GUEST BLOGGER DAVID HOWARD , POET AND FOUNDING EDITOR OF TAKAHE, WRITES OF HIS FORTHCOMING JOURNEY
The International Writers' Programme of the NZ Book Council could be the best thing since sliced bread. To be honest I don’t like most sliced bread, but I do like this programme because it provided the dough for me to ‘go north, not-so young man,' to the V Festival Internacional De Poesia De Granada, Nicaragua, 16-21 February 2009. In 2007 Michael Harlow represented New Zealand (how does one represent a country?) and his lobbying got me the invitation. Now Bookman Beattie has asked for an opinionated outline so here is a litany of names and, more importantly, lines of poetry…
After enduing the awful décor of LA, Miami, and Managua transit lounges, I will be rewarded by two days of rest. The inevitable jet-lag will evaporate, along with my spending money, before I’m called upon to perform. Speaking to the contestable notion that poetry (if not the poet) is the conscience of the earth, on the afternoon of the 18th I read with Uruguay’s Eduardo Espina [‘World, it’s all the same since in Spanish it’s mundo./When it starts to be smaller, someone will know.’] and Sweden’s Lasse Soderberg [‘What has become of your America/Walt Whitman?’].
The next evening I find – and perhaps lose - myself reading with Russia’s Yevgeny Yevtushenko [‘Something dangerous/is beginning:/I/am coming late/to my own self.’], Spain’s Luis Garcia Montero [‘Poetry is useless, it serves only/to behead a king/or seduce a young woman’], and Palestine’s Natalie Handal [‘Through literature you enter worlds…’].
Given the engaged and engaging company, I’ll present excerpts from Heroin, a long poem that was first published on 28 September 2001 in Masthead: American Terror, writings in the immediate aftermath, alongside responses by the likes of Eliot Weinberger and John Kinsella.
Heroin hasn’t been profiled at home; indeed, many months after a digital setting of the text toured America as part of Why: Art about the attack on the World Trade Center & the Pentagon, an editorial in NZ Books asserted that there was neither the will nor the ability in our literature to address such matters as 9/11. Sigh. So I’m keen to recite loaded lines like:
Get up, hero, take your prisoners to serve in perpetuity before your Lord. Place your hands on the neck of your enemy. Who, like the sailors, will come back to tell?
Hopefully I will come back to tell. Whatever, on the 20th I head out for the day to San Marcos, where I’ll sing for my supper at street-corners with seven poets including the slippery Obediah Smith (Bahamas) and the formidable Carolina Escobar Sarti (Guatemala), Given the quality of their poetry and their honed performance skills, I expect to end up famished but happy.
After enduing the awful décor of LA, Miami, and Managua transit lounges, I will be rewarded by two days of rest. The inevitable jet-lag will evaporate, along with my spending money, before I’m called upon to perform. Speaking to the contestable notion that poetry (if not the poet) is the conscience of the earth, on the afternoon of the 18th I read with Uruguay’s Eduardo Espina [‘World, it’s all the same since in Spanish it’s mundo./When it starts to be smaller, someone will know.’] and Sweden’s Lasse Soderberg [‘What has become of your America/Walt Whitman?’].
The next evening I find – and perhaps lose - myself reading with Russia’s Yevgeny Yevtushenko [‘Something dangerous/is beginning:/I/am coming late/to my own self.’], Spain’s Luis Garcia Montero [‘Poetry is useless, it serves only/to behead a king/or seduce a young woman’], and Palestine’s Natalie Handal [‘Through literature you enter worlds…’].
Given the engaged and engaging company, I’ll present excerpts from Heroin, a long poem that was first published on 28 September 2001 in Masthead: American Terror, writings in the immediate aftermath, alongside responses by the likes of Eliot Weinberger and John Kinsella.
Heroin hasn’t been profiled at home; indeed, many months after a digital setting of the text toured America as part of Why: Art about the attack on the World Trade Center & the Pentagon, an editorial in NZ Books asserted that there was neither the will nor the ability in our literature to address such matters as 9/11. Sigh. So I’m keen to recite loaded lines like:
Get up, hero, take your prisoners to serve in perpetuity before your Lord. Place your hands on the neck of your enemy. Who, like the sailors, will come back to tell?
Hopefully I will come back to tell. Whatever, on the 20th I head out for the day to San Marcos, where I’ll sing for my supper at street-corners with seven poets including the slippery Obediah Smith (Bahamas) and the formidable Carolina Escobar Sarti (Guatemala), Given the quality of their poetry and their honed performance skills, I expect to end up famished but happy.
Watch this space for an update.
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