What’s On

In May, the BPI  returns with another series of short Zoom readings. Take a poetry break with us Tuesday evenings and enjoy an opportunity to hear Andrés Anwandter, giovanni singleton, and Samantha Walton share their recent work.

6pm BST Tues May 11            Andrés Anwandter

6pm BST Tues May 18            giovanni singleton

6pm BST Tues May 25            Samantha Walton

Register in advance for these events via Zoom. Free and open to all.

Our Readers

Andrés Anwandter was born in Valdivia (Chile) in 1974 and is currently based in Bristol (UK). He is a poet and researcher who has published ten volumes of poetry, among them: Especies intencionales (2001 − Premio Municipal de Poesía), Square Poems (2002 − published by Writers Forum, London), Banda sonora (2006 − Premio de la Crítica) and Materia gris (2019 − Premio Mejores Obras Literarias). Selections of his poetry have appeared in numerous literary magazines in Chile, USA, and UK, and have also been included in major anthologies of recent Chilean poetry. He is one half of the sound poetry duo “Motor Nightingale”, along with poet Martin Bakero. As a translator, he has published in Spanish work by Tom Raworth, H.C. Artmann, Rebecca Solnit and David Antin. In 2014, he was awarded the Premio Pablo Neruda for young poets, acknowledging his literary trajectory and contribution to Chilean poetry. His last book of poems Pasados en limpio has just been released in Chile.       

giovanni singleton is the author of Ascension, informed by the life and work of Alice Coltrane, which won the California Book Award Gold Medal and AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper, a collection of visual art and poetry. Her writing has been widely anthologized as well as exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute’s American Jazz Museum, San Francisco’s first Visual Poetry and Performance Festival, and on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In 2018, she received the African American Literature and Culture Society’s Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry. She is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. For ten years she coordinated the Lunch Poems reading series at the University of California, Berkeley where she also served as the Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics. singleton was recently awarded an inaugural 2020 c3:Initiative letterpress residency and her dreamography is forthcoming from Noemi Press.

Samantha Walton is a poet and writer based in Bristol. She’s interested in how lyric poetry might be transformed to meet the conditions of ecological and social crisis, a theme explored in her first collection, Self Heal (Boiler House Press, 2018). Her recent pamphlet, Bad Moon (Spam, 2020) is an experiment in ecological gothic, and part of a longer sequence of loosely narrative poems looking at apocalypse and environmental disaster through the lens of popular fiction. Her poetry and fiction has been published in Ambit, Bath Magg, Chicago Review, Granta, Gutter, and Poetry Review, among other places. She teaches literature at Bath Spa University, co-edits Sad Press, and will publish her first non-fiction book, Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure, in July 2021.

 

 

Wed, 21 April 2021

18:00 – 19:00 BST

Virtual event via Zoom

The Bristol Poetry Institute and Indisciplinary Poetics Research Cluster are delighted to announce this conversation with Sarah Tremlett (co-director of Liberated Words) and Rebecca Kosick (co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute). The duo will discuss Sarah’s forthcoming book, The Poetics of Poetry Film: Film Poetry, Videopoetry, Lyric Voice, Reflection. Commissioned by Intellect Books and The University of Chicago Press, The Poetics of Poetry Film is the first book of its kind. With encyclopedic content, it establishes historical context, classifies the different types of poetry film, and sheds light on the fast-growing genre. Whilst Sarah Tremlett’s thinking develops around subjects such as time, lyric voice, subjectivity, the remediation of the page poem, and audio-visual philosophical practice, the book is multi-voiced, including first-hand accounts from numerous poetry filmmakers worldwide. A ground-breaking industry bible for students, academics, poetry film-makers and anyone interested in poetry, digital media, filmmaking, art and creative writing.

This event is free and open to all. For more information and to reserve your ticket, visit our Eventbrite page.

Date: Thursday 15th April 2021
Price: Free
Time: 7:00 – 8:00pm
BSL interpreted by Russ Andrews

The Bristol Poetry Institute is pleased to be partnering with Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival to host this virtual conversation between BPI Executive Board member Madhu Krishnan and Bristol City Poet Caleb Parkin. Krishnan and Parkin will discuss the themes of reconnection, nature and poetry. What do we talk about when we talk about nature? Does nature really connect us, or does it also divide? Does “nature” even exist? This conversation will consider the ways in which poetry and nature intersect, and how the human and non-human environment is produced and reproduced, (be)laboured, (de)constructed and performed through language.

