This year marks forty years that, every May, for one evening, poetry takes over this temple of music — an art that is its sister — as a gesture of delicate insurrection.

In this very important fortieth edition of the International Poetry Festival, poets from all over the world and from every corner of verse will gather at the Palau de la Música Catalana: we will welcome Georgian poet Shota Iatashvili, who leverages irony to confront the harshness of the world; Galician poet Lupe Gómez, swinging like a pendulum between delicacy and rupture; Hungarian poet Márton Simon, with his muddy verses and melodic cadence; Valencian poet Berta García Faet, whose playful lyricism plunges into today’s hubbub and then ascends pleasurably back to the 13th century; Romanian poet Ana Blandiana, a major poetic voice against authoritarianism in any form; Catalan poet Adrià Targa, whom we can justly call the poet of the year in our literature; and finally, Canadian poet Anne Carson, one of the most interesting, rich, precise, and profound voices in contemporary global poetry.

Tying the evening together will be the electronic, classical, thoroughly modern yet deeply ancient elegance of composer Clara Aguilar, who will take us by the hand and lead us through distant soundscapes.