Poetry Day!

Proof of registration, via a QR code on your phone or on paper, will be required to enter Reid Hall. Entry will be refused to those who are not registered.

Please note that access will not be permitted 15 minutes after the start of each event conforming the program.

This event will be held in English (Workshops and Readings) and French (Les Éditions La Chaise performance).

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Join us for a day of poetry in motion, with workshops, zine-making, readings, a live performance, and a night walk through the city. Come write, listen, create, and wander with poets , , Will Harris, Alice Oswald, Habib Tengour, Lynn Xu and with the poetry collectives La Chaise and .

Program:

2 p.m - 4 p.m Starting from Gennadij Ajgi’s vision of the poem as body, temple, and liturgy, Jason Allen-Paisant invites participants to consider how poetic structures of space, form, and ritual might operate within their own creative practices.

5 p.m - 6 p.m Poetry Reading with Jay Bernard, Will Harris, and Lynn Xu.

6 p.m - 7:30 p.m Refreshment break.

7:30 p.m La Chaise performance: poetic and collective celebration in three acts. Voices and instruments from the Global South will resound in a triptych in search of the secret islands of speech. (Noah Alifeni, Nadjime Mhoudini, Eva Augustine and Ando Razafindrazaka).

8 p.m - 9:30 p.m Poetry Reading with Jason Allen-Paisant, Alice Oswald, and Habib Tengour.

9:30 p.m. Last Post. Join Alice Oswald on a night walk to catch the last post at rue de Louvre, where we will write and post poems to each other.

During the whole day Loose Associations will be present, making zines live, with contributions from anyone and everyone throughout the first few hours of the day. It will be also possible to collect a short poem in the form of a stamp, part of Jay's new multi-locational work, The If Print.

Participants

Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican poet and scholar whose honors include the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is full professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. Jason is a current Institute Fellow.

Jay Bernard is an interdisciplinary writer and artist from London. Jay is the author of Surge (2019), co-author of Transitions: A Dialogue on the Crisis of the Human (forthcoming, 2026) and Judith E Wilson fellow at the University of Cambridge. In 2023-24, Jay was an Institute Fellow.

Will Harris is the author of RENDANG and Brother Poem, and is currently writing a book about social care due to be published late next year. In 2024-25, Will was an Institute Fellow.

Alice Oswald has written several volumes of poetry and her prose book "Rhapsody - Interviews with Anonymous Poets" will be published in Autumn 2026. Alice is a current Institute Fellow.

Habib Tengour Algerian poet and anthropologist Habib Tengour was born in 1947 in Mostaganem. He has more than fifteen works of poetry, prose, theatre, and essays to his name published by Algerian and French publishing houses. Prizes include the Dante European Poetry Prize in 2016 for his entire poetic work, the Benjamin Fondane prize in 2022, and the "Dante Alighieri" Prize in Rome in 2023. He edits the "Poèmes du Monde" series, published by APIC (Algiers).

Lynn Xu is the author of Debts & Lessons and And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight. With Joshua Edwards, Lynn co-translated Pee Poems by Yang Licai, and Pr*son Poems and Temple Speak, also by Yang, forthcoming in Fall. Lynn teaches at Columbia University in New York, and in 2024-25, she was an Institute Fellow.

Loose Associations is a mixed-media collective run by Finn Murphy, Emma Cheung, and pals. "Only on the cusp of psychosocial meltdown do we put out what would otherwise stay in. We make zines and tees and films and music."

Founded in October 2023, Les Éditions La Chaise is an immaterial space dedicated to the production, reflection, and advocacy of poetic craft.

The night events of this event will take place in Reid Hall’s Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, built in 1912 and extensively renovated in 2023 thanks to the generous support of Judith Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc.

This event will be recorded and may be broadcast on the Institute social media. By participating, you consent to the use of the images and sound.

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