POESIEGSPRÄCH: KAYO CHINGONYI & FRAN LOCK – repair was a form of resistance

In the organizer's words:

Studio Space

In this conversation, two of the currently most celebrated and headstrong poets on the British poetry scene meet:

Fran Lock (born 1982) writes political poems in the emphatic sense of the word, which directly address the body and read like condensed essays in which thoughts roll over each other. One of these is a late capitalist suada dedicated as a consolation to the poet Sean Bonney, who died young; it expresses the hope that somewhere there is a language "for conditions and the thoughtless finitude of fear". In another text, Lock considers the possibility of "repair" as a practice of resistance, while at the same time posing existential questions about the process of writing itself: "if writing brings me neither further away from my pain nor closer to my death, then where and when is this writing within pain, within death?"

Kayo Chingonyi's (born 1987 in Mufulira, Zambia) early poems tell of growing up in a satellite town north of London, an initiation in the absence of the "original culture" (according to the author in a preface). It's about the influence of music ("The songs we wanted to hear / existed on cassettes of pirate radio broadcasts / or the first crackle of vinyl", the color of James Brown's scream and the beginnings as a "garage emcee", until the emergence of Eminem ruined all plans. The more recent poems take us from Zambia to Leeds to London, sketching out a genealogy of his own family that stretches back to his pregnant great-grandmother. At the same time, a short, very intimate sonnet cycle tells the story of the emergence and spread of the AIDS virus, to which the poet's parents fell victim.

Fran Lock and Kayo Chingonyi in conversation with Dominique Haensell

The event will be interpreted into English and German. With the kind support of ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen

Project management: Nadine Tenbieg

Supported by:

British Council. The poesiefestival berlin is a project of the Haus für Poesie in cooperation with silent green Kulturquartier and the Akademie der Künste and is funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.