2014-15: Mediating Modern Poetry

'Mediating Modern Poetry'

Knowledge Exchange Fellow:
Professor Karen Leeder  |   Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages   |   University of Oxford

Partner Organisation:
The Southbank Centre

Professor Karen Leeder has been working with the Southbank Centre, London curating a series of events exploring aspects of modern European poetry and its transmission. A first focus was a specially curated evening exploring the reception of Rainer Maria Rilke for the biannual festival ‘Poetry International’ (July 2014). Rilke’s influence on modern culture is inescapable and has inspired poets from Auden to Zwetayava along with filmmakers, thinkers, composers and artists. Professor Leeder also organised the event ‘After Rilke’ featuring major English-language and German poets and their wide-ranging responses to the poet and his life (translations, versions, new poems). This fed into Leeder’s own project on ‘An English Rilke’, which teases out what makes an author travel like this and what happens to them en route (tackling a wide range of issues along the way). Thereafter a series of further events in Autumn 2014 explored aspects of contemporary poetry in dialogue with major English and European poets.