Les Midis de la Poésie

Midis de la Poésie offers reading performances, literary lectures, workshops and poetic aperitifs which are opportunities to address current topics and poetry in the widest sense. Authors, directors, and artists lecture on specific literary questions or questions related to the creative process, as well as discuss well known and lesser known authors who have influenced their work. Actors are present to perform readings of the texts being discussed.

07.11.2019 : Sept femmes et plus / Lydie Salvayre & Justine Lequette

Seven women. Seven emblematic women of literature who lived life to the fullest. Their relation to writing is passionate, and for some of them, was a path to suicide. Original and demanding they transcended their personal pain in their works. Their everyday life, which they considered mediocre and without interest, they lived as tragic. But is not this “everyday rut” what marked history? Pre war Paris, the Roaring Twenties, Stalinist Russia. How does one create a work through the life of an author?

Lydie Salvayre takes on this task following in the footsteps of Cioran and Sainte-Beuve, choosing as subjects those women whose books affected her life and her work: Emily Brönte (1818-1848), Colette (1873-1954), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Djuna Barnes (1892-1982), Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) et Sylvia Plath (1932-1963).

Upsetting and scandalous, they bore witness in their way to the world from which they suffered as much as they changed it. Their works are now literary monuments. Lydie Salvayre brings them back to life by writing their stories, their history, their beauty, their outsized actions, their rebellion but also their dark side and their despair.

25.04.2020 : Et nous n’aurons pas besoin de foudre pour tisser des soleils / Felwine Sarr (Midi Minuit)

“Poetry does not blind. Lucidity, which René Char called the wound that is closest to the sun, is its companion. To live the world poetically is also to live it in its unplumbed mystery, in the sinister heft of things, in the flickering glints that are waiting only for us to expand them into light with our eagerness.”
(Felwine Sarr)

23.01.2020 : Nous voulons comprendre « Autre Chose » - Anne Carson

Avec Edouard Louis, traducteur du texte d’Antigonick de Anne Carson & Claire Stavaux, éditrice à l’Arche éditeur
En compagnie de Sophie Creuz, chroniqueuse littéraire à l’Echo et Musiq3 (RTBF) et libraire.

“I was a child in the world of the powerful. / I was frightened of oysters and looked at guardsmen distrustfully. / I am not bound to it by even the tiniest fragment of my soul.” 
(Osip Mandelstam)

Because it allows us to hide what we think in cryptic metaphors, poetry is one of the arts that can face up to dictatorship. But how does poetry do in a democracy? Can it effectuate change? Could poetry express that which the headlines don’t?

07.05.2020 : Raoul Collectif

The Raoul Collectif has been engaged in collective creation for ten years. It was conceived as a laboratory in which Don Quixote, Henri Michaux, Antonin Artaud and Surrealist funny business encounter each other. Their latest production, Une Cérémonie, is an opportunity for Les Midis de la Poésie to invite actors to talk about what inspires them to get to work.