Translated material
Poetry, Internet and video
A biennale of poets is taking place in Moscow
The Biennale of Poets is being held in Moscow for the fifth time, and this year the task of the forum was to gather different - both domestic and foreign - poetry festivals in one city, to organize a festival of festivals. Thus, from October 20 to 27, all lovers of fine literature can hear live and see with their own eyes various representatives of poetry, although not world wide, but still quite vast in territory and diverse in creative methods.As the organizers of the poetry biennale assure, the regional poetry movement in our country is growing and expanding. Starting from Saturday, those who wished could attend evenings at which poets from different cities of Russia performed: representatives of the festivals “Strelka” from Nizhny Novgorod, “Slowwwo” from Kaliningrad, Yekaterinburg “Literaturrentgen”, St. Petersburg May Festival of New Poets, etc. To study this is not the most a phenomenon expected in modern conditions, such as a boom in regional poetry festivals, yesterday, within the framework of the biennale, a round table was held “The phenomenon of the festival movement in modern Russia: history, problems, trends.”
Today, the Meyerhold Center will host the opening of an international program, no less interesting and rich. Its participants this year included the Quebec International Festival (Canada), the Paris International Festival "Spring of Poets", the US National Endowment for the Arts, the Georgian Mziuri Festival, the Madrid Festival, as well as the German project of the Berlin Literary Workshops - the Zebra Video Poetry Prize " This latest project represents a genre that can be defined as poetic cinema - a combination of poetry with visuals, a short film created at the intersection of poetry, cinema and media art. Lectures will be given on the theory of such a “video-poetry clip,” and poetry can be “seen” in a new format as part of the “Video Poetry” program, where projects by Berlin, Riga and domestic authors will be shown. In general, the festival will pay a lot of attention to the problems of the existence of poetry in the modern world. Thus, some of the events are devoted to a variety of theoretical issues - from how to survive for publishing houses that produce deliberately non-commercial - poetic - products, to how the appearance of the reader is changing and what should be expected from the process of medialization of literature.
However, the main goal of the festival is, of course, meetings with poets and the discovery of new names for a more or less wide circle of readers. Throughout this week, those interested can go to creative evenings, listen to poems performed by the author, attend performances and presentations, and participate in discussions on various poetic topics - there are special “free communication zones” for participants and visitors of the biennale.
Among the various festival programs - such as “Russian Poetry Abroad”, “Intercultural Poetry Readings”, “Voice Verse Festival” - there is also the traditional program “Poets at School”. Within its framework, meetings will be held with schoolchildren - Georgian poets will communicate with students of schools with an ethnocultural Georgian component of education, Spanish poets will visit schools with in-depth study of the Spanish language, and French-speaking ones - French.
On October 25, a poetry evening dedicated to Osip Mandelstam will take place at the RSUH museum center. Participants and guests of the festival will not only be able to listen to the poet’s poems in different languages, but also get acquainted with the projects of the monument to Mandelstam, which is expected to be opened on World Poetry Day on March 21, 2008.
On the closing day of the festival, October 27, the “Non-Stop Poems” event will take place - participants will honor the memory of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov, who died in July of this year.
A more detailed program of all festival events can be found on the website www.poetrybiennale.ru.