Kim Hyesoon
Last Friday I immersed myself in poetry read aloud at the Poetry Parnassus. It claims to be the UK’s largest ever gathering of poets. (Not including pubs surely?) At least one poet from every country competing in the 2012 London Olympics. It’s big.
So does even turning up make me an intellectual?
Let’s raise the stakes. I sat through repeated bouts of poetry, in Korean by South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon. So that’s Korean poetry in Korean. That must make me a hardcore intellectual.
She said, through a translator, that she’d only read short ones, the better for us to get the meaning in translation. She may need help with the translation of the word “short”. I can tell you that she is very illustrious and pioneering and that it was an unrepeatable experience. Not to be repeated anyway.
Does that make me a philistine? (Though not in a Palestinian sense.)
Wole Soyinka thinking to himself: “Are two phones enough? Maybe I should get a third one just in case.”
Next up – Nigerian Nobel literature prize winner Wole Soyinka. I’ve read quite a bit of him. I’ve even seen him before. But the highlight of his performance was when a mobile phone started ringing during one of his readings – and the phone owner would NOT turn it off. It wasn’t until Wole came to the end of his poem that we discovered the culprit. It was Wole’s own phone ringing – conveniently amplified by the nearby microphone.
We laughed. He laughed. He turned it off. Then he took out his other phone and turned that off too.
The man has TWO phones Continue reading
Blackwatertown 