Sounds like poetry

The Antares Poetry Festival took place in Galati this Saturday and Sunday (29-30 May, 2010). Many Romanian poets and literary critics from Galati and Braila, as well as authors from abroad, were invited on Saturday, at the Public Library “V.A. Urechea”. Most of them read poetry, most of it was boring, but I guess we could talk about this later on. For the time being I would like to speak about a less boring, conventional, traditional or realistic event that took place on Saturday at the Public Library. 

One of the poets who were invited to read was Jaan Malin, from Estonia. One could tell he wasn’t as boring as the others from the first moment he started his performance. Because he really gave a performance, what we could call a one-man show. The good part about this performance was that it didn’t need to be translated – the bad part about it was that few people understood it. I can’t say that I did, but I can say that I found it very interesting.

 

I first thought about the beat generation when I saw him perform, but there isn’t actually any link between the two, except for the emphasis on the way in which the poem is read. Then, I thought about a mime artist, but Jaan Malin’s performance had a very different intention. He was in fact trying to describe a universal, ancient, a pre-Tower of Babel language. And he succeeded, from my point of view. 

As I found Jaan Malin to be quite a character, I tried to find out more about him, about his artistic beliefs, his roots, his influences. So I found out that he belongs to a surrealistic (Malin’s father is a well-known surrealist painter in Estonia) movement called the sound poetry, which is, I believe, exactly what the name suggests: poetry of sounds, of universal language. Then, I found out that he was very interested in folklore, that he studied and collected so much folklore (not the country-side folklore, but the urban folk lore) that the Estonian President himself awarded him several years ago. However, folklore is not an influence on his poetry, as he himself states.

I couldn’t find too much information about Jaan Malin over the internet, but I did see that he has won the third place on the European Slam Poetry Festival and that his performances are rather appreciated in Europe. Well, although I don’t think the close-minded Europeans from Galati appreciated or understood his poetry, I can say that I quite enjoyed it and I hope to hear more about sound poetry in the future.

adrian haidu