I am one of the creators of FLUP, a literary festival that takes place in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Since 2014, in our third edition, we have dedicated a substantial part of our programming to spoken word, particularly poetry slam. No less than 200 poets used our microphones, but in 2023 we have ended this process with an overdose of oral poetry.

Over the course of four days, we brought together poets from 40 countries, 12 of which were African, one Haitian and even Japanese and Israeli to hear poetry in over 10 languages, including Lithuanian, Slovak and Arabic.

This is more than complete proof that poetry, so often condemned to death, is more alive than ever. Anyone who was in the Providência favela from October 12th to 15th was able to see this with the eyes that the earth will eat.

Many of them left so impacted by this experience that they became poets themselves. Because one of the magics of this literary genre is that it makes us feel capable of not only enjoying the poetry, the performance, and the inseparable mixture of these two.

We also feel capable of producing our own poems. Long live poetry.