Versopolis podcast

Chinese contemporary poetry is flourishing. The most exciting poetic voices come from the 200 million migrant workers working in China. This phenomenon is still largely unknown, even though some of these workers come west to pursue their creative pursuits. The Chinese Swiss-born poet Yang Lian is one of the seminal voices of Chinese contemporary poetry from the 1980s onwards, when his work with the Misty poets combined traditional Chinese poetry forms with western modernism. He posits that every poet is the centre of the concentric circle that radiates outwards and intersects with his peers, family and society at large. Yang rejects the simplistic individual-collective dichotomy of society and states that poetry should be intimately connected with life and language. What if all poetry is in fact just one large piece of art, transcending languages, traditions and cultures? What if at the centre, this project is nothing more but an endless pursuit of a conscience’s perpetual questioning of itself?

Yang Lian is a poet and writer, who has published fifteen collections of poems, two collections of prose and one selection of essays in Chinese. His work has also been translated into more than twenty languages, including English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and many Eastern European languages. His work has been reviewed as ‘like MacDiarmid meets Rilke with Samurai sword drawn!’, ‘one of the most representative voices of Chinese literature’ and ‘one of the great world poets of our era’.

Icelandic literature may be insular but is not a monolith. Even though the nationalistic movement in Iceland eliminated dialectical variation, the language is evolving in interesting ways due to an increased influx of immigrants. Dr Lara Hoffmann, a sociologist and a postdoctoral researcher, focuses on the linguistic and creative aspects of human migrations. The number of immigrants in Iceland increased nearly 5-fold in 19 years and for many, literature is one the seminal ways to retain their sense of identity and build community. Through participation in the multilingual collective and publisher Ós Pressan, writers from different cultures meet to share their prose and poetry. Also joining the podcast is Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, an Icelandic poet and writer, whose participation in the Nýhil collective helped spark the Icelandic ‘pans and pots revolution’. Although activism and poetry have fundamentally different goals, Eirikur’s poetry demonstrates that dadaistic experiments may be more effective than mere political slogans.

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is an Icelandic experimental poet and novelist. His books have been published in over a dozen languages. For his novel Illska (Evil, 2012) he was awarded The Icelandic Literary Prize and The Book Merchant’s Prize, as well as being nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literary Award. He lives in Ísafjörður, Iceland, a rock in the middle of the ocean, and spends much of his time in Västerås, Sweden, a town by a lake.

Dr Lara Wilhelmine Hoffmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Iceland with a PhD in Sociology from the University of Akureyri in Iceland and an MA in Art Studies from the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests revolve around human migrations, particularly linguistic and creative aspects. She has been an active member of the literary collective and small publisher Ós Pressan since 2016.

Much renowned literature was written behind bars by illustrious writers from Marquis de Sade to Dostoyevsky, from Nazim Hikmet to Vitomil Zupan. How is literature, written in a confined environment, different from literature written in the free world? Why is tuberculosis closely related to the history of Swedish literature? Who was Helge Dahlstedt and what was so revolutionary about his idea to offer humanistic healing, alongside the medical? On the other hand, what is it like to mentor literary workshops inside Slovenia’s largest and most secure prison? How is it possible to separate an artistic soul from a criminal one? Is the feverish soul the only one that creates great works of art? These questions are addressed by Erik Jonsson and Matjaž Pikalo in their conversation with Mitja Drab.

Erik Jonsson was born in Vännäs and now lives in Umeå. He is a cultural writer, literary scholar and festival organizer for Littfest - Umeå International Literature Festival. He is writing a book about the history of tuberculosis from a literary and northern perspective.

Matjaž Pikalo is a Slovenian writer, actor and musician. He is the author of more than 30 works of poetry, prose, drama and children’s literature. In 2020 co-wrote and performed in the documentary film The Valley of Tears about the lives of three inmates inside Slovenia’s largest prison Dob. He was a mentor of literary workshops inside the same prison in 2019.

Since 2003, the Emerging Writers’ Festival (EWF) has been tending to Australia’s budding literary talent, establishing roots between writers, nurturing their professional development and introducing them to new audiences. This year, the festival ran from 14–24 June and featured more than 50 in-person and digital events and more than 150 performances. How did a small zine fair become one of the largest and well-respected writing festivals in the world? What is its legacy and outlook in the year of its 20th anniversary? How does it draw crowds and bring poetry to the foreground with its many playful events like readings in a greenhouse and the planetarium? How important are literary festivals for fostering community? These questions are addressed by Dr Mitja Drab in conversation with Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh and Jes Layton.

Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh is a writer, artist and arts worker living and creating on unceded Wurundjeri Land in so-called Australia. Writing primarily creative nonfiction, poetry and criticism, Ruby’s essay Death & The Devil was longlisted for The LIMINAL & Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize in 2021. The essay was published in the subsequent award-winning anthology Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory (2022). Currently the Artistic Director and co-CEO of Emerging Writers’ Festival, Ruby is also a co-founder of the Latinx arts collective, Yo Soy.

