Even
if you and I are obviously separated by a buncha lightyears airline
distance we stay tight like Barbie and Ken.
Bas Boettcher
distance we stay tight like Barbie and Ken.
Bas Boettcher
years since then, organized by the consulates and cultural institutes of several European countries operating in San
Francisco, working together with two or three locally-based literary and arts institutions. This modest act of international
collaboration, it seems to me, helps create the space for a number of unusual poetic possibilities to happen.
It allows for the rare chance that a poet writing out of an acutely particular cultural milieu and poetic condition might
be heard by an audience from elsewhere. It offers the radical occasion for an audience of poetry to cut through
crippling monocultural presumptions and witness a poet’s voice sounding from “the outside.” It builds on the groundwork
of literary translators, mostly poets “carrying over” the work of the foreign to affect and sound alongside their own
poetic practice.
At its best, the Other Words Festival initiates new meetings between distinctive poets and acts of poetry which
otherwise, because of geographic circumstance and gaps between languages or, worse, “global-political” divides,
tend to be assumed are incommunicado. It introduces difference to difference.
not random, these
crystalline structures, these
non-reversible orders, this
camera forming tendencies, this
edge of greater length, this
lyric forever error, this
something embarrassingly clear, this
language we come up against
Kathleen Fraser
Sweden, Czech Republic, Norway, and the USA. Besides the chance to witness visiting poets in performance, at
different San Francisco sites across four days, accompanied by readings of translations of their poems in English,
the Festival overlaps Saturday evening with the LitQuake San Francisco Literary Festival’s popular Valencia Street
LitCrawl. Here, Other Words visiting poets each present poems in their native tongue, without translation. It’s
remarkably affecting, and moving, to hear the bare music of multiple languages sounding in a common space.
The words come closer, step by step.
I sense the friction of their grazed heels against the tongue.
Martin Reiner
semi-buried history. The San Francisco Bay Area’s Spanish-language place names, markers of a Catholic Mission
legacy, we like to recall “for the record” then in any practical sense forget, are planted on top a 5,000-year Native
California Indian occupancy. We can’t seem to stop burying under artificial memory the pre-existing, and very actual,
“international” situation of pre-EuroAmerican California, when some 200 nations sustained themselves in the area
known by that name.
Less than two centuries after it became a city, San Francisco’s prominent ethnic neighborhoods, Italian and Chinese,
Japanese and African American, Mexicano and Irish, morph into new shapes, supplemented by multiplied clusters of
emigrant and refugee peoples scattered through the region.
How many urban zones in the “globalized” world share these aspects? Trace the past few decades of wars and
economic disasters in the peoples set in flight, who’ve marked out new local habitation for themselves.
Souls also live in societies
and history is filled with witnesses
Steinar Opstad
of an overinflated American image. It’s a blurred and mediated world “out there,” where what looks “like us” is
glorified for just this reason. And everything “unlike” is suspect or worse.
Still, San Francisco today is a far less homogeneous place than most other mid-sized United States cities. Maybe it’s a
place that’s still open to what comes from outside it? Maybe, implicit in the poet’s heretical voice, there are “other
words” that we could be ready to hear?
lightly, lightly
a walking light
lightening the ones
and lightly.
Demosthenes Agrafiotis
Steve Dickison, Director
The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University
The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University