The Ó Bhéal Winter Warmer Poetry Festival in Cork, November 2023.

The Cork-based poetry organisation and its director Paul Casey ran yet another excellent Winter Warmer Festival from 24th-26th November at Nano Nagle Place in the Irish port city of Cork.

I have followed the work of ó Bhéal for a few years now, and have been present at several online, hybrid and in-person Winter Warmer festivals. As always, I was impressed with the skilful and thoughtful integration of grassroots poetry events in Cork with the open-minded networking and hospitality beyond the city and across the world. The multi-dimensional events – workshops, recitals, spoken word, showcases, poetry films, book presentations, translation-based events – shows poetry at its best: diverse, intermedial, creative, co-operative, constantly learning and evolving.

This year I was particularly struck by a range of thoughtful contributions to intercultural and contextualized and culturally embedded linguistic and intermedial translation. U.S. based translator Laima Vincė contributed a event on the recently published collection The Cerulean Bird by Lithuanian-Jewish poet Matilda Olkinaitè, who was murdered in 1941 together with her family by Nazi collaborators. Vincė interweaved readings of the original poems, her translations of them, and narrations of the personal and historical circumstances under which the poems were written, hidden, and finally translated. She created a tapestry-like event that pulled all the linguistic and cultural registers of translation.

Poet Dylan Brennan divides his time between Ireland and Mexico City. He mediates and translates between the Irish and English cultures, their historical encounters, Náhua language and cosmovisión, and Mexican political events. The title of his recent collection Let the Dead (2023) hints at the spiritual and political dimensions of death as a form of transition across these cultures.

Rody Gorman and Alistair Mackay, based on the Isle of Skye, contributed an inspirational event on the poetic word and music across Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, and English. In their work, the richness of Gaelic languages finds its natural partner in the resonances of music. Gorman’s ´inter-tonguing´ into English has to constantly negotiate that language’s lack of detail, range of meaning and nuance, in comparison to the Gaelic languages.

The festival included a showcase of four regular open mic nights in and around Cork: Sling Slang, Ubuntu Sessions, The Underground Loft, and DeBarra´s Spoken Word. Each showcase was presented by the regular EmCee, thus showcasing the poets as well as the skill and dedication of the EmCees, who create the bespoke vibe and atmosphere of each night and create the environment for encouragement and continuity.

Political poetry was represented by Sarah Clancy, Emma Must and Fred D´Aguiar who offered completely different, equally incisive approaches to poetry and politics.

Storytelling featured more strongly than at previous festival. The genre has its own rich poetic language and poeticity, without adhering to ‘poetic’ form. Aindrias de Stiaic offered riotously funny and at times skin-crawlingly scary and uncanny storytelling from the tradition of Irish storytelling, and Zimbabwe-based storyteller S’phongo offered bilingual storytelling from Southern African tradition.

All events – including those I could not specifically mention here due to word limit (not quality or originality!) – Will shortly be available as recordings on the ó Bhéal website and youtube channel.

Congratulations once again to all the participants and to ó Bhéal, for their exceptional knowledge of poetry, organisational skill, and their warm and welcoming spirit.

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