Jes Layton invented writing, the airplane and the internet. He was also the first person to reach the North Pole. Jes is an author and illustrator currently living and working on Wurundjeri Land. He is the current co-CEO and Executive Director of the Emerging Writers’ Festival and is represented by Alex Adsett Literary Agency. Jes’ work can be found with SBS, Junkee, Voiceworks, Kill Your Darlings, Archer Magazine, The Big Issue, BlackInc, Pantera Press, Fremantle Press, Allen & Unwin, and scattered elsewhere online and in print. You can find Jes @AGeekWithAHat.

The unanimous opinion is that Slovenia more than impressed the visitors at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2023. The highlights of the Slovenian programme – under the motto Honeycomb of Words – were poetry, philosophy and deep reading. Apart from a total of 250 events at the fair, the largest selection of Slovenian poetry to date was published in German translation. The role of poetry was apparent in Frankfurt with well-attended readings, demonstrating that poetry, while often not at the forefront of the scene, still finds its place in a digital, instant-solutions-oriented age. How was poetry highlighted in this year’s edition of the fair? How does poetry enforce deep reading and critical thought that is declared in the Ljubljana Manifesto on Deep Reading? These questions are addressed by Dr Mitja Drab in conversation with translator Amalija Maček and poet José F. A. Oliver.

Amalija Maček is a Slovenian translator and scholar. Together with Matthias Göritz and Aleš Šteger she edited the largest selection of Slovenian poetry in German translation My Neighbour on the Cloud. In 2021, she received the Fabjan Hafner award for the translation of the novel Moje leto v Nikogaršnjem zalivu by Peter Handke (Beletrina, 2021) and the Faculty of Arts award for her pedagogic work in the field of translation.

José F. A. Oliver is a poet, writer, the president of the German PEN and one of the most significant inter-cultural writers of German language today. He writes predominantly in German but is also influenced by Spanish poets such as Federico García Lorca. To date he has published more than 20 volumes of poetry and essays, and has received numerous awards. He was awarded the Basel Poetry Prize in 2015 and the Heinrich-Böll-Preis in 2021.

Poetry communities have played a vital role in the cultural and artistic development of societies throughout history. Modern poetry communities of the 20th century like The Harlem Renaissance and The Beatniks used poetry to express countercultural and anti-establishment sentiments. Today, online poetry communities and social media platforms have democratized poetry, allowing poets to reach broader audiences and receive instant feedback. The Wordcraft Collective is a community of Brussels-based authors writing in English. It is a place for poets, novelists and storytellers, for everyone with a creative spark and an itch to compose with language. In this episode, Dr Mitja Drab hosts its two co-founders, poets Emma Woodford and Katja Knežević.

Emma Woodford is a Belgian/Brit who is passionate about reading and writing poetry, finding communities of poets and hosting the occasional poetry workshop. She is a Gingko Environmental Prize runner up and has been published in online journals such as Quarter(ly) and Academy of the Heart and Mind. In addition to be a Wordcraft Collective co-founder, Emma is an active member of Poets for the Planet and often writes nature poems as well as poetry about family, travel and belonging/not belonging. She lives in Flanders with her Dutch/Belgian family and works in Brussels.

Katja Knežević is an award-winning poet and short story writer. She holds a Master’s degree in English and French literature. In 2012, she won the Sea of Words literary competition organised by IEMed and the Anna Lindh Foundation with her short story, Invisible mother. In 2014 she won the Croatian national award, Goran for young poets within the festival Goran’s spring, with the manuscript Staklene breze (Birches made of glass). The collection was subsequently published in April 2015. She writes in English and Croatian. Her poetry and prose have appeared in anthologies such as 2019 Brussels Writers’ Circle and So Long as You Write, as well as literary magazines Tether’s End, Thimble, Popshot Magazine and Molecule Lit Mag.

Literary translation is a creative genre distinctly different from other art forms. Unlike music, painting, sculpture or dance, the literary work is accessible only to those who know the language in which it is written. Why is preserving a multitude of languages crucial in our globalised world in which the dominant lingua franca tends to homogenise foreign literature into the category of ‘International Fiction’ on bookstore shelves? Is there variation in the expressive power of languages and why does it need to be preserved? Through the international translating workshop, LitTransformer, Professors Aron Aji and Matthias Göritz create spaces of linguistic hospitality where translators can experience another language viscerally, forging connections through the unfamiliar.

Dr Aron Aji is the Director of MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa, the largest programme of its kind in the United States. A native of Turkey, he has translated works by Bilge Karasu, Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, Latife Tekin and other Turkish writers, including Karasu’s The Garden of Departed Cats (2004 National Translation Award) and A LongDay’s Evening (NEA Literature Fellowship; shortlist, 2013 PEN Translation Prize). Aji was president of The American Literary Translators Association from 2016 to 2019.

