Category: Poems

Reading and Discussion with Janet Hendrickson and Rebecca Kosick

Posted on by 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

Posted on by rebecca.kosick

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

Posted on by craig.savage

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.

Announcing the 2020 Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading

Posted on by rebecca.kosick

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.

 

A poem for Stephen Lawrence, 25 years on

Posted on by amanda.woodman-hardy

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.

A poem for the first day of Spring

Posted on by amanda.woodman-hardy

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

Posted on by amanda.woodman-hardy

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

Posted on by amanda.woodman-hardy

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

Posted on by amanda.woodman-hardy
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

Posted on by amanda.woodman-hardy

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.