‘You have an outer space violin in your left ear’ – Hu Xudong

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Get ready for a week full of readings, interviews, lectures, special programmes and publications; a feast for the ears and eyes. From 10 to 14 June 2014 poets from all over the world will converge on Rotterdam for the 45th time to take part in the city’s Poetry International Festival. The poetry party won’t be confined to the Rotterdam Municipal Theatre. As in previous years, this festival will spill over into the worlds of film, music and the visual arts.

It is the poet, the poem, and the translation that lie at the heart of the Poetry International Festival. Each day poets and poetry will take centre stage. In one special programme celebrated poet Jules Deelder will talk with the festival director Bas Kwakman about his poetry, life and sources of inspiration, using unique sound clips and film footage. In the afternoons Poetry Café host Daniel Dee will have a light-hearted look at the poets, programmes, publications and other poetry-related news on the day’s agenda. Before and during the festival local Rotterdam galleries will present work that brings together language and visual art with the third annual Language & Art Gallery Tour.

In turbulent and uncertain times, the tendency to increasingly regulate human activity grows. On 10 June the festival will open with a programme themed around the phenomenon of ‘Protocols’. Protocols relate to whole complexities of rules and agreements, which in this day and age have become something of an obsession. Even though there seem to be precious few points of intersection, protocols are, in much the same way as poems, linguistic structures. Surely a poem is a kind of protocol? And, for that matter, so is a festival. During the opening programme the Doelen Quartet will play the première of a composition by Aspasia Nasopoulou (Greece), set to the words of festival poet and conductor Micha Hamel.

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- Video-on-demand of all festval poets >