Music of the soul woven with words: Catalonia to celebrate World Poetry Day

Over 200 acts and activities in over 100 towns and cities, all to celebrate a worldwide event in Catalonia: World Poetry Day, on March 21. The twelfth edition celebrated by the Institute of Catalan Letters (ILC), and the 20^th year the UNESCO initiative is celebrated.

The director of the ILC Joan-Elies Adell expressed wishes for celebrations for this day to spread throughout Catalonia “like a poetry oil spill,” which will be centered on a central event on Thursday at the Arts Santa Mònica Venue in central Barcelona.

The main goal of the event in Catalonia is to promote teaching poetry, to foster the oral tradition of readings, and to provide support to smaller publishers. Inasmuch, it hopes to create an attractive image of the art form so it’s no longer “considered antiquated.”

At the event on March 20, the ILC expressed their objective to instead show poetry as “an expression that allows communities to pass down its most internal values and reaffirm its own identity to itself.”

A poem is written for each iteration, and this year's was penned by poet, writer, and doctor Rosa Fabregat. It’s called ‘Poetry. Music of the soul woven with words,’ and for the occasion, it’s been translated into a variety of languages – some very much a minority.

Roughly translated, it begins as such: 

Foam of life, light of knowledge,

expanding, softly, to all confines.

Immortal music that walks and flies

on our land and through all the skies.