Colophon

This year’s Poetry Hearings, an annual English language poetry festival in Berlin, had a strong Prague contingent, with one performing poet and several audience members making the trek to Germany.

The two night festival began Friday night with readings from British poets Kelvin Corcoran and Naomi Foyle, Prague resident Louis Armand, and Mark Terrill, an American poet living in Berg, Germany. The lineup was diverse, with poets presenting a rich variety of poetics and reading styles.

The readings took place at Kaffee Burger, a legendary pub and music club in East Berlin. The venue is straight out of the good old days, with wall paper and an ancient bar that lent an air of old style to the proceedings.

After the reading Friday night, most of the audience repaired to a brewery pub across the street for intense aesthetic discussions on the future of poetry – pentameters, line breaks and the like.

Saturday night featured an equally diverse lineup of poets, including noted British poet Will Stone, who read from his melancholy body of work and entertained the audience with his arid wit. Irish poet and Physicist Iggy McGovern read poetry that was unassuming, humorous and nearly scientifically precise in its approach to language and imagery.

Siddhartha Bose brought the evening to a close with a dramatic multi-media performance which featured music and video projections played behind his animated recitation of a narrative which spanned decades and continents. His presence – which was essentially dramatic more than poetic – at the festival brought a performance poetry slant, serving to show not only the diversity of the Poetry Hearings, but also of poetry itself.

The Poetry Hearings, now in its sixth year, is one of the premier English language poetry festivals in Europe. Organizer Catherine Hales and her team have done a fine job of gathering some of the most up and coming poets in Europe and the UK and featuring them in a unique setting. One hopes the tradition will continue.