Ocean Vuong awarded TS Eliot Prize by judging panel chaired by PoetTrio poet and researcher, W. N. Herbert

– as reported in The Guardian

TS Eliot prize goes to Ocean Vuong’s ‘compellingly assured’ debut collection

Night Sky With Exit Wounds, the debut collection by a poet who is the first literate person in his family, hailed as ‘the definitive arrival of a significant voice’

Ocean Vuong Forward Arts Prizes 2017 Royal Festival Hall London UK

After becoming the first literate person in his family and a prize-winning poet festooned with awards, Ocean Vuong has now won perhaps his most prestigious accolade yet for his debut collection: the TS Eliot prize.

Reflecting on the aftermath of war over three generations, 29-year-old Vuong’s first collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, has already landed the Forward prize for best first collection, as well as the Whiting and the Thom Gunn awards. The book has also been critically acclaimed, with Observer critic Kate Kellaway describing it as “a conduit for a life in which violence and delicacy collide”, and the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani praising Vuong’s “tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words”.

Vuong is only the second debut poet to win the TS Eliot prize, two years after Sarah Howe became the first, winning for Loop of Jade in 2016.

Before announcing Vuong as the winner at a ceremony at the Wallace Collection in London on Monday evening, chair of judges Bill Herbert called Night Sky With Exit Wounds “a compellingly assured debut, the definitive arrival of a significant voice”.

“There is an incredible power in the story of this collection,” said Herbert. “There is a mystery at the heart of the book about generational karma, this migrant figure coming to terms with his relationship with his past, his relationship with his father and his relationship with his sexuality. All of that is borne out in some quite extraordinary imagery. The view of the world from this book is quite stunning.”

READ the rest of the article here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/15/ts-eliot-prize-goes-to-ocean-vuongs-compellingly-assured-debut-collection 

PoetTrio Poets and Language Advisors

If you are submitting a proposal for our art commission, below is the list of British and Dutch poets who were members of our poetry translation ‘trios’, or PoetTrios.

For examples of them reading work produced during workshops, visit our YouTube site HERE.

British Poets

Sean O’Brien

W. N. Herbert

Fiona Sampson

Dutch Poets

Hélène Gelèns

Elma van Haren

Menno Wigman

Language Advisors

Karlien van den Beukel

Willem Groenewegen

Rosemary Mitchell-Schuitevoerder

** DEADLINE EXTENSION ** Paid Art Commission Call for Proposals

ART COMMISSION Call for Proposals 

**DEADLINE EXTENSION**

midnight FRIDAY 19th January 

Fee: £3000, inclusive of materials

The PoetTrio Experiment, an investigation into collaborative poetry translation, wants to commission an innovative artwork in response to poetry from the PoetTrio project in its original and translated languages.

The form of the work will be decided by the artist, but digital and filmic submissions are especially welcome.

Submit a written proposal (about 300 words) describing your planned artwork – including how it would use poetry from the PoetTrio project in its original and translated languages, and how it would engage audiences with the PoetTrio concept.

Collaborations are admissible. However, the fee remains fixed.

Consult this website and our YouTube channel to find stimulus material:

https://poettrioexperiment.com/

Send queries and submissions to bill.herbert@ncl.ac.uk and rebecca.johnson3@newcastle.ac.uk.

Selection will be made by a panel of researchers and practitioners from the Universities of Newcastle and Roehampton, led by director of the NCLA Professor Sinéad Morrissey

All entrants will be informed of the decision on 1st February 2018.

The winning commission must be delivered in a suitable form by 1st May 2018.

*****

If you are submitting a proposal for our art commission, below is the list of British and Dutch poets who were members of our poetry translation ‘trios’, or PoetTrios.

For examples of them reading work produced during workshops, visit our YouTube site HERE.

