Poetry International Rotterdam is an organisation in the Netherlands that exists for the promotion and propagation of poetry on a full-time basis. It is responsible for one of the largest and most consistent poetry festivals in Europe in addition to conferences and other for a organised in an attempt to influence and encourage activities in poetry internationally. The expansion of international poetry is a mission that it takes seriously enough to have set up a permanent establishment in Rotterdam administered by Tatjana Daan, Liesbeth Huijer and Erik Menkveld. This institution has been in existence and continually active for nearly forty years.
Poetry International’s main event is the annual Poetry International Festival, staged in June, one of the most prominent of its kind; but there are a number of other activities, some of which are connected to the festival. These include publications, translations, involvement in conferences and alliances with other organisations and initiatives around the world engaged in the promotion of poetry. Arising out of some of these have been efforts to encourage the organisation of similar activities, festivals and national ‘Poetry Days’ on the international calendar.
There has been some limited and qualified success in this promotion, but there is more available evidence to suggest that it has served to lend support and to complement other like activities with their own independent sources and origins in other parts of the world. For instance, Poetry International has some collaboration with the Stockholm Poetry Festival which advertises itself as “one of Europe’s foremost poetry festivals.” It is held in late October each year at The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden, and presents poetry as well as a range of other performing arts. There are performances in music, dance and theatre in addition to other revelry, and the festival advances innovative collaborations among artists and performers in different disciplines. It usually accommodates more than 60 participants in these but still lags behind Rotterdam in terms of the number of poets involved.
Like Rotterdam, however, Stockholm is also associated with a periodical publication, a journal of literature and the fine arts called Ootal which actually arranges the festival. Like Stockholm, another example of a large, prominent event of this nature with its own separate, independent origin is the Medellin Poetry Festival held each year in June-July in the city of Medellin in Colombia. Organized roughly along the same lines as Rotterdam, this has to be the largest and most popular among the local population of all similar festivals in the world. Medellin needs a stadium to accommodate the several thousands who turn out to make up the audience. What may further emphasize the focus on pure poetry in the Colombian event and confirm it as having the largest audience for poetry is that it is not as multi-faceted as Rotterdam or as multi-disciplinary as Stockholm, because it features nothing else besides the reading of poetry.
The Dutch institution, however, is interested in a wider range of engagements which it believes will support the reading of poetry and promote it internationally. Along with this is its interest in exchanges among poets and their poems across language barriers and different cultures across the globe. One of its more recent engagements in the realisation of this goal was participation in a specifically arranged conference at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on the theme Dialogue Among Civilisations. This was initiated by Ram Devineni, Publisher of Rattapalax Press and its Journal of Contemporary Literature and arranged in collaboration with Prince Claus Fonds of the Netherlands, and the United Nations. The specific event was designed to promote Dialogue Among Civilisations Through Poetry.
This dialogue had simple-sounding but ambitious objectives. These included a resolution to get each nation around the world to declare an International Poetry Day. This would not only be a day of poetry when verses are read or performed, but a day established on the calendar of each country on which the poetry of other nations would be featured. It tried to formalise what had already existed, viz the declaration of an International Poetry Day. This Day had already been accepted by the UN, but but its observance had been less than standard and less than consistent. Some kept it up, some did not, and even those who did, the actual date in the year was not standardized. Neither was its theme uniform because sometimes it was international poetry, but often it was more a “national poetry day.”
In addition to this, the Dialogue resolved to establish a directory of world poetry which would seek to document and somehow disseminate3 samples of poetry from different representative regions around the world. This was to be coordinated by Poetry International and managed via the internet from its centre in the Dutch city. The Dialogue in New York would also have been close to the heart of the Rotterdam organisation because the promotion of poetry as a dialogue among civilizations has been one of the objectives of its annual festival.
This kind of intellectual engagement would also have driven the Dutch institution’s involvement in another recent conference on the theme The Role of the Intellectual in the Public Sphere held in Beirut, Lebanon. This was arranged by the Prince Claus Fund, another Dutch establishment in the Hague with which the Poetry International has had fruitful collaborations and from which it has received sponsorship. This meeting engaged academics and other intellectuals in an analysis of their roles in the shape and direction of worldwide public affairs of a political and cultural nature.
Even in the primary activity of poetry readings there is diversification of presentations and other engagements which lend support to the main event. The Poetry International Festival started in Rotterdam in 1969 and has been followed by an unbroken series of annual readings by poets from far-flung corners of the globe. These have included familiar authors such as Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison, David Dabydeen and Kamau Brathwaite, as well as the more alien-sounding J.A.Deelder, who is, however, one of the best known Dutch poets, Judith Herzberg (Netherlands), Lev Berinski (Israel) and Saadi Youssef (Iraq). One of the exercises that have accompanied the presentation of these diverse poems is translation. This was necessary for a largely Dutch and English speaking audience, but also because the works presented are published. The translations, therefore, assist, but they have also been done as a participatory exercise to investigate the way poems turn out when presented in a different language. It was always interesting to see how different from the original a poem ends up after being translated into other languages and then, from these, back into its first language.
There have also been accompanying symposia sponsored by Prince Claus and featuring some of the poets as well as invited critics discussing related issues. There has always been a large popular audience and a few events arranged for their entertainment. In addition to the varied readings in the City Theatre in Rotterdam, there were late night events in the adjoining Caf
