Metropoetica

How does writing poetry relate to the process of walking in the city? What happens when we walk in the city without any economic purpose such as working or shopping? In translating poetry, what lost paths, dark alleys and chance encounters are stumbled across? Metropoetica is a group of women writing and walking in different cities across Europe in response to these questions.

Meeting at workshops in Kraków and Ljubljana in 2009, the poets and translators will be focusing their creativity on responses to urban spaces. Alongside these events, the poets are working collaboratively online and exploring different aspects of their own cities on foot, for example by following directions sent by other participants.

A performance of the resulting poems and translations will take place in Ljubljana as part of the Vilenica Festival in September.

The poets and translators contributing to the project are those whose work is a radical and original response to the city-scape. They include Ingmara Balode (Riga, Latvia), Julia Fiedorczuk (Warsaw, Poland), Sanna Karlström (Helsinki, Finland), Ana Pepelnik (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Zoë Skoulding (Bangor, Wales), Sigurbjörg Thrastardottir (Reykjavik, Iceland), and Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese (Kraków, Poland).

Metropoetica is jointly supported by Literature Across Frontiers and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).

The project is based a conception of creative writing as a form of research in its own right. Key aspects to the project are:

• Psychogeography
Psychogeography today is open to many different interpretations, but its central idea of walking round cities and responding to urban space in new ways is one that can be very productive for poetry. The participants hope to find new paths through the urban environment – this means finding new ways of collaborating and translating, writing and travelling, imagining and performing poetry. 

• Multilingualism
Metropoetica embraces multilingulism and co-translation as ways of exchanging personal and collaborative responses to the city.

• Women Writers
The female imagination is central to taking a new perspective on the city. The traditional image of the poet in the city (right up to the New York School and beyond) has been masculine, perhaps after the idea of the Parisian 'flaneur', whereas women's poetry has more often been associated with the indoors, domestic sphere. The participants' interests reflect a change from these perspectives and the Metropoetica project is about setting up a network to support new and exciting directions in European poetry.

• Performance and presentation
The participants will discuss their answers to the following questions: Is walking and writing a performance? What is the relationship between words and the physical experience of places? How can the performance of poetry respond to its environment? As well as translating from one language to another, are there ways in which we might want to link one art form to another, e.g. verbal to visual? Or words to other sounds?

Visit www.metropoetica.org to read writing from the project and the latest news and events.