5th International Festival of Poetry in Caltagirone

Last year I posted a writeup and photos from the 4th International Festival of Poetry in Caltagirone, Italy, and I recently received a flyer and information about this year's event, which will take place this upcoming weekend in that exquisitely picturesque and lively mountaintop city in Sicily's interior. 

Organized by some of Sicily's finest poets, Maria Attanasio and Josephine Pace, this year's festival looks like it will be even bigger. The US representative will be Chicago-based poet, translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, whose collaborative environmental poetry performance piece "Park," at Fresh Kills Park I blogged about earlier this summer, and Spanish poet, poet and critic Miguel Ángel Cuevas, from Sevilla, will also be reading from his work.

To all the poets, translators, artists, poetry-loving attendees, Siciliani e Caltagironesi, have a wonderful festival!

Recent Events from Around the Horn

Over the last few months, weeks or days I've been following a few stories from afar. These include:

The riots by and attacks on undocumented African migrant workers in Rosarno, Calabria, southern Italy (photo at left, EPA). The workers, paid almost nothing for their work and living in slave-like conditions outside the town, protested by rioting after a Togolese immigrant was shot at, with a pellet gun, by an unknown gunman or gunmen. A number of the immigrants, as well as many locals, were injured in the subsequent conflagration, which rocked the streets of Rocarno. Some locals beat the protesters with tire irons, and another tried to run over an immigrant with a bulldozer. (Rosarno is just across the Straits of Messina and up the Italian coast from where C and I were in Sicily.)

Update: The Africans have either fled or been out of the town to immigrant detention centers, and locals are celebrating. According to the New York Times, the mafia are suspected culprits.

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The deadly attack by separatists against the Togolese soccer team, in Cabinda, an oil-rich breakaway region of northwestern Angola (that I have written about in some of my fiction, strangely enough), just before the start of the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament, which has not been canceled. (The World Cup will take place in neighboring South Africa later this year.) Three Togolese have died, and eight members of the team have been injured in the attack, in which separatists machine-gunned the Togolese buses as they were passing through the area. Team captain and international star Emmanuel Adebayor, pictured above, was not injured but was badly shaken along with the rest of his teammates. Bizarrely, the CAF (African Football Federation), along with Angola's president Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, are saying that tournament games will still be held in the Cabinda region.

Update: The Togo team has, unsurprisingly, withdrawn from the tournament, which will neither be postponed nor canceled. According to NBC Sports, "In a telephone interview with AP on Sunday, Tiburcio Tati Tchingobo, minister of defense in the self-declared Federal State of Cabinda, denied his Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda forces, or FLEC, were responsible for the ambush. He said that whoever was responsible was sparked by a level of frustration that could lead to more violence."

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Unde the current economic crisis the funding situation for higher education is increasingly grave at a number of institutions, especially public ones, which has led some academic officials to push for increased privatization and neoliberal policies. Faculty and students have not taken it sitting down.

-Faculty members were on strike at Oakland University.
-UC Berkeley faculty and students led a 3-day strike that faculty and students across the UC system signed onto and the Governator's threats against California's once trend-setting system are being taken very seriously.
-Students at UC Santa Cruz occupied a building to protest tuition hikes and budget cuts.
-Protesters occupied a building at San Francisco State University.
-Graduate students went on strike at UIUC.
-There is a New School in Exile site to address ongoing problems at the New School University

In addition, students at the University of Maryland protested the ouster of a popular diversity official; Howard University students protested slow paperwork that has led to problems; University of Pittsburgh students protested the G20 summit taking place in their city; and students and faculty at the University of Vienna have protested funding and other issues, sparking solidarity protests across Europe.

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This drama about Harry Reid's reported comments on Barack Obama's candidacy. Though inartfully stated (off the record, no less), I don't think Reid was being racist nor was he incorrect, and certainly I had heard many black people I know say similar things. ("Negro dialect" is a bit antiquated, though, Senator Reid.) Seriously and unfortunately for me to put it so bluntly, but if Obama spoke even like Jesse Jackson, say, and were dark-skinned, I think he'd have had a harder time as a candidate. I should add, however, that I think the larger issue of Americans' increasing comfort with politicians of color, especially black and mixed-race politicians, and Obama's political and oratorical skills, cannot be understated, and it's a tribute to the American people that we took a tremendous leap throughout the 2007-8 primary season and, most importantly, in November 2008. As to where it's gotten us is another question.

