The launch session of the staff-postgraduate CONTEMPORARY POETRY DISCSUSSION GROUP is this week. All interested are welcome on:
THURSDAY 17th MAY at 5pm
in HUMSS 110
Whiteknights Campus
We’ll be discussing selections from the poetry of ALICE OSWALD, especially representations of landscape, private & public places, and oral history & voice.
The poetry comes from Oswald’s award-winning volume Dart (2003), and her most recent collection Memorial (2011).
PHOTOCOPIES are now available from outside the English Department –
at the mailboxes on the first floor of HUMSS, near Room 112.
While you read, do muse about the following, which we may chat about on Thurs:
1. Oswald’s experimentation, innovation & play with form. The feel, look and touch of the page…. And the sound of the poetry. How strange and disorienting – or inviting – is this?
2. The use of tradition and inheritance (ancient & modern voices, historical & everyday events are within earshot). How does history seem to inform even the most contemporary language?
3. Place and landscape, flux and slipperiness, motion and water… and some eco-critical and psychogeographical impulses… Where are we? How ‘grounded’?
4. The experience of not getting it – in art and ordinary experience – and trying to talk better about our confusion: Look out for stammerings, stutterings, silences and fumblings.
For more on Alice Oswald, see:
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=15354
Please let us know if you are planning to attend: contact Natalie Pollard at n.pollard@reading.ac.uk
