Poetry Society Annual Lecture: Ilya Kaminsky
Date(s): 15.5.23
Time(s): 19:30 - 21:00
Yoko Ono Lennon Centre, 60 Oxford Street
Liverpool, L7 3NY
The Poetry Society Annual Lecture / University of Liverpool Allott Lecture: “Poetry in a time of crisis”
The Poetry Society is delighted to announce that poet Ilya Kaminsky will be visiting the UK to give the 2023 Poetry Society Annual Lecture. Held in partnership with the University of Liverpool’s Allott Lecture series, the event will be live in Liverpool on 15 May and will combine an exciting new lecture, poems and Q&A (Chaired by Sandeep Parmar).
Kaminsky’s lecture explores poetry in a time of crisis. Focusing on poets from Ukraine, and including examples from many of the poets writing out of the current conflict, Kaminsky will also draw on a wider historical context (discussing poets such as Paul Celan) as well as poems that touch on contemporary crisis in the West (referencing poets such as m nourbeSe philip).
A year on from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kaminsky has just published a new anthology of poetry from Ukraine, In the Hour of War, which he’s co-edited with Carolyn Forché. The event will include a selection of poems from the anthology as well as some of Kaminsky’s own work.
Selected by the BBC as ‘one of the 12 artists that changed the world’, Kaminsky is author of the award-winning collections Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic – poems which confront the atrocities of our time and our collective silence in the face of them. Born in Odesa, Ukraine in 1977, he’s lived in the United States since 1993 when his family was granted asylum. He is Professor of Poetry at Princeton University.
The Poetry Society’s Annual Lecture Series has been proud to commission many of the most influential voices in international poetry. Poets who have given earlier lectures include Anne Carson, Valzhyna Mort, Les Murray, Eavan Boland, C K Williams, Rita Dove, Terrance Hayes, Paul Muldoon and Charles Simic.
Kaminsky’s lecture will be printed in full in the June 2023 issue of The Poetry Review.