Love in the time of Covid.
As many of you are aware we have had to delay our plans for this year’s Poetry Festival in McGregor. However In the spirit of endurance and optimism we are launching our annual Poetry Competition. Out theme this year is Love in the time of Covid.
The McGregor Poetry Festival invites all poets to Give Voice to This Year’s Love
Your poetry will shape how later generations come to feel and know us as we were this year: what it was like, how it felt, how we knew ourselves again in this unknown future, finding ourselves in all that’s left: you, me, all of us, here, now.
We live in time, we humans, the way fish live in water, drifting with the tides, to distant places and possibilities. The poets are our guides and our connectors, shepherding us through the centuries towards ourselves, the only place we can ever be, regardless of when or where. The path is love: for a Beatrice, for a Tadzio, for an unnamed stranger, for a language, for a god, for God herself, for ideas, for poetry, for wine or the human spirit, for the hope of an unknown journey?
Beyond small talk, politics, academies and the chattering media, it is the poets who voice the spirit of each age and bring us to ourselves – in love. From troubadours to sonneteers, from romantics to the gardeners of the beloved, from haikus to prayers, from classic to post-modern, in odes, elegies, songs, ballads, limericks, acrostics, concrete and formless styles, love in its infinity inspires the forms of our expression.
God bless the poet!
Our closing date for entries, in the Youth and Open Categories, is the 30th of September 2020. The competition is open to published and unpublished poets. For more information and T’s and C’s please visit the Competition website page at www.poetryinmcgregor.co.za Entries may be sent to mcgpoets@gmail.com Due to administrative challenges we cannot alas, at this stage, enter into any correspondence. We will, however, keep you informed of developments. Later in the year we are hoping to launch our annual Anthology at Temenos. Prize-winners will be announced at this event. We would like to thank Leila Witkin, one of the Festival’s patrons, for generously putting up this year’s prize money. Image and poster by danisphotos.com
Due to the Covid 19 lockdown, our Poetry Festival scheduled for August has been cancelled. As yet we have not set a date for a future festival, kindly refrain from any correspondence until our committee are able to reconvene and plan for the future. We shall keep you posted once our plans unfold again.
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