Update: Of course now the GOP's chosen and currently out-of-control minstrel, Michael Steele, is trying to exploit these remarks. As did Liz Cheney this morning. I say consider these rancid sources; no more needs to be said.

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Commercial real estate in New York is finally meeting Great Recession reality. There are "920 football fields" worth of office space sitting unused. Meanwhile, as I witnessed all fall, longtime stores and restaurants (including the 92-year-old Café des Artistes and Manhattan's oldest soul food restaurant, The Pink Tea Cup) are being shuttered because landlords refuse to lower rents or cut deals. New York has been through this scenario before: some refuse to learn.

Also, the Stuyvesant Town boondoggle has collapsed. What was to be the transfer of Manhattan's largest pocket of middle-income housing into the hands of the luxury market is now an official FAIL. My questions include what is going to happen to the 20,000 tenants now?

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Buy me, I'm going to be better than the rest!

Apple very well may be launching yet another pace-setter with its iSlate (iTablet?), which is allegedly slated to appear on January 27. There are all sorts of predictions about what its specs are, what it'll look like and what software it'll possess, and though it's unlikely I'll be getting one anytime soon, both because I usually like to wait until Apple gets these things right, cool as they always are, and because I can't afford another new gizmo, I am dying to see one up close. By which I mean, pick one up, play with the screen, and be mesmerized by yet another offering from the Apple product family. Given the suggested debut date of this delightful device, I'll have to go to the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue before my graduate class that night to inspect one, though something tells me that store will be more mobbed than it usually is. That is, if it really does appear in Apple Stores that day. We can hope, can't we?

iPhone Drawings 3.0

A few more recent iPhone drawings (the complete set are up at the Jstheater Flickr set):

Giardini Naxos at night (click on photo to see the entire image)

Poet Salvatore Padrenostro (I make him look a bit sleepy, but he wasn't; it's the challenges of drawing eyes with one's thumb and index finger)

And back in New Jersey and New York, on the trains:

A man sleeping on the PATH

A man reading a poster, on the PATH

A woman in conversation, on the PATH

A young man reading, on the subway (MTA)

A man on the subway (though I think I quickly sketched in a PATH background)

A cashier at Uniqlo (the line was very long, so I had a small window to sketch him)

A man on the PATH

More Photos: 4th Int'l Poetry Festival in Caltagirone

More photos (and click on them to enlarge!)


Salvatore Padrenostro, reading his work


Giovanni Miraglia introducing Ottavio Fatica


Me with Ottavio Fatica, during the reading of his translations of Elizabeth Bishop's poems


Maria Attanasio, delivering her great introduction of Rosaria LoRusso


Rosaria LoRusso reading her work


Me and Giovanni Miraglia, as I read a poem and he prepares to read a translation


The stairs/La Scala in Caltagirone, with Presepe, at night


Another view of the stairs/La Scala in Caltagirone, by night


Countryside near Catania


Wall in Catania


The former Bourbon Prison, in Caltagirone (the Bourbons still rule Spain and Luxembourg, and ruled France, Sicily, and Italy)


Tysandros Way, Giardini Naxos (mountains leading to Taormina in the distance)


Schisò Castle, with fishing boats and the beach, Giardini Naxos


Public Garden, Taormina


Islands near Taormina in the Ionian Sea, as viewed from the Via Luigi Pirandello


Passageway, Museo Hoffmann


Giovanna Giornato, Ottavio and I


Villa Patti, in Caltagirone


C & Emmanuele, on the morning of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception Day, in Caltagirone


Feast of Immaculate Conception procession, Caltagirone


Feast of Immaculate Conception procession, Caltagirone

Off to Italy (Sicily)!

