Opening night Poetry International showcases sprightly poetry #PIFR

You can watch back here http://bit.ly/1P8sFu9, read back below:

NEWSPEAK

Ernie runs into the room and shouts loudly: 'Poo'

'Hey bah, Ernie, that's a dirty word,' says Bert.
Ernie looks at Bert in surprise.
'How can a word be dirty, Bert?'

A word itself is not dirty. What it stands for possibly is.
As a result, a word can exclude populations and bring friendly heads of state into the curtains. A word can be a weapon with which to fight another's fanatically cherished values. A word indicates which club you belong to. To which subculture. What ideology you stand for. Whether you are hip, down-to-earth, patriotic, rebellious, civilised, streetwise or open-minded.

Those who speak, discriminate.

In his novel 1984, George Orwell describes a one-party state trying to gain complete control over the actions and thinking of its subjects. One means to this end is to transform the language into so-called Newspeak, an extremely compressed form of the English language, in which all words that could have a negative effect on the party have been deleted or given a different meaning.

Newspeak is the theme of the Poetry International Festival 2016, which begins here and now, and rarely has a theme been so topical.

Refugee tsunami, head rag tax, shovel software, tinderella syndrome, peace pianist, homesickness dish, villa subsidy, send-off day and sneakgate. New word combinations that want to push your opinion in a certain direction. Or vice versa, when people and groups want you too to start thinking that certain words are no longer acceptable. Because they carry an undertone of racism or are otherwise discriminatory or offensive. When literary classics are republished, such words are replaced by more neutral ones. Titles of paintings and captions in museums, which are appealing when viewed through current spectacles, are changed.

All language is framed. Language without more, as a sanctuary of the imagination, does not seem possible these days. You can no longer roll out your own words without consequences. You can no longer look under the bonnet with impunity. You have to choose between frog or helicopter perspective, conduct your apology politics at the Jip & Janneke level, and somewhere between dream and deed justify your behaviour. No register of language without ideological implications.
The ideology hijacks the language and does not let it go.

'Dear friend,' says Abdel-Ilah Salhi, our guest from Morocco,

'the ideology has brought us to the city
left in a narrow corridor between happiness and unhappiness.'

The language of ideology creeps into poetry. 'Only the market makes me alive' says the Dutch Maarten van der Graaf. 'Gives me experiences.'
Poetry is slowly creeping into ideology. In their painstaking search for the right language that really knows how to touch, spin doctors worm their way out of the woolly policy jargon of their patrons and crawl under the fences of poetry to frame the words and phrases they find there. So echoes of the parallelism Holy, holy, holy and Danton's historical l'audace, l'audace, l'audace in De Wevers' language, language, language', Wilders' Minder minder minder and Trump's China, China, China. It is poetry that screams at us in the columns of newspapers with conflict language and alarmist war comparisons: The capitulation to Mecca, the strategy of rot, shooting with red bullets, long-arm politics and brokers in the theatre of fear. The achievements from the natlab of language, poetry, are shrewdly cycled into ideology and soon there will be no word free of ideological overtones.
'The words disappear', as the Russian Sen-Senkov writes somewhere, until 'in the interior of my freezing soldier/the last warm/ letter crackles.'

It is up to poetry to recapture, defend and safeguard language as a sanctuary. Poetry as the small village bravely holding out. Many decades ago, poetry managed to free itself from its moral, formal and idealistic shackles. Poetry no longer knows any obligation and thus leans more strongly than ever on the strength of its own futility.

Poetry is irrelevant, our Dutch festival guest Anneke Brassinga once wrote, and it is that irrelevance that keeps her going. Let's cherish that irrelevance, because all that is relevant does not seem to last long. Hiding under irrelevance, poetry can go on forever being peerlessly beautiful and strong.

Peerlessly beautiful and strong like the work of the eighteen poets of the 47th Poetry International Festival, here tonight in the Rotterdam Schouwburg and next week in the halls of the Ro Theatre, our new venue. For non-Rotterdammers: that's a seven-minute walk that way.

They will recapture, defend and safeguard poetry in the coming week. Poets don't belong on the barricades, I hear you say, they only get in the way there. But perhaps they should do just that more often.
'I took ceremony from violence,' writes our Canadian festival guest Lisa Robertson.
Esther Kinsky from Germany said:

where the night
opens mouth to let the day in there
another country takes off
the new.

Ladies and gentlemen, the 47th Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam has opened.
Let the new begin. I would like to give the floor to Argentine poet Sergio Raimondi.