Future events
After another successful Runomaraton event behind us, it’s time to look in to the future. In 2021 Runomaraton will be part of planting Sakura trees in collaboration with Lahti City. These are the same trees that Japan gifted Lahti in 2019. The trees are to be planted in Pikku-Vesijärvi park in May.
Runomaraton 2021 event will be held in august/september and will be influenced by Lahti European Green Capital 2021. The next poetry video competition will be held in 2022 on Runomaratons 40th birthday year.
Poetry marathon 2020
Poetry marathon 2020 will be held in Lahti during 3.-5th of September 2020. The event will be part of Lahti Fringe Festival. Poetry marathon 2020 schedule can be found here.
This upcoming poetry marathon will be Runomaraton’s 21st. These poetry marathons have always had and continue to have live poetry in different forms.
Next poetry video competition
Runomaraton will be holding a new poetry video competition in 2022. You can find last years competition Light and Water videos from our Youtube channel.
Poetry video competition ”Light and Water”
Lahti Poetry Marathon have opened association’s international poetry video competition titled ”Light and Water”. The competition will take place from January 7 to April 14 2019. Competing videos can be submitted by a group or by an individual.
The theme ”Light and Water”, invites you to depict the landscape of the end of the current decade. Light and water work on many levels in both the natural as well as the built environment. The competing video can be created to shake a person up, to advocate for the preservation of biodiversity or pursue to increase people’s sense of responsibility. What do the beauty and challenges of life look like when examined from different viewpoints in Finland and in other parts of the world?
You can partake in the competition with one or more poem videos or video poems. A poem video
is a work based on text while a video poem is an audiovisual work that can consist of, for example, letters, words, images, motion or music and other sounds.
The competition is open for anyone and in any chosen language. The organizer, however, requires that the texts in the videos are translated into English or Finnish for the judging process. There are two competition series: the Junior Series for people under 16 years of age and the Common Series for everyone else. The combined value of the prizes that are handed to the winners is 3000 euros.
The judges of the competition are film lecturer and producer Erkki Perkiömäki, painter and doctor of social sciences Soile Yli-Mäyry and the winner of the previous poetry video competition, poet Hanna-Mari Ojala.
The best videos of the poetry video competition are introduced at the Poetry Marathon 2019 -festival from 15 to 16 June.
You can find the competition rules and instructions here.
You can participate in the competition here.
For more information, please contact Lahti Poetry Marathon association’s office at toimisto[at]runomaraton[dot]fi
POETRY MARATHON 2018
Poetry Marathon Festival was held in Lahti from 14th to 17th June 2018. The most important themes of the festival were Risto Ahti Poetry Seminaire, Estonia 100 and Bridge to Japan.
Supporting exhibitions, Blue/By the Water/Prayer at Hollola and Almost readable – 20 typographic interpretations of readability at Fellmannia Library were open from 14th to 21st June. Satellite event, bilingual Poetry Recital: Water has a memory was held at Heinola on June 20.
More than 1400 visitors attended 14 different events during the festival week. Poetry & art marathon was succesful also because of lovely summer weather.
See festival photos & feelings here. Many thanks to all participants, artists and collaborators! See you next year!
CULTURE EXCHANGE PROJECT BETWEEN JAPAN AND FINLAND
Lahti Poetry Marathon has created a pilot project called ” Bridge to Japan” in order to start and develop regular culture exchange between the city of Lahti and Japan.
Within the project, the Lahti Poetry Marathon is planning to organize a series of culture events, ”Japan weeks”, to be held in 2018 and 2019 in Lahti city. The culture events include e.g. art exhibition in Sibeliushall and open air concert by the Lake Vesijärvi. One of the purposes of the project is to find out financial instruments for organizing the culture events during the years 2018 and 2019. With the help of Lahti Region Ltd, the project aims also to productize the culture events for the international marketing. The Päijät-Häme regional council has supported the project with development project grant in November 2017.
The Lahti Poetry Marathon has nominated M.A. Sanna Virta to coordinate the project. Virta is also a Secretary General of the Lahti Poetry Marathon.
Runomaraton/ Poetry Marathon in 2017
Last year was the 100th anniversary of the independent Finland and Runomaraton tried to live up to the expectations. Our summer was busy – the annual Runomaraton event in June with plenty of programs: poetry (of course!), literature, music, dance, workshops, poetry video, competitions, foreign guests from Japan – the smell of culture was all around Lahti city for a weekend.
MORE ABOUT THE PROGRAMS HERE + PICTURES FROM OUR FACEBOOK PAGE
But we knew, if we have given something to the culturehungry ears, we should prepare something to the eyes too: the two-week long ART Lahti 2017 exhibition with the works of 10 different Finnish artists was held in August, in the very centre of the city. The exhibition offered wide range of visual arts: sculptures, naïve art, serigraphic art, fingerpainted pictures about Lahti etc.
PICTURES ABOUT THE EXHIBITION FROM HERE
Talking about exhibitions, one is never enough, so besides the one in February (PICTURES FROM HERE) , and the one mentioned before, we helped to organise an other one in December.Jatkumo -exhibition had a great intention: show the sculptures of three generations of sculpturers from Lahti, from mentors through disciples. As Toivo Pelkonen’s student, Reijo Huttu had learned a lot from the influental sculpturer, and he tried to share the same knowledge with his student Matti Vesanen. The graphic works of Markku Alhonen were also the part of the exhibition.
PICTURES ABOUT JATKUMO -EXHIBTION FROM HERE
Beside all mentioned above, the main art genre for us, the poetry itself, was firmly carried on. Thus Poetry Café events were held monthly through the year. In the summer, besides the presentation of the poetry book of Anita Fagerholm, the visitors were able to witness an exceptional live-dance performance named ’Searching for signal’ by dancer Meri-Tuuli Risberg, sculptor Sami Leutola and flutist Rainer Risberg.
PICTURES ABOUT THE EVENT FROM HERE
Other Poetry Café (Runokahvila) events can be checked from HERE
For the end of the year we managed to publish our newest ’baby’, the Katson sinua, maani (~I am looking at you, my land) poetry anthology book from the best poems from our annual poetry competition (Hullunhieno Suomi?) and a compilations of poems from the previous poetry anthologies.
It looks lovely! Check out the PICTURES from the publication day, and buy the book from HERE (just because it is lovely, even if you don’t know Finnish).
We are ready for the new year, bringing more Poetry Café events, exhibitions, we are working on exciting projects with Japan, and of course our main event will be held in 15-17th of June, the Poetry Marathon summer event!
Keep updated, keep cultured!
