[From the official announcement] The world’s poets are coming to London – meet them, hear them and celebrate with them at Southbank Centre. There are over 100 free events, activities and workshops happening every day throughout the festival. 

The world’s most exciting poets, rappers, spoken word artists, singers and storytellers are gathering for this huge event that will make history as the largest poetry festival ever staged in the UK.

Continued at the South Bank Centre’s Poetry Parnassus website| The festival runs 26 June to 1 July.

The musical quality of Hungarian.

By ERIKA PAPP FABER [St Austin Review] – What makes Hungarians so prone to poetry? Partly their temperament; they have a romantic streak paralleled perhaps only by the Irish. It may be due in part to their language: Hungarian grammar is built upon the foundation of vowel harmony, which lends the language a musical quality and makes it well suited to poetry. And it may lie partly in their geography, which has placed them at the crossroads of East and West and has thus provided poetic inspiration.

Folksongs and epics were the ancient origins of Hungarian poetry. The earliest extant Hungarian poem is “Mary’s Lament” (Ómagyar Mária-siralom), dating from around 1300. It is impossible to determine what written Hungarian poetry may have existed before that date, since the Mongolian invasion of 1241–1242 caused such devastation in the land that the reigning king, Béla IV, had to start from scratch, and is known as the second founder of Hungary. (To give you an idea: before the Mongolian invasion, the county of Somogy had 50,000 inhabitants. One year later, after they left, there was a grand total of
50—fifty!—people left in the county.)

Continued at The St Austin Review | More Chronicle & Notices.