French and British Poetries

News reaches me of a very promising looking day conference in Oxford - free and open to all - on Friday 22 February at the Maison Française d'Oxford starting at 9.30 and chaired by Patrick McGuiness of St Anne's. The night before, one of the participants, Stephen Romer, will be launching his new collection Yellow Studio. If you want to know more contact Patrick at patrick.mcguinness@st-annes.ox.ac.uk. The Conference is titled: "Poetries in Dialogue: relations between French and British and Irish Poetries."

Here is an extract from the conference prospectus: "The history of poetic relations between the French and British and Irish traditions has been intense, confrontational but ultimately creative. From Mallarmé’s Poe to Pound’s Laforgue, from Bonnefoy’s Yeats and Mahon’s Jaccottet to Barry MacSweeney’s Apollinaire and Guy Goffette’s Auden, the two poetic traditions have interpenetrated and enriched each other.

For all this, there are times in which the two have barely been on speaking terms: for the French, British poetry has been stuck in a pre-modernist rut whose only creative injections have come from the US or Ireland; for the British mainstream, French poetry has supped too freely from the poststructuralist table. Matters are not helped by poetry’s marginal status in the economics of publishing, and Britain’s derisory translation culture. "