Category: Uncategorized

Caribbean Nights: Poetry

Date: Thursday 18th April
Venue: Watershed (Cinema 3)
Time: 20:00- 22:00 (please note: this was previously listed as a 19:30 start)

Book Launch: Secret Poetics (no event link, just turn up)

Page Against the Machine: Poetry and AI

Readings, Performance, Conversation

Date: Tuesday, October 31
Time: 3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. EDT

Please join us for a selection of poetry readings and performance by Greek poet Phoebe Giannisi and Giannisi’s poet-translator Brian Sneeden, in conversation with Laura Jansen.

Award-winner Phoebe Giannisi (Athens, 1964) is among Greece’s foremost contemporary poets. She is the author of eight books of poetry, three of which, Homerica (2017), Chimera (2019), and Cicada (2022), have now been translated into English by poet-translator Brian Sneeden. Her award-winning work focuses on field of ecopoetics, on the polyphony of voices attached to place, and the ethnography of the animated subjects that inhabit it. Bodies, weather, earth, seeds, orality, writing, love, female condition, mythic personas, sound, multiplicity, language, and animal beings constitute the primary subjects for Giannisi’s poetic activity. This hybrid event offers a unique opportunity to experience Giannisi’s performative poetry both in modern Greek and English, followed by an in-conversation about her multimediatic poetic practice and thought.

This event will be held virtually on Zoom, as well as in person. Please register for the Zoom here.

The Bristol Poetry Institute is proud to support this event, hosted by the Center for Hellenic Studies (Harvard) in collaboration with the APGRD (University of Oxford), the Michael Marks Trust, and New Directions Publishing.

The Bristol Poetry Institute, in collaboration with the Instituto Ramón 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.

Mon, 24 April 2023, 18:00 – 21:00 BST

Wills Memorial Building

1.11 Old Council Chamber

Queens Rd Bristol BS8 1RL

Book your free place here

About the poets 

Míriam Cano is a journalist, writer and translator. A lecturer and director at the Bloom School where she gives seminars on Poetic Reading and Creation, she also works with several Catalan cultural media outlets as a columnist and literary journalist. Notable in her career as a writer are several collections of poems, among them Buntsandstein (Red Sandstone, Viena, 2013), winner of the 2012 Martí Dot prize, Ancoratge (Anchorage, Terrícola, 2016), and Vermell de Rússia (Russian Red, laBreu Edicions, 2020). She also wrote the short story “La Comuna de París” (The Paris Commune) in the jointly authored volume Cremen Cels (Burning Skies, laBreu Edicions, 2017), a project in collaboration with Martí Sales and Antònia Vicens. As a translator she has rendered into Catalan works by authors including Emily Dickinson, Albert Camus, Sandra Cisneros, Maggie Nelson, Lauren Groff, Martha Nussbaum, Joana Russ and John Ashbery. She is also the coeditor of the magazine Carn de Cap.

Jaume C. Pons Alorda (Caimari, Mallorca, 1984) holds a bachelor’s degree in English Philology and a masters in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature and Cultural Management from the University of the Balearic Islands. He is an award-winning writer, translator, publisher, and creative writing teacher. He in the author of multiple poetry collections, including the trilogy Tots els sepuclres (2015), as well as Cala foc als ossos (2016), Era (2018), Riu, bèstia (2023) and Mil súmmums (2022), among others. He has also published prose works, such as Faula (2012) and Ciutat de Mal (2019). Pons Alorda has translated Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth , and Elizabeth Bishop into Catalan, and he is currently working on translations of Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Iris Murdoch, Edgar Allan Poe and William Blake. He is currently editor of the Artificium and Debiaix series for the publishing house, Lleonard Muntaner. Additionally, he writes articles in the press (Ara Balears, Lletres Bàrbares, El Temps) and participates in the podcast L’illa de Maians at the Ona Llibres bookshop in Barcelona.

