The poetry festival will build integration bridges between Venezuela and 35 poets from 30 invited countries.
By Ashraf Aboul Yazid
Caracas
The President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, inaugurated the 16th World Poetry Festival of Venezuela on Thursday, October 13 which will continue till October 20, and honored the Trujillo poet Ana María Oviedo Palomares.
This poetry festival will build integration bridges between Venezuela and 35 poets from 30 invited countries. The event coincides with the Bicentennial of the poem “Mi delirio en el Chimborazo”, written by El Libertador Simón Bolívar.
The Minister of Popular Power for Culture, Ernesto Villegas, pointed out that this festival will allow the people to interact with poetry from different places.
“This space will allow poets and ordinary people to be involved in poetry dynamics in libraries, communes, schools and public spaces of various kinds. So it is a festival of poetry in all corners”, he referred.
The 16th World Poetry Festival of Venezuela 2022 is being attended by the winners of the National Prize for Literature: Gustavo Pereira, Luis Alberto Crespo, William Osuna and Juan Calzadilla. Also, they will have the participation of honorees from other editions such as: Reynaldo Pérez Só, Enrique Hernández D’ Jesús, Tarek William Saab and Antonio Trujillo.
Also, it will have 6 Galas at the Bolívar Theater in Caracas. 32 poets from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Lesotho, Lebanon, Peru, Portugal, Republic of Mali, Russia and Uruguay will be present at them. Likewise, several poets connected online from China, Chad, Egypt, Spain, France, Guam, Guatemala, Mongolia and Vietnam will participate.
The Venezuelan poet Ana María Oviedo expressed that the International Poetry and Training Meeting, as part of the Festival has become a space that will signify an important advance in the integration of poets.
It was a good opportunity to meet a great poet like Alex Pausides, director Ediciones Sur and Havana Poetry Festival, Cuba. We were reading poetry together on one platform 12 years ago in San Jose, at the Costa Rica International Poetry Festival, and I was also pleased to be with Fernando Rendon, one of the most important founders of the World Poetry Movement, and its current pole who announced that the World Poetry Movement Congress 2023 will be held in Venezuela.
Ismael Diadié, director Fondo Kati, Mali, Ayo Ayoola-Amale, Splendors of Dawn Poetry Foundation, Ghana-Nigeria, and Rati Saxena, Krytia Poetry Festival, India, were also had their entries in the online forum.
One of themes raised by WPM was saving nature. This is why I – as a country coordinator – addressed World Poetry Movement poets on the danger we face: “We are all aware of the publishing industry. Those who are working in this sector are suffering the rise prices of the paper needed for printing. Besides being expensive, paper is also destructive to the nature; millions of trees are cut to produce paper. So, my call is not only to save money, but to save nature. While I am one of traditional books cover, I must observe the possibility to transfer publishing from printing press to the online digital publishing”.
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Ashraf Aboul Yazid is Egypt’s world known writer, poet, novelist, travelogue writer, Editor-in-Chief at Silk Road Literature Series. He is author of some three dozen books.
