Author: amanda.woodman-hardy

A poem for Stephen Lawrence, 25 years on

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Matt Jacobs reads ‘Stephen Lawrence isn’t on the National Curriculum’ by Josephine Corcoran in remembrance of Stephen Lawrence, 25 years on.

When asked about the poem, Matt Jacobs said:

It is now 25 years since the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent Macpherson Enquiry into the police investigation that revealed the extent of institutional racism that infused the workings of the Metropolitan Police Force. Since that time, it seems that little has changed. Just last year, Avon and Somerset Constabulary and Bristol City Council accepted the findings of the IPCC report on the murder of Iranian refugee, Bijan Ebrahimi, that said officers showed “hallmarks” of racial bias against Mr Ebrahimi. A further independent report commissioned by Safer Bristol revealed Avon and Somerset Police and Bristol City Council were responsible for a “collective failure” and that “institutional racism” was evident in the case; institutional racism that ultimately led to the death of Mr Ebrihimi.

These issues have long been known, felt, and lived by People of Colour in Britain. Yet, is seems that we White British people are unable to accept responsibility for our part in this. Yes, we may express outrage, shock, and words of apparent support for the cause of racial equality, but what do we actually do about addressing it? This poem speaks to this issue by highlighting the institutional neglect in not teaching our children about the murder of Stephen Lawrence and by emphasising our responsibility as individuals, as parents, to teach our children that Black Lives Matter.

Matt Jacobs is a PhD Researcher at the University of Bristol. Matt is researching how ‘Whiteness’, ‘masculinity’ and ‘middle-classness’ combine in the identities of White British, middle-class men, and how they perform these identities in post-Brexit/Trump/#MeToo/Black Lives Matter Bristol.

Further information

This reading is part of the Commemorative Poem Initiative run by the Bristol Poetry Institute.

Poetry, Plagiarism and Other Matters

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The poet and artist, Ira Lightman

Date: 17 April 2018, 6.15 PM – 17 April 2018, 7.15 PM

Speaker: Ira Lightman
Venue: LR1, Arts Complex, 3-5 Woodland Road

Ira Lightman is known to many, and feared by a few, as the great ‘plagiarism sleuth’ of contemporary poetry; the results of his investigations are chronicled in the Guardian and elsewhere. Ira has made public art throughout the North East and also in the West Midlands and the South West. He made a documentary on Ezra Pound for Radio 4 last year. He is a regular on Radio 3’s The Verb and has been profiled on Channel 4. He is a professional storyteller. He won the Journal Arts Council Award for “innovative new ways of making art in communities” for his project The Spennymoor Letters. His new chapbook is called “Goose”. He has been described by George Szirtes as “Harpo Marx meets Rilke”.

Contact information

For further information please contact william.wootten@bristol.ac.uk.

A poem for the first day of Spring

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To celebrate the first day of Spring, John Lee reads ‘A Shropshire Lad 2: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ by A. E. Housman.

To mark the first day of Spring, Dr John Lee, Senior Lecturer in English, reads A. E. Housman’s ‘A Shropshire Lad 2: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’.

Of his choice of poem, John Lee said:

Housman’s poem about cherry trees blooming was published in A Shropshire Lad in 1896. Many readers have found it immediately memorable. Some of its charm derives from the rather mysterious way that cherry trees flower before they have leaves. (They are, to use the technical term, ‘hysteranthous’.)  If this were not the case, they could not precisely be said to wear white; and their being able to wear white, with its implications of marriage and new generations, chimes in nicely with the description of the season as Eastertide, a naming which invokes the miraculous resurrection of Jesus, in Christian tradition. Those mysterious and miraculous renewals are salted by the speaker’s own clear sense of mortality. He is an onlooker, twenty years old, and so, he presumes, only has another fifty years of observation; and after those seventy years, there may be no more new beginnings to be observed or, perhaps, experienced – in his personal life Housman declared himself a ‘High-Church atheist’. Critics of Housman have decried his poems’ simplicity, and have seen it as the companion of a childish pessimism. His defenders have pointed to a complexity of presentation, noting the gaiety with which dark matters are presented in the poems.  Such curious mixes of life and death are found in many of the best poems of Spring, and whichever side one takes in the battle of the critics, there is in ‘Loveliest of Trees’ a captivating musicality which plays with and against both the felt shortness of human life and the seasonal recurrence of Nature.

