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Poet Ian Thal interviewed on Kosovar TV. Photo by Yvan Tetelbom.
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An
American
Poet in
Kosovo
SOMERVILLE//Ian Thal is big in Kosovo. The Somerville-based writer, mime, performance artist recently returned to the U.S. after reading at the Drini Poetik International Poetry Festival in Prizren. For one solid week in June Thal stormed Kosovo reading poems, checking sites of battle, getting a tan, swigging espresso and even stopping to shake hands with the prime minister. “Then I come back here and I’m essentially a nobody,” Thal said, his voice echoing in the back bank vault of Bloc 11 (11 Bow St.). “Some people say how grandeur is fleeting.”
Thal conducts workshops in mime and commedia dell’arte for Somerville’s annual summer program, Open Air Circus,
“when I’m not writing poetry and such,” he said. He’s taught for the
organization since 2005 and moved to the city the following year. He is
originally from Washington D.C. When speaking about the trip his eyes fill with
wonder, but his vocal inflections try to play it down. Clearly the experience
left an imprint on him as he walked me, photo by photo, through his spectacular
journey.
The reading gig came to Thal as a
matter of connecting the dots. An Albanian-born playwright friend of his, Lediana Stillo, still connected to the area’s
literary community, had been asked to dig up some contemporary American poetry
for an anthology. She looked to Thal. He sent some poems; Stillo translated
them into Albanian. His work appears alongside the work of other poets from
around the country, including Chad Parenteau, of Jamaica Plain, and David
Brinks, of New Orleans.
The volume, titled, Sounds of Wind: New American Lyrics,
will be used as a textbook for advanced students of English at the University
of Pristina. “It’s pretty exciting to realize that,” Thal said of the honor. “I
can imagine late-night dorm room sessions.” His face torts into an angry
grimace and his voice mimics a perturbed college kid, “’I hate Thal! What’s the
obsession with the trains?’” Just as we study Frost, Ginsberg and Poe, students
in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, will study Thal. A twinkle spurns off the ball
of his eye when the thought rises in his mind.
The festival was held in the historical
town of Prizren with some 178,000 inhabitants. “Soon after arriving I realized
this was a cultural diplomacy mission,” he said. The festival coincided with Kosovo’s
centenary celebration of their independence from Albanian nationalists. The
country’s rough-and-tumble history stretches back into the Middle Ages and the
Ottoman Empire. It was only declared an independent state in 2008. “I was like the
U.S. ambassador there,” he said.
Four other speakers, including
Stillo and Brinks, joined Thal for a romp around the country, visiting the
capital, checking out the Writer’s Union library and taking part in the common
occurrence of coffee in a café. They traveled with the intelligentsia. “There
was no one language all five of us spoke,” he said, “but somehow we made it all
work.”
Thal described his own poetry as a
scenic route: New England landscapes passing through Amtrak windows; the view
from a rooftop on Beacon Hill; the lowlands of New Jersey. He has worked with
Bread & Puppet Theatre and maintains a blog where his writing piles. See
him at this summer’s Open Air Circus.