Dr Matthias Göritz is a poet, translator and novelist. He has written four poetry collections: Loops, Pools, Tools and Spools; four novels, including Der kurze Traum des Jakob Voss (The Brief Dream of Jakob Voss) and Parker; and three novellas. He has received the Hamburg Literature Prize, the Mara Cassens Prize, the Robert Gernhardt Prize, the William Gass Award and the International Pretnar Award. He teaches at WashU. He is Professor of Practice of Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.

Poetry as an act of writing demands a sensibility for contemplation that is often drowned out in our information overload culture. Billy Collins said that poets are people who get paid to look at clouds and watch chipmunks, because someone has to keep an eye on these things. Why is physical relationship with nature important for writing? Are we living in a cottage-core trend in which poets are leaving bohemian urban centres to connect with the local communities of their childhood? Why are teenagers on TikTok obsessed with Kafka? These questions are explored by poets Dr Paige Quiñones and Frank Keizer in conversation with Dr Mitja Drab.

Dr Paige Quiñones is the author of The Best Prey, which received the 2020 Pleiades Press Lena Miles-Wever Todd Prize for Poetry. She has received awards and fellowships from the Center for Mexican-American Studies, the Academy of American Poets and Inprint Houston. She earned her MFA from the Ohio State University and her PhD from the University of Houston, where her doctoral thesis explored confessionalism in 20th century American poetry.

Frank Keizer is a poet and essayist from the Netherlands. He is the author of five books of poetry, an editor at the Flemish literary magazine nY, co-founder of the online magazine Samplekanon and co-host of the literary criticism podcast Links Richten. His latest book, titled The Introduction of the Plot is an adventurous exercise in collective thinking about ‘how can we stop the capitalist exploitation of our bodies and the Earth?’

Does a great poem always present us with a crumb of philosophical insight or is it the other way around, can reading philosophy facilitate writing verses? Why has science replaced philosophy in discovering the bigger questions of life today? How can the gaze in the philosophy of Michel Foucault be related to the lyrical subject? Why is boredom important and how can we use it to battle burnout? These questions are explored by poet and writer Aušra Kaziliūnaitė in conversation with Dr Mitja Drab.

Aušra Kaziliūnaitė is a writer, poet and a philosopher from Lithuania. She is the author of five books of poetry. Her selected poems, The Moon is a Pill, was published in 2018 and listed among the five best works of Baltic literature recently translated into English. Her works have been translated into fourteen languages and received numerous Lithuanian national awards including the Young Artist Prize from the Ministry of Culture (2016). She actively participates in international literary festivals and book fairs, showcasing her poetry on a global stage. Her poetry has been called post avant-garde, active, sharp, polyphonic, often featuring surrealist, dream-like imagery. Aušra holds a PhD in philosophy with a focus on Michel Foucault’s panopticism and hosts a podcast titled Writing room.

Identity lies at the heart of poetic expression, but what if the writer feels most at home when he or she is homeless? For poet and writer Nikola Madžirov, one of the leading voices of contemporary European poetry, living in a cave of non-belonging comes naturally. Madžirov calls himself ‘an involuntary descendant of refugees’, referring to his family’s flight from the Balkan Wars a century ago: his surname derives from mazir or majir, meaning ‘people without a home’. How can poetry transcend borders and national histories and connect us like the mycelium connects the trees in the forest? Nikola explores these questions in conversation with Dr Mitja Drab.

Nikola Madžirov is one of the most powerful voices of new European poetry. His award-winning work has been translated into more than forty languages and published in collections and anthologies in the US, Europe and Asia. He is a recipient of the Miladinov Brothers poetry prize and has been a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. He is also an international co-ordinator for Lyrikline.org and a 2023 member of the jury for the world’s largest international prize for a single book of poetry, The Griffin Poetry Prize.

The climate crisis can be a source of both indifference and anxiety. What is poetry’s role in navigating through it? Can environmental poetry evolve into a political movement that invigorates climate activism? What can we learn from non-Western cultures, and what is deep ecology? How can we restructure our societies beyond the myths of the individual and the collective to create a ‘new tribalism’, akin to what was once found on pirate ships? These questions are explored by poet and writer Jan Škrob in conversation with Dr Mitja Drab.

How does living in exile influence the creative processes and themes in poetry? What challenges are encountered while trying to establish yourself as an artist in a new country? How to maintain the balance between cultural identity from your home country and new country in your art? These questions are explored by poet and interdisciplinary artist Merima Dizdarević in conversation with Dr Mitja Drab.

Why were Poets exiled from Plato’s Republic? Why were Shelley and Byron cancelled in their time? How, if at all, can we separate the art from the artist? Can the political potential of poetry be usurped to facilitate hate, division and violence? Is Instagram poetry by the likes of Rupi Kaur a gateway to more ‘serious’ poetry? These questions are explored by poet Monika Herceg and philosopher Dr Eric Powell in their conversation with Dr Mitja Drab.

How is poetry produced by machine learning algorithms? Can poetry written by AI compete with human authors and win poetry prizes? What is the future of AI generated poetry and can it connect rather than divide? These questions are addressed by Dr Tracey Guiry and Dr Zuzana Husárová in their conversation with Dr Mitja Drab.