News

/ 16 June 2015

Felix Poetry Festival completed

Seventh edition offered a very attractive program.

It is almost a tradition: in the beginning of June, the beautiful old warehouse ‘FelixPakhuis’ opens its doors and welcomes poets from all over the world to the ‘Felix Poetry Festival’. Also the seventh edition, organised in collaboration with ‘Poëziecentrum vzw’ (‘Poetry Centre’), offered a very attractive program which continuously indulged the public’s poetic desires and literary appetites.

For the program of the first day, ‘Felix Poetry Festival’ gave carte blanche to the Antwerp slam poet Seckou. The only guideline he had, was that he had to organise a wild and dazzling evening. Therefore, he invited several internationally renowned and even notorious spoken word artists, slammers and rappers: Shane Koyzan (Canada), Jhonel (Niger), Ivan Moiseeff, Didi de Paris/Knelpunt, etc. The result was an exciting show, full of bold, vivacious and sometimes completely absurd performances. Furthermore, Antoine Boute, Olivier Dombret, Julie Remacle , Milady Renoir, Delphine Lecompte and Christophe Vekeman presented the bilingual anthology Belgium Bordelio, published by Poëziecentrum and Maison de la Poésie. The book, which encloses poems of thirty Belgian authors (fifteen Wallonians and fifteen Flemish), added a vibrant Belgian tint to the first evening.

The second day of the Felix Poetry Festival was completely dedicated to Versopolis. Five poets, selected within the Versopolis project, were invited to the FelixPakhuis and gave a splendid performance: Christopher W. Bauer (Austria), Justyna Bargielska (Poland), Martin Solotruk (Slovakia), Meirion Jordan (United Kingdom) and Stanka Hrastelj (Slovenia). The public visibly enjoyed the poems, whose tone alternately shifted from romantic over ironic to completely diabolical.