All Articles (International)
2008
“Zimbabwe is a country of poets. Zimbabweans write poetry, speak it and sing it in Shona, Ndebele, Tonga, Shangaan and other minority languages; we have poetry in English, praise, performance, oratori...
In partnership with Poetry International Festival, PIW will provide in-depth coverage of the festival each day with live broadcasts of the international poetry programmes, interviews with the poets an...
It seems unlikely that poets experience a decisive city-country split, given the dreamlike nature of poetic space, and possibly due to the metonymic presence of nature in cities, in a weed or a glimps...
During the Poetry International festival each year various poetry translation projects take place. The Chinese Whispers programme is a kind of fun relay race in which a poem moves from Dutch through a...
2007
16 - 22 June 2007 at the Rotterdam City TheatreThis year’s 38th Poetry International Festival explores the links between poetry, lunacy and melancholy. Events at the seven-day festival include poetry ...
2006
During the Poetry International Festival 2005, Rotterdam provided the stage for the ‘Poetry International World Slampionship’. Eight winners of national contests in 2004 from The Nederlands, USA, Sout...
TENTH DEFENCE OF POETRY LECTURE
Members of Poetry International Foundation
Fellow Poets
Ladies and Gentlemen
Because I am growing bald, I shall greet you all with my laurel on. Clio, the muse ...
Members of Poetry International Foundation
Fellow Poets
Ladies and Gentlemen
Because I am growing bald, I shall greet you all with my laurel on. Clio, the muse ...
A world premiere for Poetry International Web: festival poets LIVE in your own home
Live streaming event, Wednesday 21st June
Live streaming event, Wednesday 21st June
2005
"Two days to the elections. I wonder if I’m still on the voters’ roll." Zimbabwean poet John Eppel queues up at the polling station, and worries about cooking supper. "ZTV is full of smug, smirkin...
Poet Andriy Bondar reflects on the political and artistic consequences of the Ukrainian ‘Orange Revolution’: “The grim Ukrainian propensity for martyrology and necrophilia, tedious seriousness and sel...
2004
Translator, linguist and PIW editor Rami Saari on linguistic obstacles in translation, the norms affecting it, and the importance of affinity. "A person has to be destroyed by the gods at least once ...
In this new diary, Zimbabwean poet Julius Chingono, out of his home country for the first time, attends the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, 2004. “All of a sudden I have a tag. I am being ...
In this new diary, Moroccan poet Amina El Bakouri muses about maternal love, terror and the role of poetry in her life in Rabat. “The artist today needs to contribute to bitter reality a measure of ...
Latifah al-Maskini takes a look at women’s poetry in Morocco:“The feminine in the women’s poetry reflects both its presence and its reaction in the discourse of the duality of the ‘I’ and the ‘other’;...
“The more I think about it, the less I can imagine an enemy of poetry,” says South african poet Antjie Krog in this eighth Defence of Poetry in our series. Poetry does not need to be defended, she ass...
Lions, puff-adders and traffic congestion: in yet another astonishing diary from Zimbabwe, poet and former freedom fighter Freedom Nyamubaya describes life on her small game farm in Mhangura, and a su...
“No country is freer,” writes Colombian poet Nicolás Suescún about the Netherlands, where he spent a week during the Winternachten Festival. “The low cultural level in Colombia – caused by poverty and...
Zimbabwean poet Julius Chingono works as a rock-blasting contractor in daily life to support his family. He is also a Mufundisi – pastor – in the Tsitsi dzaMwari Apostolic Church. On our request he ...
2003
The fatwa condemning Egyptian poet Ahmed Shahawi’s latest book as obscene is a cultural event worthy of consideration, argues our Moroccan editor Norddine Zouitni. The Al-Azhar academy that issued the...
Ern Malley, the Halloween Parade and quite a few book parties: Australian poet and Jacket magazine editor John Tranter visits New York. “Australia’s most celebrated military engagement, Gallipoli, was...
Distinguished Australian writer and poet David Malouf, back in his native Brisbane for the Queensland Poetry festival, on the city of his childhood, Australian art, opera and poetry: “New and unexpect...
In Jerusalem, the poetry readings at the 6th International Poets’ Festival at Mishkenot Sha’ananim contrast sharply with the attacks killing Israelis and Palestinians elsewhere in the country. Hebrew ...
A week in the life of Egyptian poet Iman Mersal, at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The first episode in our new series of poets’ diaries: “You just read a poem on Mar...
Something is gained, rather than lost, in translated poetry, argues Lisa Katz in this essay. Translations abound with fortuitous changes, which perhaps "can lead us to ask questions about what ...
While avant-garde writers in the 20th century were limited by the print medium, their experimental techniques foreshadowed, even shaped, modern computer technology and the world wide web, argues Sarah...
Three of PIW’s editors – from Zimbabwe, the Ukraine and India – were invited by the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam to talk about some of the problems they encounter as poets and editors. A...
Brilliant errors, being the poet's psychoanalyst and the hardest poetry translation of all: renowned poets and translators Raoul Schrott, Sibila Petlevski and Lisa Katz discuss translating poetry.
"A dangerous and indispensable art", translation is both an act of social responsibility and an aesthetic experience akin to "making love with a new person, in a new body," according to Adrienne R...
"O, yes, my client is ever the opportunist! No harm in admitting that!" Council for the defence Raoul Schrott presents his case before the members of the jury of the Court of Fourth Instance. "This...
“A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.” (Ezra Pound)
The belief in the general translatability of poetry is crucial for a poetry website which is based on Engli...
The belief in the general translatability of poetry is crucial for a poetry website which is based on Engli...
The nationalistic Palestinian literature of the 1970s and 1980s has been replaced by personalised miniatures, as a special issue of Banipal magazine shows. In poetry that was made to be shared and rea...
A poet’s impression of the Drushkininkai Poetic Fall festival in Lithuania.
2002
In this short essay written especially for the launch of Poetry International Web, poet and former executive director of The Academy of American Poets William Wadsworth asserts that in the United Sta...
Poets, poetry editors and publishers from ten countries and four continents gathered in Rotterdam, June 2002, as the guests of the annual Poetry International Festival, to discuss the final details of...
French poet Jacques Roubaud mounts a vehement attack on Jean-Marie Le Pen, free verse and SLOP, “Standard Language of Pap”, all of which, he says, pollute our language.
Throughout all ages, poetry returns to the struggle between good and evil, hell and paradise, argues Evgeni Rein. “Rationalism did not abolish hell and paradise, but rather personified them.”
In poetry, our human consciousness, body and dreams are fused, says Les Murray. “If we accept the notion that human beings are fundamentally poetic, rather than rational or irrational, it has some int...
As civilisation advances, people suffering from the madness that is poetic sensibility are less and less tolerated, argues Galsan Tschinag. “Defence of poetry thus means: defence of humanity, defence ...
An American poetry professor struggles to reach a definition of poetry through a Socratic dialogue with one of his students, encountered in the local supermarket.
The poetry festival of Vilenica in Slovenia takes its visitors to unusual, lovely, almost medieval locations. Janita Monna reports.
Poetry is best when it finds itself at the heart of human comedy, claims Charles Simic’s 2000 year old poet. "There’s no more reliable reporter of what it means to be stuck in this eternal can of wor...
African poets have no choice but to be political in their work, claims renowned Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare: ‘You cannot keep quiet about the situation in the kind of countries we find ourselves in.’ ...