Testimonials and comments
« Le Festival International de la Poésie à Trois-Rivières est assurément l’un des très beaux moments de l’année culturelle. Cette fête des mots est le rendez-vous de la sensibilité et de l’intelligence du cœur. Il est touchant de savoir que, chaque automne, une ville entière subit l’invasion d’hommes et de femmes venus nous révéler tout le pouvoir d’évocation de la parole écrite, dite et chantée. »
Line Beauchamp, ministre de la Culture et des Communication du Québec, August 2003.
« Please accept my thanks for your attention, hospitality and friendship. You are creating a superb tradition in Trois-Rivières and it was an honour for me to be included in it. »
Samuel Hazo, poète des États-Unis, October 2003.
« I am writing to thank you once again the opportunity to participate at the Festival this year. It was a great opportunity to meet a magnificent group of poets. I would have really liked to be able to communicate better in French during my stay at Trois-Rivières, but I am happy that I was anyway able to establish a very intense and enriching exchange with most of my fellow poets. Actually, I've been exchanging books and emails with several of them already, and of course I plan to resume contact with others…»
Mercedes Roffé, poète d’Argentine, November 2004
« The Festival International de la Poésie de Trois-Rivières is extremely validating for a poet – by the respect and enthusiasm of all the different audiences in the various venues – and enriching – due to the contact and exchanges with other poets from around the world. The Festival organization is a superbly well-oiled machine. That could give lessons to others who run literary events. Events are set up with a clear knowledge of the relationship between audience and attention span, acoustics and venue – during the time in my own schedule when I could be part of the audience, the main difficulty was choosing which event to go to – knowing that regardless of the choice, it would prove right! It has been an honour and privilege to be here.”
Maxianne Berger, poète québécoise, October 2004.
« As poet laureate I consider it a great honour to congratulate the city of Trois-Rivières on St Valentine’s Day of 2004, and to pay this country’s respects to the unknown poet. In addition, I would like to invite all the world’s poets into the spirit of love, so well celebrate by this great city. »
George Bowering, official poet of the Canadian Parliament, February 2004
« Please accept my thanks for your attention, hospitality and friendship. You are creating a superb tradition in Trois-Rivières and it was an honour for me to be included in it. »
Samuel Hazo, poète des États-Unis, October 2003.
« Dear Gaston
Thank you so much for the days in Trois-Rivières. I spent a really nice Time and was happy to take part in the festival. If you would like to invite a Danish poet next time I can recommend_. He is very different from me but he speaks French and he is translated. He is also a member of The Danish Academy_. Please send Maryse my warmest regard - she is doing a great job also. All the best_”.
Pia Tafdrup, poète du Danemark, October 2000.
This were great days in Trois-Rivières, but also in Quebec and in Montreal!!! - I will never forget these days in Canada with all of you and the poets, some of them are now really friends and I'm looking forward to see them again... Thank you very much for all what you did for me: When ever you want you can come to Bremen and be our guest...»
Regina Dyck, directrice du Festival de poésie de Bremen (Allemagne), October 2002
Artistic Report – Philip Hammial sent to the Australia Council
The Festival International de la Poesie, October 1-11, 2004
Trois-Rivieres – the World Capital of Poetry
It truly is. Try to imagine: 40,000 people attending a ten day poetry festival in a city about the size of Orange; 110 poets from eighteen countries, five continents, participating in 400 events at eighty venues – restaurants, cafes, art galleries, museums, schools, a bookshop, a bar/nightclub, a university and the Maison de la Culture; a poetry (not writers’) festival opened in a state-of-the art auditorium in the Maison de la Culture by the mayor, the Minister for Culture, the President of the Tourist Association and several other dignitaries; situated in a plaza between the Maison de la Culture and the Town Hall – a fifteen foot high monument to The Unknown Poet, paid for and installed by the city; two to four line poems by Quebec poets engraved on 300 stone plaques on walls in the commercial part of the city, including one on a wall next to MacDonalds, these plaques paid for and installed by the city; in a large park in front of the Town Hall, in plastic sleeves pegged to clotheslines strung between trees, about 2000 poems written by visitors, young and old, to the festival; on a placard in front of a tobacco shop - Poetry Here! Hard to believe? Has your imagination been stretched? Try this – on the last three days of the festival when I went for walks in the commercial part of the city people, total strangers, would come up to me, shake my hand and thank me for coming all the way from Australia to read my poems. Absolutely unbelievable, but it’s true. This was the twentieth festival and much was made of the fact that I was the first Australian to be invited - hopefully not the last.
Over the course of ten days I read my poetry eighteen times – at a bookshop, a bar/nightclub, an art gallery, a museum, two cafes and five restaurants. At all of these venues each poet read twice, two three minutes segments; the idea being that the poems should be short and sharp, thus keeping the audience’s attention and avoiding the possibility of a poet going on and on and on. It’s a practice we might consider here in Sydney. Before my first reading, which took place at the Café Bar Zenob on my second evening in Trois-Rivieres (after only three hours of sleep), Francis Combes, a poet from Paris and the editor of a poetry publishing house, Le Temps des Cerises, agreed not only to read the French translations of my poems but to correct them against the English originals as well. As it turned out Francis was, in my opinion, the best reader at the festival; so I was very fortunate. Just before I was due to read a local woman, Claire Tremblay, introduced herself and said she wanted to show me something. Unwrapping a long piece of cloth, she produced a didgeridoo and proceeded to play it. A classically trained oboist, Claire had somehow managed over the course of five years and with no help from anyone to become a very accomplished didgeridoo player. To make a long story short, Claire accompanied me at the Café Bar Zenob that evening and at a museum and an Anglican church later in the festival. There were about 120 people at the Zenob that evening, half of them poets from all over the world. It was very noisy, people trying to make themselves heard above a loud jazz band, but when the poetry started there was complete silence; even the bartender and waitresses were quiet. Incredible. One of the more interesting readings was at the Le Bucafin, an internet café were young illiterate adults were being taught to read and write with poetry as a medium. We, the poets, took turns with these young people reading our poems. Six of us attended a session at the Atelier Presse Papier. Paired with artists, we poets had to make up a poem in two minutes that would inspire the print-makers to make a woodblock or copper etching in two minutes. Then it was the turn of the print-makers to make a print in two minutes that would inspire us. We were then given a pile of magazines and a razor and asked to make a Dada poem in two minutes. It was a very interesting collaboration. On the last Saturday evening twenty-seven of us did a performance in the auditorium at the Maison de la Culture. Seated around nine café tables on the stage if front of an electric blue backdrop with the festival’s name and logo in white, we took turns reading at three microphones. The audience was enthusiastic, to say the least. A CD is being made of this performance.
All of the foreign poets were taken to the mayor’s reception room in the Town Hall and given Certificates of Honorary Citizenship by the mayor.
I was interviewed twice on CBC radio (our ABC) once for two minutes and once for seven minutes.
Like the other foreign poets, I was given two t-shirts with festival logos and 23 poetry collections from Gaston Bellemare’s publishing house, Ecrits des Forges.
We were accommodated in a quiet four star hotel, the Gouverneur, near the centre of the city and a five minute walk from the St.Lawrence River.
We were given a very substantial fee, much more than I’ve ever received from any other poetry festival.
Gaston Bellemare and Maryse Baribeau are incredible people. They have created the biggest & surely the best and most professionally run poetry festival in the world.
Philip Hammial