Politically, Europe and the US have bifurcated. In word, image, thought and action, however, an energy continues to bounce back and forth, an energy that we can only hope undermines the rightward movement towards ultranationalism. “Europe” figures in many American discourses as either a point of origin to push back against, or a post-colonial skein to completely overcome. But the idea of the European Union is also now one of the best wedges against ultra-nationalism, especially as it allows for multiple languages and arts to thrive.
The Prima Vista Literary Festival was held in Tartu, Estonia from May 11th to May 16th, 2026. An annual event, featuring Estonian writers as well as writers from abroad, this year’s theme was effectively “The Real and the Artificial”. This theme was clearly inspired by humanity’s current confrontation with its own offspring, Artificial Intelligence.
For the month of May I was an artist-in-residence at Rangøya internasjonale kultursenter in Norway, on the tiny island of Rangoya. It was from Norway that I flew to Tallin, Estonia on the 11th, then took a bus to Tartu, Estonia’s university town. Tartu has a counter-cultural vibe somehow reminiscent to me of Portland, Oregon, though of course in a very different culture and situation; the university was founded in 1632. Øyvind Rangøy, the director of the Norwegian residency of the same name, made the same trip as I; as a Norwegian who has taught at the University of Tartu, is married to an Estonian woman, and even writes in Estonian, he is a key link between the two cultures and languages. (I will have more to offer about the Residency that bears his family’s last name in a piece to follow.) In fact it is Øyvind who had invited me to the festival in Estonia, and who interviewed me on May 12th in English before a Tartu audience, for which I also read from my book Flacofolio.
Estonian was of course the festival’s main language, but poets from Norway, Germany, The Faroe Islands, Finland, Italy, Spain, Poland, Latvia, England, and Wales (Cymru) also read in their own languages during this broadly intra-European affair. Unlike the poetry festival in Croatia I wrote about in the first piece in this series, the guest writers weren’t tightly bound together. I clean missed several of the other guests. But I made quite a bit of contact with Estonians and other literary people based in Tartu.
On May 12th it was a delight to hear Doris Kareva read her work in Estonian, with English language translations on a screen behind her, as well as listen to her talk about her work in English. She appeared alongside Welsh poet Mererid Hopwood; both were then interviewed by noted Tartu poet Maarja Pärtna. Kareva is a mainstay of Estonian poetry, a beloved national writer and cultural leader who, among other things, makes things happen for younger and developing poets in the country. She spoke of the Estonian language as a weed, which is to say something that other languages seek to expunge as unfitting, but which keeps growing out, between the cracks, impossible to eradicate. In its history Estonia has experienced long periods of occupation and thralldom at the hands of the Germans, the Russians, the Swedes, the Danes, the Poles, the Soviets, and other national groups. The current war in Ukraine, Russia’s seizure of the Crimea in 2014, Estonia’s own long border with Russia, and the United States’s wobbling commitment to NATO, of which Estonia is a member, are all incontrovertible facts. As such there is real apprehension in Estonia now about what comes next. Fear of Russia runs deep.
Poet Doris Kareva
However, Kareva’s sense of Estonian language as a stubborn weed wasn’t only a comment about the political situation. It captured something about the Estonian sense of wildness and of wilderness, of adaptation, and of relation to the environment. Kareva’s poems consistently embody these perceptions; language itself emerges from Nature. Though Kareva is based in Tallinn and Maarja Pärtna is a Tartu poet and City Poet of Tartu in 2024, I sensed none of what Freud calls “the narcissism of small differences”, a trait which bedevils other Northern European cultures. After speaking with both Kareva and Pärtna that afternoon, I left the event primed by their poetics for something new to happen in my own language. The British publisher Blood Axe Books publishes Doris Kareva in translation; their introduction to her work is worth considering.
A linnasalu is an Estonian urban planning idea, which involves introducing small mini-forests into urban environments.
