What is the poetry in the city festival?
Poetry in the City is a collaboration between several Merseyside poetry organisations, promoters and performance nights. Our aim is to work collectively and raise the profile of poetry in Liverpool.
We hope to create an awareness of what happens throughout the year in Liverpool, and offer opportunities to get involved with our city’s lively poetry scene.
Poetry in the City differs from the conventional poetry festival in that we are not primarily promoting individual poets, but rather supporting approaches to poetry and giving local organisations a platform from which to develop their own activities.
If there is a rationale behind the festival it is that poetry is not a competition; it is a conversation, a relationship. This festival does not celebrate the poet as an individual but the individual poet as part of a community, as part of a city, as part of Liverpool. The poems that originate here arise from landscapes: parks, docks, alleys, and office blocks – they arise out of a past, and try to imagine the future.
Poets in Liverpool do not wander lonely as clouds – they are too busy…
… performing in bars, reading in theatres, running workshops, producing magazines, collaborating with other artists, musicians, dancers, talking to each other, talking to people who are bored by poetry, talking to people who are in love with poetry, helping those writing a poem for the first time or the thousandth time, helping others explore their senses, their ideas, their emotions as well as finding words for their own experience—and finding language that is strong enough for the task.
A poem is an expression of loss or of personal pain; a poem is entertainment, therapy, public, secret, comic and naïve, has mass appeal, is political action, is important, is a minority art, is performance, is silly, is intellectual, is ancient and contemporary.
With this in mind Poetry in the City offers a polyphony of voices, approaches, attitudes to poetry that demonstrate its continued importance to the cultural life of the city.
