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Merendree: Out of the city, into rural Belgium. We wound our way through cobblestone roads and cowfields to an art gallery for the visual poetry exhibit Woord en Beeld, including work by Helen White (Krikri hostess extradordinaire) and Maja Jantar (an incredible and unclassifiable artist working in polypoetry and multimedia theatre, among other grand things). The range of work in the two-storey exhibit was impressive, and it was eye-opening to see Belgium's visual poetry scene. An excellent post-festival adventure!!

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Wenduine: He took us to the place of his childhood, stretches of sand and flat ocean and horizon and the Flemish sky with its suspended turbulence.

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Bruges: Rain. Green. Clean. Any tourist's medieval wet dream.

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Ghent: We sat in the tetrahedron and, though talk was small, our past lives commingled and the subtext instinctively traced a cellular map. Longevity itudinal ing. Oh, big words. Big, big words big as Belgian hail. The sun was skyward and then it hailed and then it hailed again, the tetrahedron filled with din, our talk diminished, except. What happened next has yet to happen.

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Partyafterparty: We made a spectacular feast, ate chocolate, and made zen gardens in red-wine salt. We improvised Jelle's klankpoezie score. Kristof, Helen, Jelle, and Maja read aloud numerous poems by Canadians, a cacophonous familiarity. Maja and I improvised on a Flemish grammar book (video below). Querida watched.

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And so: how to return to Ghent? There's so much begs doing.

“I see that it’s important that we surrender ourselves and expose ourselves to things that we don’t necessarily understand, that through innocent, impassioned excitement we can’t help share.” – Lisa Gerrard

“To make the familiar strange, but also to use the materials of the familiar to make something highly recognizable and personal.” – Amina

“What matters isn’t what you could do but what you really did.” – Björk

April 26th was an enchanted day for a poetry reading: warm weather, bright sky, lots of sleep, and savoury pannekoeken with Leila. Following an afternoon stroll, I prepped for the evening's performance at the Minardschouwburg. Pre-event dinner was comforting, and provided an opportunity to chat with Rozalie Hirs as well as the music performers of the evening, Ghalia and Moufadel.

Jelle Meander introduced Spanish polypoet eduard escoffet to kick off the night, and midway through his set I knew I was in love. eduard's poetry is studied and self-aware, providing performative buffers of humour between poems direct in their chaos, generous in their depths, swirling with repetition, insistence, languages rubbed into agitation/excitation. Every gesture from eduard was timed to punctuate moments in text; every movement proved necessary, careful, poignant... slow, engrossing, exact. I video-taped the end of a poem I assume was about rural cabin life, which eduard embellished by spraying some flowery air freshener. I also caught a snippet of him eating a newspaper. I missed snagging my favourite of the night, though -- "por," a list poem that ended his set. With the final lines of

por a no ser tu
por a no ser tu
por a no ser tu

eduard then stood stock still, the hiss of his tape players feeding the microphones. To stare at him in this moment had me with a rush of thought, how naked he became onstage, how potentially confrontational or open or courageous an audience member might read this gesture. And just that: like a word, eduard invited, possibly dared, each audience member to read him, to read into him, into his lit existence on that stage.

Well, that had me! Whoever programmed the evening deserved kudos for leading with eduard, a consummate performer committed to his work and so inviting to his audience.

I nearly needed a breather then, but Dutch poet and composer Rozalie Hirs was introduced, and she offered a counterpoint performance to eduard's. Rozalie focused on longer texts, looping her voice multiple times with her computer. The Dutch lyricism wove its oneiric threads around the audience, an alchemic lullaby, dulcet. I managed to snag a longer video clip of her performance, so please check below.

