Poetry and War

Contact: RSVP http://poetryandwar.eventbrite.co.uk

Poetry and War: Carolyn Forché, Brian Turner and Ilya Kaminsky
How do poets engage with war in the twenty-first century?

As part of the University of Liverpool's Festival of Ideas commemoration of World War I – and as part of the Poetry Society's Annual Lecture 'Poet as Witness' programme – the School of English at the Univeristy of Liverpool hosts three modern poets who have written about war and their own experiences of conflict.

The activist, award-winning poet and editor of Poetry of Witness (Norton, 2014) Carolyn Forché will be joined by Iraq Veteran, memoirist and esteemed poet Brian Turner (whose poem 'The Hurt Locker' lent its title to the Hollywood film) and the Russian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky, whose collection Dancing in Odessa was heralded as an astonishing debut.

Generously supported by the Poetry Society, this event brings together three American poets in a rare reading in the UK, followed by a Q&A discussion of modern war, poetry and witness.
Tickets

The event is free, but please RSVP at the Poetry and War eventbrite page
The Poet As Witness - The Poetry Society Annual Lecture

American poet Carolyn Forché gives the Poetry Society Lecture, exploring how poets have been shaped by extreme events.
From William Blake, caught up in the Gordon Riots, to Emily Dickinson living through the American Civil War, or Thom Gunn watching his friends die of AIDS, what has been the impact of being an eye-witness to suffering?

Using the work of John MacRae and Isaac Rosenberg who fought on the battlefields of World War I, to dissidents who lived with surveillance, internment and exile - such as Akmatova and Mandelstam, American poet Forché examines poems composed at the limits of human endurance.

About the speakers

Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché is Professor of English at Georgetown University, Washington DC, co-editor of the anthologies Against Forgetting (Norton, 1993) and Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English: 1500-2001(Norton, 2014). Her collections include Blue Hour (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2003) and The Angel of History (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us (HarperCollins, 1982), which received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes (Yale University Press, 1976), which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her new book In the Lateness of the World is due out with Bloodaxe in 2015.

Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992, she received the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, given for distinguished poetic achievement.

Brian TurnerBrian Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South Korea for a year before serving for seven years in the U.S. Army. He was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. Then in November 2003 he was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. His first book, Here, Bullet, chronicles his time in Iraq. Turner has been featured on National Public Radio, the Newshour with Jim Lehrer and the BBC. He has received a NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship and a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Turner has taught English at Fresno City College.

Ilya KaminskyIlya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993. He is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the Whiting Writer's Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. In 2008, Kaminsky was awarded Lannan Foundation's Literary Fellowship. His anthology of 20th century poetry in translation, Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, was published by Harper Collins in March, 2010. Kaminsky has worked as a law clerk for San Francisco Legal Aid and the National Immigration Law Center. Currently, he teaches English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University.

Entry: Free

Time: 5:00pm