Poetry & Grief Panel with K. Michel
Poet K. Michel will join Carrie Etter, Rosalin Hudis and Claire Williamson for a panel about Poetry and Grief during Cardiff Poetry Festival.
POETRY HAS ALWAYS STRADDLED THE SPACE BETWEEN PRIVATE EMOTION AND PUBLIC…
This is especially true of the elegy – the poetry of mourning and celebration of the dead. There is a tension between the need to establish a lost person forever in cultural memory as the person who was that, who is particularly remembered for this, who can be reduced to a summarising entry in Wikipedia, and the person who is remembered in complex, nuanced, time-heavy ways by those who knew them intimately. There are differences in the intensity and experience of grief in either case. Between generosity towards a public need to remember and the ambivalence of private pain. Faced by vanishing, sometimes sudden and violent, sometimes protracted, sometimes subtle, of a loved person, or place or part of our identity, or our dreams and ideologies, how do we find a balance between memory and memorial?
In Carrie Etter’s Seren collection Imagined Sons, Carrie has written a book of vivid, heartbreaking poems on the experience of giving up a child for adoption. Rosalind Hudis’s Seren collection Restorations is a journey into what it means to preserve – a monument, a moment, a life-story, a poppy. K. Michel has written a series of elliptical poems about his sister’s death, and is now similarly dealing with his father’s dementia. Claire Williamson’s poetry explores many themes, including coping with bereavement; Claire is a doctoral candidate at Cardiff University, exploring ‘Writing the 21st Century Grief Novel, drawing on Arthur Frank’s responses to ‘narrative wreckage’ –chaos, restitution and quest.
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Date: Sundag 31st July
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Time: 13:3
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Venue: Theatre
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Price: £5.00 / £3.00