Eva Baltasar's voice is a law of Poetry i +

What is poetry, if not the word? Yes, well, it's many other things: it's also voice and silence, even music, and a harsh, sterile, abrupt, or abundant source in wild torrents. And it's a static or embodied image, as could be seen and heard this Thursday at the Centre Calisay in Arenys de Mar at the opening of Poesia i+, the literary festival radiating from the Maresme region (until July 13, with a coda on August 27).

“Now I see it clearly, the voice that is a law,” Eva Baltasar recites in one of the poems in her book Nus Schiele (Club Editor, 2021) , in which she explores twenty works by the expressionist painter. With more than a dozen poetic titles, Baltasar is not only a storyteller, but a creator of worlds, as are, without saying a word, the composer and pianist Bru Ferri and the cellist Carolina Bartumeu, who perform a suite inspired by the work between poems.

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"I am complete," Baltasar recited, also speaking of "the head, the supreme trap" because "to live is to transplant, to transplant," although "all I know is the tenderness of the cunt." The seven poems he will recite follow one another: "The primordial form, prayer, whiplash, and song. Before the word, the song." Ferri dedicates a song he wrote for a play starring actress Elena Martinell, present in the audience, and plays among scrubbed and hammered strings, or staccato plucks from both the cello and the piano.

The poet says that “the irreducible world is about that, and suddenly the poem,” and the audience that fills the room is presented with poem and painting, perhaps thinking of Schiele’s naked women.

"May the dark north serve as a temple for us," and may we find whatever refuge we need, made of words, music, and pictorial art, seen or imagined. Baltasar draws with words: "Thus bent, I cannot tell you why, in a historical silence, I am here." The recital's story ends quickly, intensely, with euphoric applause in the first act of the festival, with new direction by Gabriel Ventura and Leo Vicente, replacing the current director of the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes, Eduard Escoffet.

From painted poetry to the town's Teatre Principal, towards the theatricalized psychotic life that Dolors Miquel created in Mata'm psicosi (Tushita, 2022), monologues with dramaturgy by Albert Roig directed by Lucia Del Greco and performed by Alba Pujol –and it was her birthday– which premiered a few months ago at the Fundació Joan Brossa , followed by a discussion that included, in addition to the actress, the directors of the festival and the play, the philosopher Laura Llevadot, the psychoanalyst Miquel À. Riera and the pastor Antonio Soler Pichón , who burst into singing a few songs. “You can only embrace change,” says the illuminating text. More than poetry.