Other Worlds: Contemporary Ekphrastic Poetry

^{(Image credits: Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash; Vadim Babenko on Unsplash)}

This one-day Creative Writing symposium will explore contemporary approaches to ekphrasis, an interdisciplinary practice involving poetry and visual/non-textual art forms.

While ekphrastic poems have typically consisted of responses to visual artworks like paintings and sculptures (e.g., W. H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, Rita Dove’s ‘The Venus of Willendorf’), ekphrasis can encompass poetry inspired by many other kinds of art forms, such as films, television programmes, video games, music, theatre and dance performances, and more. This symposium will consider how poets interact with non-textual works in a variety of experimental ways.

The day will consist of panels and Q&A discussions that combine the critical and the creative, with poets giving presentations on their approaches to ekphrasis as well as reading from their own work. Speakers include Emily Berry, Janine Bradbury, Anthony V. Capildeo, Alycia Pirmohamed, Padraig Regan, and Kandace Siobhan Walker.

This symposium is part of a programme of events produced by the Contemporary Cultures of Writing Research Group at the Open University. It is supported by OpenARC, the Open University Arts Research Centre. With additional support from the Department of English and Creative Writing at the Open University and the Institute of English Studies, the University of London.

Registration: There is a £10 symposium fee. The day includes complimentary lunch and refreshments. Book here.

Key terms: Creative writing, poetry, ekphrasis, interdisciplinary, visual art, music, digital media, film, television, place, masquerade, eco-poetics, contemporary

Venue: Room G37, Ground Floor, Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

When: Wednesday 29th May, 10.30am – 3.30pm (arrival and complimentary refreshments from 9.45am)

Contact: IESEvents@sas.ac.uk  or  CCWritingOU@open.ac.uk

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Schedule:

9.45–10.30 Registration, tea and coffee

10.30–11.30 First panel – Chaired by Jane Yeh

     Kandace Siobhan Walker – Digital media and Ekphrasis – Kandace will be discussing the intersection of contemporary poetry and digital media, from video games to television streaming to social networks. She will showcase her new creative work and explore how poets might use ekphrasis to navigate with in digital landscapes.

     Alycia Pirmohamed – The Water Library: On Witnessing – In 2023, Alycia was invited to write a poetic response to the exhibition ‘The Unbearable Halfness of Being’ by Jumana Emil Abboud, at Cample Line gallery in Scotland. The exhibition explored water sources in ‘Ein Qiniya as spirited places, which connected with themes of water and spirituality in Alycia’s work. This talk will reflect on questions concerning ethics, respect, and responsibility to the artist while writing as a witness.

11.45–12.45 Second panel – Chaired by Joanne Reardon

     Janine Bradbury – Sounds Like Teen Spirit: Writing Through Nirvana’s Nevermind – Janine will be discussing her recent creative practice, which has been influenced by Nirvana’s 1991 hit ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. She will question not only the potential of a poem to describe or echo the sonic (or perhaps more accurately, rhythmic) properties of song, but its ability to recall and reanimate music video. She will explore the relationship between such writing and sensations of temporal collapse, flashbacks, and nostalgia.

     Emily Berry – ‘Writing’ Dreams and Ekphrasis – Emily will deliver an ‘annotated’ reading on the theme of dreams and ekphrasis, presenting poems written in response to dreams and various art forms, including painting, photography, music, film, and television. Asking whether a poem that ‘writes’ a dream could be considered ekphrasis, she will offer notes on the relationship between dreaming and engaging with works of art, and argue that these imaginative encounters may be intrinsically interwined.

12.45–2.00 Lunch

2.00–3.00 Third panel – Chaired by Jennie Owen

     Anthony V. Capildeo – Becoming Sailor: Embodiment, Ekphrasis, Place – Trinidadian traditional masquerade is not about putting on a costume. It is about transformation of self, channelling traditions that have converged on one small island from a wide variety of geographies and histories, some violent, some quiet, in creolizations that go beyond the bounds of ‘identity’. Claiming and activating the roads, dancers re-pattern creative possibilities, linking the dead and the living. What does it mean for a writer to enter and, later, reflect on these transformations? How might ekphrasis, the poetry of walking, the poetry of dancing, and place writing fuse in one body of work?

