An imaginary festival in the Republic of —
Invisible poems, transnational trajectories, anonymous heroes
IN THE REPUBLIC • My onward flight to S— had been delayed by an awkward incident during a brief stopover in Z—. One of the passengers—an older man with crumpled white hair in a crumpled white suit—was pulled from the boarding queue. Two persons, who did not look as if they belonged to airport security, searched the man’s carry-on luggage.
From my place in the queue behind him, I observed as they pulled out first a newspaper and then what could have been a paperback novel. The man in the suit did not flinch. The book had a green matte cover with gold lettering in a language I did not recognise. As the official flicked through its pages I could see that it was unread, brand-new. Poetry, actually.
A sales receipt fell onto the floor of the terminal building. The man in the crumpled white suit noticed its sing-song descent but the official did not (and his colleague was too busy calling the incident in on her mobile telephone, in any case). Presently, they led the man away. When I reached the old man’s spot in the queue, I calmly stepped on the receipt, hiding it from view, claiming it as my own.
Then I bent over, ostensibly to tie my shoelaces, and slipped the receipt between the pages of my poetry chapbook, not yet published but destined for general obscurity. As our ageing Bombardier turboprop banked over the hazy marble mountaintops, I marvelled at my own audacity, hoping both the receipt and the unreadable message scrawled on its reverse side would be safe from harm once I arrived in the Republic.
IMAGINARY DIARIES • If only I’d bothered to write this down in a diary all those years ago, I wouldn’t need to make up so much of it now. After decades spent writing, publishing and appearing at obscure festivals, I’m left with a compost of memories: some pickled, others moulding. Each layer rests wetly on its peers, too fragile to extract without disintegrating into dust motes, fly larvae, dirt smears. Safer to let the whole thing rot, then use it to pot seedlings, grow some flowers.
The reappearance in a print anthology of something I wrote on a computer and published on the Internet more than a decade ago prompts me to ask how the piece even came into being. One can’t be too deterministic, but the temptation is real: if I hadn’t applied for that grant in J—; if I hadn’t met M— in P— that time; if I hadn’t got into that taxi with K—; if I hadn’t been invited to attend that festival; if I didn’t edit that journal (a train of thoughts that produces its own branch lines . . . ).
Far better, I think, to just pretend I remember everything that occurred, and proceed with curious caution. I start by lighting a cigarette for the taxi driver at the airport and listening, without appearing to comprehend, to his rants about the citizens of a neighbouring homeland. Getting in so that he can move his cab one-hundred metres down the concourse to avoid their imaginary claims, the toxic plumes of their imaginary cigarettes.
‘DEAR’ • The first email arrived in my inbox in June 2010. It was addressed to ‘Dear’, and sent to four poets from A—, including myself, although I no longer lived there, having emigrated two years previously. I am coordinator for international cooperation with in the S— poetry evening’s festival, it read. As you probably know the festival is held every year in M—, precisely on the O— Lake in S—. Like an excellent poets, you have been recommended by our collaborator M—.
In fact, I’d met M— in P— four years earlier, in 2006, on a lightning trip to the continent to visit my lover, K—. I’d met K—, in turn, during a creative residency in K— in 2005, a country I’d never intended to visit until my application to undertake a similar residency in J— was accepted on the condition that I travel to K— instead. Coincidentally enough, M— lived and worked in J— at that time, although we never caught up there.
K—, M— and I met in a cafe on an island in the middle of the river S—, and I promised M— that I would send him some poems about my time in the Republic of K—, many of which were about alcohol. M—’s press published the poems as a beautiful chapbook in 2007. But we hadn’t personally corresponded for some time, although I’d seen him fleetingly in R—, at one of those festivals where it’s hard to catch up with anybody unless you’re on the programme.
Anyway, there followed some sentences inviting me to attend the poetry festival in S—, with my accommodation, good and local travel costs paid for. The email requested I send my CV and some poems in English. I am very delighted to ask you to participate because we have heard such good words about you and your poetry that we will be very happy to have you here, and to spend couple of days with you, your poetry and the beauty of M—.
Expecting to here from you, the email concluded.
No attachments, not even a signature line.
I never responded.
FLIGHT FROM Z— • The second email, sent one year later, came addressed to me personally. The text was formatted in paragraphs, and had been proofread. As an excellent poet, it is our pleasure to invite you to the 50th S— Poetry Evenings Festival, it went. Your presence will be of a great contribution towards increasing the cultural cooperation between our countries, especially because you are successful poet. We sincerely hope that you would be able to attend the festival.
Attached to the email were an invitation letter, a participation form, and a letter confirming that my costs would be covered for the duration of the festival. Perhaps these documents made me consider the offer more seriously. By then I was living in another country, undertaking postdoctoral research on electronic literature. I was lucky to be travelling a lot, and the summer holidays were long. What exactly did I have to lose?
On 6 July, I replied to the email. Thank you for the lovely invitation to attend the S— Poetry Evenings, I wrote. I would be delighted to attend. I duly sent my CV and some poems to be translated into the language they speak in M—. Six weeks later, on Wednesday 24 August 2011, I arrived in S— on C— Airlines Flight #368 from Z—. An old man in a crumpled white suit may or may not have been pulled from the boarding queue. But I had multiple copies of my chapbook in my backpack, and entered the Republic without being questioned.
HOTEL D— • The cab ride from the airport in S— to the smaller resort town of S— was long and bumpy, but there is no need to record details of our route or the initials of my fellow passengers here, except to say that the journey was rugged and the terrain inhospitable. We arrived in the late afternoon at a tall, concrete hotel right beside the renowned O— Lake, complete with its own beach and an outdoor cafe peopled by other festival guests. I ordered and drank, with barely concealed astonishment, an espresso.
