Joy and Expectation in Medellín about the
XIX International Poetry Festival

A wave of joy is moving thousands of inhabitants of Medellín, a city that has suffered great violence, as 180,000 hand programs were handed out in universities, schools, libraries, cultural centers and neighborhoods of the city, inviting people to the XIX International Poetry Festival of Medellín, that will open on Saturday, July 4th, at 5:00 p.m., in the Cerro Nutibara amphitheater, with the participation of 65 poets from 43 nations.

This new version of the Festival, which was awarded the Alternative Nobel Prize by the Swedish Parliament in 2006 and that this year was declared a Cultural Heritage of the Nation, means a spiritual and emotional liberation for Colombian citizens, oppressed by decades of war and violence, that have left thousands upon thousands of dead, wounded, disabled, kidnapped and disappeared persons.

Important figures of contemporary world poetry will take parte in this world summit of poetry, summoned and organized by the Prometeo Review, among them a strong group of Asian poets, including the Lebanese Fuad Rifka,  translator of Trakl and Rilke into Arabic and author of 16 books of poetry and four of prose; the Vietnamese Nguyen Quang Thieu, poet, fiction writer and painter, who has been awarded the  National Poetry Prize of his country; the Iraqi Fadil Al-Azzawi, who lives in Sweden and has said that poetry “takes away the masks on the faces of the sellers of illusions, revealing the hidden truth”; the Palestinian Ghassan Zaqtan, president of the House of Poetry of Ramallah, scriptwriter and playwright; and the outstanding Jordanian poet and human rights activist in the Arabic world Fathiet Saudí. READ MORE

Freedom Is Not On Sale

By Mvula Ya Nangolo

Mvula Ya Nangolo was born on August 9, 1943, in Oniimwandi Village, Uukwambi District, in northern Namibia. He is an accomplished journalist who has worked for two major radio networks in Central Europe. He also helped launch “The Namibia Hour” on Radio Tanzania, in Dar es Salaam, and has worked as commentator, producer, and news reader for Radio Zambia in Lusaka. He has published feature articles in the Daily News and Sunday News, Tanzania, Times of Zambia and Sunday Times, Zambia, Namibia-today (SWAPO), and African Magazine, London. He works for the Department of Information and Publicity and edits Namibia-Today, the official organ of the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO). His printed chapbook, From Exile, is a book of poems in English. We are including some of his poems.   READ MORE

Poetry in Tajikistan: Gulrukhsor Safieva

…The water to the spring-water comes back again,
And life, unfortunately is managed by other laws,
With crowns of Djamshed and Nasr I will compare the love,
Though you will come back to me, but without the crown…

This is how Gulrulhsor is singing in the garden, where many other famous voices are heard. It seems that there is a risk of not to be heard in that chorus of millennium old poetry, but she sings and she is heard...

Form the ancient times the throne of poetry in the land of Tajiks is high, and those who desire to climb this throne are also quite a lot. But there are courageous ones (everything good is given birth by people, everything worse - is enemy to people), to whom such aspiration is appropriate to their face, to their talent.   READ MORE

Édouard Glissant: Celebrated Francophone Writer

One of the most prominent writers from the Caribbean and the Francophone world, Édouard Glissant is the author of nine volumes of poetry, eight novels, and several essays and works of literary criticism. A distinguished professor in the Ph.D. program in French at The Graduate Center, Glissant is revered throughout the French-speaking world and has twice been a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet, he is a relative unknown in the United States.

Glissant’s writings focus on the struggle against colonialism, globalization, and their combined effects on the subjugated citizens of the world. His prose is celebrated, as one critic put it, for “a new kind of discourse out of the tension between French and Creole,” the latter a language laced with poetics that Glissant absorbed while growing up in Martinique.   READ MORE

Poet protects 'personal history'

JEFFREY BROWN: There were no olive groves on our drive from Jerusalem into the West Bank, only a high concrete barrier, the new reality of this old conflict. For Israelis, this is a security fence, built to keep out suicide bombers. To Palestinians, this is a punitive wall to divide and control, a barrier, a fence, a wall.

GHASSAN ZAQTAN, Poet and Journalist: (through translator): There is here a struggle over the language. There are two narratives in this land, and each one has its own terms, and it has its ground rules.

JEFFREY BROWN: Ghassan Zaqtan is a poet and journalist who works in the West Bank city of Ramallah, and lives in a new home in a nearby village. From his balcony, he can see a Jewish settlement on a nearby hill, another fact of life in the West Bank.   READ MORE

Some notes on Quipu by Arthur Sze: string theory

Arthur Sze’s Quipu twines a personal imaginarium of imagery and metaphor and the impulse of language. He attempts to re-connect our basic human senses to the range of all possible human experience. He asks the reader to dial into the “haiku” simplicity of image drawn out of surprise. He asks the reader to enter into the complexities of experience as far ranging as cosmology, botany, and the origins of Chinese characters. Sze’s palette ranges so widely one wonders how any reader can keep up.

In part that desire to “keep up” enacts the antithesis of Sze’s aesthetic. “Keep up” with what he might ask? Sze doe not right poems that provide simple categorical resolutions. They are meant to be, as Sze insists (a la Duncan), “polysemous.” In his aesthetic, Sze constructs poems that in a very specific, architectural way seem to be made so that even the maker does not always know exactly what they mean—and if not that—how they operate.  READ MORE

Poetry endlessly branching
Poems by Arthur Sze

An Essay on the Meaning of
Poetry in the Present-day World

Essay by Ifi Amadiume, (USA, UK and Nigeria)

Especial to the XIX International Poetry Festival of Medellin

Nagueyalti Warren aptly titles her recently edited collection of poetry by African women Temba Tupu! (Africa World Press, New Jersey: USA, 2008). She translates it to mean walking naked. In addition to this interesting title, her subtitle too speaks to the same poetic truth of this kind of nakedness in our “poetic self-portrait”. I like this meaning of poetry. It is the kind of meaning of poetry that I believe is portrayed in a short poem published in my first book of poetry titled, Passion Waves (Karnak House, London: UK, 1985). In “Passion Waves”, my mind is fully charged. When the mind is so charged, what can it do to thought, but to burst and release, make naked the overflow of passion waves of change and changes, and still changing waves of thought.   READ MORE