We'd all been invited to perform a cover text, and I'd had some last-minute hmming and haaing over what to read. Given that it was a spring night, I thought I might read my favourite Hagiwara Sakutaro poem (Hiroaki Sato translation), but indecision gripped me after Rozalie's set, as I thought how nicely Ted Berrigan's "Sonnet XXXVII" would segue between our bits. I took the intermission to wrestle with the cover, and eventually decided to go with Jordan Scott's "What is the utterance?" from blert, which had been my initial plan for some weeks. Both the cover and a favoured rendition of Wide slumber for lepidopterists went well; video clip of the slumber below.

Leevi Lehto anchored the night, proving a crowd favourite with his morphemic and lipogrammatic sound poetry. I've been looking forward to meeting Leevi, as a fan of his Google Poetry Generator and also curious about his writing practices and ntamo, so it was a pleasure to not only see him perform but also share the stage with him and chat about many things during the festival. Truly a lovely person. I started to get a little more adventurous with the video at this point (fear of running out of recording power kept my clips short early on), and so have four snippets of Leevi below. Enjoy!!

To close the evening, Tunisian musicians Ghalia and Moufadel performed Arabic music. Just gorgeous work.

Day one of Zaoem: Poëzie van Nu (an international polypoetry festival) featured the unveiling of a visual poetry exhibit, readings by Flemish and Dutch poets, and an open stage. Before the festival began, I enjoyed a tour of Poëziecentrum, the regional poetry facility with library, performance space, and bookshop. The tour's highlight included an historical exhibit of experimental Flemish poetry from the last 150 years.

Pre-festival dinner found introductions to many Zaoem participants, including Mark Insingel, Vrouwkje Tuinman, Stijn Vranken, Leevi Lehto, and eduard escoffet. Leevi, eduard, and I wandered Ghent before planting ourselves at the Flemish/Dutch reading. I was particularly entranced by the poets' use of pause as they read. All voices felt quiet, intimate and invitational, and they used silence in most delicious ways.

The visual poetry exhibit was a super introduction to several new works I'd not yet seen, and it was neat to see the works crisply displayed on computer screens, sliding one after another.

I arrived in Ghent on April 24th, met by visual poet/Krikriian/Zaoem co-organizer Helen White. After a bumpy wander to the hotel (dragging my suitcase over cobblestone), Helen and I took a tram downtown this Flemish city to find dinner on a boat-turned-restaurant. For the uninitiated (read: me), Ghent's a maze of canals, dollhouse architecture, chocolateries, and curving streets; I was instantly charmed despite directional confusion.

While checking the vegetarian status of numerous menu options, polypoet/Krikriian/Zaoem co-organizer "Dr." Jelle "Meander" arrived to dazzle us with overlong fiscally inclined Flemish vocabulary. Dinner proved to be the first of a string of delicious meals; Ghent was kind to this vegetarian.

Jelle and Helen gave me a night tour of the city after dinner (including Helen's favourite tree), which included a surprise stop at The Logos Foundation. A tetrahedron-shaped concert hall, Logos was founded by Godfried-Willem Raes and Moniek Darge. I had a love-at-first-sight experience upon entering this space: robotic orchestra. I could barely keep my eyes in my sockets. After a few pictures, it was agreed I should return the following day to have a wee tour of the facility.

And so, after a peaceful sleep, that's what I did! I met with local composers Kristof Lauwers and Sebastian Bradt (who both work with Logos) and had an excellent introduction to their music and magic. I filmed a little of the instruments at work, as well as a brief interview with Kristof where he tells me some instruments' pet names. Clips below.

The Zaoem Festival had not begun yet, and I'd already met four fascinating people with whom I'd like to spend more time and collaborate. Ahhh, Ghent!

I'm convinced more and more everyday that Vancouver's a pretty fantastic place to exist, and the announcement of this upcoming colloquium is my daily affirmation. Organized by the Kootenay School of Writing, the Positions Colloquium is "thematically open-ended," and will include readings, talks, panels, and performances over a five-day period this August. The list of invited participants has me scratching my head on how I can get myself west this summer to witness the event. Cross-Canada road trip, anyone?

Congratulations to Eiríkur for snagging the Icelandic translation prize for Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn.