The Ars Poetica International Poetry Festival is welcoming towards a wide audience and offers a wide spectrum of poetics and artistic experiences. It presents poetry, which comes in various forms of originality but is simultaneously open towards different types of people, mindsets and walks of life.
“The Ars Poetica International Poetry Festival is open to all who want to give poetry a chance to unexpectedly and incidentally pique their interest through an experience that they had no idea they might go through. It is about experiencing the beauty of that which seems like a mere word at first glance, but is in fact so much more: poetry; beauty as natural as an ordinary day,” said poet and creative director of the Ars Poetica Festival Martin Solotruk.
Nora Gomringer, Philipp Scholz, Sylvia Geist and Vesa Haapala
Taking place on November 16 – 19 in Bratislava, Slovakia, this year’s Ars Poetica Festival will welcome a wide range of international poets and performers, including those in the likes of Sylvia Geist, Vesa Haapala and Nora Gomringer along with Phillipp Scholz.
The opening night will host an appearance by the German poet and writer Sylvia Geist. She possesses a distinctive, intriguing writing style, and will be making her return to Ars Poetica Festival after ten years! In her work, she juxtaposes the outer with the inner, while imaginatively blending inner and outer cosmism with the reality of personal quality, as German critics say. The publishing house Ars Poetica has just released a collection of her poems in Slovak translation, and her performance is set to be one of the highlights of the festival.
The same evening will also feature an award-winning Finnish poet Vesa Haapala. He is a university lecturer, who has authored numerous collections of poetry and even a psychological novel exploring the difficult sides of family life and focusing on a father-son relationship. A critic described his work in the following manner: “One could say that the work of Vesa Haapala is an example of studied, academic poetry, and yet that would be to miss the point completely of his stylistically and thematically broad works.”
Don’t miss the opportunity to catch these two authors during the first night of Ars Poetica 2017, on November 16 in V Klub, Bratislava!
Another notable performance will surely be the one by Nora Gomringer and Philipp Scholz. Nora Gomringer is a half-Swiss and half-German poet, whose work is centred on the theme of orality and memory. Her performances are lively and humour is a key element in her work. She works with different musicians and visual artists, and we will have a chance to witness one such collaboration with our very own eyes: she will perform alongside her collaborator and Swiss jazz drummer Philipp Scholz. You can catch their performance titled Peng! on Saturday, November 18, in Café Berlinka SNG.
Ars Poetica festival is currently celebrating 15 years of its existence. Over the years, it has consistently delivered a thrilling experience of multi-genre fusion of art and poetry to a wide audience. This year, its stages will be graced by numerous local and international poets and performers. Poetry readings will go hand in hand with multimedia events and a rich off program. The main festival days will be followed by Ars Poetica Film, a selection of films, which will be screened in the Lumière Film Theatre over several days between November 21 and November 24.
To find out more please visit the Ars Poetica homepage www.arspoetica.sk
Or the Ars Poetica Facebook pages: https://www.facebook.com/ARS.POETICA.sk/