     Padraig Regan – Ekphrasis, Eros and Ecology – Taking as its starting points Anne Carson’s observation that ‘Eros is an issue of boundaries’, and the notion that ekphrasis itself is a mode of writing attuned to boundaries (between the verbal and the visual, the temporal and the spatial, motion and stasis, etc.), this presentation will apply techniques of ekphrasis to writing about non-human-made objects as a way of thinking about to what extent the boundary between the human and the non-human may be recast by an eco-poetics of visual pleasure.

3.00–3.30 p.m. Plenary and closing remarks

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Information about the speakers (in order of appearance):

Kandace Siobhan Walker is a writer and artist of Jamaican-Canadian, Saltwater Geechee and Welsh heritage. She writes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and creates moving-image and installation works. She is the author of Cowboy (CHEERIO, 2023), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and Kaleido (Bad Betty Press, 2022).

Alycia Pirmohamed is the author of the collection Another Way to Split Water (Polygon, 2022, and YesYes Books, 2022). Her other works include Hinge (ignitionpress, 2020), Faces that Fled the Wind (BOAAT Press, 2019), and the collaborative work Second Memory with Pratyusha (Guillemot Press, 2021). Her nonfiction debut, A Beautiful and Vital Place, won the Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing and is forthcoming with Canongate. She currently teaches on the Creative Writing Master’s at the University of Cambridge.

Janine Bradbury is a poet and critic. She is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Writing and Culture at the University of York. Her poems have been published by Oxford Poetry, Magma, and the Emma Press, and her debut pamphlet is forthcoming with ignitionpress. She was a recipient of a 2020 Poetry London Mentoring Prize, a finalist for the 2022 Aurora Prize for Writing, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition. Her wide-ranging academic criticism has been published by Palgrave Macmillan, Bloomsbury, Routledge, and others. She’s been a repeat guest on BBC Radio 4 and has written for the Guardian.

Emily Berry is a poet, writer, and editor living in London. She is the author of three books of poems published by Faber and Faber – Dear Boy (2013), Stranger, Baby (2017), and Unexhausted Time (2022) – and a co-writer of The Breakfast Bible (Bloomsbury, 2013), a compendium of breakfasts. Her lyric essay ‘In the Secret Country of Her Mind’, on dreams, agoraphobia, and the imagination, appears in the limited edition artist’s book Many Nights (2021) by Jacqui Kenny. She is editor-in-chief of the bedtime stories app Sleep Worlds. (Image credit: Sophie Davidson)

Trinidadian Scottish writer Anthony V. Capildeo FRSL is Writer in Residence at the University of York. Their work includes responses to Launceston’s environment for the Causley Trust. Recent books include A Happiness (Intergraphia, 2022) and Polkadot Wounds (Carcanet, forthcoming July 2024). They served as a judge for the 2023 Jhalak Prize. (Image credit: Andrew Latimer)

Padraig Regan's debut collection, Some Integrity (Carcanet, 2022), won the Clarissa Luard Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. They are the author of two poetry pamphlets: Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). In 2015 they were a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2020 they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Prize. They hold a PhD from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University Belfast, where they were a Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow in 2021. They are currently Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge University.

Information about the panel chairs (in order of appearance):

Jane Yeh’s most recent collection, Discipline (Carcanet, 2019), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She was named a Next Generation poet by the PBS for The Ninjas (2012), while her first collection, Marabou (2005), was shortlisted for the Forward, Whitbread, and Jerwood Aldeburgh poetry prizes. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University. (Image credit: Jon Stone)

Joanne Reardon works extensively with visual artists on site-specific projects in museums and art galleries. Her collaborative work with artists includes publications in exhibitions including ‘Medusa and Her Sisters’ with Natalie Sirett (Burgh House Museum, Hampstead, 2019), ‘Still Life with Black Birds’ with Richard Kenton Webb (Corinium Museum, Cirencester, 2015), and ‘Mythopoeia’ with Iain Andrews (Warrington Art Gallery and Museum, 2012). Her novel The Weight of Bones (Cinnamon Press, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2017 Cinnamon Debut Novel Award. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University.

Jennie E. Owen is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University. Her writing has been widely published online and in anthologies and literary journals. She is reading for a PhD in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, focusing on poetry and traumascapes. Her ekphrastic poetry is featured in the anthology Mischief of One Kind and Another (Nine Pens Press, 2024), and her pamphlet The Horses Still Run will be published in 2024 by Flight of the Dragonfly Press.