Penzance literary festival is unlike any other’ reads the welcoming and informative website http://penzance-literary-festival.org.uk It’s a community festival, started last year, and organised again by a small number of volunteers who have somehow succeeded in expanding it on an extremely small budget. Contributors are mostly local or have Cornish links, and entrance to an event costs less than a cup of coffee.
However, people do cross the Tamar to get there. The first person I bump into is Tessa West, another Aldeburgh festival veteran. Tessa has travelled from East Anglia to exhibit and read from ‘The Other Vikings’, her handmade and illustrated book of poems, which she unwraps and unfolds before an attentive audience. She is also contributing another talk and reading, as well as sampling the sea bathing of West Cornwall – definitely warmer than Aldeburgh in November.
The theme of this year’s festival is ‘stories’. There are story-writing/telling/reading events for all tastes and ages, talks on writing and publishing, stories in photographs and on the paintings of the Newlyn School artists, travel stories, biographies, and a ‘Big read’ of The Secret Garden. And even stories in poems.
With an incredible 80 events in 13 venues over 5 days, even deciding what to choose requires concentration, and I’m full of admiration for the programming skills involved. But even after many years’ training at other poetry festivals my enthusiasm exceeds my stamina, particularly as there are often six or even seven events running concurrently. So, lacking a time-turner, I miss out on Philip Marsden (I loved ‘The Main Cages’ ), and various talks including ‘The Oblivion of Richard Trevithick’. And sadly I can’t make it to the improvised opera entitled ‘The Dangerously Rough Guide to Getting Published’. Sounds brilliant. I just hope there will be a repeat performance next year.
So I choreograph my own sequence of poetry events, including Nick Round’s translation workshop of Portuguese and Spanish poetry which is full of gems and turns out to be one of my festival highlights. Here, with permission, is his translation of Antonio Couto Viana’s The Lyrical Ostrich
Ostrich:
The bad joke of two stumpy wings
(A thwarted longing for space and light, which
yearns after fragile, lyrical, delicate things.)
Flat feet glued to the ground.
Will it fly? As far up as its neck goes.
A creature for which no label has been found.
One thing? Or the other? Nobody knows.
That’s me.(The irony causes a pain
– an unaccountable modesty.)
Hence the daft notion entered my brain
to bury my head in poetry
which nobody reads, it seems to me.
On Saturday morning we arrange the Penlee Coach House for those booked into my workshop, but then they just keep on coming so we put up more and more tables. It’s an international group (South African, German, Venezualan, North Devonian, Cornish…) with a range of ages and writing experience: the festival definitely lives up to its aim of ‘inclusiveness’. I follow the story theme and read them Dean Parkin’s poem ‘Waiting Room’ to use as an exercise. They are equally enthusiastic about poems by Andrew Waterhouse and Tess Gallagher, which also provoke some great draft poems. It’s a brilliantly supportive group, and we are all amazed by what everyone else has written. Definitely a case of flying ostrich. I go on a bit about the need to read contemporary poetry if seriously attempting to write it, and they take away magazines, and Rialto leaflets, and booklists, and everyone goes out grinning and blinking into the perfect bluesky sun.
Emily Wills
