Getting ready for World Poetry Day

Last Thursday, we celebrated national poetry day in the Netherlands. The cultural office of my university asked all staff teaching on that day to read a poem during class. I selected a couple from a volume edited by Amnesty International, which has translations of wonderful poems by great poets like Nazim Hikmet or Pablo Neruda. Yet since I forgot the book at home, I took refuge to the internet, where I found some lovely poems by Miriam van Hee, a Belgian/Flemish poet who writes in a sober and accessible style and whose poems I read quite a bit in my youth. That’s how I ended my teaching that day, and I hope to be lucky that next year national poetry day is again on a day when I teach.

All this reminded me of a delightful thread we had here at CT a while back, in which Trane suggested we could all come up with translations of our own favorite poems. In slightly amended fashion, I suggest the following: on 21 March, World Poetry Day, I will open a thread where everyone can post a poem of their own making or their favorite poem by someone else – and in both cases with or without translation into English/Globish. Go write, people!