What’s On

20 Minute Poetry: The Bristol Poetry Institute Zoom Readings

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 MagazineThe 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 ReviewStandBlackbox ManifoldThe 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.

 

 

Reading and Discussion with Janet Hendrickson and Rebecca Kosick

Image of the book covers.

The Bristol Poetry Institute will host, with the Wild Detectives Bookstore in Dallas, TX, this engaging conversation and reading featuring translator Janet Hendrickson and BPI co-director Rebecca Kosick. The event will take place Thursday 14 January from 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM GMT.

Rebecca Kosick and Janet Hendrickson will discuss how writing and translation are inseparable practices during this transatlantic reading from their recent books. Rebecca Kosick’s Labor Day (Golias Books, 2020) is a serial poem set in the postindustrial US Midwest that explores the landscapes of the author’s childhood through the distorted lens of memory. Janet Hendrickson’s Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language (New Directions, 2019), an experimental translation of a seventeenth-century dictionary by Sebastián de Covarrubias, turns the original into a series of prose poems. Laura Jansen of the University of Bristol will moderate the conversation.

For more information and to book your place, head over to Eventbrite.

Poetry Translation Workshop with Assiya Issemberdiyeva and Liz Berry

In partnership with the Poetry Translation Centre and the Embassy of Kazakhstan in the UK, we are pleased to be hosting a translation workshop on Tuesday 26 January 2021, 18:30-20:30 GMT. This session exploring Kazakh poetry will focus on the work of Yerlan Junis. Junis’s lyrical verses are highly regarded by his literary colleagues for their unexpected surrealist images and expression of human emotions. The session will be led by poet Liz Berry and guest translator Assiya Issemberdiyeva.

This online workshop will take place over Zoom in one two-hour session. In order to make this workshop experience as accessible as possible, pricing is pay-what-you-want. Knowledge of the source language is welcome but not required; the poet/translator-facilitators will support you in crafting your translation.

Follow the link to Eventbrite to book your place now.

National Poetry Day: Poetry Karaoke

National Poetry Day is celebrated each year on the first Thursday of October. To mark the occasion the Bristol Poetry Institute held a session of Poetry Karaoke hosted on Zoom.

We also discussed the importance of observances like National Poetry Day as well as poetry, lockdown and the Institute’s role and activities in an interview for National Poetry Day 2020 with the Arts Matter blog.

More videos from the Bristol Poetry Institute can be found on our YouTube Channel.

Bookings for the 2020 Annual Reading with Claudia Rankine are now live

Portrait of Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine, 2016 MacArthur Fellow, New York, New York, September 7, 2016

Tickets for the 2020 Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading with Claudia Rankine and Vanessa Kisuule are now available for booking with our event partners, the Festival of Ideas. Tickets are free, but booking is essential.

Wed 18 November 2020
18:00-19:00
Crowdcast
Free Admission

Click here to book your place now

Award-winning poet, writer and thinker Claudia Rankine delivers the 2020 Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading. Recipient of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship and author of five poetry collections, Professor Rankine will read from her new publication, Just Us: An American Conversation (published in the UK by Allen Lane) and be in conversation with Vanessa Kisuule, Bristol’s City Poet from 2018-2020. Just Us is Claudia Rankine’s most intimate work yet, questioning what it means now to interrogate white privilege, well-meaning liberal politics, white male aggression, the implications of blondness, white supremacy in the White House, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and what she calls the alarming move towards Brexit.

This event has been organised in partnership between the  Bristol Poetry InstituteFestival of Ideas and Centre for Black Humanities. It is part of the A Poetic City season of events commemorating 250 years since the death of Bristol-born poet Thomas Chatterton and The Festival of Ideas Great Reset programme looking at the solutions to the challenges we face (which runs October 2020-October 2021).

This is a Festival of Ideas Online event and will take place on the Crowdcast platform. It will also be live-streamed to Facebook. You can find out more about how this works from the Festival of Ideas blog.

