My name is Nyk de Vries, and I’m one of the poets at the festival. Yesterday I practiced one more time with guitarist Fokke van der Veen for our performance at the opening of the festival this upcoming Saturday.

I’ve known Fokke since high school, where we first met. We started making music together, but after about ten years I found English too restrictive to sing in, since it is not my native language. The band stopped and I started writing prose in Dutch and Frisian, the language of Friesland, a province in the Northern part of Holland. From then on I wrote two novels, and a collection of prose poems. This flash fiction, as some call it, more or less unintentionally arose, as some sort of remnant, small sketches with a life of their own that I didn’t manage to fit into my longer prose. Slowly it came more and more to the centre of my work, in any case in terms of live performance.

Over the years I continued making music, with different groups, though not as a vocalist. Not so long ago, I started combining my prose poems with music. I’d like to refer in this case to the short-story songs of Tom Waits. At the moment I’m working on an album to be released on the Excelsior label at the end of this year. I asked Fokke to collaborate, and it feels like things from different parts of my life are starting to come together: the beat and atmosphere of the early band experience, combined with the content of writing.

Though we have occasionally played live together, we’ve never done so at an event like Poetry International. I’m very much looking forward to the festival.

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)

Eugenijus Alisanka, Hassan El Ouazzani, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi and Nyk de Vries in Rotterdam

Today I decided to write about two events which I was involved in last week, two events important to me. At first glance they are not connected to each other, but I am connected to both. At least both of them have became objects of my poetic interest.

The first one – my trip to Rotterdam. On Sunday I took part in the Dunya festival which, I was told, gave birth to Rotterdam Poetry International years ago. Now, Dunya is not a literary festival anymore, it is a musical one, so there is only one poetical event on the schedule. The festival takes place in the Rotterdam city park, with tents scattered across the entire area. Music thunders from all sides, energetic Latin, African and other beats, and I can hardly imagine how and where our poetry will fit in. The festival lasts just one day, and it rains that day every year, as organisers tell me. There were attempts to change the date of the event, but in vain – the festival is doomed to be soaked in rain. This Sunday too – spurts of wind turn into gusts of rain. It clears in the evening, and more people flow into the park. But most of them never reach the poetry reading – H. Hesse’s idea about music as a high art is borne out. In the tent of the Poetry park Cuban musicians play, they ignite the full hall, they perform an encore, they take away time from the poets’s slot, the organisers get worried. After the concert, the hall empties, and it is frightful to go to the mike and to read to thin air, to those empty benches which still vibrate with Caribbean spirit.

And a surprise – voices of poets successfully fill all those empty places. There is nothing missing anymore. I believe in poetry again. And I recall how I was climbing once from the bed of the Colorado River uphill along canyons right before the sunset and came across the voice of a lonely flute. It had no audience, its voice rolled over stones and precipices, it echoed from caves and passes. I was an accidental spectator. The veriest one.

The second event – the evening in Zabarija village, at my country-house on Thursday. The dark cloud is approaching, green meadows are suddenly enlightened by incredible yellowness even though the sun is absent, a strange fiesta of colours. And suddenly gusts of wind descend upon the landscape, tearing trees. Bean-sized hail spills out of black cloud. The sky is slashed by lightning, wildfire like crazy. I see rapidly flowing fields, the dirt road turns into a roaring river. Maybe for the first time in my life I am scared of nature: I do not dare even to leave the house. And I am flooded with the wave of an unhuman beauty. Tremendum et fascinance. Nature performs one of its celestial oratorios. I am an accidental spectator. The veriest one.

I have tried to put poetical clothes on both events. But the most striking thing is that both poems I’ve written do not even hint at the stuff mentioned above. Both poems are like preludes to these events. In the first one I talk about the canals of Rotterdam, about the cruise ship, the biggest in the world, docked here, about my transit mood, about the world port centre. In the second one the action takes place before the rain, right before the rain. Why don’t these poems centre on the main events, as might be natural given my prosaic talk above? Maybe here one can find the aim of poetry – to be a prelude, a prolegomenon to the texts of life?

Read more about and by Eugenijus Alisanka on Poetry International Web.