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.

Saturday night, a quarter past eight. The director’s speech kicked off the festival and the fourth poet is already reading. In Polish. Luckily, she doesn’t talk too fast and we can easily keep up with her original poems and our translations on the screen. The poets read quite quickly after each other however, so there is hardly time to breathe in our small upstairs room.

Saturday night, ten to nine. The show continues like a fast train but some poets really do cross the speed limits. Perhaps the Japanese lady had to catch her plane home that same night. We tried to keep up with her but she took her own route. The audience doesn’t seem to mind, though – the speedy sound of the incomprehensible far-eastern language makes them laugh.

Saturday night, twenty past nine. A poet with a guitar, poetic actors and a breakdancer have been on stage already. We take these opportunities to stretch our arms and sip some water. And to prepare for the next three poets who will read in Farsi, Arabic and Portuguese. We do have a translator who helps us with the two non-Western languages, but the tension rises again when the trio step onto the stage.

Saturday night, ten o’ clock. The opening show has finished and the audience are celebrating and drinking in the foyer. I shut down the laptop and we both take a deep breath. I feel like I just ran a marathon, with the only difference that after that water tastes best. Now I’ll definitely go for a beer. Six more nights like this to go, but the kick-off went well!

The Production team is made up of Liesbeth Huijer, Loesje Derkx, Rosa van Ederen and Marloes van Luijk.

The days before the festival are strange. What needs to be done is done, and it’s too late for everything else. The calm before the storm. Printing out schedules, press releases, translations, speeches, timetables for drivers, arrival times of flights, technical lists. Lots of schedules.

Everything lying on my desk was put in a box with the name Bas on it and taken with the other office equipment and papers to the Rotterdam City Theatre.

Many poets are already on their way here. They’ll be flying into Rotterdam from 20 different countries and 5 different continents. They’ve got their visas with them, letters from Poetry International, their personal schedules, their books and the names of the people picking them up at the airport. They are thinking about the poets they’ll soon meet, about the city and the audience.

There is a huge contrast between the initial introductions which will take place tomorrow, and the warm parting hugs, the type of hugs you would only give to close, old friends, as everyone says goodbye at the end of the week.

A great festival awaits. In the next week, Rotterdam will host enough poetry from around the world to last an entire year. The programme is full with new events, such as a live radio play, a theatre performance, an opera and films. And I’m very much looking forward to the events centred around our two focal points: the relationship between prose and poetry, and poetry from the USA.

But what I’m looking forward to most of all are the poems that will be recited for the first time on the stages of the Poetry International Festival; to the beautiful translations that bring the most unfamiliar languages straight into the hands of the audience; to seeing poets translating each others’ work so they can share it with friends in their home countries in their own languages.

Tomorrow is the official opening of the 41st Poetry International Festival: let the poetry begin.

Yannis Kyriakides

‘The Arrest’ is based on a dream of George Perec. It is from a collection of 150 dream narratives which he published in 1973 as La Boutique Obscure. The particular dream is typical of a recurring nightmare which Perec used to have of being stopped and arrested by the police, a fear which he perhaps carried from the experience of his parents who were deported and killed in the holocaust. In fact there are references in the dream to his Jewish heritage and the discomfort he felt regarding his pro-Palestinian position. In the dream he is not sure why or who was arresting him. He is also unsure of his identity: he asks in his dream whether he will be a Tunisian prisoner in France or a French prisoner in Tunisia, but mostly he is concerned that in prison he will have to keep his socks on for several more years, and that they are already dirty.

Continuing on from a series I wrote for Ensemble MAE in 2006, Dreams of the Blind, this piece sets the dream text as an animated text film, underscored by electronics and ensemble. There is an interplay of several layers and speeds, which suits the peculiar disjointed time narrative of dreams. The audience has to read the text in the specific time that is revealed in the music, so just as we are forming images in our minds when we read the dream text, we also hear our mind’s voices reading the text to the music. This is a way of making the voice of the audience both intimate and integral to the music. As opposed to hearing it sung or spoken by a performer on stage, the voice is an internal one, closer to the voices that drive these dream narratives.

Yannis Kyriakides’ ‘The Arrest’ will have its world premiere at the opening night of the Poetry International Festival on Saturday 12 June 2010.

'The Arrest' - George Perec (excerpt)

During the festival 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 this blog.

For a schedule and more information about the festival, visit www.poetry.nl.

In the weeks leading up to the festival we’ll be introducing you to this year’s guest poets via this blog and giving you a taste of what’s to come in June. And throughout the week of 11-18 June itself we will be covering the festival with diaries, interviews and recordings.

We can now reveal a list of guest poets to this year’s festival:

Eugenijus Ališanka Lithuania

Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi Sudan

Ursula Andkjær Olsen Denmark

Jon Fosse Norway

António Gamoneda Spain

Christian Hawkey USA

Hiromi Itō Japan

Lêdo Ivo Brazil

Katia Kapovich Russia / USA

Kim Hyesoon South Korea

Marc Kregting The Netherlands

Hasso Krull Estonia

Tomas Lieske The Netherlands

Ewa Lipska Poland

Carlos López Degregori Peru

Thomas McCarthy Ireland

Kamran Mir Hazar Afghanistan

Hassan El Ouazzani Morocco

Michael Palmer USA

Valérie Rouzeau France

Erik Spinoy Belgium

Nyk de Vries The Netherlands (Friesland)

C.K. Williams USA

Ron Winkler Germany

From early May you’ll find information in English about the festival events and guest poets via www.poetry.nl.