Month: October 2022

Announcing the 2022 Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading

Posted on by rebecca.kosick

Author photo of Denise Riley smiling warmly

We are delighted to announce that this year’s Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading will be delivered by Denise Riley.

[Update 12/12/22: This event has unfortunately been cancelled due to illness and we are working to reschedule in 2023.]

Over the last five decades, Denise Riley has steadily acquired the reputation of being, in the words of Simon Armitage, ‘one of the best poets around’. Sarah Perry, writer of The Essex Serepent, and Max Porter, writer of Grief is a Thing With Feathers, each called her 2016 volume, Say Something Back ‘the best thing I’ve read in ages’, while Robert Macfarlane declared the book’s ‘heart-piercing elegy to her son Jacob, “A Part Song”: the most powerful contemporary poem I’ve read in years’. 2022 sees the much anticipated publication of its successor, Lurex. The evening promises to be enjoyable, thought provoking and moving.

Denise Riley lives in London. Her prose books are War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother [1983], ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History [1988], The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000), The Force of Language (with Jean-Jacques Lecercle; 2004), Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005) and Time Lived, Without Its Flow [2012].  Poetry collections include Marxism for Infants (1977), Dry Air (1985), Mop Mop Georgette (1993), Penguin Modern Poets series 2, vol 10 (with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair; 1996), Selected Poems (2000, 2019), Say Something Back (2016), Penguin Modern Poets series 3, vol 6 [with Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine; 2017], Lurex [2022].

Admissions to the 2022 Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading are free but booking will be essential.

Ways of Reading: Bernadette Mayer and the New York School

Posted on by rebecca.kosick

image from Rosemary Mayer's Ways of Attaching Exhibition

Join the Bristol Poetry Institute and Spike Island for a conversation and a collaborative writing session dedicated to the New York School poets and the works of Bernadette Mayer.

Date and time
Location
Spike Island 133 Cumberland Road Bristol BS1 6UX

Book your free place here

Bernadette Mayer is an influential avant-garde writer associated with the New York School poets of the mid-20th century. Like her artist sister Rosemary Mayer, she garnered visibility during the second-wave feminist movement in the US. Mayer is known for her experimental poetic forms and narrative structures akin to streams of consciousness, which examine the complexities of gender and sexuality within the intimate interactions and attachments of family life.

A conversation between Dr Rebecca Kosick, Co-Director of the Bristol Poetry Institute, and Dr Rosa Campbell, Associate Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of St Andrews, is followed by the collective reading of selected texts by Bernadette Mayer.

Ways of Reading is organised in collaboration with Spike Island and hosted on the occasion of Rosemary Mayer’s solo exhibition Ways of Attaching.