Valerie Rouzeau, (c) Michele Hutchison, Poetry International festival 2010

Stien Kregting, 3 year-old daughter of poet Marc

Hasso Krull (c) Michele Hutchison, Poetry International festival 2010

Kamran Mir Hazar and Ron Winkler (c) Michele Hutchison, Poetry International festival 2010

Ledo Ivo (c) Michele Hutchison, Poetry International festival 2010

Antonio Gamoneda getting off the boat during the poets' outing, Sunday 13th June

If poetry existed, there would be no novels.
If poetry existed, there would be festivals celebrating the titles of poems, festivals for reading poems by the use of deep-brain stimulators, congregations for (and against) sistine sestinas, festivals for dancing the grammar, sleeping the haiku.
If there was poetry, we wouldn’t really sleep.
We wouldn’t creep either.
If poetry existed, we would have iambic tea, shampoos for troubadours, power plants using packed words.
If there were to be something like poetry, we would live in three-point-five-dimensional rooms.
And everyone would have a room.
If poetry existed, Ulysses would still be on his trip. And each country would have several Inger Christensens and Derek Walcotts.
At borders we would have to show our favourite book of poetry instead of a passport.
If poetry existed, there would be a Vatican for Metrics.
Brokers dealing with interpretations.
There would grow not only passion fruits but passionate panic fruits as well. And we would drink the milk of mother poems — for that poetry would be a fluid.
If poetry existed, we would clear 12 million hectares of tropical rain forest a year to save that poetry.
If poetry existed, no one would walk on stones anymore.
If there was poetry, literary criticism would be poetical as well.
And our capital would be called Poetry.
Electricity would be poetricity.
If poetry existed, nobody would be a poet.
If poetry existed, we would visit non-fiction parks every now and then, and drop some words into the cages.
If poetry existed, we could play the Himalayas on Sahara pipes.
Every new sentence would be our only home.
If poetry existed, there would be no desire for poetry.

Read more by and about Ron Winkler on www.poetryinternational.org.