“Poet as Witness, Poem as Voice”
A Poetry Worksop by Anthony Anaxagorou

April 29, 2024
6:00-8:00pm (UK time)
Zoom
Fee: £25

What is the role of the poem in a time of war, displacement, genocide and trauma? Poems can’t change anything at a policy level, nor can they stop bombs dropping on unarmed civilians, but they can offer an apparatus that gets us closer to the feeling, the turmoil and distress, which with any luck, enables us to keep going.

This poetry writing workshop with Anthony Anaxagorou aims to explore the role of poetry as a witness and a voice in such times. Through distinct poetic methods, participants will probe into the intricacies of these experiences, offering a method to convey the turbulence, suffering, and resilience inherent in such contexts, ultimately fostering understanding and resilience.

We will also be looking at poems (such as “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa, “Vietnam” by Wislawa Szymborska, and “Didn't Apologize to the Well” by Mahmoud Darwish) that use very distinct methods to get into the intricacies of war, both as someone who is experiencing it first hand, and those who observe from a safter distance.

Anthony Anaxagorou FRSL is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist and publisher.

His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics published with Granta Poetry in 2022, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award. It was listed as one of New Statesman’s top books of 2022.

His second collection, After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year.

In 2020 he published How To Write It with Merky Books; a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry.

Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press. He is the editor-in-chief of Propel Magazine, an online literary journal featuring the work of poets yet to publish a first collection.

In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow at the University of Roehampton. In 2023 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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