It started with a market, Place Gérald-Godin, where you can still read, next to the Mont-Royal metro station, the Montreal Tangothis magnificent poem by Godin.
Today, the market has become a festival, the Montreal Poetry Festival, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. In the meantime, Montreal poetry has become younger and more diversified. The event, which takes place this year from May 26 to June 2, focuses on discoveries and reunions between various generations of poets. At the head of several publishing houses, the oldest have given way to the youngest. “I think that poetry has created a better place in the sun in recent years, especially thanks to poets like Joséphine Bacon or Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, who tour a lot with poetry,” says Catherine Cormier-Larose, who succeeded Isabelle Courteau at the head of the festival. She also mentions the case of the poet Marjolaine Beauchamp, who performed on stage in the first part of the Richard Desjardins show.
“For the festival, we tried to invite poets from almost all the years of the festival, to mix the new, the renewal and the poetry that we have heard for a long time, but which continues to evolve, then we is doing a poster exhibition at the Quai des Mignes,” she continues.
The poet Diane Régimbald has been there since its beginnings. Today, she notes, programming is making room for greater diversity. “It’s also to create a Montreal signature, different from the Trois-Rivières poetry festival,” she says.
Touch new environments
This year, on May 29 at the Maison de la culture Claude-Léveillée, an anthology of Quebec poets in French and Arabic, published by a Tunisian publishing house, will be launched. The idea came from the director of the international poetry festival in Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia, who recently received a delegation of five Quebec poets. “It is certain that being translated into Arabic, for Quebec poets, will allow us to reach a new environment,” says Catherine Cormier-Larose.
Then, the Great Evening of Poetry, at the Sala Rossa on May 30, will be the opportunity to award the International Francophone Prize of the Montreal Poetry Festival (PFIFPM), and will be led by Marilou Craft and Elyze Venne-Deshaies, accompanied of seven poets. The Video Poetry Rendezvous, a competition open to the general public, will present at the Moderne cinema the creations of the 12 finalists among those who took part in the game. We will take the opportunity to present the Ancrages project. “It’s a cinematic montage of eight poets from the black community who read unpublished texts,” says the director.
A talk on “language within language” will explore the influence of the mother tongue in poetic writing, with Nicholas Dawson, Fiorella Boucher, Moira-Uashteskun Bacon and Maxime Catellier, will be held at the La Livrerie bookstore.
And a projection of selected poems will appear on the wall of the Grande Bibliothèque to mark the quarter century of the festival. It all ends with the Poetry Market, from May 31 to June 2, at Place Gérald-Godin.
Catherine Cormier-Larose says she discovered, during tours, “that farmers read a lot of poetry. There are some who read one or two poems while doing their fields. […] There is something about poetry that can touch everyone, that allows you to integrate yourself into the poem. Unlike the novel, where the whole story is there, in front of you. Poetry allows itself to be appropriated. »
In 2023, according to Bilan Gaspard data on book sales, poetry accounted for 0.8% of books sold in Quebec, behind novels, 11.4%, but before essays, 0.6%.
For Diane Régimbald, the poetry market is doing “relatively” well. “Now we do reprints of poetry books. It wasn’t seen much before. There, I find that it is happening a lot more. There is really a dynamism. People are very interested. And then, in fact, we see it in bookstores, when we have an event, there are a lot of people,” she says.