iQue Viva la Poesia!

Granada, Nicaragua — iQue Viva la Poesia! iQue Viva la Libertad! These battle cries adorned one side of a funeral hearse that spearheaded a procession on the fourth day of the joyous 8th International Festival of Poetry in Granada held from Feb. 12 to 19. On the other side, also strapped across wreaths of colorful daisies and green palm fronds, were iQue Viva El Amor! And iAout Esta Granada! 

Assembling in front of the San Francisco Church, one of 35 that dotted the small city, over a hundred poets from 54 countries joined what seemed to be more of a merry parade — whose declared symbolic intent was to bury all negative feelings that may impede the liberation of happy poetry. 

The black coach drawn by a couple of horses clad in woven white blankets clip-clopped along cobblestoned streets, followed by a flower-bedecked float with a small wooden dais and podium, where the poets took turns reading their poems at every street corner where the curious contingent stopped before exhilarated crowds.

Preceding the procession was a marching band escorting an odd papier-maché couple: a lady higante and a dwarfish ovoid figure that obviously had a small boy inside. A “chain gang” of muscular young men, with a few athletic women, would run raucously up a street, masked and clad in pastel undergarments, dragging long chains. They’d pounce on a “victim” and strap him with chains, then hoist him up in the air, bring him down to the middle of the street, and crowd around the hapless fellow before his release.

Other participants were motley groups representing municipalities and social clubs of Granada, founded in 1524 by Spanish conquistador Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba, after whom the Nicaraguan paper bills are named.

The fourth largest city in Nicaragua, Granada is often billed as the first European city in mainland America, by virtue of its registry in official records of the Crown of Aragon and the Kingdom of Castile in Spain. Unlike its historical rival and sister city of León which boasts of Castilian architecture, Granada reflects a Moorish and Andalusian appearance, so that it’s also known as La Gran Sultana.

Only one building in the city of 110,00 people stood all of three stories. All the rest were of only two stories, these in the central quarter of government offices and hotels, and mostly simple bungalows that lined the picturesque streets, their borders defined only by the sudden change in their facades’ pastel hues.

It is a city that certainly appeals to shutterbugs. More so when a colorful, indeed riotous, mock-funeral cortege cum street party and poetry wends its way slowly to the Malecon or lakeside drive past several more churches.

Nicaraguans love poetry, their own as exemplified by their beloved Ruben Dario, Ernesto Cardenal, and the contemporary Gioconda Belli, as well as the poetry read and recited at Granada’s Plaza de la Independencia by the world’s poets who are welcomed yearly. Primarily because of this activity, Granada will soon be declared as a Cultural and Natural Patrimony of Humanity by the UNESCO.

The Granada Poetry Fest now rivals the much older International Poetry Festival of Medellin, Colombia, to which this Filipino poet was fortunate to have been invited in 2008. That was fun, too, if I may keep to understatement. Marjorie Evasco was our representative in Medellin in 2009, followed by Dr. Alice Sun Cua in 2010, and Gémino H. Abad in 2011, with young poet Mookie Katigbak Lacuesta expected to pick up the Pinoy baton anew this coming June.

As a result of our participation in the Medellin poetry fest, Marj Evasco gained an invite to Granada’s the following year, in 2010. It was Alice’s turn last year. And in a grand gesture of rapprochement between De La Salle and Ateneo, the two gracious ladies recommended my participation in Granada this February.

I will forever be grateful to them, for indeed, it was much fun, too. In fact it proved to be more of a party place than Medellin, with music bands performing nightly at Casa de los Leones where we gathered for late dinner after readings at the central plaza. With the exception, that is, of one tough hombre de Pasig who together with “bad boy” poetas de Central American simply dug elbows on a table laden with bottles of the local Toña beer and excellent Flor de Caña rum. 

But it was also a packed schedule for the week, beginning with the poets’ arrival on Sunday, registration with the secretariat manned by young volunteers, and check-in at various hotels near the city center. From the Managua airport, a bunch of us including the esteemed Irish poet Desmond Egan and his wife Viv, Slovenian poet Brane Mozetic, Delana Dameron from New York, and young Austrian poet Ann Cotton, were ferried to Granada an hour away.

After the welcome amenities, there was a preliminary reading by emerging young Nicaraguan poets at Plaza de los Leones, followed by a music concert by singer-songwriter Katia Cardenal, then the first dinner with entertainment by the three-piece cumbia band Los Hijos del Son.

On Monday, Feb. 13, a book fair and craft fair were inaugurated, as well as a literary workshop by poet Luis Alberto Ambroggio. This year the festival honored Nicaraguan poet Carlos Martinez Rivas, while also commemorating the centenary of the poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra. The fest’s slogan was a line from Rivas: “La Poesia es Insurreccion Solitario. (Poetry is a solitary insurrection.)”

Poetry’s crafting may be so, but then poets are also known to party hard, so that the rest of the days always culminated in dinner, drinks, and dancing. Some of us wound up at the promenade fronting Hotel Dario, with its strip of festive resto-bars with live music and al fresco settings.

Desmond Egan found O’Shea’s Irish Pub, run by his countryman Tom Griffin. And Nicaraguan poet Isolda Hurtado and I agreed that it served the best filet mignon in all of Central America, as vouched for by Desmond himself. Now who was I to doubt the word of one fine Irish poet, the director of the annual Gerard Manley Hopkins International Conference in Dublin, and who had visited the Philippines in the early ’80s as a member of Amnesty International?

I quote excerpts from Egan’s poem “On the Second Anniversary of the Murder of Rudy Romano”:

“I want to sing you Marcos in exile/ one last tatty song/ a cement ode for your testament of/ cement// … cement jails with cement hatches/ for anyone whose mind had not rotted/ blindfolds of cement./ cement screams// … Marcos midas of cement/ at your touch at your yellow smile/ the rubbertrees the fruit the vegetable sun/ went cement/ cement cement cement everywhere/ cement bread cement lives// cement on the feet of Father Romano/ dropped by your soldiers from a helicopter into/ the cement of Manila Bay.” 

And that is how friendship is nurtured at poetry festivals, with an exchange of verse notes over drinks and much laughter and song. Such as with the poet Rene Figueroa of El Salvador, with whom I took a horse-drawn coach ride to the Parque de la Poesia where a dozen Nicaraguan poets are honored with sculpture featuring their verses. With Israeli poet Tal Nitzan and Spanish poet, Yolanda Castaño, while abrazo-ing the bar at Hotel Dario at one party. With Colombian poet John Galan, who led the LatAm poets in commending me after my reading of my translated poem “Circuito Poesia Mundial,” and asked for a copy so they could add to the 25 statement/lines.

Our poetry goes a long way, indeed, when floated upon wings of camaraderie — by the crater lake of Apoyo in an excursion to the town of Catarina, or on that last day together on a resort island, one of 365 in Lake Nicaragua, 20th largest in the world and unique home to a freshwater shark species, with a grand view of Mombacho Volcano across the blue waters, an infinity pool in the foreground, full of very wet poets in their trousers and ready bikinis. Yes, that’s what an international poetry festival amounts to, also, tambien, tambien, muy bien.