Who needs poetry festivals anyway?

January 18, 2006 The Israeli Poetry Festival in Metulla (June 5-7, 2003) provoked a controversy expressed in a sharp exchange of letters in the pages of Ha’aretz, Israel’s leading newspaper. Two writer-translators took issue with an article by Elite Karp saying that poetry festivals are quite useless. In response to Karp, Rina Litvin said that “lyric poetry has never aimed at the majority but rather at the individual alone inside four walls… Paradoxically, in our world, controlled by mass culture and its ‘instant messages,’ good poetry is clearly the refuge of the individual.” Still she maintained that “Public poetry presentations (that is to say, festivals) are necessary for several reasons. Among them is the opportunity to hear the poet in action: sometimes this dimension enables us to see the text in a new light… It also provides an opportunity for poets to step out of their isolation and make contact with readers. And, too, there is exposure to unfamiliar texts.”

Amir Or wrote against “the house arrest of poetry, far from the reach of many. What should be done with horses in the twenty-first century? Give them wings. Our material world has changed over time, but it’s doubtful that the human soul has changed in the same way. Perhaps poetry requires a more unbuttoned and spirited framework; perhaps survivors of literature classes, victims of the oppression of thought in our schools, no longer see the fun in it. But the way to share the richness of poetry with the culture at large is not to hide it.”