Poetry International Opening Night: Festival Summit
What role can poetry play in addressing the climate crisis? Four leading ecopoets gather to discuss the questions facing their craft, ahead of Sunday’s NPL at 70 event.
CAConrad, John Kinsella, Olive Senior and Yang Lian come together with chair Gareth Evans for a vital conversation to crown the first night of Poetry International.
This discussion comes ahead of the National Poetry Library’s 70th birthday event, where the same poets read their work.
Tonight they examine quandaries like: does poetry have an intimate and direct relationship with specific environments? Can poets provide the language needed to illuminate the world around us? And what practical actions do poets-as-activists make?
There is also some time set aside for you to ask the poets your own questions.
CAConrad is the author of nine books, including AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), which won the 2022 PEN Josephine Miles Award. They received a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship and a Lambda Award. A new collection of poetry, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, is forthcoming from Wave Books in 2024.
John Kinsella's recent books of poetry include Insomnia (Picador, 2019), Brimstone: A Book of Villanelles (Arc, 2020) and the verse novel Cellnight (Transit Lounge, 2023). His new collection, The Pastoraclasm (Salt), was published in the UK in March 2023. He is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Olive Senior is the Poet Laureate of Jamaica 2021 – 24. She is the award-winning author of 20 books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children's literature. Her many awards include Canada's Writers Trust Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Commonwealth Writers? Prize, an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies and the Gold Medal of the Institute of Jamaica.
Yang Lian was one of the original Misty Poets who reacted against the strictures of the Cultural Revolution. His work was criticised in China in 1983, formally banned in 1989 when he organised memorial services for the dead of Tiananmen, and he was in exile thereafter until 1995, finally settling in London in 1997. Translations of his poetry include five collections with Bloodaxe Books. He is co-editor with WN Herbert of Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2012), and was awarded the International Nonino Prize in 2012.
The chair for the event is Gareth Evans, a London-based writer, editor, film/event producer and host, and documentary mentor. He works on special projects for the London Review of Books and has curated their Screen at Home, as well as co-curating for many international film festivals.
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