Price: Free
Time: 18:00 - 19:00
Captioned ✓ BSL Interpreted ✓

Poetry has long explored contrasts between the pastoral and the metropolitan, industrialisation and environmentalism. What is poetry’s role in portraying or, indeed, critiquing the city? What further possibilities, or perhaps limitations, do poets encounter when they consider the sounds, crowds, nightlife, business, communities, architecture and, indeed, green spaces found in urban areas? Join Samantha Walton, Jason Baskin and Cliff Williamson in this panel discussion, chaired by Madhu Krishnan, as they discuss poems of past and present and consider what it really means to ‘write the city’.

This event will be BSL interpreted and live captioned.

Presented in partnership with Bristol Ideas and Bristol Poetry Institute.

MADHU KRISHNAN:

Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures at the University of Bristol, where she currently serves as Director for the Centre for Black Humanities. She is author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (2014), Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel (2018) and Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (2018). She is currently working on a five-year project funded by the ERC titled 'Literary Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa: Commons, Publics and Networks of Practice'.

SAMANTHA WALTON:

Samantha Walton is a writer, researcher and editor, based in Bristol. Her most recent book, Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure (Bloomsbury) is a work of nature writing and cultural history which explores the nature-wellbeing connection in the context of ecological crisis and late capitalism. Her poetry includes Self Heal (Boiler House Press), a collection of ecological lyrics, and Bad Moon (Spam Press), an ecogothic feminist horror story about the end of the world. She is Reader in Modern Literature at Bath Spa University and Director of the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities.

CLIFF WILLIAMSON:

Dr Cliff Williamson is Senior Lecturer in History in the School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities at Bath Spa University. He has written on the history of public health, urban politics, popular culture and religion, especially on the subject of his home city of Glasgow. In addition, he has written about US presidential history, the faith of Margaret Thatcher, Teddy Boys and the Beatles. He lives in Bath with his cat, Dexter.

JASON BASKIN:

Jason Baskin is Senior Lecturer at University of Exeter, specializing in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture. The author of Modernism Beyond the Avant-Garde: Embodying Experience, he has recently written on poetry and gentrification in Vancouver. In 2022 he led a GW4 network in the Urban Humanities, and now co-directs a cross-disciplinary urban research group at Exeter. He is currently writing a book about literature and visual culture in the age of planetary urbanization.

Part of Lyra - Bristol Poetry Festival 2023.

Entry requirements: — Read more — Read less