Dr John Lee is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English. His main areas of research interest are Shakespeare, English Renaissance Literature, Literature and Medicine and Rudyard Kipling. His publications include, Edmund Spenser’s Shorter Poems: A Selection (London: Everyman, 1998) and Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and the Controversies of Self (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

Further information

This reading is part of the Commemorative Poem Initiative run by the Bristol Poetry Institute.

A poem for International Women’s Day

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Sumita Mukherjee reads ‘The Pardah Nashin’ for International Women’s Day 2018.

To mark International Women’s Day and the centenary of (some) women’s suffrage in the UK, Dr Sumita Mukherjee, Senior Lecturer in History, reads ‘The Pardah Nashin’ by Sarojini Naidu.

Sarojini Naidu published three books of poems, written in English, in the early 20thcentury. She was also a leading campaigner for Indian independence and votes for women in India.

Dr Mukherjee’s research focuses on the movement of men and women from the Indian subcontinent to other parts of the world, and also their return back to India, as well as the activities of Indian campaigners for the female vote. Her first book, Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities: The England-Returned, was published in 2009. Her current research will appear as the book, Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks, from Oxford University Press, later this year.

Further information

This reading is part of the Commemorative Poem Initiative run by the Bristol Poetry Institute. More detailed information about Sumita Mukherjee’s research can be found here and here. For more information about International Women’s Day visit internationalwomensday.com.

A poem for Valentine’s Day

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In celebration of Valentine’s Day, Genevieve Liveley, Senior Lecturer in Classics, reads her selection from Ovid’s Amores.

Of her choice of poem, Genevieve Liveley said:

As Valentine’s Day is supposed to have its roots in the Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia (also celebrated in mid-February), it seems appropriate to have a Latin poem to celebrate the occasion. This elegy from the Roman poet Ovid’s Amores (Love Songs) is more than 2000 years old, yet in both tone and content it feels like the work of a contemporary. There is almost a cinematic quality to Ovid’s description: the soft-focus lighting that spotlights the bed upon which Ovid rests, his lover’s dramatic entrance, the slow striptease which reveals her naked body – and then the cut away to a final shot of the couple, post coitus, relaxed on the bed.

Dr. Genevieve Liveley is Senior Lecturer in Classics and academic lead for the Bristol Classics Hub, a project that develops the study of Latin and Greek in schools and colleges. Her research interests lie in ancient (especially Augustan) narratives and narrative theories (both ancient and modern). Her recent publications include a monograph for OUP’s Classics in Theory series on Narratology and two books on Ovid: A Reader’s Guide to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Ovid’s Love Songs.

Further information

The Comemmorative Poem Initiative was established in 2017. The project is run by the Bristol Poetry Institute.

Cian Murphy selected in 2018 Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology

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BPI poet, Cian Murphy

Cian Murphy’s poem, ‘At the Clinic’, will be published in the 2018 Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology.

‘At the Clinic’ was selected by the American poet and writer Maggie Smith-Beehler. The poem will be published in April by Eyewear Publishing as part of their forthcoming anthology of the 50 best new British and Irish poets.

Cian Murphy was born and raised in Cork. He is Senior Lecturer in Public International Law at the University of Bristol, where he also sits on the board of the Bristol Poetry Institute. His poetry has appeared in Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Honest Ulsterman, and Envoi.

Further information

For further information on the Bristol Poetry Institute, please contact: poetry-institute@bristol.ac.uk.

Poem at the New Year

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To mark the coming of the New Year, Rebecca Kosick, Lecturer in Translation Studies, reads a poem by John Ashbery.

