The celebration will open on Thursday, March 26, with a Signature Dinner by Yannick Alléno, dedicated to poetry, in the splendor of the Salle Belle Époque. The following day, on March 27, the Salon Excelsior will host a series of conversations devoted to poetry. Intimate exchanges where language, thought, and artistry meet in luminous dialogue. This event will welcome distinguished guests: poets and writers Louis-Philippe Dalembert and Pascal Bacqué, pianist and composer Karol Beffa, actor Lambert Wilson, and Thierry Consigny, curator of the event. With elegance and intention, Monaco Poésie Nuit et Jour aspires to become a refined sanctuary for words.
Program
Thursday, 26 March
Lambert Wilson, accompanied on piano by Karol Beffa. Lambert Wilson will recite and sing poems, mainly in French, but also in English, Italian and Spanish. Translations will be projected in the Belle Epoque room.
The Yannick Alléno Signature dinner will open with an exceptional recitation, which we are keeping a surprise. Then poets and writers Louis-Philippe Dalembert and Pascal Bacqué will recite their own poems – who said poetry no longer existed? Karol Beffa will improvise ‘musical translations’ of the poems on the piano.
And echoing the opening, a female voice, which we are also keeping secret, will close the dinner.
The evening will continue with a poetic jam session. Those who wish to do so can stand up and recite or read a poem of their choice in the language of their choice. The translation will appear instantly in the room. And Karol Beffa will once again improvise on the poems that inspire him. This finale may not be without a certain amount of disorder, but so much the better! As the poet said: ‘Order is the pleasure of reason, but disorder is the delight of the imagination.
Friday, 27 March
The misery and splendour of poetry
Thierry Consigny, curator of Monaco Poésie Nuit et Jour, is the author of Léopoldine, published by Grasset, La Mort de Lara, published by Flammarion, and Le Soleil, l'herbe et une vie à gagner, co-written with his son Charles and published by Lattés.
Why does poetry both repel and delight us? What makes it so indispensable? These are the questions he will address with the audience, illustrated by well-known and lesser-known poems.
Writer and poet Pascal Bacqué is the author of poetic texts, Imperium, Ode à la fin du Monde, Chemin harangué, Doubles, a play, La France, and the prose work, La Guerre de la Terre et des hommes, a new edition of which is forthcoming.
Some intellectuals see Pascal Bacqué as a ‘Mallarmé of our time’. His poetry is both epic and metaphysical, scrutinising the world in a tireless quest to transcend it. His very free play with forms, both classical and modern, is strangely based on the poet's Jewish adventure, which is both steeped in language and set in another world, from which he comes as a voluntary stranger to what is perhaps the most beautiful, and perhaps the most threatened, of all languages. To save language is to save humanity. An enigmatic beauty, even if it keeps its distance, serves in his eyes to preserve the treasure of speech like a jewel in a case.
Louis-Philippe Dalembert, born in 1962 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, writes in French and Creole. He won the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie in 2024 and the Prix littéraire de la Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco in 2025. A resident of the Villa Medicis in 1994 and 1995, writer-in-residence in Jerusalem and Berlin, as well as at SciencesPo in 2021, he has been a visiting professor at numerous American universities, notably the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Since 2017, with Avant que les ombres s'effacent, his novels have been published by Sabine Wespieser éditeur. Mur Méditerranée (Mediterranean Wall), 2019, won the Prix de la Langue Française and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt des lycéens. Milwaukee Blues, 2021, was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt and won the Prix Patrimoines de la BPE and the Prix des Lecteurs des Ecrivains du Sud. Among his most recent poetry collections, published by Bruno Doucey: En marche sur la terre, 2017, Cantique du balbutiement, 2020, L'Obscur Soleil des corps, 2025.