Poetry Society Annual Lecture 2017: The Shedding of Skins and Schemes: a voice of one’s own and the voices of others

PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF VENUE

Jan Wagner is the outstanding German poet of his generation. His lecture, delivered in English, is on influence and the exchange of poetic ideas across borders; of the teachers poets must find for themselves (and then distance themselves from again). Interspersed with readings of some of his own poems, Wagner’s lecture draws on poets such as Rimbaud, Heym and Brecht, Popa, Pound and Hughes, and the poet-translators who have carried their work between cultures.

Wagner’s collection Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc), translated by Iain Galbraith, won the Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015. He has translated into German poets including Armitage, MacNeice, Shapcott, Simic and Sweeney.