Born in 2018, the 2019 European Poetry Festival will take place between April 4th and April 15th 2019. It will invite over 70 European innovative avant-garde poets to come to London, Norwich, Manchester, and Dublin for 9 events over 2 weeks.
The goal of the festival is to interrogate our relation to poetry and its very essence by conceptualising it as a live experience that comes alive through the interaction between the artist and their audience. The strong insistence on the sense of community, engagement and sharing-in is all the more important in today's context.
The first European Poetry Festival, in April 2018, presented ten events in three British cities, in under two weeks, to over 500 hundred people; before touring the rest of Europe to cross both physical and metaphorical boundaries.
This year, the festival can count on the support of the Institut français, Arts Council England, National Centre for Writing, London Bookfair, Goethe Institut, and over 30 international agencies and organisations to expand the limits of what it has done before.
Perhaps the most innovative moment of the festival, The European Camarade (6th of April) will ask 34 poets from 25 countries to pair up to present a new form of poetic collaboration and surprising performances.
The Institut français is proud to announce that poets Yekta and Pierre Alferi will take part in the festival.
Born in 1979 in la Vallée aux Loups near Paris, Yekta is a poet and a musician. He began to perform onstage with the Actuel Free Théâtre and director Claude Bernard between 1998 and 2002, before putting together the band Librorbite, which mixes poetry, photography, painting, music and theatre. He has been published in many poetry reviews such as Pyro (Editions du Grand Incendie), Avel IX, and Bacchanales, as well as in several anthologies. He is involved in the French-English Poetry Festival and is in charge of several tasks in its magazine, La Traductière, an international review of poetry and visual arts. Since 2014, he has been a member of the jury for the poem in prose Prize of the Assocation des amis de Louis Guillaume.
As a composer, guitarist, pianist, narrator and singer, Yekta collaborates with several projects linked to poetry. Recently, he has composed the soundtrack for videopoems Statue (2015) and The Way of Dreams (2016) directed by Nicolas Sandanassamy. In 2016, he released his first piano E.P., which accompanies the book Le mangeur de reflets.
Yekta is a member of Versopolis platform, supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the EU.
His works include four boosk:
Veilleur sans visage, 2009, Editions Le Grand Incendie
Registre des Ombres, 2013, Editions L’oreille du Loup
Le mangeur de reflets, 2016, Editions Transignum
Brisées pour l’étranger, 2018, Editions Petra
A few poems are available online, at https://www.chairpoetryevenings.org/yekta.html :
Pierre Alféri is a novelist, poet, essayist, translator and filmmaker. Alféri earned a degree in philosophy at the University of Paris and published his thesis on William of Ockham (Guillaume d'Ockham le singulier) in 1989. Two years later, Alféri published another philosophical essay on questions of language and literature, Chercher une phrase (1991). He has published twelve books of poetry, four novels, and four works in film, for which he has received fellowships and grants from the Villa Medici in Rome, the Fondation Royaumont outside of Paris, and numerous other bodies. His wok mixes poetry and visual arts, most notably drawing and the cinema, developping the genre of the cinépoème.
Pierre has translated works by John Donne, Giorgio Agamben from English and Russian into French.
He is the co-founder of the literary journal Détail and of La Revue de Littérature Générale. He is also a teacher at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, and the European Graduate School.
Available in English: Night and Day, Fence Books, 2012
Translated by Kate Campbell from P.O.L. (1997)
Poetry in French (POL Editions): Kiwi, POL (2012) Après vous (2010) Les Jumelles (2009) Ça commence à Séoul (2007) La Voie des airs (2004) Des enfants et des monstres (2004) petit, petit, Rup et rud, 2001 Handicap (with Jacques Julien), Rroz, 2000 Personal Pong (with Jacques Julien), Villa Saint-Clair, Sète, 1997 Sentimentale journée (1997) Fmn (1994) Kub Or (1994) Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif (1992) Les Allures naturelles (1991)
Novels: Fmn, POL, Paris, 1994 ISBN 2-86744-440-3 Le Cinéma des familles, POL, Paris, 1999 ISBN 2-86744-713-5 Les Jumelles, POL, Paris, 2009 ISBN 978-2-84682-309-8 Après vous, POL, Paris, 2010 ISBN 978-2-8180-0009-0
Essays: Guillaume d'Ockham le singulier, Minuit, coll. « Philosophie », Paris, 1989 Chercher une phrase, Christian Bourgois, coll. « Détroits », Paris, 1991 Des enfants et des monstres, POL, Paris, 2004
Video Lectures: Films, Novels and Poetry. 2008. 56min Reading and Multimedia. 2007. 55min The Poet and the Nightingale. 2006. 38min
Art: Ca Commence à Séoul - DVD. Pierre Alferi, Jacques Julien, Le Label Dernière Bande and Éditions P.O.L. 2007 L'inconnu, Pierre Alferi, Jacques Julien, le Quartier - Centre d'art contemporain de Quimper. 2004
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