A couple of months ago I received an unexpected call. Someone I didn't know was inviting me to participate in a Poetry Festival that she was organizing in Lanzarote. That person who called me to infect me with her illusion was Mercedes Minguela, a wonderful woman from Segovia who has made the island her home.
I was surprised not to know someone who wrote poetry in Lanzarote after all these years and I was excited to know the details of the project that she was devising in Teguise with the suggestive name of Verses, Volcanoes and Wind. I joined without hesitation and, finally, last weekend we met in La Villa a group of about twenty poets from different parts of the Canary Islands and even the Basque Country, with the special visit of Elisa Rueda, writer and organizer of Poets in May in Vitoria.
The Festival had several events that began with a recital on Friday, November 25 at the Spínola Palace in Teguise before a large audience that gathered there. In addition, a poetic anthology of the participants was presented, which included a beautiful prologue by the writer Yolanda Soler Onís (current director of the Cervantes Institute in Beirut and who left her mark after many years living on the island) and concluded with a small tribute-explanation of how the meeting was organized from a lunch in Las Palmas in which the writers Berbel, Puri Santana and Montse Fillol raised the challenge of organizing a poetry recital in Lanzarote.
And after a difficult organizational work, finally on Saturday 26th a poetic-literary tour of La Villa was carried out led by Luisa Molina and Delia Martín and, finally, on Sunday 27th “Street Verses” was celebrated, an open event in the Plaza de La Constitución in which the invited poets, neighbors and passers-by participated reciting their verses (in several languages) and which closed with the performance of the soprano Virginia Hernández Molina. All this while we wrote the poems on papers that we hung on ropes in the square to let them sway in the wind of Lanzarote.
It only remains to congratulate Mercedes Minguela for so much work to organize the festival for the love of art, Rufina Santana for the logo and the painting “Mercury” that she gave for the poster designed by Lola Tapia, as well as to recognize the willingness of the Department of Culture of the City Council of Teguise directed by Nori Machín and encourage them to continue supporting literature. I hope that this Festival will continue because it has been a beautiful opportunity to meet on the island and give prominence for a few days to the word, to poetry.
