Bengaluru Poetry Festival returns after 2-year hiatus

Falah Faisal | NT

Bengaluru: Indian poetry is in a very healthy place, believes Subodh Sankar, one of the organisers of the Bangalore Poetry Festival (BPF), with niche publishers as well as mainstream publishing houses printing more poetry than they used to and a lot more poets finding their voice online untethered by traditional media.

“Every year that we have done the festival in the past, there has been this tremendous energy. The poetry community is an intensely engaged community. At a poetry festival, the audience is so engaged. They really love poetry, and some of them write poetry and are so much more involved,” says Subodh Sankar, the founder of Atta Galatta and board member of the festival, and adds that he is an old-fashioned guy who prefers things in the physical realm than the online realm.

 “Poetry goes on when nothing else does. It is our only weapon against mortality. Long after we are gone, the hard truths that came howling out of our hearts in the middle of the night will remain. The Bengaluru Poetry Festival is coming with songs and strange new rhapsodies, with magic poems, shock poems, and poems that whisper tenderly. The verse is flying at you,” says Shinie Antony, the festival director.

“This year’s festival has poetry in numerous languages including Khasi, Manipuri, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, and Urdu,” points out Subodh who says he is most looking forward to watching Rajesh Reddy who is one of the foremost Urdu poets working today.

Things to look forward to at the festival will be singer Rekha Bhardwaj talking about how she finds poetry in the music that she does, actor Arunoday Singh unveiling his poetry collection Unsung, and a poetry discussion with actress Deepti Naval.

There will also be performances by Niranjan Bharathi, a descendant of the Renaissance poet Mahakavi Subramanya Bharathi, activist Irom Sharmila who will be reading poetry by Varavara Rao translated into Manipuri alongside her own poems, and Aswin Vijayan, the winner of Toto Award for Creative Writing.

There will also be new and fierce poets starting out on their journey. Who knows , some of them might go on to be the next generation of great Indian poets.

The festival program will start with an invocation and rendering by the choir comprising 34 visually impaired children and their teacher from the Jyoti Seva Sadan Trust and end with an artistic performance on August 28 by Jeet Thayil, poet, novelist, and musician, along with his band members Hollis Coats, Disco Puppet (Shoumik Biswas) and Sangeeta Agnes Hosea

Where: The Leela Palace, Old Airport Road

When: August 27 and 28

 Register: www. bengalurupoetry festival.org