My own talk was on the evening of May 12th. Entitled “The Kratt, The Compost, and Versions of Freedom.” Øyvind Rangøy and I spoke for about an hour and a half. The first part of the title of the talk refers to the Estonian mythical figure of the kratt. What is a kratt? Imagine, say, you find yourself walking by an abandoned lot, and in that lot lies the broken door of a refrigerator, a flattened bicycle tire and broken bicycle chain, smashed glass, discarded metal rods, and other detritus. If one makes a deal with The Devil, offering three drops of your blood or better yet substituting three drops of berry juice so that you don’t have to sell your soul in the process, The Devil will assemble these fragments into an animate being that will offer itself up to you. This newly animate being will have three basic needs. The first of these is for you to give it commands: in truth, to enslave it. The second need it will have is for you to command it to steal for you. The third need it will have is for those commands to steal to continue to be issued to it without cease - if the commands stop, the kratt will turn against you, violently. Clearly this figure is a reaction in some way to the subjugations of national history I mentioned above. (It is also true that in 2017, on my first visit to Estonia, in the little village of Kasmu on the Gulf of Finland, I saw a very small kratt in action.)
The kratt is an intriguing figure. I felt confirmed in my choice of this subject in that a Tartu writer, Meelis Friendenthel, also spoke about the kratt that very day, without any coordination between the two of us. It is also true that Artificial Intelligence in its various formations appears to be a kratt. After all AI presents itself as our servant or even as our slave, a tool to make our thinking and work lives easier; AI ceaselessly steals from pre-exisiting vocabulary and grammar to form its sentences; AI is accompanied by an anxiety that it will eventually turn against us, or that those who are exposed to it but refuse to use it regularly will somehow be set upon and swallowed up.
AI also very clearly involves a deal with the devil. Many writers are currently experimenting with seeing if there is a way of substituting berry juice for blood in the arrangement they make with it, thereby saving their souls. Also too Amiri Baraka wrote somewhere about the Devil: “he wasn’t calling himself The Devil when he hit on me”. That is also a relevant point about this technology. If we wake up tomorrow unable to think, functionally illiterate or maybe still able to read a sentence or two, our speech flattened, it will have been because there was never any berry juice to really substitute for blood, and because we never understood who was offering us what.
For me there is also a clear stake in the question of the real and the artificial in the case of Flaco the owl. Incubated in North Carolina, caged at the Central Park Zoo, “liberated” to fly free in The City… could there ever have been a more artificial situation for a Eurasian eagle-owl to find itself in? This was explored in my 2025 book with artist Heide Hatry, Flacofolio. (See#2 in this series of essays at Futurepoem for a fuller description of that book.) What is “real” and what is “artificial” in the scenario of such a creature? The kratt is an assemblage, created by a compact between a supernatural being and a human being. What was the owl? A compact between birds and humans? Furthermore, how compost our writing in such a way as to make a wealth of new possibilities available, as opposed to appropriate, sample, plagiarize, or cede all of language to AI? How can the new grow from our compositions? A link to our talk on kratt and owl and compost can be found here.
Finnish poet Heidi Livani is a twenty plus year resident of Tartu and one of several foreign-born writers who now call Tartu home; I met her in Tallinn in 2017. She has a poem on The Dome Hill (as in the dome of a ruined cathedral), part of a public display of poetry designed by the ubiquitous Estonian designer Asko Künnap. Alongside nationally celebrated poet Jaan Kaplinski (see photo), in a beautiful park on that hill, Tartu announces it commitment to poetry as a public art with a series of these posts and poems, many of living poets out and about in the city.
Public Poems on Dome Hill
On May 13th Livani and I went to the Estonian National Museum, a converted military airforce installation from the Soviet period a little outside of town, in a building that seems to stretch for forever and contains Estonian artifacts from Neolithic times to the present. One really must have a look at this piece of architecture.
Here is a powerful reframing of an overwhelming, dark space constructed by the Soviets; an icon of that occupation is turned into a site of national heritage. There I was introduced to a kratt prop from Estonian filmmaker Rainer Sarnet’s film November (2017). I have seen the film and remembered that kratt, somehow larger in the movie. It stole a cow, carrying it off through the air (the kratt, like owls and airplanes, can often fly). I also remember thinking that in the film the image of the kratt seemed unduly influenced in its rendering by the style of the renowned Czech animator’s Jan Svankmajer’s work. (The one I saw on my own in Kasmu was more streamlined, though still clearly an assemblage: more like a drone with claws, capable of flying off with a lamb maybe.) The book on which the film November is based, Andrus Kivirähk’s novel Rehepapp, has not yet been translated into English, though it is available in French translation.
