This year we will search for a “more capacious form” for stories of today’s world.

The motto of the tenth Miłosz Festival, “Unattainable Earth”, is once again borrowed from the patron’s writings. It refers to the sense of disorientation we experience when faced with rapid changes all around us. Somewhat surprisingly, poetry comes to the rescue. Krzysztof Siwczyk, the festival’s artistic director, suggests that it “doesn’t save people or nations, but rather the sense and meaning of words. We need them like we need oxygen, which seems in short supply in the stuffy language we use to communicate.” He adds, “Perhaps poetry conceals a new imagination which will help the world shake itself out of doubt and uncertainty.” During the festival we will take part in online meetings with Agi Mishol, Alice Oswald, Ivan Štrpka, Peter Gizzi and Anthony Joseph – artists who follow a similar path to Czesław Miłosz in searching for a language to express the vastness and elusiveness of our life’s journey and the everchanging world.

Agi Mishol stresses the great sensitivity of poets to the tiniest changes in language driven by issues such as climate change, extinction, pandemics, political crises and rapid technological development. “Poets, who are attentive to words, are the seismographs of language and immediately identify all changes in a language, which is an organic entity that develops and changes, reflecting society and politics. Our way to savour a new word is to integrate it into the poem. The poem is our taste buds. In particular, we are sensitive to ‘laundered’ words, new words or expressions that have been created to camouflage something that is not fit to be said explicitly. For example, in Israel, instead of saying ‘occupied territories’ people say ‘settlements’, thereby slowly modifying perception and thought. Such phenomena greatly stimulate poetry, one of the roles of which is to awaken people who have dozed off into comfortable new phraseologies.” The American poet Peter Gizzi responds to the current crisis in his poem Speech Acts for a Dying World from the volume Now It’s Dark: “when my library is full of loss / full of wonder / as the polis is breaking / and casts a shadow / over all of me / thinking of it”. The author feels a pressing need to note and communicate what he sees: “as I look at the end / and sing so what / sing live now / thinking why not / I’m listening and / receiving now / and it feeds me / I’m always hungry.”

What role should poetry play in the contemporary world which changes at a terrifying pace? According to Ivan Štrpka, poetry shapes unique, original meanings which can affect readers: “From the very beginning the virus of poetry grew its own living, open network of unique, individual language. It influences us in myriad ways. It deepens our sensitivity to the world, to relationships, to life. By thinking, it feels; and by feeling, it thinks. All in the same moment. Only poetry can do this. It turns to perceptive individuals whose sensitivity to the living energy of poetry can have an enormous influence on it and on the rapidly changing world quietly, almost imperceptibly.” So open a volume of contemporary poetry to find the potential of poetic language in how our perception of the world is changing.

The Miłosz Festival also seeks a more capacious form to present new ways of expression linked with poetry in its OFF section. Anthony Joseph, the British/Trinidadian poet whose work combines poetry and music, is a perfect fit. He says: “The music that accompanies my poems is not always improvised, but we work with a jazz sensibility in which the musicians are free to improvise within the form. That flexibility, and the ability to work organically and in the moment, is what gives the music, and the instrumentation, its vibrancy. And I consider myself to be another musician in that action.” Can music help poetry reach a wider audience? “I would say that it’s the other way around. Other art forms NEED poetry to reach their audiences. They need the vibrancy and life force of the poetic. Poetry for me is an umbrella term for a range of aesthetic discourses. Like ‘music’ or ‘literature’. There is poetry in jazz, in painting, in writing and performance. It's a destination rather than a static space.”

Where else can festival guests find poetry? Writings of the British author Alice Oswald explore the world of plants, although she rejects the label of being a “nature poet”. Her sensitivity to nature is fuelled by her former job as a gardener. Oswald says, “Nature Poetry (as I define it) is human verse written in a human voice about the human experience of the natural world. Plants at night (blindly and scentedly) communicate a kind of pre-music, which I call Natural Pattern – it sometimes takes visible form as frost – and that is the language I am trying to learn. I am happy to be called a Gardener Poet, since that is my profession, but not a Nature Poet.”

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What else does this year’s Miłosz Festival have in store? As well as online discussions with guests from abroad, we will also meet Polish authors in person at the Potocki Palace. They include Justyna Bargielska, Magdalena Bielska, Sebastian Brejnak, Jacek Dehnel, Małgorzata Lebda, Agnieszka Wolny-Hamkało, Joanna Roszak, Andrzej Sosnowski, Sara Szamot and Urszula Zajączkowska. The OFF section can be described in three words: avantgarde, punk and Brexit… And there will be discussions with authors from home and abroad whose work is frequently shocking while encouraging reflection.