Committed to the advancement of poetry
Join the Bristol Poetry Institute to celebrate the 60th anniversary of US poet Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, purportedly written during the poet’s lunch break from his job at the Museum of Modern Art. We will gather together to read the book aloud over our own sack lunches. All welcome!
Lunch with Lunch Poems
Thursday 9 May
1-2 PM
Royal Fort Gardens (near the mirrors), Bristol BS8 1UH
Rain location: PHYS BLDG 3.34
We are delighted to announce that this year’s Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading by Don Paterson will take place on 7 February 2024 at 6PM in the Wills Memorial Building Great Hall.
The Bristol Poetry Institute, with the support of the Department of English and the School of Modern Languages, are very pleased to present Don Paterson as this year’s annual reader. The event will last one hour and comprise of a poetry reading. A 30-minute book signing with the poet will follow the reading.
Don Paterson is the author of numerous works of poetry and non-fiction; his writing has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, all three Forward Prizes, and the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009; he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and for many years taught at the University of St Andrews, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Poetry in the School of English. From 1997 to 2022, Paterson was poetry editor at Picador. For most of his life he has also worked as a jazz musician and composer. He lives in Kirriemuir, Scotland.
Dr Lesel Dawson and Dr William Wootten will lead a discussion of the grief expressed in some poems by Denise Riley.
The Bristol Poetry Institute, in collaboration with the Institut Ramon Llull and the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, are pleased to invite you to a showcase of recent Catalan poetry. This one-hour event will feature bilingual readings with English translations of four Catalan poets, with the special collaboration of Dominic Jaeckle, writer and editor of Tenement Press.
The Bristol Poetry Institute is looking forward to hosting this reading group addressing the works of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, to take place in September. Please see the poster below for more information or reach out to the organiser, Dr Laura Jansen.
![THE ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK READING GROUP Faculty of Arts Organised by Laura Jansen Under the auspices of the Bristol Poetry Institute Fridays 3:30-5pm September 3, 10, 19 and 24, 2021 With the participation of poets Alice Oswald & Phoebe Giannisi ‘There is an aura of almost legendary, classical prestige that surrounds the life and work of Alejandra Pizarnik.’ César Aira (1998) During her short life, Alejandra published eight small books that have earned her a fundamental place in poetry in Spanish. Her forerunners were classical Greek and Roman poets, Arab-Andalusian poets of the Middle Ages [...] Rimbaud and the French surrealists. Eventually, her poetic vocabulary became unique: echoes of [these traditions] can be heard in the background of her writing, but they are never allowed a full presence. Alberto Manguel (2015) Postgraduates and Postdoctoral researchers interested in twentieth-century writers are warmly invited to attend this online interdisciplinary reading group, hosted by Laura Jansen of the Department of Classics and Ancient History in partnership with the Bristol Poetry Institute. Our focus this year is on the oeuvre of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires 1936-72), whose writings include poems, diaries, correspondence and critical essays. We will be exploring a selection of texts from works such as Diana’s Tree/ Árbol de Diana (1962), Works and Nights/ Los trabajos y noches (1965), Extracting the Stone of Madness/ Extracción de la piedra de locura (1968), and A Tradition of Rupture: Selected Critical Writings (2019). The texts will be circulated in English, while readings of short poems during the sessions will be performed in English, as well as in Spanish and French, the two languages in which Pizarnik wrote. Participants are expected to commit to regular online attendance of the four sessions. The group will meet on Fridays, 3:30-5pm, starting on September 3, 2021. It is expected that the reading group will be predominantly for postgraduate and postdoctoral scholars, although senior scholars are also very welcome. All those interested in attending should get in touch with the organiser by July 1, 2021: laura.jansen@bristol.ac.uk](https://poetry.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/files/2021/06/POSTER-PIZARNIK.jpg)
The Metre and Memorisation Project, funded by the Brigstow Institute at the University of Bristol, announces the Bristol by Heart poetry recitation contest in collaboration with Poetry by Heart and the Bristol Poetry Institute.
Details of the Prize
Contestants are required to recite a poem from memory. Poems chosen should be poems or extracts from poems of between fourteen and forty lines in length and in English. All poems must be published and not the work of participants. Beyond this, the choice of poems is up to students and their teachers. Poems can, for instance, be poems that are also being studied as part of regular school work, such as poems required for GCSE. Alternatively, they can be selected from the wide range of suitable poems on the Poetry by Heart website, or indeed from further afield. Why not choose poems that reflect Bristol’s diverse population or poems from its rich poetic history? Participants choosing a poem not on the Poetry by Heart website are asked to include a copy of the text of the poem learned along with their entry.
There are four age categories: 7+, 11+, 14+, 16+. Heats will be held in participating schools. The process of judging these heats will be left up to the individual school: judges can be teachers, the participants’ peer group, or a combination of two. The best 3-5 performances in each age category will then be uploaded onto the Poetry by Heart website for consideration by the judges. Students whose school / class is not participating in the competition can enter independently, providing that their entry is approved and uploaded by a teacher or parent/legal guardian.
We would encourage teachers and parents to make learning and performing the poems as enjoyable and inclusive a process as possible and to talk about different methods of memorisation. The judges will be looking for a high quality poetry recital rather than a dramatic interpretation, and we recommend that poems are performed in the reader’s natural accent. Further Tips on poetry recital can be found on the Poetry by Heart website. All participating students, whether shortlisted by the schools or not, are invited to fill in a questionnaire about their experience of memorisation. The data from these forms will be anonymised and used to help the Metre and Memorisation project into its research into the psychological effects of poetry memorisation. Three of the contestants who complete these forms will be chosen at random to receive a £10 book token.
There are four age categories: 7+, 11+, 14+, 16+
The Deadline for entries to be uploaded is 5pm on Friday, 2nd July.
Winners in each category will receive a £50 book token plus a £25 book token for their school libraries. The two runners up in each category will receive a £15 book token plus a £10 book token for their school libraries.
The Competition is open to children and young people in Bristol and the Surrounding Area. All schools in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire are eligible. If your school is from further afield and would like to take part, please contact the organisers who will make a discretionary decision.
Further details about how enter are available on the Learning Zone at poetrybyheart.org.uk.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.