Soaking in the sounds

Multilingual poetry reading focuses on sound, language, not comprehension

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Jasmine Angelini-Knoll closed her eyes, letting words she didn’t always understand flow into her ears. Turkish, French and Spanish poems — the audience might not have understood the meaning of the words, but comprehension wasn’t the intention.

“It helped me sometimes to close my eyes so I could really focus on the voice and the sounds and not get distracted,” she said.

Angelini-Knoll, a student in the organic farming certificate program at MSU, was one of about 40 people who attended the Festival of Listening on Friday night at the LookOut! Gallery in Snyder-Phillips Hall, an event hosted by the Center for Poetry.

The center is a subset of the Residential College of Arts and Humanities, said Stephanie Glazier, assistant to the director of the Center for Poetry.

The festival brought 16 readers together from a broad spectrum of cultures to read poems in languages other than modern English, from an exiled Burmese poet to the dean of the RCAH.

“I think one of the remarkable things was the cross section of people we got — old and young and students and faculty and people from the community,” said Anita Skeen, director of the Center for Poetry.

The purpose was to get back to the roots of poetry reading and focus on listening to the language rather than trying to digest what it meant. This meant no translations or texts were handed to the audience, Skeen said.

“We designed this more for people to just listen and to not worry about having a text in front of them and matching up text with what they’re listening to,” she said. “Long ago, when people listened to poetry, they didn’t have a text in front of them.”

In her opening remarks, Skeen quoted poet Robert Frost: Poetry is something that gets lost in translation.

Anthropology graduate student Fredy Rodriguez-Mejia said he wasn’t sure how the idea for the poetry listening would work in practice.

“It was a really interesting experiment to hear somebody recite their poetry in their language,” Rodriguez-Mejia said. “Sometimes you don’t know if you’re going to get the music and the cadence but you really do.”

Instead of closing her eyes, Skeen said she couldn’t take her eyes off the readers, noticing their hand gestures and facial expressions.

“It was interesting how conscious I became of watching the poets’ expressions,” she said. “I don’t know if I do that when I go to listen to someone reading English — I don’t think I pay that much attention to the facial expressions and things like that.”

Rodriguez-Mejia, Skeen, Glazier and music performance graduate student Igor Houwat designed the event to be aesthetic rather than literal.

The success of the event prompted Skeen, Houwat and Rodriguez-Mejia to start planning for next year’s festival soon after the event ended, specifically citing the need for more space.

“There were people sitting outside of the doors,” Skeen said.

Other ideas for next year included a repeat of a translation workshop that had been held Tuesday before the festival, placing a time limit on poems and having readers choose music to be played in the background.

“(The poems) that were concise — it was easier for people to switch from one language to another in terms of what they were listening to,” Rodriguez said.

Both Rodriguez and Houwat read for the event.

East Lansing resident Dorothy Brooks said she plans to be in the front row for the event next year.

“I just found it very moving that so many languages and so much of the world was present in one small space and I found it very hopeful,” Brooks said.

Angelini-Knoll said she was a longtime supporter of the Center for Poetry and the idea of listening to poems in other languages intrigued her.

“I think that it was interesting — the range of emotions and the different ways different readers brought different words to life and different feelings,” she said.

Skeen said poetry and translation should be brought together more often.

“I don’t think we do enough with poetry and translation — we tend to read in the language that we speak and while we might read a translation, not many of us can read poetry in another language,” Skeen said. “We certainly can’t read with the accent and the cadence and the beauty that native speakers can.”

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