Poetry in a Time of Crisis

The acclaimed poet Ilya Kaminsky visits Liverpool to give a new lecture specially written for tonight, which explores his Ukrainian artistic heritage.

Commissioned jointly by the University of Liverpool Centre for New & International Writing and The Poetry Society, this event is the 2023 Allott Lecture / Poetry Society Annual Lecture.

The event combines an exciting new lecture, poems and an in conversation led by Professor Sandeep Parmar, followed by audience Q&A.

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. Deaf Republic was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. 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 Allott / Poetry Society 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, C K Williams, Jan Wagner and Terrance Hayes,

Kaminsky’s lecture will be printed in full in the June 2023 issue of The Poetry Review.

For further information, please contact [email protected]

This event is also hosted in conjunction with the Open Eye Gallery as part of their HOME programme, which includes exhibitions, publications and poetry events in the gallery and across the Liverpool city region, commissioned by Culture Liverpool for EuroFestival.

This event will last approximately 85 minutes with no interval.