Poetry - The Other Side of Prose

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The Other Side of Prose - Valerio Magrelli in conversation with Jamie McKendrick

How does it move about in space? Where does it cast its shadow (and can a word cast shadow)? How can it be observed from behind or set against the recession of space? I should like to render in poetry the equivalent of perspective in painting. To give a poem the depth of a rabbit escaping through fields and make it distant whilst already it speeds away from the one who's watching and veers towards the frame becoming smaller all the time and never moving an inch. The countryside observes and disposes itself around the creature around a point that's vanishing.

Valerio Magrelli is the author of four poetry collections, for which he has won the Mondello Prize, the Viareggio Prize for poetry, and the prestigious Montale Prize. In November 2003 the Accademia dei Lincei awarded him the Premio Antonio Feltrinelli. A professor of French literature at the University of Cassino, he is also a frequent contributor to the cultural pages of several Italian dailies. His poems have been translated into English, French, Spanish and numerous other languages.

Jamie McKendrick has published six books of poetry including The Marble Fly, which won the Forward Prize, and most recently Out There, which won the Hawthornden Prize. He edited The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems and he has translated two novels by Giorgio Bassani, a verse play by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Valerio Magrelli's poems, The Embrace, which won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the John Florio Italian Translation Prize in 2010. Archipelago, his translation of Antonella Anedda's poems is due to be published in 2014.

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Time: 6:30pm