Noted Bollywood lyricist and Urdu poet Javed Akhtar and Piyush Mishra are all set to enthrall poetry lovers by rendering poems in the first-ever Bengaluru Poetry Festival beginning tomorrow.
"The participation of Javed Sahab is confirmed. He is attending the first-ever BPF tomorrow. He and poet Piyush Mishra are going to delight poetry lovers in the city... there's no doubt about it," co-founder of Atta Galatta and one of the organisers of BPF, Subodh Shankar told PTI here.
The two-day festival will culminate on August 7 and Goa-based poet Manohar Shetty is also participating in it, he said.
The festival will witness 34 sessions and a total of 67 artistes including poets, musicians and performers are taking part, Shankar said.
"We wanted to conduct the festival at a small scale, but we are surprised that a large number of artistes have taken interest to participate," he said.
To a query, Shankar said the organisers were keen on providing a platform for poets, which they normally don't get as prose writers do.
"At Atta Galatta, every month we see many poets performing and voicing their poems, but they go unrecognised in large perspective. Hence, we thought of giving poets a platform - that was the inspiration behind conducting such a festival," Shankar said.
The festival will provide a platform for poets in English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Maithili and many other languages, he said.
Artistes from city-based groups like 'Airplane Poetry Movement', 'Let Poetry Be' and 'Poetry At The Park', which encourage local community of poets, are also expected to showcase their talent, Shankar said.
Asked what he thought was the difference between poetry and prose, he said "a poem stays on for long or sometimes forever, but prose doesn't, and that's the beauty of poetry.
"Also, listening to prose makes you feel drowsy, but listening to poetry makes your hair stand up to the emotions captured in tender words, written in a lyrical and rhyming forms," he added.
