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Showing posts from December, 2014

The Old Year in Poetry | Umar Farouk Sesay

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The old year’s gone away to nothingness and night, but the talk of yesterday  are things identified,  writes poet John Clare. For Umar Farouk Sesay, 2014 was an eventful year and one of the highlights has to be the Medellín International Poetry Festival.  If, like me, you've never heard of the event, here's how Cultures of Resistance dot org, a website that promotes activists and artists who seek a peaceful, just, and democratic world, describes it : Medellín, Colombia, a city once notorious for being the epicenter of the cocaine trade, is reinventing itself as a global center for the living word. The Medellín International Poetry Festival was founded in 1991, when the streets of Medellín were at their most precarious. Organizers envisioned the Poetry Festival as a form of cultural resistance--a venue for cultivating peace and a protest against injustice and terrorism, including state terrorism. Over the past 20 years the festival has established itself as the largest of