“There is something powerful about being in a space where people arrive from different cultural and geographical backgrounds but recognise certain things in one another.” Jamila Pereira
What is it about poetry that makes us feel so deeply? How is it that when we hear a poem spoken in another language, we can still understand something of what it is trying to say? Rachel Stevens looks at how poetry can transcend borders and build connections.
At a time when so much public conversation feels increasingly polarised and siloed, the need for spaces where different perspectives can meet is as great as it has ever been. Poetry creates such spaces for us all.
That was on my mind as I listened to poets from Leeds and Rio de Janeiro share work developed through Music and Poetry of the Black Atlantic, a collaboration supported by the British Council's UK/Brazil Season of Culture. Despite different languages, histories and experiences, their poems revealed shared questions about identity, belonging, migration and memory.
The project featured at this year's BBC Contains Strong Language festival, which marks ten years of collaboration between the British Council and the BBC. Among the participating artists was Rio-based poet Mileny, who described the project as an opportunity to reflect on the "ocean that connects so many continents" and a reminder that "we need to reclaim and reconnect with these histories."
Over the last decade, Contains Strong Language has shown that bringing poets together is about much more than one-off encounters. These connections can create publications, performances, new artistic networks and relationships that continue long after a festival ends.
How poetry transcends borders
So why is poetry so effective at creating these connections?
Poetry is language, sound, rhythm and history brought together to create something powerful. It reflects the traditions and cultures that shape who we are, yet it has travelled across borders for centuries, crossing languages, oceans and political boundaries to find new audiences far from where it began.
Poetry allows us to encounter another person's experience not simply as information, but as feeling, image and imagination. It does not travel because everyone understands it in exactly the same way, it travels because it creates space for difference and complexity without requiring easy resolution.
In that sense, poetry travels not because it is culturally neutral, but because it is culturally specific. It allows us to encounter a voice that is not our own, a history we have not lived, a language we may not speak and an identity we may not share.
A decade of collaboration between the British Council and the BBC
These ideas have shaped ten years of collaboration between the British Council and BBC Contains Strong Language. Over the past decade, the partnership has supported poets working in more than 25 languages and brought international voices to audiences of over two million people across the UK through live events, creative exchange and BBC broadcasts.
Each year, the festival has provided a platform for artists and communities to explore questions that matter to them.
Giving voice to underrepresented experiences
The Language is a Queer Thing project connected LGBTQ+ poets across India and the UK, creating space for the often unheard and leaving a legacy of new relationships, collaborations and opportunities.
For poet Garfield Dsouza, Language is a Queer Thing was the first space that encouraged him to bring his own languages English, Konkani and Hindi into a poem with confidence. What he had once viewed as something to simplify, he came to see as a strength.
Restoring histories that have gone untold
The Unwritten Poems project explored the hidden stories of Caribbean soldiers in the First World War. Its editor, the poet Karen McCarthy Woolf observed the project helped “bear witness to an emotional history that's not been captured elsewhere”, restoring stories largely absent from public memory.
Music and poetry across the Black Atlantic
This year's Music and Poetry of the Black Atlantic demonstrated how the programme continues to evolve. Bringing together poets from Leeds and Rio de Janeiro, the project created opportunities for artists to travel, collaborate and develop new work together in both countries.
For Leeds-based poet Jamila Pereira, the experience offered an opportunity to think about “the Black Atlantic as something lived”, rather than simply an academic concept. The significance of the project lies not only in the performances it produced, but in the relationships it created and the conversations it opened across languages, cultures and experiences.
Following their visit to the FLUP festival in Rio de Janeiro, the Leeds poets described arriving in Brazil as feeling unexpectedly like coming home. For Jamila, whose work explores migration, identity and belonging, it was a reminder that cultural exchange is not simply about encountering difference. It is also about discovering unexpected points of connection.
What ten years has taught us
In a world where opportunities for meaningful dialogue can feel increasingly limited, poetry remains one of the simplest and most powerful ways of entering another person's experience.
When people are given the space to listen, exchange ideas and create together, those conversations can continue to resonate long after the final poem has been read.