Of her choice of poem, Rebecca Kosick said:

I chose ‘Poem at the New Year’ to honor the great American poet John Ashbery, who died in 2017. I admire how this poem draws together the many, at times contrasting, significances of a new year’s arrival—there’s melancholy but also the promise of new chances. There’s the feeling of being outside of time alongside the feeling of time’s passing. There are questions about the everyday and questions about the far away. Though Ashbery’s poetry can be challenging, I appreciate how this poem allows these contrasts to coincide and how it invites the reader to question and wonder along with it.

Dr. Kosick is the new co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute. Her research focuses on 20th century and contemporary poetry and art in hemispheric America, with interests in word and image studies, experimental approaches to the practice and theory of translation, and materialisms old and new. She is currently at work on a book project entitled Word, Image, Object: On the Matter of Poetics in Hemispheric America.

Further information

‘Poem at the New Year’, 1992, in Hotel Lautreamont, copyright © 1992, 2017 by John Ashbery, All rights reserved, Published in the UK by Carcanet, Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt Inc. for the author’s estate.

Another way for poems to speak

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Over the past month, ‘Poems for…the Wall’, hosted by the Bristol Poetry Institute, held an exhibition at Beacon House. The following is a reflection on the exhibit by Rogan Wolf.

A busy gathering place for students, staff and visitors from all over the world is not where you’d normally expect to find an exhibition of poster-poems.

But if all those poems were bilingual, with many different languages represented, written originally by poets often famous in their own countries? That might be quite an eloquent statement, quite apart from what the words themselves were saying.

The collage of photographs here records a small exhibition of bilingual poem-posters that has recently been showing in a public setting managed by Bristol University. The exhibition went up under the stewardship of the university’s Bristol Poetry Institute.

Half way up the collage, towards the left, you can see a background photograph of all the poems together displayed on the wall. Four of them are printed on paperboard at A3 size, the rest on card at A4 size.

Although they are too small to be read here, it may be of interest to note that there are ten different languages represented in the group picture : Arabic, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Punjabi, Tigrinyi.

I have slightly enlarged five of the languages for this collage : Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and two ages of Mandarin. One of the Mandarin pair  – by Gu Cheng  – was written approximately a thousand years after the other – by Li Bai. And the poem by Li Bai was almost certainly painted, not written.

And when Li Bai positioned his letters, he started at the top and from the right and his eye ran downwards and leftwards. By the time Gu Cheng was writing, a thousand years later, he saw his writing in the same way as the westerner does – horizontally and rightwards from a margin on the left.

And for those Westerners who don’t know, please note that the Arabic and the Hebrew you can see in the picture above here are both written and read from the right.

The poet David Hart once said of the “Poems for the wall” project : “we have the chance here to open people’s lives to each other.”

Further information

For further information about the Poems for…the Wall project see: poemsforthewall.org. For more on the collaboration between the BPI and Poems for…the Wall see here.

Jack Thacker wins first prize in international poetry competition

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Jack Thacker’s poem, ‘The Load’, has been judged by Sir Andrew Motion as the winner of the 2016 Charles Causley international poetry competition

Jack Thacker’s poem, ‘The Load’, has been judged by Sir Andrew Motion as the winner of the 2016 Charles Causley international poetry competition.

The Load by Jack Thacker (PDF, 174kB)

Jack Thacker grew up on a farm in Herefordshire. He lives in Bristol, where he is studying for a PhD on contemporary poetry and agriculture at the Universities of Bristol and Exeter. His poetry has appeared in PN Review, The Clearing and The Literateur and has been commissioned

by the Bristol and Bath Festival of Nature and the Bristol Nature Channel. He is the co-founder of the University of York-based poetry magazine Eborakon and is a board member of the Bristol Poetry Institute.

Making my final decision about the poetry prize, I wanted to balance my admiration for risk and the spirit of adventure with my liking for poems that obey their own laws of organisation. I felt ‘The Load’ managed to get the best of both these worlds, and in the process to achieve something at once clear and suggestive.

