About
The Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, run by Poetry International, is now in its 41st year.
Poetry International is a literary organisation which aims at promoting quality poetry from the Netherlands and around the world, stimulating the international exchange of poets, poetry translators and poetry-lovers.
Poetry International’s main activities including organising annual events, including the Poetry International Festival and National Poetry Day. For eight years, Poetry International has also collaborated with partners worldwide on a poetry web magazine, Poetry International Web (PIW), now published twice a month, which features news, articles, interviews and discussion, but, first and foremost, hundreds of poems by acclaimed modern poets from over seventy countries worldwide, both in the original language and in English translation. These form part of an extensive archive containing text, images, audio and video.
Congratulations for managing to build an entire network of contemporary poetry around your Festival. PIW is one of the first reference tools I use when I investigate contemporary poetry.
I am writing you in order to express my deep concern regarding the condition of poetry today. And my intention is not to signal another crisis. But on the contrary to point at a shift in today’s poetic conscience.
More than ever, poetry seems to keep an important meaning only for those that write it. Actually the fact that poetry still held a powerful part was allways explained by the opposition it meet. Even than this year was announced the murder of Iraqi young poet Zardasht Osman because of his writing. I live in Romania and here, since August 2009, already two of the most well known young poets already died in strange suicides.
Poetry not only attracts but searches opposition and this opposition is not necessarily violent. The opposition that gives strengh to poetry today can be also indifferent.
But the main opposition is not outside poetry but, as ever inside it. Because the same who writes it too many times forgets to consider their art with a professional standard that should be at least corect.
The opportunities for financing and supporting poetry tend to be oriented toward poetry that is either unharmful or is deprived of any interest in investigating the poetic potential of our time.
This will bring today’s poetry to the spectacular overtrone of academic poetry values. Of course this shouldn’t be something new, but, given the global access to internet and means of communication it might mean a very fast change in the means of poetry.
As your effort has been always to promote poetry, please consider this call as an argument to develope and use tools that can connect the poetry that has been written for the last 150 years with the poetic posibilities of today. We still do not have a map of contemporary poetic tendences and I haven’t heard even an intention of developing anything close to this.
best wishes