Poetic celebration of the power of words
Stanza Poetry Festival
Byre Theatre, St Andrews & online at www.stanzapoetry.org
The sense of living in difficult times ran through Stanza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, in St Andrews. Difficult times for the arts; difficult times for the world. Yet, there was also a sense of triumph that Stanza has survived the tough pandemic years and, under new artistic director Ryan Van Winkle, begins a new chapter its story.
Thisyear’sconfident programme brought together poets of all kinds: Scottish, British and international, established and emerging, young and old, and was rewarded with busy, appreciative audiences.
A triumphant opening night,
Warp and Weft, featured seven poets including Scots makar Kathleen Jamie, Pádraig O Tuama, host of the podcast Poetry Unbound, and Jason Allen-paisant, who recently scooped both poetry’s top prizes, the Forward and the TS Eliot.
O Tuama set the tone for the weekend when he spoke of “menace and tenderness”, twin themes which would echo through the next two days. Allen-paisant took them up when he gave the Stanza & Poetry Association of Scotland John Masefield Lecture on Saturday on “Poetry and the Sensorium of Catastrophe”. He described how he took on a challenge to write a haiku a day for 100 days around the time of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and found himself asking: What does it mean to write poetry in the current moment?
While admitting he has no easy answer, he proposed that poetry – its in-built empathy, its capacity for memorialising – is essential even in a time of war.
The twin themes continued to interweave: in the lengthy, ultimately successful, battle for a visa for leading Moroccan poet Soukaina Habiballah to appear at Stanza; in work of Nigerian-british writer Yomi Sode, illuminating everyday racism; in a joyful reading by Liz Lochhead and Michael Pedersen; and in the way headliners Leontia Flynn and Daljit Nagra brought a light touch to difficult subjects. In tough times, Stanza became – in Nagra’s words – “a celebration and an act of resistance”.