Major institutions throughout Athens, such as the Benaki Museum and the Athens Concert Hall, as well as public squares, poetry institutes and cafes will welcome no less than 69 poets from 22 countries, all coming together from 22-29 September 2013 for the 1st Athens World Poetry Festival.
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| Adam Zagajewski/ © Athens Poetry Festival |
The 1st Athens World Poetry Festival
is a multilingual and multi-faceted week-long event which sets out to
prove that, if anything, we do need poets in lean years. Inspired and
determined to react in a time of crisis, Greece’s Poets Circle
and a long list of eager participants decided to listen to their Muse
and organise the 1st Athens World Poetry Festival. They aim to lyrically
renew Greece’s portrait as a land of poets. From Homer to Seferis and
from China’s Lan Lan
to Germany’s Hölderlin — whose characteristic phrase ‘Who needs poets
in lean years?’ becomes chillingly topical — the festival now seeks
common ground and a poetic vision without borders. Events — poetic,
musical, visual or otherwise — will spread from the Acropolis Museum and
the central Koumoundourou Square to the Corydallos Women’s Prison (with
no public access) and the historic site of Delphi, urging their
audience to travel both physically and allegorically.
Contemporary Greek poets such as Yiorgos Chouliaras, a major player in the organisation of the event, Titos Patrikios and Nanos Valaoritis, will be joined by Poland’s Adam Zagajewski, Ireland’s Desmond Egan, Germany’s Gerhard Falkner, Spain’s Juan Carlos Mestre and USA’s Lawrence Ferlinghetti, beat poetry movement pioneer and founder of San Francisco’s cult City Lights
bookstore, amongst others. The opening night, September 23rd, welcomes
visitors free of charge at the spacious gardens of the Athens Concert
Hall, joining a big party of poets — Egan, Mestre, Valaoritis and 14
more from Greece
and beyond, who will respectively read their original works. Given the
multilingual nature of the festival Greek and English will naturally be
the predominant languages of most events, such as the colloquium Poetry without Borders
(26/9, Stanley Hotel), as well as in the powerpoint translations,
discussion panels and the collective festival book that you will find on
sale with poems, poet bios and photographs. All in all, wherever you
may come from, you will somewhere find a poem (or a poet) that speaks to
you.
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| Alicia Stallings/ © Athens World Poetry Festival |
Seizing
the opportunity for a warm-up discussion with the festival guests,
Yiorgos Chouliaras asked a selected few to answer the burning question:
What is the significance of poetry in today’s world? According to
Falkner, in a day when ‘we are about to lose the ability to communicate
with ourselves...poetry is almost the only independent language left.
Poetic language is not only to detect and recognize the mind, it is also
a remedy to build and enlarge the self, not as an ego, but as a
potentially enormous inner space’. Egan quotes ‘Not on bread alone does
man live’, adding that ‘...great art survives, indestructible as the
poetry of Simonides or the drama of Sophokles. Its very survival
suggests some kind of necessity and need’. For US poet Alicia Stallings,
‘...the opposite of the aesthetic isn't the ugly, it is the anesthetic’
and poetic ‘wakefulness’ is the antidote to ‘electronic anesthesia’.
As
for Adam Zagajewski, things are quite simple: ‘Poetry is like
homeopathy. Small amounts; doctors are skeptical. And yet some people
are cured by it...’. More ‘medication for the healthy’ is distributed
generously at the festival by 65 more literary doctors, in rough and
idyllic urban backdrops - starting tonight.