Xavier Mas Craviotto (Navàs, 1996) studied Catalan Philology and a postgraduate program in Language Consultancy and Publishing Services at the University of Barcelona. For two years, he worked at the Research Centre for Sociolinguistics and Communication (CUSC-UB). He is currently a lecturer at the University of Bristol, where he teaches Cataln language and culture, and also works as a proofreader for Catalan publishing houses. He is one of the cofounders of “Com ho diria”, a digital platform that specializes in slang used by young Catalan speakers. He is also an award-winning author of poetry and prose fiction. At the age of 17, he was a finalist in the Jordi Sierra i Fabra Literary Prize of Spain and Latin America and, since then, he has won more than twenty narrative and poetry awards. His first novel, La mort lenta (2019) won the Documenta Prize, and he has recently published his second novel, La pell del món (2023). He has also published three poetry collections: Renills de cavall negre (2019), which won the Salvador Iborra prize, La gran nàusea (2021) and La llum subterrània (2023), which was awarded the Ausiàs March prize. His short stories have been included in collaborative anthologies and he has participated in many poetry readings and panel discussions about language and literature.

Eduard Escoffet (Barcelona, 1979) is a poet and visual/sound artist. He has worked across many styles of poetry (visual and written poetry, installations, oral poetry, poetic action), but principally is principally invested in sound poetry and poetry performance. He has performed in poetry festivals and events across Europe, China, the United States, South Africa, and many countries in Latin America. Starting from an exploration of the body, the voice and the text, his poetry expands into territories such as politics, sex and architecture, with special attention to their political meaning. He has presented his work in venues and festivals all over the world, and has created sound and audiovisual pieces for several institutions and festivals. He has published the poetry collections Gaire (2012), El terra i el cel (2013), and Menys i tot (2017) in Catalan; the artist’s book Estramps (2021) with the artist Evru; as well as prints of his visual and graphic poetry. Escoffet has also released two records with the electronic music group Bradien: Pols (2012) and Escala (2015). He is now member of the band Barba Corsini (www.barbacorsini.net). http://propost.org/escoffet. Videos: http://youtube.com/txtstate. Sound: http://soundcloud.com/txtstate

We are delighted to announce that this year’s Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading by Denise Riley has been rescheduled and will take place on 21 April 2023 at 6PM in the Wills Memorial Building Great Hall. 

Book your free ticket here.

Over the last five decades, Denise Riley has steadily acquired the reputation of being, in the words of Simon Armitage, ‘one of the best poets around’. Sarah Perry, writer of The Essex Serepent, and Max Porter, writer of Grief is a Thing With Feathers, each called her 2016 volume, Say Something Back ‘the best thing I’ve read in ages’, while Robert Macfarlane declared the book’s ‘heart-piercing elegy to her son Jacob, “A Part Song”: the most powerful contemporary poem I’ve read in years’. 2022 sees the much anticipated publication of its successor, Lurex. The evening promises to be enjoyable, thought provoking and moving.

This spring, the BPI returns with another series of short Zoom readings. Take a poetry break with us Tuesday evenings and enjoy an opportunity to hear Tjawangwa Dema, Nathaniel Farrell, and William Thompson share their recent work.

6pm BST Tues May 3      Tjawangwa Dema

6pm BST Tues May 10    Nathaniel Farrell

6pm BST Tues May 17    William Thompson

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

Our Readers

Tjawangwa Dema is author of The Careless Seamstress, winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. Her chapbook Mandible was published as part of the New-Generation African Poets box set. She has received fellowships and residencies from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, Northwestern University’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Danish International Visiting Artist program, amongst others. Tjawangwa has given readings/facilitated workshops in over twenty countries and her poetry and essays on poetic pedagogies have been featured in various publications, most recently New Daughters of Africa, Botswana Women Write and the MLA’s Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media. Tjawangwa sits on a number of poetry festival and institute boards and is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol. Her poetry has been translated into several languages. In addition to two book translations, her collection, an/other pastoral, was published by No Bindings in April 2022. Photo credit Petra Rolinec.

