A combined poetry reading and symposium

Symposium

The symposium aims to bring together young scholars and practicing poets for a discussion on the connections between poetry and ecology, both in terms of thematics, ethics, poetics and poetic form.

• Saturday 15 dec., 14:00, Uni Bastions | B214

Martin Leer (UNIGE)

The Role of Place in a Global Ecological Crisis: The Importance of John Kinsella.

Rachel Nisbet (UNIL)

Ecology, Ethics and Literature

Arnaud Barras (UNIGE)

Ecopoetic Metafiction: Alexis Wright’s Australia.

Lily Dessau (UNIGE)

Eco-Sounding in the Poetry of John Clare.

Oran McKenzie (UNIGE)

Light and Attention in Modern Poetry.

Poetry Reading: John Kinsella & Tracy Ryan

• Saturday 15 dec., 18:30, Société de lecture

John Kinsella (born 1963) is Australia’s leading poet of his generation, with more than 30 collections of poetry, essays, autobiography and fiction. His is first of all a poetry of immersion in the landscape around his family property Wheatlands in the Wheat Belt of Western Australia, which he evokes both for its stark visual beauty and the stories it tells of environmental devastation due to monoculture and irrigation-induced salinity. But Kinsella is also a writer with a global reach, who is a Fellow of Churchill College Cambridge and a former professor in the creative writing programme of Kenyon College, Ohio. He now teaches at Curtin University in Perth. The great American critic Harold Bloom, who edited Kinsella’s Selected Poems: Peripheral Light for Norton, sees him as the contemporary heir of Percy B. Shelley for his sense of the prophetic calling of poetry and political commitment to environmentalism, veganism, indigenous rights and pacifism. Kinsella has drawn his poetic models from a wide range of sources from Hesiod to Hölderlin and contemporary literary and linguistic theory. He also combines the strengths of his two major Australian forebears: the rhetorical power of Judith Wright and the linguistic richness of Les Murray. The postmodernist playfulness in his work does not mean that he eschews the direct and even uncomfortably personal.

John Kinsella will be performing with his wife Tracy Ryan (born 1964), who is a poet, novelist and translator especially from French. Ryan’s poems often take their point of departure in a critical engagement with other poets and in her feminism, but they achieve an often surprising, witty, spiky, polychromatic effect.

Production

• Département d'Anglais, Faculté des lettres de l'UNIGE
• Activités culturelles de l'UNIGE