We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel.

Elizabeth Bishop

The fourteenth edition of the FIP International Poetry Festival of Buenos Aires begins and we, the faithful ones, convene again. Poetry, as almost every mystery in the world, is secret. “Secret”, meaning that its codes and strategies are revealed for those who study it only. The tone, the rhythm, the melody of the flames, the melody of ice, darkness and light are part of that clear mystery. Poets are part of this society trying to figure out what the secret is. So are poetry readers. Two elements, us and them, come together here. As a Mexican once said, poetry is our missing half. It is the poet as much as the reader or listener’s job to reunite with it or to find it.
Poetry comforts us insomuch as it gives us what we haven’t been able to find in solitude. Olga Orozco, Enrique Molina, Alfonso Sola González, Alejandra Pizarnik, Pedroni, Bayley, as well as hidden poets in the Andes or the jungle in Misiones, in the Pampa, Patagonia and poets visiting us from faraway countries are looking for just that: to find what they are missing and what we are missing. The reader and the poet at some point become one. We have been navigating these years in the search of that fusion. In this new edition of the FIP, the fourth held at CCK, we welcome poets from the Argentine provinces: Córdoba, Mendoza, Tucumán, Buenos Aires Province and Autonomous City -they would make up a national festival. But it is international because poets from Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Mexico, Slovenia,Sweden, Uruguay, Venezuela and, for the first time, England, are coming to participate.
We celebrate them becoming part of our FIP in its fourteenth edition.

Welcome all.