All morning we circled around the Present Continuous verb “Ontdekken’’ as in “Ontdekken Dat Je Te Laat Bent” or “Discover (Discovering) That You Are Too Late”—or the title “Kompel” that may mean “Cobbler” or “Coal-miner” depending on whether you are digging into the linguistic heritage of Southern Ireland or Southern Holland. Tomorrow we must work on the texts again. One of my fellow translators, the poet Patrick Cotter, is running well ahead of the pack, but we will catch up with him before the week is out.

It is a day of hidden foyers. Sometimes you come upon a foyer with books, or a foyer with food, or a foyer with a busy bank of Festival interns, all beavering away, answering phones, checking checklists. It is a world of hidden efficiencies, of quiet Dutch perfections. Around the table next to us, in our large hidden foyer, is a group of poets at work on the texts of the sublime Carlos Lopez Degregori of Peru. I remember the first time I saw his poems on the Poetry International web. I was bowled over by their reticence, their humane quality, their astonishing sensitivity. These texts alone prove that translation can work. Some quality of the poetry does survive the translation. We will continue at our dissecting tables: word-surgeons at work, saving organs of phrases and adjectives for a foreign body of words.

Last night was a night of prose-poetry, of poetry and prose, of poetry with its hyphenated life. Hassan El Ouazzani and I read our poetry to a fine audience in the main auditorium of the City Theatre. Ireland’s Ambassador to the Netherlands, Mary Whelan, along with her husband, and the Embassy Attaché in the Hague came down to hear us read. Afterwards we had a mighty chat about politics and culture. Among the Irish in the audience, also, was Lucy Cotter, daughter of the lately deceased poet, Bonnie Quinn Cotter. It was lovely to see her. For an Irish poet it was a personal moment.

We have oscillated between poetry and prose. We have been to the precarious ledge of prose-poetry, Hassan and I; we have been to the edge and not toppled over. Prose-poetry is for outlaws, for outsiders, for those who have endured extremes of politics and culture. Prose-poetry describes a hinterland of being. It began with the French, of course, with Bertrand and Baudelaire, and continued with Rimbaud. But even in the Irish tradition, which is so overwhelmed with songs and lyrics, prose-poetry breaks through in James Joyce and Beckett. It is all of Finnegan’s Wake and a good part of Ulysses. It is everywhere in Beckett, in Molloy, Watt, Waiting for Godot. Godot, a poetry of theatre, with its gestures, silences, timing, choreography, with its worn-down and weary opinion, is prose-poetry. After all, it is Vladimir who turns to Estragon and says, ‘you should have been a poet.’

Prose-poetry is now strongest in the American language, I think. I think (it is nearly midnight and I am doing my best). Prose-poetry is action through reflection. Competent Americans like John Ashbery and Charles Simić have turned it into a kind of guerrilla warfare against anthologies and canons. Prose-poetry invites you in. You don’t need a dinner-jacket. Come right it as you are. It is a summer night. It is Rotterdam.

Thomas McCarthy (c) Michele Hutchison, Poetry International festival 2010