Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

I am not saying for certain that the same thing will happen in Lithuania, but, given how the program is organized for the Friday, with the recital of the American poets, I don’t exactly have high hopes.

It will begin with the farce the American trio have prepared for us. Kelly Francesca, Daniella Goldblum, and Jenny Lipp.

The first day proper of the festival is Saturday. All right, I say. All right. Nothing wrong with that.

But that the first item in the program is called “After Midday with German poet Günther Meierhof” is not only typical but even an inevitable discrimination against poets who speak and write in minor languages; that seems to be a given at festivals like this, whether they are held in England, Sweden, or Iceland.

This so-called “After Midday” with the German poet (a poet no-one outside of Germany has ever heard of) goes on for two hours, and then, only then, does someone else get a turn.

First up are the domestic poets, and things proceed with them offering some outlandish play, no doubt some sort of “lyrical” play — I can’t understand why people haven’t seen through this phenomenon long ago, since the theater has nothing whatsoever to do with poetry.

There seems, in fact, to be something missing from the program on Saturday: it ends after this “performance” and participants are simply left afterwards in an empty space. There is not even any mention of supper.

The second day starts with the formal registration of participants at something called the Dainava center at 16 Maironio Street.

Why on earth do the people who organize these things assume that we all know where Maironio Street is? Most of us have come to Druskininkai for the first (and last) time in our lives.

But at the end of the registration period (which I don’t expect will be any better; I imagine we’ll get some kind of card with our name on it, which we’re expected to wear hanging on our chests) we suddenly jump into a recital by some poet from Wales, some totally unknown poet who has decided to go by the name Niphin Bush, absurd as it sounds.

It doesn’t take a powerful imagination to predict that such people are more accurately called drinkers. A poet bearing the same last name as an American president doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously as a poet.

I don’t intend to cast specific aspersions on the job of the American president — haven’t we had enough of that grumbling? — but trying to make a career as a poet who shares a name with George W., Jeb, and George the elder is about as clever as sitting in the driver’s seat of a truck that’s going at full speed only to find the steering wheel is missing.

I perhaps shouldn’t be allowed to make assertions about people I’ve never met. But if anyone is allowed to do this, then I think I should be the one.

Before I went to the poetry festival in Liège, the one I mentioned above, I carefully read the documents about the festival which I’d been sent, and one participant caught my attention: a fifty-something poet from Ireland (exactly the way you’d describe me, if you changed the “r” in Ireland for a “c”). This person has published an incredible number of poetry books, as well as some books on the art of poetry in general (as if there aren’t enough books about that already).

Although I didn’t have a picture of this person, I immediately knew he had to be a drinker, and I was also sure his sole purpose in visiting Liège was to sample the Belgian strawberry and cherry beer.

Indeed, I had a very vivid image of this person in my mind, long before I met him, and in that image he was sitting at a Belgian beer bar with a huge glass of light-red strawberry beer in front of him, and beside the beer were two or three whisky glasses which he had gulped down between mouthfuls of beer.

And then I met the man: the only thing wrong with my prophetic image was his preference for Irish rather than strawberry beer; he drank Guinness with whisky. But his main purpose in turning up at the poetry festival was, as he himself put it: “One has poetic license to drink more than one usually drinks on a working day at home.”

I don’t know whether I should recount the other items on the program for Sunday. To tell the truth, what most attracted my attention in the program was the midday, coffee, and supper breaks, which could be more frequent, based on a quick glance at how compressed the poetry program is.

There, at least, you get some nourishment, something you don’t get from all the Nordic drivel which will be poured over us by the bucket-load at the festival.

And barely have I got my head around the term “creative writing” than, between one o’clock and half-past three on Sunday, we’re offered a lesson in this sort of writing.

I am fairly sure the trio of American poets will do really well at that gathering, shouting interjections in the form of pretentious-sounding questions which have no value besides disturbing the moderators of these so-called lessons from their attempt to share their limited knowledge with the simpletons who go in for the creative-writing lark — a group which definitely won’t include me.

And that about covers the major points of the Lithuanian program, which I have here in front of me, except for the Sunday night, when they’ve planned some universal gathering of poets. And, following that, there’s an item in the program with the embarrassing name “Night of the One Poem.”

Monday, the last official day of the festival, naturally begins with breakfast. Some people won’t exactly be bright-eyed that morning.

Then there is some ridiculous performance planned for the tired, ready to depart participants, some nonsense called “The disagreement between fire, water, air, and earth.”

I’m going to make myself disappear while this torture takes place.

At the end of all this, there’s a festival publicity event to introduce a festival poetry collection which is being published on behalf of the festival.

The only good thing about both the presentation and the publication is that — mixed in with all the stillborn poems by Jespers, Bengts, and Kláuses — you can find my own poems in the collection, the poems of a poet who has turned his back on poetry.

Actually, the poems will be in the odd Lithuanian language, but nevertheless they will be there, and as far as I’m concerned it will be enough that people know the poems were originally written in the one Nordic language you can definitely describe as having a somewhat lyrical tone: the Icelandic language.

And then, as a way of concluding this tragicomic presentation, all kinds of reading groups take over the program. We poor devils will be arranged into groups according to some rigid system one of the festival committee members has been devoting months to, and I’m assuming that these groups will perform an autopsy on one of the poems.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up choosing a messy effort by one of the American housewife-poets, or by the Meierhof Phenomenon; it certainly won’t be a poem by that drunkard Bush or by me, who is from the back of beyond.

And finally, when we’ve all been over-stuffed with the art of words, the organizers will reveal to us who is the idiotic winner of the poetry contest they announced on the first day of the festival.

At this moment, I will be asking myself why in the world I accepted the invitation to this strange festival. Especially as I’m already thinking about, eagerly anticipating, the moment I get to take off in the airplane from Vilnius, free from all that crap, at least until the invite to the next festival arrives.

Nevertheless, I am going to go there in mid-October; not long now.

Indeed, I got my tickets in the mail this morning. Keflavík — Copenhagen — Vilnius and back. The tickets were sealed in a stupid envelope which was so tight a fit that I tore them on one corner when I tried to get them out.