WEDNESDAY 9 MAY

WORKSHOP: WRITING & RESISTANCE

5:30-7pm, R3.41 Ramphal

Professor Stephen Collis will discuss the role poetry has played in his environmental activism, specifically in resistance to Canadian tar sands mining, extraction and transport, and alongside members of the Critical Environments group will lead a workshop on writing and activism.

(In the same time slot, Dr. Patrick Barron will lead a seminar on translation with MA in Literary Translation students. For more information, please contact Dr. Chantal Wright.)

THURSDAY 10 MAY

PERFORMANCE: WARWICK THURSDAYS 

1:30-2:30pm, Writers Room, Millburn House

Professors Stephen Collis and Patrick Barron will give a reading (of original poetry, prose, and translation) and discuss their creative work.

SEMINAR: UNCOMMON SOLIDARITIES

4-6pm, R2.41 Ramphal

Professors Stephen Collis and Patrick Barron will briefly present creative and critical work around landscapes of the Anthropocene—threatened, enclosed, abandoned, occupied, reclaimed, irrevocably humanized more-than-human commons—and lead a discussion about the new kinds of solidarity and resources called forth in and through environmental writing in a time of accelerated climate change and intensified pressure on the planetary commons. Professors Collis and Barron have provided the following texts for participants to read in advance of the seminar, though this reading is not required for participation.

Stephen Collis: "Manifesto of the Biotariat," "Reading Wordsworth in the Tar Sands"
Patrick Barron: An Assemblage of Passages by Gianni Celati; from Verso la foce (Towards the River’s Mouth), by Gianni Celati; from Paesaggio Italiano

ALL EVENTS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

ABOUT THE VISITORS

Stephen Collis’s many books of poetry include The Commons (Talon Books 2008; 2014), On the Material (Talon Books 2010—awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), DECOMP (with Jordan Scott—Coach House 2013), and Once in Blockadia (Talon Books 2016—nominated for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature). He has also written two books of literary criticism, on poets Susan Howe and Phyllis Webb, a book of essays on the Occupy Movement, and a novel. Almost Islands is a forthcoming memoir, and a long poem, Sketch of a Poem I Will Not Have Written, is in progress. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

Patrick Barron is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, where he co-directs the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program and teaches courses in environmental literature, translation studies, and poetry. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Program, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His books include Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale (Routledge); Haiku for a Season, Haiku per una stagione, by Andrea Zanzotto (Chicago); The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto (Chicago); and Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology (Italica). A critical edition of Gianni Celati's Towards the River's Mouth (Lexington) is forthcoming in 2019.

For further INFORMATION about any of these events, please contact Dr. Jonathan Skinner: J.E.Skinner@warwick.ac.uk