— Sir Andrew Motion, Chair of the Judges

As part of his first prize award, Jack Thacker will receive £2,000 and a week long residency at Cyprus Well, the former home of Charles Causley, in which to work on his writing and explore North Cornwall.‌

Further information

This year’s entries to the Charles Causley poetry competition came from a diverse range of poets, both established and emerging. There was a considerable increase in the number of international entries, and the panel of shortlisting judges – Dr Kym Martindale, Dr Luke Thompson, and Charlotte Walker, writer-in-residence at Cyprus Well, spent a day at Charles Causley’s house reading and discussing the poems before selecting a shortlist to send to Head Judge, Sir Andrew Motion.

For more information on the Charles Causley Trust please visit www.thecharlescausleytrust.org.

Danny Karlin to give 2016 Clarendon Lectures

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Danny Karlin at the site of Henry James’s house in Boston, MA, 2015.

Daniel Karlin, Winterstoke Professor of English and founding Director of the Bristol Poetry Institute, will give the prestigious Clarendon Lectures at the University of Oxford this Michaelmas term.

Professor Danny Karlin will give the career-defining Clarendon Lectures at the University of Oxford later this term.

In delivering the Claredon Lectures, Danny Karlin will join a line of exemplary writers and critics to have received the honour. Previous Clarendon lecturers include, Frank Kermode, Stephen Greenblatt, Elaine Showalter, Christopher Ricks, Margaret Atwood, Stanley Fish and Quentin Skinner.

The subject of Danny Karlin’s Clarendon lectures will be ‘Street Songs’. The lectures will expatiate around the appearence of street songs and street singers in literary texts, such as Proust’s narrator hearing the cris de Paris in La Prisonniere, the one-legged sailor growling out ‘The Death of Nelson’ in Ulysses, or the old woman singing outside Regent’s Park tube station in Mrs Dalloway. The lectures will concentrate on how authors use street songs in their work.

Danny Karlin is known particularly for his work on the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. His first book, The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett (1985), brought about a decisive shift in the way the ‘myth’ of the two poets’ courtship was viewed, and is cited as a standard work in almost every subsequent biography and critical study. Browning’s Hatreds (1993) exemplifies his critical practice, based on the close reading of literary works, richly contextualised by reference to biography and to literary and linguistic history. His most recent monograph, The Figure of the Singer (2013), demonstrates the range of scholarship for which Professor Karlin is celebrated among his peers.

Textual scholarship is another major interest. With John Woolford and, latterly, Joe Phelan, Professor Karlin has edited four volumes of Browning’s poetry for the acclaimed Longman Annotated English Poets series, with a further volume in preparation; a substantial paperback selection appeared in 2010. He has also edited a successful selection of Browning’s poems for Penguin. His knowledge of the wider field of Victorian poetry is evidenced in the Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (1997), which includes the work of 147 poets, many of whom had never been anthologised. Other editions include Kipling’s Jungle Books, Rider Haggard’s She, and, the first fully annotated Scholarly edition of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Most recently he published a selection of Kipling’s Stories and Poems for Oxford University Press (2016).

Professor Karlin has a long-standing interest in American literature; he gave the Chatterton Lecture at the British Academy in 1987 on Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems, and has published on Bob Dylan (whom he has nominated for the Nobel Prize, and who he still thinks should get it). His edition of Henry James’s The Bostonians will shortly be available from Cambridge University Press.  He is a fluent French speaker, and in 2005 published Proust’s English, an innovative study of Proust’s use of English words and phrases.

Besides his continuing work on the Browning edition, Professor Karlin regularly publishes on British and American literature of the long nineteenth century, with a concentration, especially but not exclusively, on poetry.  Recent essays include, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ and other poems of love and marriage’ and ‘Editing Poems in Letters’. During his career, Professor Karlin has made a point of engaging with research supervision across the gamut of English Literature from the Early Modern period onwards. In his time at Bristol he has supervised PhD projects on P. B. Shelley, Victorian poetry and fiction, and nineteenth-century American literature. His current research supervision includes a PhD on Bob Dylan by Craig Savage.

 

Further information

The 2016 Clarendon Lecture series will take place at the University of Oxford on the following days:

  • 8 November 2016
  • 10 November 2016
  • 15 November 2016
  • 17 November 2016

A full list of Danny Karlin’s publications can be found here.