Urban Word all set to bring its poet programme to Pakistan

The Urban Word, a literary organisation in the United States that provides platform to young writers to showcase and develop their talents and is credited for the launch of poetic careers of many a young poet in the country through its youth poet laureate programmes, is all set to extend its poet programme to Pakistan by identifying, nurturing and celebrating young poets in the country.

American poet and literary enthusiast Michael Cirelli, whose one of the four poetry volumes was declared a bestseller by the New York Times, shared details of the Pakistan Youth Laureate Programme to begin next year with the assistance of the US Embassy at a talk at the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) on Tuesday evening.

The programme, whose details can be found at www.nationalpoem.org, will seek poetry submissions in English and Urdu from young poets of Pakistan having ages between 16 and 25 years. In the first phase, 20 of those poems would be selected and published in an anthology, following which their respective poets would be offered training sessions and workshops to help them polish their craft.

The programme will culminate with the announcement of two youth poet laureates of the country — one each for English and Urdu.

Cirelli, who has been a founding member of the Urban Word as well as the founder of the youth poet laureate programme that was first held in New York, had an interesting story to tell about his literary journey.

He said he grew up in a restaurant where his father was a cook and his mother a waitress. He himself did the dishwashing job at the restaurant and had no literary background when all of a sudden he felt the joy of poetry while visiting a poetry slam, which could be imagined as a sort of Mushairah.

He explained that the tradition of poetry slam started in Chicago where a labourer tried to take poetry out of the academic realm and take it to the masses. Such events would be held at public places where poets would recite their poems and some laymen were chosen as judges who would mark those poems.

Cirelli said he was as much interested in poetry by laymen as he was interested in classics. He said he also designed a curriculum to compare classic poetry with hip-hop poetry, in which he would show that hip-hop poets employed the same poetic devices that have been long cherished by the classical poets.

He said eventually he launched the Youth Poet Laureate programme in New York, which became so famous that it was replicated in another states and cities of the US. Once, the winner of the poet laureate programme was invited to recite a poem at the oath-taking ceremony of the New York mayor where Harry Belafonte and Bill Clinton were the other speakers.

The event was moderated by US educationist Dr Sara Zaidi, who is also the wife of Cirelli. She was born in Taxila, Pakistan, and inherited the love for poetry from her parents.

In between her talk in English, she spoke simple Urdu sentences with ease, but when she struggled in pronouncing some difficult Urdu works, she quipped that her mother would be very angry if that came to her knowledge.

Talking to The News, she said her parents would often recite an Urdu verse if they wanted to assert something as they believed an idea was best encapsulated in poetry. She added the she read Ghalib, Iqbal, Faiz and Sadequain and her husband had also read translations of Faiz into English.

The audience was surprised when they were told that Pakistan was the first country outside the US where the youth poet laureate programme was to be launched. When Cirelli was asked why he chose Pakistan over other countries, he cited the Pakistani origin of his wife as one of the reasons as it would help them make connections and reach out to more

people.

He added that he had a friend in the US embassy who was a poetry lover and was enthusiastic about initiating a poetry talent hunt in Pakistan. He added that they were also considering initiating similar programmes in countries like India, Nigeria, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.

In his exclusive talk to The News, Cirelli said he did not believe that poetry was dying in the digital age. He said major contemporary poets in the US enjoyed a celebrity status similar to what Robert Frost enjoyed during his life.

“Poetry is in the heart of pretty much everybody,” he said, adding that the art was a great connector among people.

US Consulate Public Affairs Officer Lee McManus also spoke at the event. He said arts were a powerful medium that connected people and the US embassy had decided to support the programme because it wanted to venerate poetry. He ended his speech with ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, a short poem by William Carlos Williams.

At the end, some young poets and seasoned poets like Ambreen Haseeb Amber were invited to the stage like a Mushairah to read out their verses in English or Urdu languages. One of the takeaways of the ending section was Kashif Raza’s translation of Langston Hughes’ Harlem that he recited alongside the original poem.