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/ 7 September 2016

Margaret Atwood’s speech at Church “St. Sophia”, Ohrid

Poetry Portrait of the Poet Laureate

Traditionally, since 1967, a Poetry Portrait of the winner of the “Golden Wreath” award takes place in the Church ”St. Sophia” which is located in the old part of the town of Ohrid. As one of the biggest medieval churches in this region, it is one of the most significant monuments in Macedonia and represents an important venue for cultural happenings such as concerts and theatrical plays. It has been a regular programme destination where the homage of the poet-laureate of SPE takes place, one of the most significant events of the Struga Poetry Evenings festival.

This year, the Poetry Portrait will be dedicated to Margaret Atwood, a Canadian poet, essayist, literary critic and activist, the recipient of the ”Golden Wreath” award 2016.

The most impressive part of the Poetry Portrait is the speech delivered by the poet-laureate. This year’s recipient of the “Golden Wreath” award gave an extraordinary and powerful speech on poetry and its significance.

Besides the video that will be shared by Struga Poetry Evenings, it is important and valuable to share Margaret Atwood’s speech here as well. We present you the whole speech:


 

Thank you once again for inviting me here to this amazing festival of poetry at Struga. I don’t know of any other festival like it. There are many literary festivals – a great many, all over the world – but this is the only multi-day festival I am aware of that is consecrated to poetry and to nothing but poetry.

And with so many poets present, not only from Macedonia but from many other countries – which involves a lot of translating. Congratulations to all of the organizers for the monumental effort you have put into this festival – poets everywhere should be appreciative of your festival, and indeed should be more aware of it.

Although I am the grateful recipient of this year’s Golden Wreath Award, I know that I am simply a representative of poetry-at-large. Other poets have been representatives before me, and yet others will come after. It is poetry itself that we are celebrating here.

So let us consider poetry. What do we mean when we say this word? There are different words in different languages, and words can change their meanings over time. For instance, Plato wanted to banish the poets from his ideal republic because he thought they told lies, and also because they appealed to parts of the soul that he considered lower – the emotional and instinctive parts, as opposed to what he considered the rational part. He was right, in that poetry does address the whole human being. He was wrong in that he thought the emotions could be separated from the reason. We now know that they are joined at the hip. Those whose decision-making brain function has been sealed off from their emotional centre cannot make decisions at all, even about what kind of ice cream they might like, because – unable to like or dislike – they try to answer the question by reasoning it out, and there is no reason why vanilla is better than chocolate.

What Plato meant by “poetry” was not only the form employed, and not only the figurative language – it was also the stories told by the poets – their myth-making and myth-interpreting capabilities. Poesis, as we know, is derived from the Greek word “to make.” Poets were makers, and Plato did not approve of what they made.

In English, the word “poetry” has several meanings – some less positive than others. I’ll talk about three of these meanings.

  • Poetry can mean excess verbiage or flowery ornamentation. Thus in gangster films a tough character might say, “Skip the poetry. Cut to the chase,” meaning, let’s get down to business. When I went to high school we were expected to write a précis of each poem we were studying. “In twenty-five words, what was the poet ‘trying to say’?” were the instructions on the exam. This gave the impression that poets had some difficulty expressing themselves. If they would only focus, they could just give us the “message” – war is hell, love is great, cats are beautiful, or whatever – without cluttering up the page with all those extra words.

 

This of course entirely missed the point. What the poet was trying to say was what the poet did in fact say, including the intricacy and therefore the ambiguity of the sum total of his or her words. As the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, poetry is “The best words in the best order.”

  • Poetry” can mean a literary form, or forms. Traditionally – and in most Western cultures – such forms employed metre and rhyme. But some languages, such as Japanese, don’t follow suit, as metre and rhyme don’t fit the language itself. Instead, they employ different kinds of patterning. And in “free verse” the patterning is likely to involve internal rhyme and repeated syllables and sounds. Let’s just say that poetry uses condensed patterning – “thickened speech” – of one kind or another.

 

Such a definition of poetry has nothing to say about subject matter. The existence of a form does not guarantee that it will be used for purposes we may consider virtuous. Poetry can be and has been used for inflammatory propaganda, for defamatory attacks, for the advancement of various political agendas. I can picture Plato nodding his head and saying “I told you so.”

  • The third meaning of poetry, in English, contains a judgment about the spiritual or artistic value of the poetic object. This object need not be a poem. It might be a sunset, a well executed athletic move as in hockey or football, or a moment in another art, such as ballet or singing. “Sheer poetry,” one may say, meaning that this object or moment rises above the level of mere prose, to the realm of the inexplicable. Divinity or magic may be implied.

 

That is of course what all poets would like to achieve, at least sometimes. An elevated expression of the human soul in its wholeness.

But at other times, poetry is simply an attempt at truth-telling. At bearing witness, to crimes, to catastrophes. At depicting the world as it is, or might soon be. And it is that kind of poetry that has so often got poets into trouble in their own times and places. Poets may be, as Shelley declared, the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but the acknowledged legislators haven’t always been happy with that. History is littered with dead poets, and not all of them died a natural death.

Why should powerful rulers care at all what the powerless poets have to say? Because words do have power – they are our oldest human technology, after all – and poets are skilled wielders of words.

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At their best, poems open locked doors. They encounter the other, in nature, in human beings different from themselves, and they sing the praises and dangers of such encounters. They enter the dark wood of despair. They descend with Dante and Virgil into the underworld. They return with treasures – sometimes ambiguous treasures – did we really need to be told what horrors lie hidden inside Bluebeard’s Castle? – but treasures nonetheless – and they give these treasures to us. If we accept the gift, we must make of these treasures what we can.

A poem is forged by its poet in music and speech, but then it falls silent. It lies inert, waiting, until it happens upon a hearer, or reader. It is the reader who sings the poem to life again.

Dear readers and fellow poets – that is why we are all here.

Thank you for your gifts.

 

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