“A lecture on Anne Stevenson”: David Fuller

Professor Fuller will describe Anne Stevenson’s poetry overall, with some focus on the books “Correspondences” (1974) and “Completing the Circle” (2020), but with examples of individual poems from different periods of her life, and with brief accounts of her other writings (biography and criticism), illustrating with audio and video examples of Stevenson reading her own work

David Fuller is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Durham. He is the author of “Blake’s Heroic Argument” (1988), “James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’” (1992), “Signs of Grace” (Cassell, 1995, with David Brown), and essays on a range of poetry, drama and novels from medieval to contemporary. He edited “Tamburlaine the Great” for the Clarendon Press complete works of Marlowe (1998), “William Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose” (Longman Annotated Texts, 2000), and co-edited (with Patricia Waugh) “The Arts and Sciences of Criticism” (1999), and (with Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton) “The Recovery of Beauty” (2015). His edition (with Corinne Saunders) of “Pearl”, modernized by Victor Watts, was published by Enitharmon (2005). “The Life in the Sonnets”, with a complete recording of the poems, was published in the series ‘Shakespeare Now!’ (2011), and his “Shakespeare and the Romantics” in the series ‘Oxford Shakespeare Topics’ (2021). He trained as a Musicologist and writes on opera and ballet.

“Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015”: Wolfgang Görtschacher, Jerzy Jarniewicz, David Malcolm

What are some of the recurrent forms and genres of contemporary British and Irish poetry? What are the relations of fixed forms and free forms, of tradition and the avant-garde? What are some of the groups and movements of poets in this period? Have the voices of women writers and Black writers become more important over the past few decades? What of poetry from the regions of Britain? Who are the poets everyone knows, and who are the poets everyone should know? What institutions underlie the writing and publishing of poetry in Britain and in Ireland?

These and many other topics are raised in “The Companion to British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015,” published in 2020 by Wiley-Blackwell and edited by Wolfgang Görtschacher and David Malcolm. In this meeting Görtschacher and Malcolm will discuss “The Companion” and the issues it raises. They are joined by the distinguished poet and scholar Jerzy Jarniewicz.

Dr Wolfgang Görtschacher is Senior Assistant Professor at the University of Salzburg. An expert on the institutional background to contemporary poetry, he is also a widely-published translator and scholar of modern verse. He is owner-director of the small press Poetry Salzburg and editor of “Poetry Salzburg Review”. For many years, he has been a regular guest at the Between.Pomiędzy Festival.

Professor Jerzy Jarniewicz is a Polish poet, translator, and literary critic, who lectures in English at the University of Łódż. He is editor of “Literatura na świecie”, a much-published scholar and poet, a regular guest at the Between.Pomiędzy Festival, and a contributor to “The Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry”.

Professor David Malcolm teaches at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. He has been involved with the Between.Pomiędzy Festival since 2010.

“Poetry in Scotland Today”. Moderator: Monika Szuba

Thursday, 13 May 2021, 13.00 CET

The premise for the seminar originates in Kathleen Jamie’s statement that “what provokes poems, all poems, is the curious business of being in the world”. Considering the flourish-ing of creativity in Scotland, the discussion will revolve around poetic representations of this moment. How do poets explore “the curious business of being in the world” in, and through, their work? In what ways do they evoke time experienced through place by em-ploying language and other means? What are the main themes, forms, movements and trends? These and other questions will provide the essence of the discussion.

Guests:

Dr Lindsay Blair (University of the Highlands and Islands)

Dr Robin MacKenzie (University of St Andrews)

Prof. Camille Manfredi (Université de Bretagne Occidentale)

Prof. Julian Wolfreys (Uniwersytet Gdański)

Chair: Dr Monika Szuba (Uniwersytet Gdański)

Monika Szuba – literary scholar and translator. From 2011 to 2017 Deputy Director for Research of the Between.Pomiędzy Festival. Author of “Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World: Burnside, Jamie, Robertson and White” (Edinburgh University Press 2019).

Julian Wolfreys, “For These Days”

“For These Days” is an album of progressive rock songs and instrumentals by Behind the Sofa, the alter ego of Julian Wolfreys. Behind the Sofa is a “virtual collective”, an imagined band for these times, in which Julian Wolfreys plays all the instruments, composes, and produces.

The album is available at Bandcamp:

Julian Wolfreys is an independent scholar, writer, poet, and musician. The author and editor of over forty volumes, he has taught in the USA, Europe, and Great Britain.