The Poetry in McGregor Festival has become a popular literary festival, with about 150 poets expected to arrive in the picturesque village soon.
From August 23 to 25, the weekend celebration of poetry will include readings, workshops, music and poetry, and open mic sessions.
The founder of the festival, Billy Kennedy, said: "Poetry is intensely valuable to me, and I reckon for the planet, too. From a child, blessed by the presence of a passionate English teacher, to this present day, as a retreat director at Temenos, poetry has been a constant thread running through my life.
"Like Zorba, poetry can embrace and celebrate the 'full catastrophe' of being alive, the paradox of what it is to be fully human and divine. It can launch one into a moment of unsurpassed beauty, and into an extraordinary awareness of being connected to a myriad things.
"It can also be an antidote to despair or tiredness and loneliness. One can even truly solve problems with its lines – not just their lexicon, but the life breathed into form by rhythm, rhyme or meter.
"It is the borrowed voice that colours a deeper awareness of who we are and what we experience.
"Poetry is often undervalued and avoided perhaps because it has a potential to propel one, on one hand, into introspection and on the other, into a vast realm of previously unimagined possibilities."
To celebrate its seventh year, the 2019 theme is "The heart of the moon."
Participating poets include Joan Hambidge, Michelé Betty, Sally Ann Murray, Brian Walter, Malcolm Gooding, Quinne Brown, Douglas Reid Skinner, Christopher Culpo, John Maytham, Luna Paige, Willem Fransman jr, Zane Dangor, Makhanda Senzagakhona, Kobus Moolman, Phillipa Namutebi, Toast Coetzer, Erns Grundling, Dan Wylie, Pieter Odendaal, Dominique Botha, Peter Fox, Thandi Sliepen, Lerato Sibanda, Hugh Hodge, Julia Kramer, Patricia Schonstein, Dorian Haarhoff, Marguerite van der Merwe, Diana Ferrus and Andries Walter Olifant. The festival is organised by The MAC Project.
To view programme visit www.poetryinmcgregor.co.za
NB: Get the Afro Poetry Times September edition.