I may then have demolished a beer or two. Returning groggily to my small but well-furnished room on the top floor of the hotel, complete with its own balcony and view of the lake, I opened my private communications console and navigated to the landing page of a referral network I have long since deleted from my para-virtualised environment. Using the console’s travelling keyboard, I typed: Ummm, just arrived in S—, in M—. Talk about first class! Is this a dream?
To explain: I’d never even heard of a half- or full-board hotel before, let alone stayed in one free of charge for a whole week. In all of my somewhat-aimless peregrinations, I had always chosen the cheapest options, as befitted my status as a low-level researcher with a tenuous link to electronic literature, a field which was then experiencing a kind of hyper-Renaissance. But the sky was blue, the days were long and I was living what passes for a dream among the obscurely published poets of this world.
FESTIVAL • Which was just as well, because my name did not appear on the festival programme. Nor had I been invited to participate in the legendary tree-planting ceremony that precedes each iteration of the famed S— Poetry Evening. This being the 50th iteration, there was much digging and planting of young saplings by distinguished poets, or at the very least older people who dressed like distinguished poets and refused to meet anyone’s eye or show the front sides of their festival lanyards to anyone.
I should have had an inkling of this before my arrival. A poet friend from N—, named A—, had actually written to me about the festival two years earlier, informing me that another poet from A— had been due to read there but had fallen and broken his knee. Yes, I was in M—, S—, Lake O—, he recounted, for a big festival of... what? Poets were simply decoration, the whole thing was like a joke. Okay, I had wonderful hours with four or five of the others. These words, which I paid no attention to at the time, would also come to sum up my days at the festival in S—.
As you would expect, many poets had been invited from around the world, and many of them had come, enticed no doubt (as I had been) by the offer of free accommodation and food. Which, when you think about it, would usually be enough to draw an enthusiastic crowd to even the most obscure literary festival held in the smallest city in the world. The appearance of translations of these poets’ work in the festival anthology, in both their native languages and the official language of M—, would be mere icing on these literary cakes.
Not knowing a soul in attendance, I attempted to mingle on the perimeter of the tree-planting shenanigans, and struck up conversations with this or that visiting scribe from countries near and far. It wasn’t too hard. Pretty much everyone else was in the same boat, too, and within an hour or two I had gotten to know most of the people it was worth knowing there. Some young, others old, all slightly eccentric—in other words, everything was soon as it should be, particularly once wine began to be served.
Over the next three days I attended various events, including an opening ceremony on a barge on the river D—, a feast in a park on the shore of the O— lake, a cruise on the lake itself, and a dinner in the lakeside city of O—, whose terracotta-tiled houses snake up the hillsides, giving the whole settlement the vibes of an ancient fort. As the peak tourist season was almost over, we had these places virtually to ourselves, although the days were baking hot and the cool waters of the lake offered only minimal respite. For the remainder, there was always more beer.
BABYLON • I met K— by a small church on Lake O—, having just had a quick tour and come outside to soak in the rays and tread the marble walkway. We hit it off, he later wrote, enjoying the peculiar jokes about writers and the business of writing.
“I recall the same”, as Robert Forster once sang. I recall, in particular, the sense of excitement I felt when I realised that we were both cricket fans, and West Indies cricket fans in particular. I had just seen the epic documentary on the West Indian cricket team, Fire In Babylon, and our rants on it during another bumpy taxi ride were probably the most exciting thing that happened to anyone in S— that week.
K—, who was the editor of a university-based journal in the city of L—, had travelled halfway across the world to attend the festival, and was doubtless extremely jetlagged for the entirety of his visit. I did not get a chance to hear him read, as he was not on the bill for any of the big-ticket events. Still, K— and I promised to stay in touch, and several weeks later he sent me an email: I am the guy who wore sandals, he wrote, in case I might not otherwise remember him.
SUNFLOWER FLAGS • Once the main proceedings of the festival concluded, teams of poets were dispatched to all corners of M— to read their work and meet the locals. I arrived in the unknown city of K—life-bruised and hung-over, lucky to have escaped the clutches of bureaucracy, the festival of mute poets barely a memory. The lines of poetry I rehearsed in my head were nothing compared to the roadside fields of rice and the strange national sunflower flags.
It remained hot in K—, further inland from S— and far from any sizeable body of water. Still, I experienced the evening’s cool remedy: couples walking beside a tiny river, and our readings in a children’s park, where swings and miniature trains reminded me of times when a swing was all I needed: times before words took over. I projected my voice into darkness, a single poem my only weapon in a war where disarming complete strangers was my only aim.
(SLIGHT) RETURN TO WORK • I returned to the capital for more readings and more wine, but soon enough it was time to leave the Republic, knowing full well that I would probably never visit again. I promised to stay in touch with the poets I’d met, and a perusal of my electronic archives from the time shows that I did indeed do so. I met up with one poet in A—, edited the thesis of a poet living in C— and created a fictitious band, named after the word in M— for ‘kiss’, with a poet from B—. But in time even these connections faded and we fell out of touch.
But, finally, K— proposed that we collaborate on a joint issue. I’d been editing a poetry journal for ten years but never received such an invitation, either in my own country or internationally. Of course I jumped at the chance. We emailed back and forth for some weeks, eventually agreeing to select 15 poems from the archives of our respective magazines on the theme of ‘Work’. One of my final acts as editor of the journal was to introduce the issue, which appeared online in 2012.
Last week, 13 years after the fact, I received in the post three print copies of an anthology bringing together works from eight such collaborations conceived by K— and guest editors from all over the world. In fact, our collaboration was the first in what has proven to be a rich and productive series. It is a strange pleasure to see a work of mine republished and anthologised in this way.
If only I’d bothered to write this down in a diary all those years ago, I wouldn’t need to make up so much of it now.
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