Poetry and Animism: Re-enchanting the World

What is the relationship between poetry, creativity and animism? Do poets consider their writing as a form of animist practice?

As a collaboration between the 2019-20 Sadler Seminar Series “Animist Engagements: Creativity, Ecology and Indigeneity” and the University of Leeds Poetry Centre, this public event invites poets to both consider and perform the relationship between poetry and animism.

Poets will perform a combination of new pieces, works-in-progress, previously published work, and curated texts by other poets.

Invited poets include Nick Makoha, Malika Booker, Rachel Bower, Khadija Ibrahiim, Kimberly Campanello, and Jason Allen-Paisant.

Through their readings, the poets will generate literary answers to some of the following questions:
Which poems offer an animist worldview, and which others create an animist aesthetics?
What kind of magic is involved in metre, voice and the spoken word?
How do metaphor and simile work to produce the relational or even morphological ontologies at the heart of animism?
Might we understand poetry as a mode of becoming-similar, or of being both possessed and dispossessed?
Are poetic techniques such as anthropomorphism and prosopopeia fundamentally animistic in their (re)distribution of personhood? Conversely, how do animism and poetry destabilise conventional notions of personhood and sovereignty?

This event is open to everyone.

Tickets are available on Eventbrite.

For more information, please contact Dominic O'Key.