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'Palabras Prestadas 4' is a collection of poems based on donated words. This book celebrates the fourth year of this Spanish poetry project run by the New Zealand artist and poet Charles Olsen and Colombian writer Lilián Pallares. Every two weeks poets from around the world have sent in their poems which include five words proposed by an invited guest. Some have been particularly challenging such as the mixture of Spanish and Palenquero (in Colombia) words by percussionist Franklin Tejedor, or the words in Samoan from Doug Poole. Also interesting were the five words – woman, school, work, maw, note – donated by the director of the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival and Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, Thomas Wohlfahrt, which came from the first translation of the bible into vernacular German by Martin Luther. The winning poem from each edition is included in the book 'Palabras Prestadas 4' which is published in Spanish by Ediciones de la MediaNoche. The book ends with this evocative poem by Carmen Hernández Montalban from Granada using the words donated by the young Spanish writer Cristina Morales: exhaustion, solitude, lid, pen and rush mat.

Sleeping Poems

In the ink lie dregs of verses
slumbering in the deep, bare words
halfway between exhaustion and the pen.
Their incoherent movements remind us
of the solitude
of lovers who
never meet.
So the paper, the folio, remains
a white
untainted rush mat
thirsty for lyricism.
The ink pot with
closed lid
like a dark pond
of melancholy fish.

(Translation of Carmen Hernández Montalbán's 'Versos dormidos' by Charles Olsen)

The publishers Vaso Roto, Pre-Textos and Huerga & Fierro and Cuadernos del Vigía have donated books from their poetry collections as prizes for the best poems. The project has also been featured in the national Spanish newspaper El País and on national Spanish television (RTVE) in NCI Noticias. The project is currently in its fifth year during which it has had donations of words from a number of New Zealand poets including Emma Neale, Hinemoana Baker, Harry Ricketts, Carolyn McCurdie, Claire Beynon, Penelope Todd, Tayi Tibble and current poet laureate C.K. Stead. New Zealand writer Paula Green has published the poem created from her five words on NZ Poetry Shelf. The current edition of Palabras Prestadas, open during the Spanish summer months, has five words donated by Australian poet Les Murray: walled, crane-swing, jaw, blubber and blurts.

The book Palabras Prestadas 4 (Ediciones de la MediaNoche, 2016) was included in the Madrid Book Fair in May/June and presented in the arts space EO7 in Madrid, Spain, on the 28th June 2016 with the participation of the poets who appear in the book. The photographs of the presentation were taken by Carmen Lafuente.

Palabras Prestadas (Poetry project in Spanish)