While I earn my living as a superintendent and a poet, this man works on the other hand for a wealthy firm in Reykjavík, and the hotel which he stayed at in Vilnius, located on the main street in the city center, was, according to his account, the best of the many hotels he’d stayed in.
It was comparable to the best hotels in New York and Paris. There was a roomy Jacuzzi, a thirty-inch flatscreen on the wall facing a California King-size bed, a DVD player, and not just a box of assorted chocolates laying on his pillow on the bed, but also a little bottle of champagne and a cloth bag containing orange-flavored chocolate.
I can’t help but suspect I’ll be thinking about the magnificent description of this hotel when I step over the threshold to the dormitory, or hostel, or shelter, which is were I assume I’ll be staying in Druskininkai and Vilnius.
Unbelievably, that is in fact the usual situation for invited guests if you make your living as a poet. Even the Faroe Islands, the one nation out of all nations which ought to comport itself well towards Icelanders, is no less apathetic when it comes to dealing with Icelandic artists and literary folk.
A few years ago I went to a kind of “culture week” in Þórshöfn, where poets, visual artists, and musicians from all the Nordic countries and Greenland come together, and it was not until the small welcoming committee greeted me and the other Icelanders at their poky little airport in Þórshöfn that I found out I wouldn’t have a private room at the hotel. I wouldn’t be based at the hotel at all, but instead in a boarding house at the edge of town.
I ended up sharing a room with a Norwegian who had come over from Norway and spoke the absurd children’s language nýnorska, or New Norwegian, and who was purging himself through some kind of detox, letting nothing pass his lips the whole week except lemon-flavored water.
It was, evidently, incomprehensible that this miserable individual should choose exactly this week for his self-centered cleansing ritual. The smell emanating from his mouth every time he opened it (which wasn’t infrequently) was the sourest halitosis I have ever experienced from anybody.
That we were roommates made other participants at this Faroese poetry farce look at me with compassion for having to share a room with this New-Norwegian phenomenon, but also with ironic glances, which I interpreted as indicating they had formed an opinion that I, the Icelander, deserved to spend the darkest hours of the day in Þórshöfn in an atmosphere transformed by the cocktail of lemon juice, water, Norwegian exhalations, and unused digestive fluids.
I am not saying for certain that the same thing will happen in Lithuania, but, given how the program is organized for the Friday, with the recital of the American poets, I don’t exactly have high hopes.
It will begin with the farce the American trio have prepared for us. Kelly Francesca, Daniella Goldblum, and Jenny Lipp.
The first day proper of the festival is Saturday. All right, I say. All right. Nothing wrong with that.
But that the first item in the program is called “After Midday with German poet Günther Meierhof” is not only typical but even an inevitable discrimination against poets who speak and write in minor languages; that seems to be a given at festivals like this, whether they are held in England, Sweden, or Iceland.
This so-called “After Midday” with the German poet (a poet no-one outside of Germany has ever heard of) goes on for two hours, and then, only then, does someone else get a turn.
First up are the domestic poets, and things proceed with them offering some outlandish play, no doubt some sort of “lyrical” play — I can’t understand why people haven’t seen through this phenomenon long ago, since the theater has nothing whatsoever to do with poetry.
There seems, in fact, to be something missing from the program on Saturday: it ends after this “performance” and participants are simply left afterwards in an empty space. There is not even any mention of supper.
The second day starts with the formal registration of participants at something called the Dainava center at 16 Maironio Street.
Why on earth do the people who organize these things assume that we all know where Maironio Street is? Most of us have come to Druskininkai for the first (and last) time in our lives.
But at the end of the registration period (which I don’t expect will be any better; I imagine we’ll get some kind of card with our name on it, which we’re expected to wear hanging on our chests) we suddenly jump into a recital by some poet from Wales, some totally unknown poet who has decided to go by the name Niphin Bush, absurd as it sounds.
It doesn’t take a powerful imagination to predict that such people are more accurately called drinkers. A poet bearing the same last name as an American president doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously as a poet.
I don’t intend to cast specific aspersions on the job of the American president — haven’t we had enough of that grumbling? — but trying to make a career as a poet who shares a name with George W., Jeb, and George the elder is about as clever as sitting in the driver’s seat of a truck that’s going at full speed only to find the steering wheel is missing.
I perhaps shouldn’t be allowed to make assertions about people I’ve never met. But if anyone is allowed to do this, then I think I should be the one.
Before I went to the poetry festival in Liège, the one I mentioned above, I carefully read the documents about the festival which I’d been sent, and one participant caught my attention: a fifty-something poet from Ireland (exactly the way you’d describe me, if you changed the “r” in Ireland for a “c”). This person has published an incredible number of poetry books, as well as some books on the art of poetry in general (as if there aren’t enough books about that already).
Although I didn’t have a picture of this person, I immediately knew he had to be a drinker, and I was also sure his sole purpose in visiting Liège was to sample the Belgian strawberry and cherry beer.
Indeed, I had a very vivid image of this person in my mind, long before I met him, and in that image he was sitting at a Belgian beer bar with a huge glass of light-red strawberry beer in front of him, and beside the beer were two or three whisky glasses which he had gulped down between mouthfuls of beer.
And then I met the man: the only thing wrong with my prophetic image was his preference for Irish rather than strawberry beer; he drank Guinness with whisky. But his main purpose in turning up at the poetry festival was, as he himself put it: “One has poetic license to drink more than one usually drinks on a working day at home.”
I don’t know whether I should recount the other items on the program for Sunday. To tell the truth, what most attracted my attention in the program was the midday, coffee, and supper breaks, which could be more frequent, based on a quick glance at how compressed the poetry program is.
There, at least, you get some nourishment, something you don’t get from all the Nordic drivel which will be poured over us by the bucket-load at the festival.
And barely have I got my head around the term “creative writing” than, between one o’clock and half-past three on Sunday, we’re offered a lesson in this sort of writing.
I am fairly sure the trio of American poets will do really well at that gathering, shouting interjections in the form of pretentious-sounding questions which have no value besides disturbing the moderators of these so-called lessons from their attempt to share their limited knowledge with the simpletons who go in for the creative-writing lark — a group which definitely won’t include me.