Poetry event celebrates languages, listening

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Poetry wasn’t lost in any kind of translation Friday when 19 poetry readers from different backgrounds took the stage at (SCENE) Metrospace as a part of the second annual Festival of Listening.

More than 60 people filled the performance space to attend the event, which was presented by MSU’s Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, or RCAH, Center for Poetry.

The event featured poets reading in 18 foreign languages including Kazakh, Bamanankan, Urdu, Spanglish, Middle English, Haitian Creole and Hindi. Undergraduate and graduate students, MSU faculty and staff, and community members were among those who read Friday night.

“It’s really an opportunity for people to just sit and listen,” said Anita Skeen, director of the Center for Poetry. “They listen to the cadences and the music of the language. The people who are reading don’t translate.”

Skeen said the event was held at the Lookout! Gallery at Snyder-Phillips Hall last year and was moved to (SCENE) Metrospace, 110 Charles St., to provide a larger venue.

“A lot of times we ask the community to come into the university,” Skeen said. “Oftentimes we don’t go out into the community though, so I’m really happy to be in this space.”

Silvana Alfaro, a Lansing Community College creative writing student, said she attended the event because it was an opportunity to experience poetry in a different form.

“It’s wonderful to see how many different sounds we can get out of our mouths,” she said. “It’s unbelievable. There are so many different languages and we still get the feeling of poetry, the feeling that something happens to your soul when you hear it.”

Mojtaba Solgi, computer science graduate student, read a poem by the Persian poet Rumi. Solgi, a native of Iran, said the poem was about how love can make anything possible.

“I’m Persian and there is saying we have that every Persian is either a poet or likes poetry,” he said. “It’s part of my culture.”

Solgi said the event was helpful in providing an outlet for the community to experience culture and language.

“I think the most important contribution of events like this is that people get to know different cultures,” he said. “Trying to get to know people of different languages is sometimes hard for some people. Experiencing language helps those efforts to be more successful.”

Stephanie Glazier, the assistant to the director of the Center for Poetry, said it is important to provide a public space for those of different backgrounds to share their language and culture with the community.

“Part of something that the Center for Poetry is trying to do is to re-establish the oratory of poetry,” she said. “We’re proud to be giving the space to do that.”

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