Fran Lock: Creative activism: exploring the radical, social and political through poetry
Tuesday 9th May
Online
18:00 – 20:00
FREE/£15/£18
Event Description
‘Activism is my rent for living on the planet.’ – Alice Walker
‘poetry makes nothing happen’ – W.H. Auden
Is there poetry in activism? Can poetry itself ever be described as ‘radical’? If poetry makes nothing happen, then what does it do and who is it for? Looking at work from a number of activist/ poets and poet-activists, from Audre Lorde to Sean Bonney, this workshop will interrogate what poetry does make happen, and how the contested spaces of page, stage, and picket line can grant us the power to renegotiate terms of textual, social, and political encounter.
Fran Lock is the author of numerous chapbooks and ten poetry collections. Her most recent chapbook is Forever Alive (Dare-Gale Press, 2022), and her most recent collections are Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, 2021), Hyena! Jackal! Dog! (Pamenar Press, 2021) and White/ Other (87 Press, 2022). Fran is the current Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University. She is an Associate Editor at Culture Matters, and member of the new Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. She is a proud pit bull parent, and she edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review.
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