Announcing the 2020 Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading

The Bristol Poetry Institute is delighted to announce that Claudia Rankine will join us on the evening of 18 November for the 2020 Annual Reading. This virtual event will be held in collaboration with the Centre for Black Humanities and the Festival of Ideas. Broadcast live online, the 2020 Annual Reading will be a slightly different format than in years past, but we are planning a fantastic event and looking forward to seeing you again this autumn.

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) was published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her next publication, Just Us: An American Conversation, is forthcoming in September 2020. She is also the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

 

Applications Open for Next Bristol City Poet

 

20180525 – FOI Vanessa Kisuule Poet Marvin by @JonCraig_Photos 07778606070

 

Our collaborators at the Bristol Festival of Ideas are in search of a new Bristol City Poet. Could it be you?

Poets, spoken-word fans and performers in Bristol are invited to apply to become the new City Poet. The winner will be required to compose 12 poems for specific events or projects and will also take part in public performances and community engagement activities over the next two years. The application deadline is 12 noon Friday 29 May 2020.

More information can be found at the Festival of Ideas’ website.

#bristolpoeticcity

Poetry Translation Workshop with Leo Boix

The Bristol Poetry Institute, in partnership with the Poetry Translation Centre, are pleased to be hosting a translation workshop with Argentinian/British poet Leo Boix on the evening of 24 March. We’ll be translating Argentinian philosopher and writer Silvina Giaganti, and we’d love for you to join us! Knowledge of Spanish is not required, as workshop participants will receive support in crafting the final, translated poem in English.

For more information and to book your FREE place, click here.

Bristol Poetry Institute at the Lyra Poetry Festival

The Bristol Poetry Institute is looking forward to Lyra, the Bristol Poetry Festival, taking place between 13 and 22 March. We are proud to have helped organise a number of the Festival’s events, including:

 

Simon Armitage | Live at Bristol Poetry Festival

13 March 18.00

Wills Memorial Building

 

Romantic Bristol Walking Tour

14 March 12.00

OR 22nd March 12.00

meet at Wills Memorial Building

 

Prose Poetry: Performance + Open Mic

14 March 17.00

Wills Memorial Building (Old Council Chamber)

 

Romantic Bristol Tour: Coleridge & Wordsworth

15 March 12.00

meet at Wills Memorial Building

 

Maths and Poetry Workshop

16 March 17.30

Fry Building (Room G13)

 

Romantic Bristol Walking Tour: Women Writers

21 March 12.00

meet at Wills Memorial Building

 

The full programme is available here.

Bristol Project Celebrating the City’s Poets and Poetry Wins Funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund

Chatterton’s Holiday Afternoon, Engraved by William Ridgway after a picture by William Benjamin Morris that was published in The Art Journal, 1875., BRL B28436 SR50

A group of Bristol projects celebrating the city’s poetic past, present and future has been awarded £87,700 funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund. A Poetic City is a programme of activity run by organisations including The Bristol Poetry Institute, Lyra poetry festival, Glenside Hospital Museum, the University of Bristol, Bristol Libraries, Bristol Culture, the RWA and St Mary Redcliffe. Poets from across the country, as well as poets from the city, will be writing and performing new works, guided poetry walks will explore different parts of the city and a free comic will be produced, telling the story of Bristol’s famous poets. The project has been inspired by Bristolian poet Thomas Chatterton, who was born in 1752 and inspired generations of poets after him.

The project runs until the end of 2020 and includes:

  • Writers in residence being based a public sites across the city.
  • New poetry commissions being written by 10 poets, performed and shared across the city.
  • The new app, exploring the city and it’s connections with poetry and poets.
  • The story of Bristol’s poetic history, and one of the city’s most famous poets, Thomas Chatterton, told in comic-book style and distributed across the city.
  • Walking tours of the city led by academics and poets.
  • Poets working with local communities, young and old, through St Mary Redcliffe Church.
  • A new poem specially written by the City Poet, Vanessa Kisuule.
  • A series of lectures exploring young people, arts and mental health.
  • Special events across the city as part of Bristol Open Doors (https://bristolopendoors.org.uk/).
  • More activity and events will be added to the programme as it is developed over the coming months.

Find out more on Twitter: #BristolPoeticCity