Int'l poetry festival starts today

Kolkata: The city will witness the second edition of the three-day Chair Poetry Evenings international festival starting from November 22.

The poets from Australia, Hungary, Slovakia, Chile, USA, Netherlands, Portugal along with many other countries will attend the festival. Poets like Brian Turner from USA, Sara F Costa from Portugal, Elmar Kuiper from the Netherlands, BalázsSzőllőssy from Hungary, HajnalCsilla Nagy from Slovakia along with Indian poets, including Arundhathi Subramaniam, Devi Prasad Mishra, Ashutosh Dubey, HemantDivate, Yashodhara Roy Chaudhuri, AshwaniKumar,AngshumanKar,Katyayani, BinaSarkar Elias, Prabodh Parikh, Koushiki Dasgupta and AbhimanyuMahato will attend the festival.

The inaugural event of the festival will take place in Rathindra Mancha, Jorasankoon, where poets will recite poems in their mother tongue followed by a reading of the same in English translation. Jnanpith award winner Pratibha Ray will inaugurate the Chair Poetry Evenings 2019.

The inaugural programme would also host indigenous folk music towards the end of the evening. In this edition of the festival, the audience will have a mixed music of various languages with the participating poets reciting their poems in Hungarian, English, Bengali, Hindi, Gujrati,

Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch.

There would also be a poetry workshop for the students on the November 22 with poet Ashwani Kumar as the guest. The festival would continue in different parts of the city, including Jorasanko and Ganges Art Gallery on the next day and would culminate with the unique Poetry on Ganges event on November 24 where poets would perform on a cruise over the river Ganges from afternoon till night.