Eventhttps://doi.org/10.25620/e220705-1
Discussion, Staged Reading
5 Jul 2022

Poetry, Community, Translation

Poetry can unite and estrange us. In this event, poets and translators Vahni Anthony Capildeo, Christian Hawkey and Daniel Tiffany, will read a selection of their poetry and offer their reflections on the proximity and alienation of other people’s voices or even one’s own; on the sense of never quite being at home in language; and on the potential of poetry to open up not only habitable and shareable spaces but also haunted and unbridgeable distances.

Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo FRSL is Writer in Residence and Professor at the University of York, an Honorary Student of Christ Church, Oxford, and Charles Causley Trust Poet in Residence (2022). A Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction, Capildeo’s interests include traditional masquerade, silence, plurilingualism, and the poetics of place. The most recent of their eight books and nine pamphlets are Like a Tree, Walking (2021), which was a Poetry Book Society choice, and Gentle Housework of the Sacrifice(forthcoming). Capildeo is a contributing editor at PN Reviewand a contributing adviser for Blackbox Manifold. Current research (also facilitated by Pembroke College, Cambridge, 2021) centres on silence.

Christian Hawkey has written several full-length poetry collections: The Book of Funnels, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Citizen Of (Wave Books), and most recently: Sift (2021). He’s published numerous chapbooks, as well as the widely reviewed and celebrated cross-genre book Ventrakl (2010). A collaborative bi-lingual erasure made with the German poet Uljana Wolf, Sonne from Ort (2013). A selection of Ilse Aichinger’s short prose, Bad Words, translated with Uljana Wolf, appeared in 2019 (Seagull Books). His own work has been translated into over a dozen languages. He is currently at work on a co-translation (with Marouane Zakhir) of two books by the Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali.

Daniel Tiffany is the author of six collections of poetry, published variously by Wesleyan, Omnidawn, Noemi, and Action Books. In addition, five volumes of his literary criticism, including Toy Medium (2000) and Infidel Poetics (2009), have appeared over the last two decades, from presses such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago. His translations from French, Greek, and Italian have appeared in various journals, and he is a recipient of the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, as well as the author of the entry on ‘Lyric Poetry’ in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory.

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

Vahni Anthony Capildeo
Christian Hawkey
Daniel Tiffany
Irene Fantappiè

Organized by

Irene Fantappiè
Francesco Giusti
Laura Scuriatti
In cooperation with ICI Berlin and Bard College Berlin, and the EXC Temporal Communities

With the support of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership

In English

First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/poetry-community-translation/
Rights: © ICI Berlin

Part of the Symposium

Rethinking Lyric Communities

From the circulation of poetic forms across different languages and traditions around the globe, through the envisioning of national and transnational discursive communities, to the use of poetry in contemporary episodes of political resistance and its dissemination on social media, lyric poetry seems to be a privileged site for an inquiry into community formation and its politics. Various theoretical approaches cast poetry in this peculiar role, from French and French-oriented political philosophy, (exemplified in the famous exchange between Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy begun in the 1980s), to the reevaluations — in reader-response criticism as well as in postcolonial and decolonial studies — of poetry’s roots in orality and performance.

This workshop aims to bring the investigation of historical poetic communities into dialogue with recent developments in the theory of the lyric and in theories of community. While discussing a variety of poetic phenomena in modern European poetry that have been at the center of the critical debate — the poetics of the fragment, the unworking or désœuvrement of the work, the obscurity or polysemy of language, a change of aesthetic regime —, the workshop will also explore the lyric, in its longer history and transnational features, as a particular discursive mode that may offer alternative models of community formation.

This symposium consists of three parts: an Oxford session at the Christ Church Research Centre, on 23 June 2022, a Berlin session at the ICI Berlin, on 5 July, and a poetry event, also on 5 July, at the ICI Berlin with Vahni Anthony Capildeo, Christian Hawkey, and Daniel Tiffany, who will read a selection of their poetry and offer their reflections on poetry, community and translation.

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

Derek Attridge
Adele Bardazzi
Roberto Binetti
Philip Ross Bullock
Vahni Anthony Capildeo
Jonathan Culler
Irene Fantappiè
Francesco Giusti
Manuele Gragnolati
Peter D. McDonald
Emily McLaughlin
Jahan Ramazani
Laura Scuriatti
Daniel Tiffany
Anita Traninger

Organized by

Irene Fantappiè
Francesco Giusti
Laura Scuriatti
In cooperation with ICI Berlin, Bard College Berlin, and EXC Temporal Communities of FU Berlin

With the support of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership

Related Parts

Part of the Symposium

Containing also

Cite as: ‘Poetry, Community, Translation’, discussion, staged reading presented at the symposium Rethinking Lyric Communities, ICI Berlin, 5 July 2022 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e220705-1>