The 6th annual San Francisco International Poetry Festival will be held this upcoming month in October. 'Other Words' will feature performers from all corners of the world, and as a part of the Other Words' signature style, performers will be presenting their work in both their native language as well as english.
10/1/2008 :: The Other Words International Poetry Festival began in San Francisco in Fall 1999, 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.
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.
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.
Other Words is a collaborative presentation of the offices of the following organizations: Art Bureau (USA), Czech National House (USA), Consulate General of Ireland, Consulate General of Sweden, Consulate General of Switzerland, Goethe-Institut, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Irish Arts Foundation, Royal Norwegian Consulate General and NORLA (Norwegian Literature Abroad), The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, University of San Francisco, Parthenon West and the Swedish Institute.
PROGRAM:
Date: Friday, 10 October, 7:30 pm
Topic: Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives
Where: Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin Street (& Geary), San Francisco
Who:
- Michel Abdollahi, Germany
- Fabiano Alborghetti, Switzerland
- Ingvild Burkey, Norway
- Genny Lim, Poetry Center
- Li Li, Sweden
____________________________________________________________________
Date: Saturday, October 11, 8:30 – 9:30 pm
Topic: Litcrawl
Where: Marsh Café, 1070 Valencia Street (between 21st and 22nd), San Francisco
Who:
- Michel Abdollahi, Germany
- Fabiano Alborghetti, Switzerland
- Ingvild Burkey, Norway
- Li Li, Sweden
- Sulaiman Masomi, Germany
All poets read in their native languages without translation
____________________________________________________________________
Date: Sunday, October 12, 5 pm
Topic: City Lights
Where: 261 Columbus Avenue (& Broadway), San Francisco
Who:
- Jean-Michel Espitallier, France
- Fabiano Alborghetti, Switzerland
- Michel Abdollahi, Germany
- Li Li, Sweden
- Sulaiman Masomi, Germany
By: Stein M Wilmann