Some thoughts from Medellín, Colombia, where the theme of https://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/ this year is ‘Desde el corazón de las comunidades’ / ‘From the heart to communities’.
The festival is a vast exercise in creating encounters through poetry readings, not just in Medellin but in its surrounding municipalities. Medellín’s integrated transport system, Sitva, is advertised in the arrivals hall of the city airport, and it is a magnificent achievement. A single ticket takes you along the metro and swooping vertiginously up the mountainside by cable car. It’s not for tourism, but a means of connecting poorer outlying communities with the high-energy centre. The city is changing rapidly in a process of regeneration that includes opening up parks around the river that previously cut the city in half.
If poetry acts, it acts in circulation. At this critical point in Colombia’s fragile peace process every means of strengthening relationships is precious. Peace is not a feeling, but collective work. The festival is a crucial part of this work, and in its 29 editions it has built relationships with cultural and social organisations across the city and region. There are hundreds of readings, each one a contact built on listening and human presence.
Sometimes it feels as though presence is all you can offer. In Sonsón, a remote mountain village that has suffered terrible violence, I saw an exhibition of embroideries of the names of the dead, patchworks of corpses in the streets. There is nothing one can say about this.
But the festival’s work is a contact built on poetry, which multiplies connections through language. Every reading is a dialogue between Colombian and foreign poets, making new kinds of circulation. A heart that only pumped in one direction would be a medical emergency. The work of the heart is to oxygenate and heal – not just the wounds of war in Colombia but also the crushing effects of political systems designed to reduce all experience to market values. Translation multiplies perspectives, creating unexpected links, new routes, changed bodies. It’s thinking in contact and movement – the heart as a transport system.
