The Future of Poetry: UCL-French Embassy Conférence-Débat 2

9 May 2012, 6pm

The Future of Poetry

The massive growth in creative writing courses in recent years has meant that there are probably more practicing poets at work now than ever before. Yet the position of poetry in relation to the public sphere at large seems to grow increasingly opaque. Is poetry merely a minority leisure activity, or can it still claim to be, as it was for Milton and Wordsworth, a means of understanding the world unrivalled both in its scope and its complexity? With so many new media changing the ways in which we produce and consume texts of all kinds, what is the future of poetry? 

Mark Ford (UCL) and Jerôme Game (AUP), both published poets as well as university professors, will be in conversation in this second event of this year's series.

The conversation will be chaired by Judith Palmer, Director of the Poetry Society.

Series

This is the second in a new Conferénce-Débat Series dedicated to the Humanities, jointly proposed by the UCL European Institute and the Embassy of France.

These talks, in which distinguished figures from research-intensive universities and the arts in France and from UCL speak and debate (in English), are open to the wider public. 

The event is also supported by the UCL Grand Challenge of Intercultural Interaction.

Biographies

Mark Ford is Professor in the Department of English at University College London, where he teaches and publishes widely on nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first century British, American, and French literature. He has published three collections of poetry, Landlocked (1991), Soft Sift (2001), and Six Children (2011). He has also published a biography of the French writer Raymond Roussel, and a parallel text edition of Roussel's final poem, 'Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique' (New Impressions of Africa). He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and a selection of his reviews and essays have been published in two volumes, A Driftwood Altar (2005) and Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays (2011). He is currently editing an anthology of the poetry of London for Harvard University Press. 

Jérôme Game is a French writer. He was born in 1971 in Paris, where he lives after spending several years in the United States and England (where he received his PhD (Cambridge) and worked as a researcher (UCL). Since 2000 he has published a dozen books and given numerous poetic readings in various countries (France, the UK, Turkey, the US, Belgium, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, China, Italy,…). He is also the author of theoretical texts on experimental literature and contemporary aesthetics. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Film Studies at the American University of Paris and currently Visiting Scholar at NYU as well as Adjunct Associate Professor of Film Studies at Columbia University. Recent publications: Sous influence. Ce que l'art contemporain fait à la littérature (mac/val, 2012), La Fille du Far West (mac/val, 2012), Poetic Becomings. Studies in contemporary French literature (Peter Lang, 2011), ça tire (livre + CD, Al Dante, 2008). Web sites :
- http://www.al-dante.org/content/view/54/
- http://www.aup.edu/faculty/dept/film/game.htm