Poetry Day
November 16th marked 'Poetry Day' in the Czech Republic, held on the anniversary of the birth in 1810 of the great Czech Romantic poet, Karel Hynek Macha. This year, it was the 4th time the 'Poetry Day' was held, and it has been expanding with each new year.
The 'Poetry Day' was coordinated by Club 8, which also runs the Poetry for Passengers project which displays poetry on Prague's metro system. Its agenda this year included a variety of ventures in and outside Prague, not on November 16th only, but over the whole weekend. The main idea of the venture is to celebrate poetry in all its forms and in as wide a range of places as possible. On the very first day I spoke with the main organizer of the event, Bernie Higgins:
"This year's theme in Czech it's Mista poezie - poezie mista. It doesn't translate exactly into English but really it's about poetry and places used as inspiration for poetry. And this year we've got a lot of interesting places, not just in Prague and other cities and towns like Pilsen, Teplice, but a number of Czech poets are actually doing readings in other countries, somebody's reading in a wood in Athens, and somebody's reading their poetry on a seashore in Nice and another Czech artist is exhibiting his work in Berlin, so that's quite good fun this year, I think."
Can you tell us more about Mista poezie - what kind of project is it?
Well, each year we have a scene for the Poetry Day - it's usually trying to discover some interesting connection between poetry and audience and place. "The 'Poetry Day' is not really just a festival of reading poetry. It's often trying to go to new places, this year, some of the main readings will be in schools, because we are launching this year a poetry project for schools, which involves offering teachers posters of poetry on them to use in the classroom and having poets doing workshop, and the British Council are supporting the project by bringing two poets to be involved in this project in schools. These are two poets who are very much involved in performance. Francesca Beard is involved in a folk hop group, as well as in performing at the spoken word scene in London, and Anthony Joseph is a very experimental poet and performer and they're both described as being very exciting poets, and they've been involved in a British Council project called 'The Modern Love Tour".
Poetry for schools - what is it?
"Well, Club 8 which organizes the Poetry Day also organizes the poetry on the metro, people might have noticed the poetry posters there. And we want to extend this idea of putting poetry posters into schools. So we are launching a project called Poetry in Schools at the Pedagogical faculty and all teachers have been invited to come along and hear poets reading - they're all either teachers or graduates of the Pedagogical faculty at Charles University. All the teachers will be able to take a selection of poems for their classroom walls, so that students have something inspiring and interesting to look at in the lessons."
Is it poets' poems or poems by students?
There are four poems in Czech - it's one about skeletons written by an 18th century Czech poet, an anonymous poet - we don't know who it was. Then there are poems by Ivan Wernisch, Jan Skacel and also Marketa Hrbkova. Then there are two poems in two languages - a lovely poem by Tara Fabianova which is in Romany and Czech and there's a poem by William Blake, the well known English poet, 'Tiger', and that's in English and Czech, a translation by Zdenek Hron. So I think this might be an inspiration for the students and their language learning as well.
What is your experience from the previous years, do many people - students and even children - take part?
"Each year more and more people have become involved. And there have always been schools and children involved somehow. This year a whole school - gymnasium in Troja - is doing poetry related activities and we're finding that more people are contacting us each year to say that they're interested in doing something, so I hope that it'll continue to grow and more people will do things. To celebrate poetry at least once a year is not such a bad idea."
