napovednik
Dear Versopolis friends,
the last newsletter for 2022 is dedicated to some of the highlights that took place throughout this year. A throwback to reflect, re-read and be taken back for a moment, before we are heading into a new year, a new episode in our lives. We picked articles, events and formats that figure a bit as a shopping window for you - more to be found on Versopolis' main site and its satellites, the social media channels.
We wish you a peaceful break + hope to see and hear from you soon and lots in 2023!
Happy Holidays,
your VERSOPOLIS team
This is how we started the year, with the third edition of a "winter festival" taking place online, on the channels of Versopolis and its partners and friends. The motivation stays the same, to connect over poetry and literature, with changing topics and titles every year, and voices from many places.
In a time of uncertainty, we connect artists from all over the world, call for dialogue, nurture diversity and human creativity, as well as build a bridge between continents and cultures.
We at Versopolis want to counter the all-encompassing pessimism and provide a platform to those brave literary acteurs that have developed practices and frameworks that surpass the status quo, that offer novelty, raise awareness and perhaps even mobilise. We are convinced literature is not and has never been obsolete, but can function as a laboratory of new, progressive ideas that strengthen communities, as well as individuals.
Poetry and Reception
"To a generation of poets, it makes no difference whether their common denominator is determined by philologists, critics and scholars at home, or by the publishing houses abroad; it makes no difference whether the labelling is done by the traditional Greek elite institutions, or by the rules of the global free market. What matters is whether the label corresponds with what is in the texts – whether it truthfully reflects what we write about and who we are as authors."
>> Read the entire article online
Universal poem, the poem that everyone in the world is writing through twitter, text and through the webpage www.universalpoem.com will be sent on January 30 from Punta Arenas, Chile to the Coalsack Nebula, located 600 light years away from Earth.
>> Visit the Website
Ptuj, Slovenia
Days of Poetry and Wine is an annual international festival of poetry and other artistic forms like music, theatre and fine arts, which was founded in 1996 by Beletrina Academic Press and has hosted more than 600 internationally renowned poets and young emerging authors ever since. One of the many festivals that took place with the involvement of Versopolis.
>> Visit the Website
Novi Sad
Camera Obscura (in Serbian: Književna mašina) in collaboration with Versopolis was producing four one-week residencies for emerging poets at Literary Machine Residency in Novi Sad, Serbia on the occasion of “Novi Sad - European Capital of Culture”. The residencies took place between September and November.
>> Read the Interview with Billy Ramsell
Versopolis was present at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest trade fair for books! On this occasion the fair's visitors had the opportunity to meet three poetic voices from our European platform and to experience their poetry in different languages: Martin Piekar (Germany), Nina Dragičević (Slovenia) and Gaia Ginevra Giorgi (Italy).
>> Visit the Website
An Article by Olga Bubich
my grandmother
doesn’t know pain
she believes that
famine is nutrition
poverty is wealth
thirst is water […]
from Grandmother (2008), by Valzyna Mort
>> Read the entire article online
