“The muttering of a mystic waterfall is a gutter bubbling over
The falling of a fresh bedsheet is the sky I am under…”
The above lines are from my attempt at the writing prompt provided by Camilla Nelson. I started my virtual day at StAnza with this ‘Starting Point’: ‘Take a notebook or audio recorder and walk’. It woke me up, forced my mind to focus on translating my surroundings into words. It readied me for the sessions of the day.
First up was ‘Past and Present: Whose Tradition is Whose?’ where Yang Lian, calling over Zoom, said the events of the last two years and the subsequent isolation it enforced was ‘a call to deepen our thinking’. Lian goes on to explain The Dictionary of Chinese thought and the true meaning of the modern, fashioned also from the old. An interesting discussion on time ensues, Lian explains that poetry encapsulates all of time, it brings the past and present together like no other form, even though it does not stand still. Adnan Al-Sayegh says beautifully in his Iraqi mother tongue that poetry is always on the move. He agrees with Lian’s comments, stating that heritage is a foundation of knowledge and a synthesis of human experiences from which we draw to move forward. His translator, Jenny Lewis explains the relationship between translator and poet, and how the translation need not be exact, word for word, as long as the meaning is the same; rhymes and meter, of course, cannot be translated exactly from language to language as the words are completely different.
The next session, and my favourite of the day is Poetry Café with Omar bin Musa, Australian poet, rapper, and author. His readings transport the audience from their seats to his childhood in a town on the outskirts where ‘floods scatter fish over the streets/ as if pieces of the moon have fallen’. We often view the major cities in Australia to be the cultural hubs of the country, but Musa wanted to celebrate his origin and raise up stories from his small town. He goes on to discuss the power of collaboration in poetry. He used to think poetry was a solitary art form, and he used to give the advice that the writer was the dictator of their own art. But now he thinks poetry is not singular and that creating art in collaboration is as inspiring as it is rewarding for artists working together. He recites a poem he wrote in collaboration with Inua Ellams titled ‘Fuck/Batman’. It considers Batman as a metaphor for the Coronavirus as it swoops down on London/Gotham: ‘We grew madder yet clearer headed with each day’. He worries some of his Ozzie slang and phrases do not translate oversees but puts beautifully: ‘Poetry is a language of feeling as much as of words’.
My final session of the day was The Contemporary Epic where the writers apply the tradition of the epic upon a modern narrative. Stephanie Sy Quia reads from her collection Amnion which gives a miniature family history: stories from her grandparents’ childhood passed on to her which she moulded gently into poems. Khaled Nurul Hakim reads a few excerpts from A Book of Naseeb which is written in the striking emergence of Qur’an inspired language and the vocabulary of the streets. Hakim reads with a commanding voice that echoes around the room he speaks to and out through my laptop speakers. It’s not unlike a king speaking to his subjects, the audience and myself hang on to his every word. Gёzim Hadjari reads from Bitter Grass, examining the ways in which the epic when armed with oral traditions become a force to be reckoned with, a resistance.
I will describe this day at StAnza as a bouquet: of accents, languages, and cultures. All so varied, poured into poetry and shared so honestly. The online experience did not separate me from the wonderous poets and their words, rather it unites. Poets from across the world, their stories, their feelings, told.
Renni Keay, for Dundee University Review of the Arts (DURA)
