Stockholm Poetry Festival 2009 — Three Acts of Love
“Something / is bursting the walls of my arteries something / is pounding its way up my throat like a volcano / rising / finally / I understand why I’m a poet,” said Shailja Patel, and the hall erupted in cheers. Patel’s fearless spoken-word poetry, singing along Ngwatilo’s alternatingly sharp and sweet lyrics, and all the other authors stories of love, of truths, and of strength, made up the magazine 00TAL’s thirteenth poetry festival.
This year, 00TAL’s poetry festival took place on November 3rd, 2009. It was opened by Editor in Chief Madeleine Grive, who proclaimed the festival as acting in love, for love, against the metaphorical and literal coldness of the world we live in today. They were bold words, the ones she spoke, words of love and of poetry as something that is whatever we want and need it to be.
She reminded us of Michael Bowen, the artist behind the initiative to bring a thousand kilos of daisies to the 75,000 anti-war demonstrators outside Pentagon on October 21st, 1967. This, of course, led to the iconic image in Time Magazine, where the demonstrators are placing daisies in the barrels of the guns of surrounding soldiers. With this image projected on a large screen, the Royal Dramatic Theatre felt warmer, more open, as we sank into our chairs and waited for the first poet to take the stage.
Internationally renowned playwright Jon Fosse read with fiddler Benedicte Marseth, whose driven music intertwined with the calm, fleeting images of Fosse’s poetry until we were listening to a sometimes melancholic, sometimes gravely joyful dance. There was love, there was rain, and there was love raining through us and through the world of the poem.
This was not the only combination of music and poetry we would see this evening. Ngwatilo, the young Kenyan poet, read her love poems with a warm smile, and finished by singing one of her songs, leaving the audience breathless. Sofia Stenström and Terés Löf performed a piece that combined newly written words by Stenström with Löf’s variations on Philip Glass’s Modern Lee Waltz. A love story, spun out lightly and deftly under the lights in the room. Later, Sibille Attar and Ola Joyce both sang their songs in a way that left no doubt about whether music can also be poetry.
Of course, sometimes all you need is the words and yourself. Shailja Patel read Shilling Love, and she filled the main stage of the Royal Dramatic Theatre through her presence, her movements, and her poem. She told us of not understanding or claiming a word (love) before you’ve pushed it through every hell imaginable. Earlier, Jonas Gardell had read us a piece about the advice given for your own good, the way we are taught not to dream early on, but that what we love might be the impossible.
The evening also brought us Swedish authors Ann Jäderlund, Johannes Anyuru, and Staffan Söderblom: we had birds and sharp edges and the first love of youth. The art/dance/music collective Balboa had put together a very unique and forceful performance, which packed a welcome punch.
The festival closed with Caravan of Love, sung and/or performed by all the participants. Thus, the evening came to an end with snow falling on the stage (and on the first row of the audience), roses being distributed, music and dancing, and the entire room on their feet. While some of us in the audience may have danced more than others, I am convinced we all left feeling just a little warmer, just a little happier, than when we’d entered a few short hours earlier.
