With the precedents set by Viena, Medellín and Havanna, and based on their experiences, our International School of Poetry was created. Now on its sixth version, it will be active within our festival. This will take place between Wednesday 14 through Sunday 18 this year.

The School aims at working on the findings of poetic experience through varied points of view. This way it tries to provide some answers to questions which otherwise seem only too simple: what is poetry? , what are we to do with a collection of poems ?, where does a poems come from?, what’s the ultimate aim of poetry?, what does a poem operate on us?

Through non-formal academic activities carried out by some of our visiting writers we shall somehow exhibit the creative potential of words, stimulating some pondering on those queries mentioned above so that the opening gate to poetry –which remains closed to many- can be widely opened.

We mean to find and keep fresh young readers as well as to learn, all together –through amusing proposals- new ways of producing poetry using body, voice, and singing –among others elements.

Poetry is not only that written by poets; it’s a poetic look which anybody can have and one that enriches him so that the universe can be actually enlarged.

It’s almost commonplace to believe poetry can be reached by the chosen ones, those “highly read”. What if poetry was everywhere waiting for anybody’s attention and ready to be unveiled or revealed?

Many, in their everyday life, avoid starting to read a book poems since “poetry is demanding” and can produce discomfort since it unveils too any things. But for those who work in libraries, or teachers, or those who feel like reading to others, a father who reads to his child before going to sleep, for that person who feels like listening to “the world’s music through the conch a poem is” (a metaphor by Octavio Paz), we come to offer this School of Poetry which sets to discover hues of poetry’s huge potentiality.

We want, with your collaboration, tell of the power of words and their daily richness, speak about contemplation, thought and dreams. We mean to speak about the many things that are part of our being –the beautiful ones but also the cruel and skunky ones- which poetry kindles; all this in order not to forget as well as to reveal its condition in its fair and accurate measure or fertile excess. Poetry helps us to see as well as to see ourselves.