Local Poets Celebrate National Poetry Month Multiculturally

Cupertino Poet Laureate Jennifer Swanton Brown breathed new life into a classical poetic form, a crown of sonnets, which means a sequence of sonnets linked by repeating the final line of the preceding sonnet as the next one’s first line, at the San Jose Poetry Festival.

Brown read her own crown of sonnets on contemporary themes related to life in Silicon Valley, and a poem by one of her students. She was one of the featured readers at the largest local poetry event since 2007 to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Following her performance were poetry readings by Harry Lafnear, an award-winning poet and Poetry Center San Jose board member, and David Sullivan, a highly accomplished poet and Cabrillo College professor.

The San Jose Poetry Festival was an all-day event at the historic Le Petit Trianon Theatre on April 12 from 9 am to 5 pm.

Besides listening to poetry readings, attendees participated in workshops to learn the craft of poetry writing and met literary magazine editors and publishers.

The idea of the festival first came from David Eisbach, a former San Jose Arts Commissioner and a contributing editor with the Willow Glen Poetry Project, which hosts poetry readings at the Willow Glen Branch Library on the third Thursday of each month. Numerous volunteers with the project and Poetry Center San Jose worked together to put on the large-scale festival.

A special component of the festival was the World Poetry session, which featured poetry readings in multiple languages along with English translations.

This was world poetry event number three in Silicon Valley, according to Pushpa Macfarlane, a writer, editor and artist who hosted the World Poetry session of the San Jose Poetry Festival.

The first world poetry event was presented at Barnes & Noble on Stevens Creek Boulevard by Sally Ashton, Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County from 2011 to 2013. The second one was an on-line Poetry Podcast presented by Erica Goss, current Poet Laureate of Los Gatos.

“This is an opportunity to present poetry from different cultures, to appreciate the musicality of different tongues, to savor every sound, every syllable, and every word in synchrony from the readers of World Poetry, ” said Macfarlane.

The languages in the world poetry readings included Farsi, German, Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Native American, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

Note: The author of this article, Star Patcher Crystal Tai, was the Chinese poetry reader at the World Poetry session. Tai has recently published a book titled A Poetic Portal to Chinese Culture, which takes the reader through an imaginary calendar year to experience traditional Chinese holidays and savor English translations of season-related Chinese poems.