Committed to the advancement of poetry
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.
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.
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 Institute, Festival 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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:
Find out more on Twitter: #BristolPoeticCity
The Bristol Poetry Institute is pleased to host Argentine artist Marisol Bellusci for a night of Latin American videopoetry in February. We hope you will join us!
Latin_no American VideoPoetics
6.00 pm, 12 February 2020
Old Council Chamber Room
1.11 Wills Memorial Building
Bristol BS8 1RJ
Free and open to all
This event will consist of a rare UK screening of videopoetry from Latin America (by the poets and artists listed below), an introduction by Marisol Bellusci and Javier Robledo (coordinator and director, respectively, of VideoBardo, the longest-running videopoetry festival in the world), and a discussion with UK-based videopoet Sarah Tremlett (author of The Poetics of Poetry Film, and co-director of Liberated Words).
Paula Herrera Vivas / Argentina; Mariana Maia da Silva / Brazil; María Papi / Argentina; Loayza
Claudia Peru / Argentina; Melissa Haller / Argentina; Marisol Bellusci & Luis Saray / Argentina-
Colombia; Nicolás M. Pintos / Argentina; Dan Boord and Luis Valdovino / USA- Argentina;
Pagan Maximum / Argentina; Javier Robledo / Argentina.
(credit for header video: Marisol Bellusci)
Book your free ticket here.
Daljit Nagra has published four poetry collections with Faber & Faber. He has won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem and Best First Collection, the South Bank Show Decibel Award and the Cholmondeley Award. His books have been nominated for the Costa Prize and twice for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and he has been selected as a New Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society. He was the inaugural Poet-in-Residence for Radio 4 & 4 Extra, and presents a weekly programme, Poetry Extra, on Radio 4 Extra. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was elected to its Council, and is a trustee of the Arvon Trust. He has judged many prizes including the Samuel Johnson Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Prize, the David Cohen Prize and the National Poetry Competition. His poems have been published in the New Yorker, Poetry Chicago, LRB, TLS and New Statesman and appear on GCSE syllabuses. He has written for the Guardian and Financial Times. He teaches poetry at Brunel University, London.
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.
This reading is part of the Commemorative Poem Initiative run by the Bristol Poetry Institute.