Today is World Poetry Day

«Poetry is as varied and fluctuating as the present. It is not graven in stone, but is where relationships with the world and with meaning, culture and language are constantly created and re-created.

Each year, World Poetry Day, together with many poetry events, fairs and festivals, affords an opportunity for dialogue and reflection that may help to bring poetry in from the cold.

The particularity of poetry that must be recognized is that it does not convey clear words that can be instantly grasped, but constructs new, unprecedented forms of language that owe nothing to common codes.

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UNESCO, hand in hand with poets and poetry readers, makes common cause today with all those who detect inventiveness in language and propose new art forms, venturing to chart new genealogies that may construct anew the interconnections, challenges and vocabularies that underpin our modernity.»

(Extract from the Message b Mr Koïchiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO, on the occasion of World Poetry Day, March 21, 2007) Complete Message here