Adventures in Iceland: Nýhil Day Three

On the third day of the Nýhil Poetry Festival, poets participated in panel discussions at the Nordic House. The first panel was chaired by Birna Bjarnadóttir and comprised of Markku Paasonen, Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen, Leif Holmstrand, and Arngrímur Vídalín. I appreciated the structure of this panel, which included an invitation to the poets to share poems during the talk; nice to contextualize work within the discussion. An intriguing digression completed the panel, where an audience member raised the obtuse issue of the role of beauty in contemporary poetry. This could have been a topic intrinsic to the panel, had parameters been established for what was meant by 'beauty'. As was, I felt as though some speakers tried to address what was meant by the abstract notion while others attempted to answer the question... A fascinating, dizzying game of trying to discern what, exactly, everyone meant.

The second panel focusws on politics, poetry, and literary groups, with digressions into English as a dominant language and marginalization. It was chaired by Benedikt Hjartarson; I joined Ingólfur Gíslason, Lars Skinnebach, Linh Dinh, and Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl for the chat.

There was a high level of audience interactivity, and the panels felt at times like they might have been better suited to a round-table forum given the audience participation. Definitely a pleasure to partake in the afternoon.

Nýhil ended off an exciting weekend of sharing with a classy group dinner in Stokkseyri, 45 minutes from Reykjavík, at Fjöruborðið (famed for its small, Icelandic lobsters). It was such a rare gift to be invited to participate, and to fraternize with Nýhilists and international poets. Takk fyrir!!