Born and raised in Western Pennsylvania, Nathaniel Farrell is a poet, collage artist, and educator. His first two books of poetry — Newcomer (2014) and Lost Horizon (2019) — are published by Ugly Duckling Presse. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Columbia University, where he studied Modernist American poetry, and currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri where he teaches composition at Washington University. His collages have been included in exhibitions in New York and Missouri and, like his poetry, engage problems of American national identity, including settler colonial fantasies, consumer culture, and environmental degradation.

William Thompson is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol. Born in Cambridgeshire in 1991, his work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Wild Court, The Honest Ulsterman, One Hand Clapping, Ink Sweat & Tears and The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-21 (Eyewear).

The Bristol Poetry Institute looks forward to hosting poet Xavier Mas Craviotto for a launch of his new book La gran nàusea. Join us for a reading and conversation with the poet facilitated by James Hawkey and introduced by Joanna Crow.

Free and open to all, booking required

La gran nàusea is a book of poems that delves into a process of exhaustion and weariness. An erosion that consumes the bonds between consciousness and reality, and inevitably leads not only to a feeling of tedium, but also to a hyperconsciousness of unreality and an invasion of strangeness. Taking as its starting point the symbol of the nausea that can be found in Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous novel and also in some of Nietzsche’s works, together with other authors like Lars Svendsen, Peter Handke, Byung-Chul Han or filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman, the poems of this book rummage in the apathy raised in a world of demolished senses and wasted meanings, in the deep malaise that we have inside when we feel close the presence of an invasive, compact and solid void. La gran nàusea is a book about the (capital-V) Void. A Void that, like from the nausea to the vomit, starts being an inner and intangible discomfort and ends up being an outer and material reality; a deified Void that we liturgically venerate; a Void that goes from the individual to the community; a Void that in the beginning of the book pulls down a house and at the end of the book devours a whole city.

La gran nàusea is divided in three parts —repleció, antiperistalsi and èmesi—whose titles correspond to the three phases of vomit. In these poems, the reader will embark on a poetic journey with an I and a You that struggle to understand not only each other but also a world that fades away right before their eyes. A world in which anything makes sense because words have been worn away and have lost their capability of evoking and attributing meanings and identities.

Xavier Mas Craviotto (Navàs, Catalonia, 1996) is currently the Catalan lector at the University of Bristol. He studied Catalan Philology in Universitat de Barcelona and a postgraduate degree in Language Consultancy and Publishing Services at the same university. He also collaborated for two years with The Research Centre for Sociolinguistics and Communication (CUSC-UB). He is one of the founders of Com ho diria, an online platform focused on the use of slang amongst young Catalan speakers. When he was 17, he was finalist in the Jordi Sierra i Fabra Literary Award in Spain and Latin America, and from then on he has won around twenty literary awards of narrative and poetry. He has published the novel La mort lenta (‘The slow death’, 2019), with which he won the Documenta Award 2018, and the book of poems Renills de cavall negre (‘Black horses’ neighs’, 2019), awarded with Certamen Art Jove Salvador Iborra Prize. He has participated in several poetry readings and in some collective books of short stories along with other Catalan authors.

Joanna Crow is Associate Professor in Latin American Studies. She has worked at the University of Bristol since 2006 and is currently Head of Subject for the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies. Her research focuses on Latin American cultural and intellectual history. She is particularly interested in histories of race, racism, and anti-racism. Her forthcoming book with Palgrave Macmillan is a study of transnational networks and debates about indigenous rights in early twentieth century Chile and Peru.

James Hawkey is Catalan Studies Coordinator at the University of Bristol. His research is focused on Catalan Linguistics and Cultural Studies. He has worked at the University of Bristol since 2014, prior to which he held positions at the Sorbonne University in Paris, as well as the Centre for Catalan Studies at Queen Mary, University of London.

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.