Pic-heavy review by Kylie Thompson
Festivals are weird. There are the ones you go to just to catch up with your friends, where the constant motions of crowds are a backdrop of white noise to your socialising. There are festivals you go to where you have the best of intentions, but end up lingering over coffee and conversation, shrugging off any events you happen to miss. And then there are ones where coffee is for quitters because every second missed feels wasted, feels like you’re losing something important to your soul or your art.
Queensland Poetry Festival? It’s the kind that makes grabby hands at your heart and your soul.
It’s hard to talk about festivals sometimes without falling to fangirling, but harder still when the festival is this good. Where do I even begin? Well, I tried, and the original piece was over 5k long. Hence the epic lag.
How do you decide what to talk about, and what to overlook in your review? How do you do justice to the feelings and thoughts? In the end, you can’t do it all justice. Especially here. QPF, in a lot of ways, is a sacred space. It’s a place of honesty and vulnerability, a place of love and support. It’s a place of learning, growing, and finding yourself, even if only in the smallest of ways.
QPF in recent years has become the sort of festival a lot of others could stand to learn from. This isn’t about drawing crowds through aimless controversy, giving over the stage to people you know will offend just because it catches the media’s eye. This is a festival where every single voice on the stages is carefully chosen for what they bring- truly bring- to the conversations at play. Diversity is showcased here in a way that isn’t just lip service, and there’s something beautiful in bringing together a crowd to witness personal truths and victories.
There aren’t a lot of easy conversations here, nor people chosen just because they’ll be popular. There’s no idle panel conversations, no simple thoughts for bookselling success or discussions designed to up book sales. Queensland Poetry Festival, at its heart, is a call to arms, a reminder that every voice matters, and sometimes appreciating art means sitting down, shutting up, and letting everyone share their art with the world.
It makes for breathtaking conversations.
There were glitches, of course, as any event running during a bus strike is going to have, but they were handled with the sort of warmth and humour that made it impossible to find fault.
It would be easy for QPF to be another fun festival, rife with banal conversation and readings of the least offensive bits of work. It’d probably be far easier to get funding for the yearly event, truth be told, to bring together the usual older white guys, with a few token women thrown in for diversity (generally white, too, with the ocassional sighting of the ever-glorious Anita Heiss). But Annie Te Whiu and David Stavanger have kicked the traditional festival format to the curb rather spectacularly here. And the results of opening the floor to voices we don’t always hear from at festivals?
My heart still hurts, my brain still runneth over with ideas and questions I want- need- to learn more about. And I love way, way more poets than I started the festival knowing.
So, lemme give you some highlights:
Quinn Eades suckerpunched the room with a poem about transitioning, and the impacts of change. As Australia falls deeper into hatemongering around the upcoming plebiscite, it was hard not to cry at Quinn’s ability to stand up and bring dignity and compassion back into the conversation. The Queer Literary Salon, too, kicked goals here, proudly showcasing our talented GLBTQI word-whispers.
Sam Wagan Watson reminded us that you can be a refugee in your own home, and in your own sacred spaces. Upcoming First Nation poet, Sachem Parkin-Owens brought the room to silent tears with his Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize winning piece, ‘My Ancestors’, a blending of traditional language and English.
Luka Lesson sang the praises of a grandmother I’d love to meet, before breaking hearts with the realisation that sometimes, people invested in hate will see mockery in expressions of love and affection.
Hani Abdile, former detainee on Christmas Island, spoke of the bittersweet fear of forgetting where you’ve come from, and who you’ve left behind. In fact, the ‘Writing Through Fences’ initiative (of which Hani is a part, and which performed at the Brisbane Multicultural Arts Centre during QPF) was truthfully one of the most breathtaking, heart-stomping parts of the festival. It’s hard- impossible, really- not to have your heart broken open to hear stories such as these, to be reminded of the humanity of people we’ve spent far too long demonising and mistreating. And as our government fights to send rape victims back to the guards that allegedly attacked them, this was a sorely needed reality check.
Maxine Beneba Clarke (who you should seriously be following on Twitter) talked about the aftermath of slavery on personal and family history, and the heartbreak of understanding, even if only a little, the horrors inflicted on your ancestors.
Clozapine Clinic showcased the often overlooked creativity behind mental illness, searching for the silver lining on an often isolating, and scary, experience. And about a hundred other staggeringly talented sorts wowed audiences over the multi-day event. There was music- including a tribute to late poet and musician Leonard Cohen- and mayhem, the Nomad Travelling Theatrette providing side-splitting giggles from their roadside clinic… I don’t know how QPF manages to balance comedy and serious, honest conversation, but it seems to be their superpower.
QPF is an imperfect festival- they all are, if you look hard enough for problems- but in the end, it’s impossible to hate an event that dedicates itself so utterly to bringing a diverse range of voices together. For four days, the QPF team worked tirelessly to create a community where all were welcome to share their truths and their art with the world.
What is there not to love?
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