Heidi Livani and kratt prop
That night at the Estonian Museum Heidi and I saw a performance piece by Estonian artist Kristina Norman. Entitled The Dew Point, it combined dramatic form (delivered by Norman and one other performer, Katrin Essenson), documentary film footage, family video of the artist and her father, and an abundant text (which Norman was kind enough to provide me in English translation). The central focus for all of this was the sauna. Estonians are just as passionate about saunas as the Finns, it would seem. The father tries to build a sauna that will withstand the elements, the President of Finland engages in sauna diplomacy with the Soviets, a balance is sought between conflicting impulses for keeping in and keeping out, the performance and the films and the text modulating between personal history and the history of nations. More about this piece can be found here.
Kristina Norman is a kind of cultural historian who works on finding ways to access collective memory from the point of view of the materials themselves. Some of Norman’s earlier work concerning a controversy followed by riots after the disassembling of a Soviet era monument to the country’s liberation from the Nazis, is also intriguing. I cannot say to what degree tensions between Estonia’s Russian speaking minority and the Estonian-speaking majority persist, though Norman, as a descendent of that Russian speaking minority, is clearly exploring that fault line in Estonian consciousness.
One of the few events at Prima Vista focused on visiting foreign writers I managed to attend was that by Faroes Island poets Kim Simonsen and Vónbjørt Vang. They were accompanied by Rangoy leading the conversation and Maarja Pärtna reading the translations into Estonian, in an event in Faroese, Estonian, and English which celebrated the Estonian publication of books by Simonsen and Vang. Simonsen showed a film/poem of his entitled "The Biological Composition of a Drop of Seawater Resembles the Blood in my Veins", meditating on the death of his father and drawing from his book of that same title. Vang talked about a book of hers, Black Orchid, involving an almost Orphic descent into zones of confusion and lostness in order to bring back her son. Vang spoke about the book in the most personal ways imaginable. The book has been a sensation in The Faroe Islands, perhaps due to its personal nature. I thought of Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette. Both Vang and Simonson’s writings are the real thing, not the artificial products of an enforced literary style. Many writers become trapped by their own literariness. Vang and Simonson have eluded that.
Adjacent to The Prima Vista Literary Festival the city of Tartu was also hosting the UNESCO Cities of Literature Annual Conference. This UN funded event of cities allied together to promote literary activity, reading, publishing and contact between the member cities and of course the countries they are part of, was in full swing; Marja Unt was effectively directing both events, an amazing organizational feat. There were at least two receptions in which the events explicitly mingled. At these I enjoyed speaking with City of Literature representative from Nanjing, Sifan Zhao; Kahramanmaras, Turkey representative Elif Kocagoz; Lucia Diaz, from San Luis Potosi, Mexico; Seattle representative Stesha Brandon; Conkary, Guinea representative Sansy Kaba Diakite; representative Hawwa Alam from Manchester, and Laura Prinsloo, UNESCO City of Literature representative from Jakarta, Indonesia. There is no substitute for face-to-face unscripted conversation between people about the future of the word. In the in-between spaces created by, for one, Tartu’s commitment to intellectual exchange, the word surprises. This also is the real, not the artificial.
The festival also involved music: we heard from Kaisa Ling, poet, UNESCO Cities of Literature facilitator, and Estonia's celebrated cabaret and blues singer, who performed before a rapturous audience. On the last night of the festival, I heard Estonian poet of Ukranian heritage Igor Kotjuh perform with musician Faershtein and multimedia artist Valentin Siltšenko; their poetry band is known as FSK. Word, light and sound were wonderfully integrated. Such balance is rarely encountered; the performance was beautiful.
It wasn’t till Kotjuh and I spoke after the performance, outside the venue, that I realized we had met in Tallinn nine years before. I remembered from 2017 that he writes in both Estonian and Russian. Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2022 risks shattering many complicated mosaics, but for now, here, the balance seems to hold.
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