Poetry Workshop: History's Missing Documents
Deconstruct the subversive relationship between recorded history and poetry in this online poetry workshop led by poet and former journalist April Yee.
Starting with Muriel Rukeyser writing about the aftermath of an industrial health disaster in the 1930s, poets have manipulated, subverted, and destroyed official documents to reflect the incompleteness of the historical record and the limits of public memory.
In the current century, writers of colour in particular have turned to these techniques to overcome the limits of the line.
M. NourbeSe Philip, Tarfia Faizullah, Anthony Cody, Emily Jungmin Yoon, and Don Mee Choi communicate through innovative texts the effects of state or capitalist violence on bodies marginalised for their race, gender or nationality.
Highlighting techniques from these wide-ranging docu-poetic practices, participants in this workshop utilise personal or inherited memory, archival video, and Roland Barthes’ reflections on photography to create their own texts that fracture history’s apparent completeness.
The workshop is led by former Southbank Centre New Poets Collective member April Yee, a London-based writer, former journalist, and winner of the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Ivan Juritz Prize.
With generous support from the TS Eliot Foundation
Need to know
Tickets go off sale at 10am on the day of the workshop.
This taster session is part of a recruitment drive for the 2024/2025 cohort of Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective. Come along to this taster session if you are thinking of applying to the collective and would like to give it a try.
Find out more
For your visit
This event is held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall Southbank Centre
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