The UNESCO first adopted March 21stt as World Poetry Day during its 30th General Conference in Paris in 1999. Practiced throughout history, poetry includes various forms of language, expressions and signification. It is often accompanied by music and performed during special occasions. The universal nature of this artistic expression is shown by the number of elements linked to poetry on the Lists of the 2003 Convention, from the most recently inscribed Pasillo, an Ecuadorian musicalized poem, to the Lebanese Al-Zajal, inscribed in 2014, and the Ukrainian Cossack’s songs of Dnipropetrovsk region inscribed in 2016 on the Urgent Safeguarding List. Being one of the five domains of the 2003 Convention, oral traditions and expressions encompass an enormous variety of spoken forms including proverbs, riddles, tales, nursery rhymes, legends, myths, epic songs and poems, charms, prayers, chants, songs, dramatic performances and more. Oral traditions and expressions are used to pass on knowledge, cultural and social values and collective memory. They play a crucial part in keeping cultures alive.
Statement from the UNESCO Director-General, on the occasion of World Poetry Day 2024; March 21st.
Poetry, whether in prose or verse, symbolist, engaged in society or objectivist, has a unique propensity to make us perceive the world around us differently.On this World Poetry Day, UNESCO is celebrating the power to question certainties in order to remain open to others, to welcome the world in all its diversity – all essential foundations for building peaceful societies. That is why our Organization stands by poets, especially the younger generation, to enable them to take full advantage of this literary form, and to support the publication of their works. For example, we facilitated the participation of 10 young Caribbean authors in the 40th Marché de la poésie, in Paris in June 2023. At this poetry festival they were able to showcase their work, discuss it and meet publishers to assist in the publication of their poems.As part of our efforts to safeguard living traditions, UNESCO has also included a number of poetic forms on the Representative List of the Intangible Heritage of Humanity: the Hudhud chants of the Philippines in 2008; the Mapoyo oral tradition of Venezuela(Bolivarian Republic of) in 2014; the Eshuva, Harákmbut sung prayers of Peru, in 2011; and the Koogere oral tradition of Uganda, in 2015.Poetry is a powerfully living art, but it has also, through the centuries and continents, been the key medium societies have used to write their history and preserve the memory of their culture, as well as to record ancestral knowledge. As the Ivorian poet Bernard Binlin Dadié so aptly said in his poem “Tu dors” (“You sleep”), from the collection Hommes de tous les continents (Men of all continents), the poet is “the old watcher/who stands guard over the ramparts”, and has “in his eyes, the dawns of ancient times/And in his head, the song of future times”. The poet is that in-between figure who stands at the crossroads of a bygone past and a future yet to be built.This is why UNESCO is helping to preserve some of the most emblematic poetic texts of their time. In 2023, the Codex Manesse, a collection of medieval German lyric poems, the collection of Turkmen manuscripts of Magtymguly Fragi, and the stone inscriptions of Tsogtu Khung-Taiji, Prince of Khalkha, which are among the finest examples of Mongolian poetry, joined our Memory of the World Register, which aims to safeguard documentary heritage and make it more accessible to the general public.World Poetry Day is thus an opportunity for each and every one of us to move into the living heart of ourselves and of the world, to paraphrase the great Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire, in a gesture of peace as internal as it is universal.
Mrs. Audrey Azoulay; UNESCO Director-General.
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