Postcard from the Granada Poetry Festival

Last week, I and roughly one hundred other poets from around the world converged on sunny Granada, Nicaragua, for the seventh annual Granada International Poetry Festival - a week of poetry, translations, sun, volcanoes, copious cuba libres, monkeys, street music, and more poetry. Among the guests of the festival were the ND poets Ernesto Cardenal and Forrest Gander, as well as Sujata Bhatt, Claribel Alegría, Juan Carlos Abril, Pierre Joris, C.D. Wright, Magnus William-Olsson, Michael Augustin, Lisa Mayer, Brian Johnstone, Rozalie Hirs, Martin Glaz Serup, and many others.

Because I had never been to a literary festival in Central America before, I was unsure how well-attended the readings would be, or how the poets reading with translators would be received. Having witnessed the presidential reception accorded to Ernesto Cardenal at the opening ceremony, I had some inkling that Nicaraguans took their poetry seriously, but the crowd attending my first reading with poets Emad Fouad, Tom Schulz and several emerging Central American poets completely blew my mind.

Our reading was held outside at night in the central public square, and there were hundreds and hundreds in the audience: children, old women and men, but mostly teenagers and young people. To my huge surprise, there were so many people in the crowd that the sea of chairs wasn’t nearly sufficient: people were packed at the back and in the aisles, lounging on statues, sitting cross-legged on the ground. The square was alive with a kind of carnival atmosphere - children picking through the crowd with baskets of Chiclets and cigarettes, men pushing jangling carts of shaved ice and sodas, women roasting ears of corn on kettle barbecues. But the most impressive thing was that the raucous crowd was clearly there for the poetry.

This frenzied vibe carried on right through the week - packed readings, late night parties with pumping music, groups of slightly sunburned poets roving around  Granada like exotic birds. All this culminated in a surreal parade the organisers called “Poetic Carnival: Burial of the Miseries and Poverty of the Soul”, a three-hour extravaganza with poets on floats reading to huge crowds chanting “viva la poesia”, women shimmying in sequinned bikinis and spaceboots, kids in vampire masks dancing to salsa music, and a very strange scene where a group of skeletons carried a real coffin down to the water’s edge and made as if to throw it in.

Amidst all the parties, I was also able to attend many of the other poets’ readings; among the highlights was Forrest Gander’s extraordinary reading (in Spanish, no less - no translator required!) one night outside the cathedral, with attendant bats wheeling around overhead in the palm trees. I caught up with Forrest later in the week for some bird talk - turns out we’re both amateur ornithologists - and since my return to New York have been re-reading his ND classic Eye Against Eye. 

I’ve been particularly taken by his long work “Mission Thief” from that collection, a poem which begins with a simple encounter (a couple running into a bike thief in Mexico) and ends with the speaker’s realization of the “stark spectacle of [his] separateness” from other people, even from his wife with whom he has just renewed his vows. What I like most about the poem - aside from its gorgeous bird-image of “two starlings / their wings scissored behind them / like mournful rabbis” - is that it’s also quietly and cleverly a poem about travel: wandering, digressive, full of the kind of heightened awareness we have when walking down the street in a foreign country. Sitting in the ND office today and re-reading the terrific descriptions of “poles mummified with posters”, “scrawled noise”, and “slabs of root-tilted sidewalk,” I’m transported again to the swarm of heat and noise in Granada, all that tropic light.

- Sarah Holland-Batt

Forrest reading on the carnival float, Granada 2011.

Eye Against Eye.