The Three Manifesti by Davide D’Elia The Centre for Poetic Innovation addresses poetry and poetics creatively, critically and historically, promoting and studying poetic innovation in a broad sense of both terms, from poetry as traditionally understood to poetic aspects of visual and material art forms, of prose writing as well as interactions with music, dance and digital poetry. The key aims of the Centre are:
- Hosting speakers, workshops and conferences
- Support and development of doctoral and post-doctoral research
- Public engagement and impact activities
- Joint Research Grant applications and research projects
Upcoming events
Wednesday 25 September, 2-4pm, Buchanan 216
‘Poetry and the other arts’
a Masterclass with Philippe Beck (open to UGs, PGs and researchers)
‘Poetry is here or there. Not everywhere./ It depends on a sortie.’ (Opéradiques, Flammarion, 2014)
In this masterclass we will address the relationship between poetry and the other arts. The following questions will be discussed:
- How does poetry approach the plurality of other arts?
- Through which formal explorations can poetry understand the reality of other arts and the conflicts not only between them but also within each one of them?
- Through which kinds of reconfigurations can the poem question the hierarchy of the arts?
- What spaces or new scenes open up to poetry as it confronts the other arts?
- What is at stake in poetry’s encounter with the other arts, both in terms of its own existence and its ability to make a difference in the world and to the possibilities of sociability?
This event is free but booking is required at https://events.st-andrews.ac.uk/events/poetry-and-the-other-arts/
Wednesday 25 September, 6-8pm, Parliament Hall
Poetry Reading by Philippe Beck
Philippe Beck will read a selection of poems(French with English translations), including some from his latest collection, Ryrkaïpii (Flammarion, 2023).
This event is free but booking is required at https://events.st-andrews.ac.uk/events/poetry-reading-by-philippe-beck/
Thursday 26 September, 5.15-7.30pm, Hebdomadar’s room
‘Poetry and “Ecoanthropology”’
Research seminar with Philippe Beck
Inspired by an article published in December 2019 relating how polar bears were dangerously approaching the village of Ryrkaïpii, on the edge of the Arctic banks of the Choucotka River at the north-eastern tip of Russia, the one hundred poems that form Ryrkaïpii (Flammarion, 2023) invite readers to follow both non-human and human animals in their various crossings. Joseph Kabris, a key character in the ethnographers’ libraries, is one of the figures to which the poems keep returning. His full-body tattoos not only testify to his encounter with the societies of the Pacific Ocean after his shipwreck in 1795, but it also opens up the possibility of new texts and writings, and to the amplification of poetry’s own gestures and formal developments.
An examination of the relationship between poetry and modern anthropology suggests that poetry is not simply an object, or a possible object, of cultural anthropology but that it is perhaps its inner object insofar as poetry is at work in the didactics of anthropology. One might even say that poetry has taken the place of anthropology, while anthropology has had to clarify its relationship with poetry. This reassessment of the relationship between poetry and anthropology is all the more necessary since ‘[t]he modern paradox is a need for “ecological connection”’. In a context in which we have been increasingly separated from Nature’, the destruction of that from which we have been cut off, paradoxically, affects us more than ever. If poetry appears inseparable from ecology, the ‘ecological connection’ we can hope to create is not a kind of ‘imitative harmony’, but requires the ‘necessary re-inscription of “natural elements” in the modalities of form itself.’ (Documentaires, Le Bruit du temps, forthcoming in 2024). This is what Ryrkaïpii exemplifies.
This event is free but booking is required at https://events.st-andrews.ac.uk/events/poetry-and-ecoanthropology/