LesArt, the Berlin Centre for Children’s and Youth Literature is holding interactive digital events for children from 9 onwards on “Tante Oosha” by Fatima Sharaffedine and Hanane Kai and on “Der Zug” by Salah Elmur, as well as a storytelling event for families, as part of the poesiefestival berlin.

In addition, LesArt invites you to visit the exhibition. The illustrations by Fadi Adleh, Said Baalbaki, Salah Elmur, Simar Halwany, Hanane Kai, Intelaq Mohammed Ali, Walid Taher and Hassan Zahreddine reflect the diversity of picture book art in the Arabic-speaking world, which can be seen in Europe as part of this travelling exhibition.

sold out

Get people excited about poetry! But how? This seminar for poetry teachers offers the opportunity in several modules to familiarise yourself actively with current procedures of analysis and teaching of contemporary poetry. This year the seminar is based on the technically skilled, and at the same time linguistically playful and comic work of poet Karin Fellner.

Greeting by Klaus Lederer, Senator für Kultur und Europa des Landes Berlin

Greeting by Barbara Gessler, Head of Unit Creative Europe, European Commission

Weltklang – Night of Poetry is the opening in many voices of the poesiefestival berlin – this year in video format online. Poets from all parts of the world read, sing and perform in their seven native languages. They show the wealth of contemporary poetry, the diversity of its content, the wide range of its approaches and styles. The German translations will be faded in; many of the poems have been translated into German for the first time for Weltklang.

Can Dündar, former editor-in-chief of the newspaper Cumhuriyet, will be casting an eye in his lecture on Europe’s (linguistic) diversity from its position as Turkey’s next-door neighbour and the internal view of an exile living in Europe.

free admission

This year’s young and open poems classes give us round or oval peeps into and views from their work in twenty-minute Zoom sessions.

In the panel discussion, Kristina Cunningham, Levke King-Elsner, Jürgen Trabant and Zoltán Danyi will discuss ambivalences inherent in the wealth of languages, social and political developments and translation tasks for the EU.

Poets let us hear their poetry and essayistic language portraits in Ladin, Occitanian, Macedonian, Southern Sámi and Welsh and swap ideas about minority languages and their relationship to the more widespread languages in poetry.

⇒ Tickets 3€ | Festival Pass 19€ 

Both the poet and music producer Mira Mann and Rosaceae, a music project of Leyla Yenirce, work aesthetically and in their content with boundaries and borders, albeit only with their artistic and thematic transgression.

free admission

This year’s young and open poems classes give us round or oval peeps into and views from their work in twenty-minute Zoom sessions.

A conversation among neighbours

The question as to whether Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian and Serbian are ultimately just variants of a ‘common’, pluricentric language or languages in their own right is one that can probably only be answered in political terms. What is plain is that everyone in the region understands each other’s languages 99 % of the time. Everyone agrees on that.

Johannes Jansen (born in East Berlin in 1966) is delivering this year’s Poetry Lecture. It is a text in 34 prose miniatures, in which a poetics of the state of emergency is sketched out. It is about the fear that sits in the forms and the “grudge against the world”. But it is also about moments of epiphany in being lifted out of the everyday, which show a clear move into the mystic.

sold out

Living well with environment and sustainability, mobility and diversity, enjoying freedom for all – most young people are only too aware that Europe is constantly in a state of becoming. Poet and Spoken Word artist Bas Böttcher investigates continental and linguistic building sites with young people and together they bring their own experiences of Europe into vibrant, pulsating rhythms.

Spain’s multilingualism is a result of its history and is lived in the densely-populated regions of Catalonia and the Basque Country as well as in Galicia, and has been increasingly instrumentalised for political purposes.

Initiated and curated by author Fiston Mwanza Mujila in cooperation with the Haus für Poesie, an anthology is coming out this Summer from Verlag Das Wunderhorn featuring, in German translation, 33 poets born or (literarily) socialised in Europe. The anthology places the work in a common context which is not limited to Blackness. Four of the poets featured in the anthology come together at the poesiefestival berlin.

sold out

The Swiss writer Peter Bichsel once said that “children live in questions, adults live in answers”. Eva Stollreiter, co-founder of the children’s philosophy association The Little Thinkers, brings the big concepts of ‘future’ and ‘Europe’ down to a manageable size for thinking and writing about them and is joined by primary schoolchildren to seek out fresh questions and answers.

sold out

From a future seen through rose-tinted glasses to hope in various shades of green – poet, children’s book author and translator Tanja Dückers reads from her book “Katzenaugen-grüne-Trauben-Blitzer-Glitzer-Geistergrün” and entices primary schoolchildren into some fantastic games with colour poems.

Together with Radu Vancu, Claudiu Komartin and Teodora Coman, Romanian poets who are also citizen activists prominent for their political writing, the Romanian-German writer Ernest Wichner looks into the question of the state of minority languages (including Ukrainian, Hungarian, Romani and Russian) in Romania before and after 1990 in view of the conservative nationalist tendencies in politics and society.

The focus of this year’s VERSschmuggel/reVERSible translation project is on poetry from Belarus. In view of the current political situation it seems more apposite than ever to let the country’s poets be as loud as possible and to intensify bilateral relationships, especially on levels other than the political one.

Neo-Orientalism and queer Islamic Poetry

Is Usbekistan Europe? Of course it is – if we define Europe as a cultural space and take the Poetic School of Fergana into consideration. Does Islamic-influenced feminist poetry belong to the cultural space of Europe? Sure, if we take the poetry of the Russian-Azerbaijani poet Egana Djabbarova as an example.

Tolerance as well as intolerance of non-heteronormative sexualities and identities has been on the increase in recent years in Europe. While equal legal status for gay marriages has been successfully fought for in many countries, in others, such as Poland, the human rights of LGBT people are daily being violated and their freedom is increasingly being restricted.

Where does Europe’s cultural space start and where does it end, if you are looking eastwards from Berlin? In Narva? Yekaterinburg? Vladivostok? What is the cultural self-perception in the north-eastern Baltic?

Poetry is continually being made through language and bodies, production and reception. But in the pandemic performances, readings, concerts and discussions can no longer be experienced. Is there a danger that poetry will disappear from the collective consciousness if we are not listening to it together, discussing it, teaching it, translating it and continuing to write it? Where can we hear the voice and the silence of poetry today? Where are the round tables at which multilingualism, the musicality of language and translatability are discussed?

In 2000 more than a hundred poets from 43 European countries spent six weeks travelling across the continent – a working trip and reading tour through the whole of Europe. After all the upheavals and turmoil and the conflicts of the Nineties, it was also a journey of new beginnings. Now, twenty years on, poets who took part in the project as well as a younger generation of writers have been invited to write an essayistic, poetic reworking of the myth of the “Rape of Europa”.