Poetry Parnassus: “This global chorus“

An audacious celebration at the Southbank Centre.

Whether you’re counting down the hours to the Games or couldn’t give a damn, the Cultural Olympiad programme – now well underway – is doing its best to win over all people to the London 2012 cause. A successful festival of any sort has about it the spirit of collaboration (over competition) and elicits in its goers the irresistible notion that, for the moment, they’re part of some utopia. Such was the feeling among hundreds of writers and readers last week, at probably the greatest international gathering of poets in history.

Poetry Parnassus, the “back of an envelope” idea of Simon Armitage, artist-in-residence of the Southbank Centre, saw 204 poets from as many countries come together to represent their nation’s poetic tradition at the many-venued culture complex on the Thames. Readings and workshops, parties and debates filled six days and nights.

Did you know Somalia is possibly the world’s most poetry-loving nation? Such takeaways about the global poetry scene were easy to come by over the week, but far more interesting was the demonstration of how many various ways people of countries around the world relate to poems. Take Somalia again: while poetic expression there is the base from which almost all other creative outlets develop – and most people can recite many poems – the tradition is entirely aural. How unlike the UK, where poetry is so often read in one’s head, the verse printed and bound; confined to a page.

With such an international gathering the political dimension of poetry didn’t need teasing out. On Wednesday, PEN International & English PEN hosted Freedom of Expression Day where personal narratives and debate centred around themes of exile, identity and conflict. Free speech, the defiance and deviance inherent to the purposeful writing of poetry, was alluded to throughout the festival: Shailja Patel, the Kenyan poet, warned writers should never “[take] lightly the privilege of a platform,” and Yuyutsu Sharma from Nepal picked a lofty quote by Shelley, that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.

Still, this was as much a celebration of the listener/reader as of the performer/published writer. Many times over the week they were at least as grateful, but on Tuesday evening poetry lovers may have been most excited. At dusk over Jubilee Gardens, behind the London Eye, a helicopter dropped 100,000 cards printed with poems by 300 contemporary poets. The “aeronautical display” by Chilean collective Casagrande had adults and children jumping for poetry, or merely gazing at the “Rain of Poems” that gently fell against the city skyline. Later, crossing Waterloo Bridge, I read the first I had caught: an abridged version of a poem by Rafeef Ziadah (Palestine’s representative at the Parnassus) that I’d seen a video of her performing last winter. Printed on a little card and shortened to just a stanza, took my breath away again.