Saturday 8 February, 7pm
Rich Mix
35-47 Bethnal Green Road
London E1 6LA
FREE
RELATED EVENT
Friday 7 February
Grzegorz Wróblewski and friends at eMigrating Landscapes, UCL SSEES
RELATED BOOK
Kopenhaga by Grzegorz Wróblewski
The Enemies project presents some of the finest contemporary poets from Poland collaborating to read original works of avant garde / literary poetry with British contemporaries.
Multiple pairs of poets will present work that is cross language, cross media and truly groundbreaking, evidencing the innovative potential of collaboration in poetry and the force of European poets very much working in the 21st century. Featuring Grzegorz Wróblewski, Piotr Gwiazda, Adam Zdrodowski, SJ Fowler, Marcus Slease and many others.
Interested in the possibilities of poetry in collaboration, The Enemies project took as its starting point Steven Fowler’s practice as a poet and spoken word artist. Using his collection The Enemies, published in November 2013, in which Steven partnered his words with the work of visual artists, he programmed a series of events throughout 2012/13 that explore cross-disciplinary collaboration with a variety of artists.
This project aimed to bring about and showcase original, dynamic examples of what is produced when the other in question is the equally avid mind of another artist/poet. The Enemies project sought to explore the possibilities of poetry as text, as language, as art, when it is married to the expansive potentiality of alternative modes of expression and/or fundamentally different artistic mediums.
Grzegorz Wróblewski, born in 1962 in Gdańsk and raised in Warsaw, has been living in Copenhagen since 1985. He has published ten volumes of poetry and three collections of short prose pieces in Poland; three books of poetry, a book of poetic prose and an experimental novel in Denmark; a book of selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina; and a selection of plays. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. His poems in English translation appear in many journals, anthologies, and chapbooks, as well as in two collections Our Flying Objects (Equipage Press, 2007) and A Marzipan Factory (Otoliths, 2010).
Piotr Gwiazda has published two books of poetry, Messages (Pond Road Press, 2012) and Gagarin Street (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2005). He is also the author of James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).
Adam Zdrodowski, born in 1979, poet and translator, is preparing his PhD on Elizabeth Bishop. His translations include Lifting Belly by Gertrude Stein, poems by Mark Ford and some works by William S. Burroughs. His poems have appeared in: Odra, Dwukropek and Dziennik portowy. His first collection of poems is entitled Przygody, etc. [Adventures, etc.] and has been published in Wrocław (2005). He lives in Warsaw.
Read more about Wróblewski & Gwiazda by Chad Post at Three Percent
Supported by the Polish Cultural Institute in London