Bring a quote or poem of up to fifty words related to these themes and there’ll be chances to feed these into the conversation, keeping things live and lively. This event will be BSL interpreted.

To book your free ticket, head over to the Lyra Festival’s page.

Date: Wednesday 14th April 2021
Price: Free
Time: 6:00 – 7:00pm

This virtual talk will introduce the poetry of Thomas Chatterton to a contemporary audience. While Chatterton’s obsessive invention of mediaeval Bristol certainly makes his writing unique, it also risks alienating readers. Why should we bother reading him today, unless we have a particular interest in eighteenth-century literature that describes the past? In fact, not only does Chatterton’s phenomenally imaginative recreation of the Middle Ages have striking significance today, it is in any case only one aspect of his writing. Chatterton’s multi-facetted work runs from scathing satire to some of the earliest anti-slavery poetry ever written, and among his extraordinarily diverse writing are moments of insight that can help us think through the challenges and dilemmas of the twenty-first century.

Dr Nick Groom has published on a wide range of literary and cultural topics, from national identities to cultural environmentalism to the Gothic – the latter earning him the sobriquet of the ‘Prof of Goth’ in the media. His environmental writing includes the book The Seasons: A Celebration of the English Year (2013), runner-up for the BBC Countryfile Book of the Year, while his extensive work on the Gothic has helped to redefine the field through books including The Gothic (2012) and editions of The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, The Italian, and Frankenstein (2014-19). The Vampire: A New History, described by the New Yorker as ‘colossally smart’, was first published in 2018 and has been translated into Italian and Spanish. He has also published extensively on Thomas Chatterton in many essays and articles, has edited Chatterton’s poetry for a selected edition, and his book The Forger’s Shadow (2003) focuses on Chatterton’s life and work. Nick Groom is currently Professor in English at the University of Macau, having previously held positions at the universities of Bristol, Chicago, Stanford, and Exeter.

This event is presented in partnership with Lyra the Bristol Poetry Festival, Bristol Ideas, and supported by the National Heritage Lottery Fund. It is part of A Poetic City, a multi-partner, city-wide programme that explores the legacy of Thomas Chatterton.

To reserve your free ticket, visit our partners at Lyra.

In March, the BPI will be hosting a series of short Zoom readings. Take a poetry break with us Tuesday evenings and enjoy an opportunity to hear Holly Corfield Carr, Suzannah V. Evans, and Jack Thacker share their recent work.

6pm Tues March 9                    Holly Corfield Carr                    

6pm Tues March 16                  Suzannah V. Evans 

6pm Tues March 23                  Jack Thacker

Register in advance for these events via Zoom.

Our Readers

Holly Corfield Carr (photo Ellen Wilkinson) makes poems, publications and performances, most recently for the Hayward Gallery, BBC Radio 4 and a passenger ferry called Matilda. Her work has received the Frieze Writer’s Prize and an Eric Gregory Award and she is currently a Research Fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. Previous fellowships and residencies include the Henry Moore Institute, the Wordsworth Trust, Spike Island and the National Trust. Her latest publications, Subsong and Indifferent Cresses, were both published by the National Trust in 2018.

 

Suzannah V. Evans (photo Sophie Davidson) has published poems in ENGLISH, The London Magazine, The Scotsman, and Carcanet’s New Poetries VIII, with others broadcast on BBC Radio Bristol. She has read her work at Keats House, London, where she organised Keats House: New Poets, for York Literature Festival and StAnza Poetry Festival, and at Underfall boatyard in Bristol, where she was poet in residence in 2019. She is the winner of the 2020 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment and of a 2020 Northern Writers’ Award from New Writing North. Her debut double-pamphlet Marine Objects / Some Language was published in April 2020 with Guillemot Press; her second pamphlet, Brightwork, is forthcoming with the same press in May 2021.

 

Jack Thacker (photo Deborah Lam) was born in 1989 and brought up on a farm in Herefordshire. He studied English at the University of York and completed a PhD at the University of Bristol. His poetry has appeared in numerous print and online magazines, including PN Review, Stand, Blackbox Manifold, The Clearing and Caught by the River, as well as on BBC Radio 4. In 2016, he won the Charles Causley International Poetry Competition. He has been the writer in residence at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading and more recently at Lighthouse, Poole. His debut pamphlet-length collection is Handling (Two Rivers Press, 2018). He is currently Postdoctoral Research Assistant in Critical Poetics at Nottingham Trent University.