World Poetry Day

We celebrate today the World Poetry Day 2006, which was launched by UNESCO in its 30th Conference of 2000. This year Unesco celebrates the centenary of the birth of the great philosopher-poet, Leopold Sédar Senghor, who wrote: “It is enough to name something for the meaning beneath the sign to emerge.”. In Unesco’s website, Mr Koïchiro Matsuura, the Director-General, writes that “poetry is the great way of naming the world, its permanent features and its transformations, in a manner that delights the human spirit. Let World Poetry Day remind us of this magical capacity of poetry in all its forms.”.

At the same occasion, Portugal’s newspaper Publico launches the initiative “a poem a week”, for those of you who can understand Portuguese. They start today, as by chance with a poem by Portugal’s most universal poet, Fernando Pessoa. Critic Harold Bloom referred to him in the book The Western Canon as the most representative poet of the 20th century, along with Pablo Neruda. I leave you here an excerpt of one of his most famous poems, Autopsychography:

"The poet is a faker
Who's so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact"