{"id":1046,"date":"2011-08-08T08:22:13","date_gmt":"2011-08-08T08:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/?p=1046"},"modified":"2025-02-03T12:08:12","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T12:08:12","slug":"the-story-of-the-time-turner-and-the-lyrical-ostrich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/2011\/08\/08\/the-story-of-the-time-turner-and-the-lyrical-ostrich\/","title":{"rendered":"The Story of The Time-turner and The Lyrical Ostrich"},"content":{"rendered":"

Penzance literary festival is unlike any other\u2019 reads the welcoming and informative website http:\/\/penzance-literary-festival.org.uk<\/a><\/span><\/span> It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018The Other Vikings\u2019, 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 \u2013 definitely warmer than Aldeburgh in November.<\/p>\n

The theme of this year\u2019s festival is \u2018stories\u2019. 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 \u2018Big read\u2019 of The Secret Garden. And even stories in poems.<\/p>\n

With an incredible 80 events in 13 venues over 5 days, even deciding what to choose requires concentration, and I\u2019m full of admiration for the programming skills involved. But even after many years\u2019 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 \u2018The Main Cages\u2019 ), and various talks including \u2018The Oblivion of Richard Trevithick\u2019. And sadly I can\u2019t make it to the improvised opera entitled \u2018The Dangerously Rough Guide to Getting Published\u2019. Sounds brilliant. I just hope there will be a repeat performance next year.<\/p>\n

So I choreograph my own sequence of poetry events, including Nick Round\u2019s 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\u2019s The Lyrical Ostrich<\/em><\/p>\n

Ostrich:<\/em><\/p>\n

The bad joke of two stumpy wings<\/em><\/p>\n

(A thwarted longing for space and light, which<\/em><\/p>\n

yearns after fragile, lyrical, delicate things.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Flat feet glued to the ground.<\/em><\/p>\n

Will it fly? As far up as its neck goes.<\/em><\/p>\n

A creature for which no label has been found.<\/em><\/p>\n

One thing? Or the other? Nobody knows.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

That\u2019s me.(The irony causes a pain<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2013 an unaccountable modesty.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Hence the daft notion entered my brain<\/em><\/p>\n

to bury my head in poetry<\/em><\/p>\n

which nobody reads, it seems to me.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u2019s an international group (South African, German, Venezualan, North Devonian, Cornish\u2026) with a range of ages and writing experience: the festival definitely lives up to its aim of \u2018inclusiveness\u2019. I follow the story theme and read them Dean Parkin\u2019s poem \u2018Waiting Room\u2019 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Emily Wills<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Penzance literary festival is unlike any other\u2019 reads the welcoming and informative website http:\/\/penzance-literary-festival.org.uk It\u2019s a community festival, started last year, and organised again by a small number of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[122],"class_list":["post-1046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","tag-emily-wills-ostrich-lyrical-ostrich-time-turner-penzance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12169,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions\/12169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}