Poetry Spring at St John’s College: an afternoon of poetry workshops, discussions and readings with British and international poets on Saturday 30 April

Join us to welcome in Poetry Spring on Saturday 30 April at St John’s College, an afternoon of poetry workshops, discussions and readings with British and international poets. All the events are free but places must be booked.

Poetry Spring is organised by Mina Gorji (Pembroke College) and Sasha Dugdale (St John’s College) and is funded by St John’s College and a grant from the Judith E Wilson Fund.

2pm-3.30pm To Dwell in a Shell: Poetry Workshop

Fellows Garden, St John’s

(Meet at St John’s Great Gate at 1.50pm, this will take place in the Lightfoot Room, Divinity School, if the weather is bad)

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard daydreams of living alone. To live alone, he says, is to dwell in a shell. This creative workshop withdraws into the iridescent interiors of shells, looking closely at forms of repetition and repair to consider the human, animal and mineral entanglements of solitude, survival and rest. Participants will be provided with poems, prompts and a shell, although you are welcome to bring your own.

Holly Corfield-Carr is leading this workshop. Holly is a poet, writer and researcher with an interest in site-specific writing practices and sculptural poetics. Her latest pamphlet is Subsong (National Trust, 2018). She is a research fellow at the University of Cambridge.

To book a place for To Dwell in a Shell follow the link to Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/to-dwell-in-a-shell-poetry-workshop-by-holly-corfield-carr-tickets-313235906027?aff=ebdsoporgprofile

3.30-4pm Tea and Coffee in the Divinity School (opposite St John’s College)

4pm-4.45pm Air Raid: Discussion and Reading

Lightfoot Room, Divinity School

Valzhyna Mort, poet and translator of Polina Barskova’s Air Raid, in discussion with translator Sasha Dugdale.

The Siege of Leningrad began in 1941 and lasted 872 days, resulting in the most destructive blockade in history. Air Raid (Ugly Duckling, 2021) takes us through the archives of memory and literature in this city of death. Polina Barskova’s polyphonic poems stretch the boundaries of poetic form – this is what we’re left with after poetry’s failure to save nations and people: post-death, post-Holocaust, post-Siege, post-revolution; post-marriage and post-literature. How does language react to such a catastrophe? And how does translation convey that catastrophe into a new language?

Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011) and, mostly recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020), named one of the best poetry books of 2020 by The New York Times and The NPR, and the winner of the 2020 International Griffin Poetry Prize.

Sasha Dugdale is the writer-in-residence at St John’s College. Her fifth collection Deformations (Carcanet, 2021) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and her translation of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

To book a place for Air Raid: Discussion and Reading follow the link to Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/air-raid-discussion-and-reading-tickets-313257590887?aff=ebdsoporgprofile

5pm-6pm Pavilion Poetry Launch: Readings

Lightfoot Room, Divinity School

The Pavilion Poetry Imprint of Liverpool University Press, edited by poet Deryn Rees-Jones, publishes three books a year in collaboration with the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool. Constantly surprising and risk-taking, in recent years Pavilion poets have won and been shortlisted for all the major UK awards, including the T. S. Eliot Prize, Costa and Forward Prizes. The list includes poets such as Bhanu Kapil, Nuar Alsadir, Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Mona Arshi. We are proud to launch this year’s Pavilion poets, Jemma Borg, Anita Pati, Denise Saul.

Image credit: Jemma borg (Charlotte Knee Photography)

Jemma Borg won the inaugural Ginkgo Prize in 2018 and The Rialto/RSPB Nature and Place Competition in 2017. Her first collection The Illuminated World (Eyewear, 2014) won the Fledgling Award and the New Writing Ventures Award for Poetry. She was a zoologist and evolutionary geneticist before working in scientific research management in the voluntary sector and in science publishing. Wilder (Pavilion, 2022) is her second collection. Selima Hill said of her first collection: ‘Jemma is a poet to watch and wonder at’.

Anita Pati’s debut poetry pamphlet Dodo Provocateur won The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition (2019) and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets. She has been a Jerwood/Arvon mentee, an Aldeburgh Eight participant, a winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize and a joint winner of the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize (2018/20). Hiding to Nothing (Pavilion Poetry, 2022) is her first collection and was described by Fiona Benson as ‘humane, fierce and original’.

Image credit: Denise Saul (Karolina Heller)

Denise Saul is the author of two pamphlets. White Narcissi (Flipped Eye Publishing, 2007) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and House of Blue (Rack Press) was a PBS Pamphlet Recommendation. She is the recipient of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and Fellow of The Complete Works. The Room Between Us (Pavilion Poetry, 2022) is her first collection and a PBS Recommendation for Summer 2022. Mona Arshi called it an ‘achingly tender debut’.

To book a place for Pavilion Poetry Launch follow the link to Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/pavilion-poetry-launch-readings-tickets-313264581797?aff=ebdsoporgprofile

6pm Drinks and refreshments in the Divinity School

6.45pm Valzhyna Mort and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin: Readings

Lecture Theatre, Divinity School

Readings by two of contemporary poetry’s leading international figures.

Image credit: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Aurelio Stoppini)

Born 1942 in Cork, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin taught English Renaissance literature at Trinity College, Dublin from 1966 to 2011. She was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2016-19. She has published eleven collections of poetry; the latest, The Mother House, received the Irish Times/ Poetry Now award in 2019. Her Collected Poems appeared in 2020 from Gallery Press and was awarded the Pigott Prize at the Listowel Writers’ Week in 2021. She has published translations of poetry from several languages, most recently Dánta Antonella Anedda, translated from Italian into Irish, published by Cois Life in 2019.