Poetry in Stavanger

Stavanger is known for the oil industry, beautiful nature and street art, but this small city in southwestern Norway is also home to some brilliant poetry. Stavanger Is the birthplace of some of the biggest Norwegian authors from the past (Alexander Kielland) as well as of today (for example Torild Wardenær).

Norway’s largest literature festival “Kapittel” is held annually in Stavanger and so is Litt Sandnes focused on literary events (organised by Stavanger’s sister town Sandnes). Kapittel grew from a small festival called “Alexander's week” in 1990s. The first “Kapittel” (Chapter in English) was organised by Kurt Kristensen in 1995 with the aim of celebrating the works of Kielland and Sigbjørn Obstfelder, another author and poet born in Stavanger. The festival was called “Kapittel 95” and the tradition was born. Today, the Kielland Centre is the festival’s partner and the events are organised by Sølvberget Library and Cultural Centre. Across five days, the city hosts major literary figures from across Norway and the world.

For the past two years, I have been fortunate to lead a group of young poets as part of a workshop series “Poesi for Unge” (Poetry for the Young”) organised by the Stavanger main library (Sølvberget). The group was driven by the literature librarian Hild Bakka (and Grethe Mo in 2021) and included regular poetry sessions each first Tuesday of the month. In 2021, the workshops led to the publication of an anthology of poems written by the young poets and published by Tekst Forlag. This year, the group produced a series of ekphrastic poems in response to the paintings of Reidar Berge, a painter and sculptor born in Stavanger in 1922.

The poems were shared at the opening of the celebration of Reidar Berge’s 100th anniversary, run in the first week of December 2022. To create their poems, the poets visited the Reidar Berge’s gallery and selected paintings that resonated with them most. Using the ekphrastic poetry method, the poets wrote poems that captured their feelings and their interpretation of the artworks. At the opening event, the poets read their poems at the 3rd floor of the Reidar Berge museum, accompanied by chamber music from the Stavanger orchestra. The mini-orchestra played an extract from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s  C major, K. 128, which Mozart composed when he was sixteen years old. The young energy was felt in the room, as was the art meshing with spoken word and music.

Mozart was a child prodigy and there are many gifted young artists out there, creating music, art and writing poetry. At our workshops, we saw how important the group power is for sustaining the practice and making it an enjoyable journey. Experimentation with various styles, detailed feedback from peers, as well as the space to discuss difficult topics, were all part of the secret sauce of the workshops. Seeing how the young people grow on their poetic and life journeys, was incredibly rewarding to me and I learnt a lot from them all.

In 2023, I will be working on a collection dedicated to Stavanger and focusing on other writing projects, but the workshops will continue under the skilful leadership of Hild Bakka. The format will be slightly different: we have learnt that an open invitation to join the group works well at the start of the workshop series but is best to be continued as a closed small group afterwards. Limiting the number of members is important to allow for building trust and facilitating conversations where everyone can critique each other’s writing and advance their thinking.  If you read this blog and wonder about joining our poetry workshops or running your own, I encourage you to always trust what “comes to you” when you write your poem.  The key ingredients of a good poem (attention to title, pattern, rhythm, economy of words) become the notes for your poetic voice.  

The power of imagination

Imagination is a quintessentially human ability. It is the capacity to conjure up a different reality, to hold a different world in a thought. To me, imagination is a means to realize the wholeness of a human being.

The longer we live, the more we experience and the more scripts we build about what we experienced in the past and what we will experience in the future. These schemas structure our thoughts in predictable patterns. The patterns are helpful because they facilitate the ways in which we learn and socialize. At the same time, however, the patterns constrain our imagination.

Children’s imagination is less controlled by life algorithms. Unlike adults, children have fewer schemes to draw on. That is why I wrote that children are native artists and native poets – when given the space, children’s creativity is an original act of conveying the mysterious world hidden inside their minds. It is a fascinating space.

I am fortunate that part of my daily job is to observe how children express their imagination in different activities, such as story-making or pretend play. Often, during pretend play, children take on roles that reflect the power relationships they are part of at home or kindergartens. In that kind of role-play, children’s dialogues reproduce what they overheard from their parents or teachers. I hear children instructing their younger siblings or teddy bears to ‘put on the shoes’ or ‘eat nicely’. There is little imagination in those dialogues. But when children set their imagination free, they surprise me with incredibly original images - like ‘a purple Sun that cried stone-like tears’, or a prince who ‘has a green nose because he eats frogs and trees’.

When Slovakia entered the national lockdown in 2020, I was in close contact with my four-year-old niece Zuzanka. We used to meet regularly on Zoom, read books together, talked about what we saw or ate that day, played music instruments. But what we loved most were our imagination games. Zuzanka would say ‘Let us pretend’ and we would pretend. We pretended that she was a princess from a far-away land. We pretended that we ate ice-cream together (she had a strawberry flavour and I had chocolate), or that she could send me her toys through the screen.

One day we pretended that Zuzanka sent me a big package. Seeing the big broad smile on her face when I pretended I was opening her package in my flat (using a box similar to the one she held in her room), was priceless. It wasn’t about the package or what was inside it, it was about the continuation of the same imaginary thread in two different realities. It is that reciprocity in imagination that brings most joy and happiness.

If you invite someone else to be part of your imagined world, you create a shared country with its own boundaries and possibilities. To me, that is the moment when imagination becomes an art. An art that is undervalued in everyday language and our relentless pursuit of tangible manifestations of thoughts. It is a kind of art that cannot happen with anyone, there needs to be a bond, a sense of trust for opening up your soul to the other. There is softness in that act. A bit like when a sunray falls on a long grass stem. There is so much warmth and intimacy in shared imagination that it runs straight through you and touches you deeply. To me, such shared imagination is the ultimate expression of love.

Life is under no expectation to give us what we expect, as Margaret Mitchell said, but life gave us imagination. At times of constraints, imagination brings into relief the resilience of a human mind. It acts like a magic coat that you can put on and fly yourself away from an illness, imprisonment or gloomy situation.

When imagination is reciprocated, it honours your entire being. It allows liberation, healing. I cherish spending time with children because of their generosity in opening up imaginary spaces with trusted adults. And I love poetry for giving me the space to be a Nefelibata, a "Cloud Walker" who lives in the clouds of their own imagination. Do not let ever anyone take your imagination away. Hone your imagination with art, fellow cloud walkers, love seekers.

Artifactual poetry

In my experience of artifactual poetry, poems become objects and objects become poems. Could artifactual poetry grow into a new poetic genre? Full essay available from Glasgow Review of Books.