Sometimes, when you least expect it, good things appear, seemingly out of the air. And so it came to pass that I was invited to participate in the 4th Annual Festival of Poetry, in Caltagirone, Italy, this upcoming week. Needless to say, I'm very excited. (I've even been learning some Italian. No posso parlarlo bene però io so gli elementi della grammatica e dei parole.)

The three-day event takes place in what I'm told is a beautiful, small city in Sicily's interior, famous for its remarkable, colorfully tiled steps and its pottery. It is also home to some of Italy's most important contemporary writers, including Maria Attanasio, renowned both for her poetry and her fiction. In previous years the festival has brought in a poet or two from Algeria, Tunisia, Ireland, France, and Syria, and this year, yours truly (described as the New York-ese African American poet--I love it!) will represent the United States (Gli Stati Uniti).

I have sent work forward to be translated, which is very exciting, and am also really excited about a scheduled chat with students in Caltigirone and to the scheduled reading with Rosario LoRusso. C and I are also greatly looking forward to seeing Caltagirone and one or two other cities in Sicily. I will take pictures, perhaps even some videos, and duly post them here.


For those who read Italian, the official press release:

6, 7, 8 dicembre 2009: il Festival Internazionale di Poesia – Città di Caltagirone- giunge quest’anno alla 4° edizione con il titolo: “Building Cultures. Culture, transiti, integrazione e il linguaggio universale della Poesia”. Dopo Algeria e Tunisia, Irlanda, Francia e Siria, il Paese ospite per l’edizione 2009 saranno gli USA.

Sul solco delle tre precedenti edizioni, viene focalizzato il ruolo coesivo dello scambio culturale, dell’osmosi linguistica, possibile, in particolare, attraverso i codici della poesia che, come nessun’altra forma espressiva, fa dell’autenticità del messaggio e della verticalità della parola l’essenza stessa del suo venir fuori. Poieis, quindi, nel senso di azione poetica: in un’era di scontri ed intolleranze significa innanzitutto superamento di distanze, avvicinamento non millantato ma vero tra esseri umani, per i quali la poesia costituisce mezzo espressivo privilegiato per condividere la propria condizione e superarne i limiti, la finitezza.

Non si potrebbe in tal senso non rendere omaggio, discreto ma sincero, ad Alda Merini che di questo anelito verso l’altro e verso Dio (misticamente e non confessionalmente inteso) ha fatto la sua cifra. Pertanto il festival di Caltagirone aprirà i suoi lavori con una serata, quella del 6 dicembre, interamente dedicata alla poetessa recentemente scomparsa, utilizzando una location particolare: la sala delle feste di Villa Giusino, i cui utenti con disagi psichici saranno tra i protagonisti del reading collettivo a cui parteciperanno, tra gli atri, i poeti Maria Attanasio, Biagio Guerrera, Giuseppe Condorelli, Josephine Pace, Sebastiano Burgaretta, Ottavio Fatica.

La serata del 7 invece avrà come protagonisti tre voci differenti ma essenzialmente collegate alla trascrizione/traduzione/travaso della poesia: Ottavio Fatica, grande e noto traduttore di Keepling e di tanti altri, adesso presente nella bianca Einaudi con una sua opera prima di notevole impianto lirico, Sebastiano Burgaretta depositario della poesia dialettale-metafisica siciliana e Salvo Padrenostro, giovane talentuoso poeta dell’ironia, dal pensiero agile e linguaggio trasversale, delineeranno le traversate del linguaggio attraverso codici nuovi, luoghi immaginari e fraintendimenti possibili.

La serata conclusiva dell’8 sarà affidata alla magistrale performer, nonché bravissima traduttrice, Rosaria Lo Russo, che regalerà al pubblico un’anteprima del suo ultimo lavoro di prossima pubblicazione, e al calore/vigore del poeta afroamericano newyorkese John Keene, che sull’integrazione e la poesia ha davvero molto da raccontare.

Il Festival Internazionale di Poesia è un evento fortemente voluto dal Comune di Caltagirone, in collaborazione con la Provincia regionale di Catania. E’ interamente ideato ed organizzato dall’Associazione Culturale ALTAVOZ, attiva in Sicilia dal 2004, in collaborazione con Leggerete e Isola Poesia.