The eloquence of salt : notes on poetry and poetic voice in the Mediterranean

Abstract

The atmosphere at the Biennale was pregnant with the momentum that each of us, as budding practitioners, had already ramped up over the very first years of the new century. But the conversations on Bari's lungomare, the city's distinctive waterfront, were also heaving with the concerns we were trying to respond to: the spike in the arrivals of thousands of migrants who had set out from North Africa's politically simmering shores, the blockade of the Gaza Strip a year earlier and the tensions that were rising towards war and bloodshed in December of that year, the growing impact of climate change across our shores. With fellow poets from Cyprus, Palestine, Italy, Greece, Sicily, Spain, Tunisia and Egypt, I remember talking about the issues coming my way as I grappled with a new poetic idiom in the Maltese language, just as my island-home was living through the first years of its European Union membership: as a community of young writers back then, we were trying out and exchanging new ways of voicing the islands' rapidly shifting cultural, political and demographic landscape. [excerpt]