Printemps des Poètes 2023: exploring frontiers

After Ardeur (ardour), Beauté (Beauty), Courage (Bravery), Désir (Desire), Éphémère (Ephemeral), and it’s the turn of Frontières (Frontiers) to be crossed this year, “a word that calls up on happiness and imagination, until war tragedy falls on Ukraine”, as writes the National Centre of Books, coorganiser of the event.

More than 15,000 events are organised throughout France, and increasingly abroad, in schools, colleges and higher education establishments, as well as in hospitals, media libraries, gardens, theatres, prisons and railway stations!

Writing without borders

“To usher in the season of all hopes, the Spring of Poets is the most beautiful ritual there is,” wrote the French Minister of Culture in her editorial presenting the event. For its 25th anniversary, the minister continues, the festival “invites us to explore borders, those that we cross and those that we never cross, real and imaginary borders, the demarcations of conflicts that shake the planet as well as those that unite and bring people together”.

Because writing has no borders, she concludes. Writing is indeed capable of “touching our hearts from thousands of kilometres away”. In concrete terms, the Spring of Poets invites us to abolish this distance, by inventing a “vast and singular” programme each year that shows the extreme diversity of the environment of poetry and publishing. To achieve this, many tools are made available to the general public: bibliographies, quotations, directories of actions, an online agenda, as well as thousands of writing workshops and calls for poems launched simultaneously.

An international patron

Kurdish on her father’s side, Russian on her grandmother’s, having lived in England, Ireland and France, the actress Amira Casar is the patron of this new edition.

A polyglot actress, Amira Casar “has no use for borders” and it is said that “it is poetry that best underlines her singular career”. Having attended the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique de Paris from 1991 to 1994, the actress is lending her voice this year to the Spring of Poets. As such, she will host a poetic and musical evening in Paris on 20 March, entitled Je touche encore aux frontières d'un mot et d’un autre pays (I still reach the borders of a word and another country).

Thousands of events throughout France and the world

In addition to these national and prestigious events that it produces itself, the Spring of Poets also generates momentum for thousands of events that promote poetry in educational, leisure and cultural settings each year.

It is thus under the banner of the Spring of Poets that a number of actions with poetry as a common thread are deployed, “in forms that vary according to the partnerships and the venues”: readings, meetings, workshops, residencies, festivals, book selections, prizes, original creations, poetry poster campaigns in public transport, etc. These events, centred on books and reading, bring together authors and book professionals who are addressing the widest possible audience and even beyond borders, since many countries are taking part in this festive fortnight this year, from China to Canada, including Morocco and Romania. All these national and international actions complement the digital tools offered by the Printemps des Poètes website, which is a true documentation centre, and its social networks, which have become “a space for sharing culture”.

Image

© JR

A poster to question borders

This year, the contemporary artist JR created the poster for the Spring of Poets.

“Who better than JR to question frontiers?” said the organizers when they entrusted the brilliant photographer with the design of the poster. And yet, “his career is so international and dedicated to all the ends of the world, that one would almost forget that JR is French”!

This poster, placed under the gaze of a child displayed on a huge table, shows a giant picnic organised on both sides of the US-Mexico border on 8 October 2017, where JR “reconciled the unthinkable in a sharing seen from the sky”.