Poetry in motion: Versopolis transatlantic exchange

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Two poets travelled in opposite directions across the Atlantic. Volha Hapeyeva journeyed from Europe through the United States; Rachel DeWoskin travelled from the United States to Latvia. Together, their journeys inaugurated the Versopolis USA Mobility Programme – an encounter shaped by poetry, translation and the belief that literature can still create connections across borders.

A poem begins to travel long before its author boards a plane. It moves from one language into another, from the page into a reader’s imagination, from a familiar cultural landscape towards an audience whose responses cannot be anticipated. Such movement lies at the heart of Versopolis, which has spent more than a decade creating routes for European poetry to circulate between languages, countries and literary communities.

With its first transatlantic mobility programme, developed together with partners in the United States, those routes extended across the ocean. The exchange brought together two poets travelling in opposite directions: Belarusian poet Volha Hapeyeva crossed the United States for a series of readings and encounters, while American poet Rachel DeWoskin travelled to Latvia to participate in the Page Break International Poetry Festival.

Their itineraries were different, but the questions accompanying them were closely related: How does a poem change when it enters another linguistic and cultural space? What can poets discover beyond the borders of their familiar literary communities? And what forms of solidarity can emerge from the simple act of gathering to listen?

From Washington to the Arizona desert

For Volha Hapeyeva, the journey began with an invitation to travel across the United States as a European Versopolis poet.

‘I received the invitation to go to the USA as a European Versopolis poet, which was an honour to me,’ she recalls.

Rather than imagining in advance what the journey might bring, she decided to approach it without expectations: ‘I decided not to have any expectations or hopes, I went with an open mind and heart.’

At one of the USA airports.

Her route began at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, continued at the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson and concluded at Washington University in St. Louis. It was a journey through different American landscapes and literary environments: university campuses and libraries, bookstores and reading rooms, the dry expanses of Arizona and, finally, the banks of the Mississippi River.

Volha Hapeyeva at the bank of the Mississippi River, St. Louis.

For the readings, Hapeyeva brought poems from In My Garden of Mutants alongside new work written in Belarusian and German. Her multilingual practice made each appearance more than a presentation of completed poems. The readings became spaces where languages met and revealed their different textures – where translation was not merely a tool of communication, but part of the poetic experience itself.

‘What was new to me,’ Hapeyeva says, ‘is the understanding that poetry life, readings and discussions in the USA mostly happen at universities.’

Poster at Poetry Center in Tucson.

Compared with many European literary scenes, where readings often take place in independent cultural centres, festivals, cafés or municipal institutions, the American poetry community appeared to her as closely connected to university life. At each stop she encountered poets, translators, students and academics, discovering how poetry moves through American institutions and how communities form around classrooms, libraries and writing programmes.

Yet the most lasting moments were not necessarily those belonging to an official programme. Travel rearranges attention: a road, a conversation or an unfamiliar plant can suddenly acquire the intensity of a poem. In Tucson, the formal literary itinerary gave way to the desert.

‘One of the next mornings Tyler and I went to the Sabino Canyon Desert and read poems to a cactus.’

Saguaro Cactus and Volha Hapeyeva, Tucson.

The image might sound playful, but it contains something essential about poetry: its capacity to address what cannot answer in ordinary language. In the vastness of the Arizona landscape, reading to a cactus became both a private joke and an elemental literary encounter – a poem offered not to an institution or an audience, but to another form of life rooted in a radically different environment.

For Hapeyeva, inspiration begins precisely in such details. ‘This is where my inspiration comes from – everyday life, small things and details.’

Volha Hapeyeva in the Poetry Library, Tucson.

Across the Atlantic to Latvia

While Hapeyeva travelled westwards, Rachel DeWoskin followed the opposite route. She first encountered Versopolis through Writers for Democratic Action, the international organisation bringing together writers committed to democratic values and civic engagement.

‘I learned of Versopolis through my beloved colleagues at Writers for Democratic Action,’ she says.

Her journey took her to the Page Break International Poetry Festival in Latvia, where poets from different countries and linguistic traditions gathered to read, listen and translate one another. For DeWoskin, the festival became ‘a brilliant experience of global poetry, translation and camaraderie.’

Preparing for an international audience also meant considering which poems could travel most freely. DeWoskin selected work that might open itself to readers beyond its immediate cultural setting – poems engaging with China, translation, love and fear.

‘I chose poems I hoped were international in some sense or another, and that lent themselves to translation.’

No poem passes unchanged between languages. Translation shifts its sounds and associations, while a new audience brings different memories, references and expectations. Rather than treating this transformation as a loss, the festival made it visible as a shared creative act.

‘Reading in our native languages while translations were beamed onto the walls was beautiful,’ DeWoskin remembers.

The poets’ voices remained rooted in their original languages, while the projected translations allowed meaning to move across the room. The audience experienced both the distance between languages and the possibility of crossing it. Even when individual words remained unfamiliar, rhythm, breath and presence created another form of comprehension.

Asked about the differences between poets from Europe and the United States, DeWoskin resisted easy cultural divisions. ‘Any differences were artistic and individual; they didn’t really cleave along cultural lines.’

Perhaps this was one of the exchange’s quietest but most important discoveries. International programmes are often described through nationalities and geographical directions, yet the encounters themselves complicate such categories. Poets meet not simply as representatives of countries or continents, but as individual voices shaped by different artistic choices, personal histories and ways of seeing.

DeWoskin finds inspiration ‘in books, my daughters, unfamiliar cities, movies, conversations, and transitions.’ Her answer could also serve as a description of the journey itself: movement through unfamiliar places sustained by literature, conversation and the state of being between one world and another.

What poetry carries across borders

The two journeys did not mirror each other exactly. Hapeyeva travelled through several American cities, observing a poetry culture strongly connected to universities and discovering inspiration in landscapes far removed from Europe. DeWoskin entered the concentrated multilingual world of an international festival in Latvia, where poems appeared simultaneously as spoken originals and projected translations.

Yet both journeys revealed literary mobility as something more profound than physical travel. It is a practice of attention and receptiveness – a willingness to enter an unfamiliar setting without knowing what it will offer. It allows poets to encounter not only new audiences, but new versions of their own work. A poem heard beneath the desert sky is not quite the same poem as one read in a university library. A poem accompanied by its translation on a wall acquires another visual and linguistic existence.

At a time when political discourse increasingly returns to borders, antagonisms and cultural isolation, such encounters also carry a political meaning. DeWoskin describes this directly: ‘Cultural exchange keeps us sane, mobilized and connected in ways that are essential and too vast to measure.’

Hapeyeva’s reflections arrive at a similar hope: ‘I wish we could stay more connected and have more exchange projects… and build relations based on mutual understanding and love.’

These words describe the larger ambition behind the Versopolis USA Mobility Programme. Its significance lies not only in enabling individual poets to travel, but in creating relationships that might continue after the reading has ended and the traveller has returned home. A conversation in a bookstore, an exchange with a student, a translation projected onto a festival wall or a poem unexpectedly addressed to a cactus can become part of a longer network of memory and connection.

The first transatlantic exchanges have opened a new chapter for Versopolis: two poets, two journeys and a literary route stretching between Europe and the United States. Hapeyeva and DeWoskin travelled in opposite directions, but their experiences converged in a shared understanding of poetry as a form of movement – between languages, landscapes and people.

A poem cannot abolish distance. It can, however, cross it, inhabit it and briefly transform it into a space where strangers listen to one another. This may be the deepest purpose of literary mobility: not simply to carry poetry across borders, but to allow poetry to create a meeting place where no such place existed before.