Making Literature Travel

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.
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) met in workshops in Ljubljana and Kraków in 2009, and since then have been taking part in a project which explores urban spaces and artistic responses to them from a new angle. Taking their cue from the tradition started by the Parisian ‘flaneurs’, Metropoetica’s participants seek to see their home cities through fresh eyes and to bring strong female voices to the tradition of urban poetry.
For the writer’s accounts of their experiences, as well as poems and filmed performances, go to www.metropoetica.org.
Metropetica is a Literature Across Frontiers project, supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union, Bangor University and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).