Berlin

My disrupted internet access and the forthcoming house move delayed me putting this up. The conference of Festivals covered much of the ground one would expect. There was the usual sharing of recent project ideas and much discussion of destructive cuts to literature funding across the globe, with representatives farthest stretched to Chile in the West and the Ukraine in the East. A lot of  Balkan Festivals too. The Text Festival was the only overtly non-literature festival.

Pleased to see Eduard Escoffet (Barcelona) again.

Berlin again

It’s been a while since I thought about blogging; a mixture of Text Festival exhaustion, illness, holidays, buying a new apartment and kicking off a major new international project (which I will be setting up with a visit to China in September) put it to the back of my mind.

Tomorrow I set off for the Berlin Poetry Festival http://literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=1016  – I was invited to be part of the festival’s ambition to establish collaborative programming and joint projects between various international festivals. I was quite looking forward to this dialogue until today when I received the agenda for the sessions. The second presentation of Saturday is fucking Poetry Parnassus. http://tony-trehy.blogspot.com/2010/11/olympics-and-poetry.html So we are in a sharing environment with an organisation with which you have to keep your copyright close to your chest. I find this hugely annoying and now am not optimistic at all. I guess, as with most conferences, the best links will be established over lunch.

More positively, I am very much looking forward to meeting up again with Steve Miller – an artist for whom I have a lot of time.

Anyway, I hope to blog about the trip during or on my return.