Dear friends,

Once again it is time for Kritya and her friends and well-wishers to meet face to face and share poetic thoughts. I am happy to announce Kritya's fifth international poetry festival - 2010. Our focus this time would be on 'The Poetry of Exile, Trauma and Survival.' The final dates will be announced during the first week of February 2010. Here is an overview of the themes we hope to highlight on this occasion.


The Poetry of Exile, Trauma and Survival
 

....and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die....Adrienne Rich



The fifth Kritya 2010 Festival will concentrate on the poetry of exile, trauma and survival. The known poets of exile all around the world have expressed exile in different individual terms. The poetry of exile, here, as a concept has been stretched to include voluntary and involuntary exile not only from one's land and life but emotional, spiritual, political, social, cultural, economic and similar contexts of the term. This would, therefore necessarily include diasporic poetry. Though politically exiled poets experience acute trauma in terms of being politically uprooted from a motherland, voluntary exile and diasporic poems also entail similar pain of displacement and loss of nativity.

Trauma poetry therefore would include experience of loss, rape, war, natural or circumstantial and other tragic and vulnerable situations that make use of poetry for catharsis. This would include poems dealing with insistent memory and using poetry for curative or therapeutic purposes to overcome trauma. In the final analysis the "minimal affirmation" endorsed by surviving under duress would bring back hope through poetry. ( Presented By Dr. Shyamala Nair )

Friends, coming to this issue of Kritya, as usual we have a wonderful assortment of poems from various skilled poets, which we hope you will all enjoy. Let me also express my heartfelt thanks to ASE ANDA, an artist from Norway whom I met in Stavanger- Rogaland, for giving her beautiful paintings for Kritya, which makes this issue all the more appealing.

Rati Saxena