International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong 2015
– Poetry and Conflict –
International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong 2015 was held in November 2015. The Organizing Committee of IPNHK 2015 continued to accomplish the mission of making literature a more prominent part of daily life in Hong Kong, by organizing more literary activities such as this biennial International Poetry Nights. IPNHK 2015 brought together internationally renowned poets from different parts of the world, so as to create opportunities for college and high-school students, as well as for local writers and the public, to meet the invited poets, broaden their horizon in the reading of world poetry, and be aspired to the writing of their local environment. In the meantime, we took this opportunity to foster close collaboration with institutions of tertiary and secondary education, connecting the higher education with the public at large in the spirit of knowledge transfer.
The theme of IPNHK2015 is “Poetry and Conflict,” which explores the multi-layer relationships between poetry and war. Poetry has been generally recognized as the highest form of language, while war inflicts the most pains on human history. IPNHK 2015 invited the world-acclaimed poets from war-troubled countries in the past such as the United States (Anne Waldman, Peter Cole), Japan (Tawada Yoko, Mizuta Noriko), South Korea (Moon Chung-Hee), Macedonia (Nikola Madzirov), Catalonia (Gemma Gorga), Portugal (Fernando Pinto do Amaral), Burma (Ko Ko Thett), Morroco (Mohammed Bennis), Mainland China (Wang Xiaoni 王小妮), Taiwan (Chen Li 陳黎), Hong Kong (Lau Yee-ching 飲江), and those of today such as Israel (Agi Mishol), Palestine (Ghassan Zaqtan, Najwan Darwish), These poets, who engage their works with “war” as a topic, exchanged views and explored the many layers where the equanimous poetry is able to play its role in the most violent events in the human history, and in so doing, encouraged writers and readers of the war-free Hong Kong to reflect upon the local milieu in a global framework.