British Poets

Sean O’Brien

W. N. Herbert

Fiona Sampson

Dutch Poets

Hélène Gelèns

Elma van Haren

Menno Wigman

Language Advisors

Karlien van den Beukel

Willem Groenewegen

Rosemary Mitchell-Schuitevoerder

Professor Francis Jones reads translation of poet Mak Dizdar on television in Bosnia and Herzegovina

On 14th December Poettrios principal investigator Professor Francis Jones appeared on the Public Service of the Federal Television of Bosnia and Herzegovina reading his translations of work by poet Mak Dizdar: 

WATCH HERE: 

 

Poettrio at IATIS Hong Kong 2018

Three members of the Poettrio research team, principal investigator Francis Jones, and research associates Rebecca May Johnson and Sergio Lobejón Santos will be presenting two papers at IATIS (International Association for Translation & Intercultural Studies) 6th Annual conference. The conference will take place in China at the Hong Kong Baptist University, from 3rd-6th July. 

See you there!

Fiona Sampson’s new biography of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, published in January

The poettrio experiment co-investigator Professor Fiona Sampson has written a new biography of Mary Shelley in time for the 200th anniversary of the publishing of Frankenstein. Published by Profile on 18th January 2018 in the UK, and by Pegasus in May 2018 in the US.

Read the publisher’s blurb below to get an idea of Shelley’s dramatic life. Pre order here:  

Mary Shelley was brought up by her father in a house filled with radical thinkers, poets, philosophers and writers of the day. Aged sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, embarking on a relationship that was lived on the move across Britain and Europe, as she coped with debt, infidelity and the deaths of three children, before early widowhood changed her life forever. Most astonishingly, it was while she was still a teenager that Mary composed her canonical novel Frankenstein, creating two of our most enduring archetypes today.

The life story is well-known. But who was the woman who lived it? She’s left plenty of evidence, and in this fascinating dialogue with the past, Fiona Sampson sifts through letters, diaries and records to find the real woman behind the story. She uncovers a complex, generous character – friend, intellectual, lover and mother – trying to fulfil her own passionate commitment to writing at a time when to be a woman writer was an extraordinary and costly anomaly.

Published for the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, this is a major new work of biography by a prize-winning writer and poet.

Francis R. Jones’s translations of Serbian poet Ivan V. Lalić in Modern Poetry in Translation

The poettrio experiment’s principal investigator Francis R. Jones has had his translations (Serbian –>English) of three poems from Pismo by Ivan V. Lalić (1931 -1996) published in the new issue of Modern Poetry in Translation 2017 Number 3 – War of the Beasts and the Animals

Here is one of the poems, shared for free on their website. Visit their site and buy the issue for more.

In Praise of Sleeplessness

Ivan V. Lalić

Translation by Francis R. Jones

Unsleeping eyes which do not only see
Wallpaper patterns and the morning’s stain
Can read a future summer’s history
Painstakingly hand-written by the rain –
For each leaf’s destiny a single line
Attests to form: each drop’s semantics dream
The future garden’s shape, or the design
Of empty skies which sparkle, skies which scream.

The dreadful blessing of a waking night
Is felt when patience unbraids, from inside,
The eyes, then shifts the broadened roots of sight 
To form new roads where new images ride –
A star is bursting into blooms of sea,
And in a glass of water, silence glitters,
Time after time your pasts keep breaking free, 
No sea could taste as beautiful, as bitter.

Insomnia brings a fresh sleep into play:
Your waking self works on another plane – 
Made in the old day’s image, the new day
Has grown a shadow, so is not in vain;
You take your coat, your keyturn still ignites 
The engine – acts exact but other-led – 
Polysemy sings at the traffic lights,
Weaves a new fabric with three hues of thread…

All those who feel by night that time’s unsure 
Will give a different structure to their day, 
From hour to hour; bound by its simple law, 
They ask ‘Is there a structure anyway?’ 
Insomnia spawns another sort of sleep:
The waking state which recreates you teems
With this new sleep, just as rainwaters seep 
Through desert sands. And in it, freedom gleams –

For those who stay awake, nights are elsewhere, 
A star is bursting into blooms of sea,
Primeval forests, choking, drink the air
And water of a summer still to be;
Last image: sleepless eyes, just like a rear- 
View mirror filled with road as it’s unrolled 
To nothing, glimpse at Eden as they peer 
Into the final sleeplessness, the fold.