Film Still, MMXXIAfter a long sleep there are gaps in walls where things used to sit. Domes of grass are sprouting so carefully my books exchange page numbers, scripts meet up in song carefully my voice is a password, re- typed in a milk-flow-sequence. A tree falling quiet, my body hangs from a hook of faith into the world. 1st May 2023
John Stadnicki’s last photographs (1-24 August 2022). Black and white film.
The Aftercrying
Dreamed I found a child sleeping
on the steps of my house; perhaps lost
back from night shifts at a nearby foundry.
His fists, the size of fruits, face up
shinning below street lamps. Everything
grey as expected in night terrors.
Blackbirds call his name, flutter
in circle. Above city parks, a time-grenade
hissing before its safety pin snaps.
Lights off. …………………………………….
I reach up holding a door key.
Open a final version of myself.
25th August 2022, Maria Stadnicka
Date: Saturday 11 June 2022
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Price: Pay What You Want – recommended price £7
Age Range: 16+ years
Venue: The Crescent
Romanian culture experienced dramatic changes in the transition from the Ceaușescu era to post-revolution, and the ensuing Romanian diaspora has transported these changes across Europe, including to cities across the UK and Ireland.
Join poets Maria Stadnicka and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin for an afternoon of poetry readings and conversation with Shannon Kuta Kelly to traverse the many ways that continued contact with Romania and its poetries inflects poetic production.
Maria Stadnicka is a writer, editor and freelance journalist who is currently a PhD researcher and associate lecturer at the University of the West of England. Her writing explores social identity, transgenerational trauma transmission, cultural theory and the ethics of memory. She is the author of five poetry collections and her poetry was highly commended for the Forward Poetry Prize 2021. Her latest collection Buried Gods Metal Prophets (2021) was included among the best poetry books of 2021 by The Telegraph and the collection, Somnia (2020), was named one of the best poetry books to read in 2020. Her latest collection, Uranium Bullets is forthcoming in 2022. She recently performed her work at Edinburgh Festival, StAnza International Poetry Festival and Cheltenham Literature Festival. She is a contributor to International Times (UK) and Dissident Voice (US).
Born in Cork, Irish poet, translator, and editor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is the author of numerous poetry collections, including The Mother House (2020), The Boys of Bluehill (2015), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and The Sun-fish (2010), which won the International Griffin Poetry Prize. She has translated numerous books including The Legend of the Walled-Up Wife (2012) by the Romanian poet Ileana Malancioiu and co-translated Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s The Water Horse (2001) with Medbh McGuckian.
Shannon Kuta Kelly is a writer, translator, and musician based in Belfast. Her work has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, the Irish Times, Body Prague, the London Magazine, and in Poetry Jukebox installations across Europe. She has collaborated with the Romanian ConTempo String Quartet for events such as the Dublin Enescu Festival and performances in conjunction with the Embassy of Romania in Ireland. She is a doctoral student at Queen’s University Belfast researching poetry and censorship in Romania and Northern Ireland.
Date: Saturday 11 June 2022
Time: 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Price: Pay What You Want – recommended price £7
Age Range: 16+ years
Venue: The Crescent
Is writing in another language an opportunity for creative freedom?
How is poetry affected by poets working across more than one language?
Join us for an afternoon of discussion and readings that will explore not only acts of literary translation but also the many modes of translation available across disciplines.
Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction. Capildeo’s eight books and eight pamphlets include Like a Tree, Walking (Carcanet, November 2021) and The Dusty Angel (Oystercatcher, 2021). Their interests include plurilingualism, traditional masquerade, and multidisciplinary collaboration. They are Writer in Residence and Professor at the University of York, a Visiting Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and an Honorary Student of Christ Church, Oxford.
Maria Stadnicka is a writer, editor and freelance journalist who is currently a PhD researcher and associate lecturer at the University of the West of England. Her writing explores social identity, transgenerational trauma transmission, cultural theory and the ethics of memory. She is the author of five poetry collections and her poetry was highly commended for the Forward Poetry Prize 2021. Her latest collection Buried Gods Metal Prophets (2021) was included among the best poetry books of 2021 by The Telegraph and the collection, Somnia (2020), was named one of the best poetry books to read in 2020. Her latest collection, Uranium Bullets is forthcoming in 2022. She recently performed her work at Edinburgh Festival, StAnza International Poetry Festival and Cheltenham Literature Festival. She is a contributor to International Times (UK) and Dissident Voice (US).
Paddy Bushe is a poet and translator in both Irish and English. He has published thirteen collections of poetry, and has translated the work of Somhairle MacGill-Eain, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Gabriel Rosenstock, Zhang Ye and Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin. The recipient of the Oireachtas Prize for Poetry in 2006, he also received the 2006 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award and the 2017 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. His most recent books are Peripheral Vision, a collection in English, and Second Sight, a selection of his poems in Irish with his own translations into English, both from Dedalus Press in 2020.
Born in Cork, Irish poet, translator, and editor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is the author of numerous poetry collections, including The Mother House (2020), The Boys of Bluehill (2015), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and The Sun-fish (2010), which won the International Griffin Poetry Prize. She has translated numerous books including The Legend of the Walled-Up Wife (2012) by the Romanian poet Ileana Malancioiu and co-translated Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s The Water Horse (2001) with Medbh McGuckian.
Brian Holton is a translator of modern and classical Chinese poetry and fiction, into both English and Scots. He has been a university teacher and broadcaster. Brian is also a poet, singer, and songwriter, and regularly performs on stage and has appeared at literary festivals in many countries, giving talks or readings in the USA, Canada, Europe, the Far East, and New Zealand.
Once upon a StAnza… Stories and narrative have long had an important role to play in our making sense of what it means to be human and to live in our communities and environment, and in negotiating how this might alternatively look. StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, 2022 (7-14 March) will focus on ‘Stories like starting points’, exploring the opportunities and the pitfalls of stories, ranging over narrative poetry, prose poetry, re-writing old stories and imagining new ones, reportage, process / chance narratives, myth /epic.
The festival brings together a superb line-up and I feel so excited to be part of the journey on Saturday 12 March at 2pm. Will be performing and discussing the ethics of writing about difficult narratives with Alice Hillier and Annemarie ni Chuirrean.
ERASURES will take place live at the Byre Theatre Auditorium, Sat. 12 March 2022, 2pm-3.30pm, and will also be broadcasted online via zoom.
For information, details and tickets to the live event at the Byre Theatre Auditorium, please access the link: ERASURES: What we cannot say and how we say it. (The Byre Theatre)
For information, details and tickets to the online event, on zoom, please access the link: ERASURES: What we cannot say and how we say it (online).
The discussion will focus on emotive and difficult themes, and will explore the techniques and approaches when finding words for things that can’t easily be said. Through use of hand-erasure techniques in bird of winter, Alice Hiller discovers transient holding places for the darkness of being groomed and sexually abused in childhood. Maria Stadnicka’s Buried Gods Metal Prophets is a poetic documentary exploring the lived experiences of children in care during the Romanian communist dictatorship which ended in 1989. Annemarie ni Chuirrean will join from Ireland via Zoom to read from and speak about The Poison Glen, a collection at whose heart sits the story of the stolen or missing child, including work responding to a long-gone Foundling Hospital in Dublin and bearing witness to family loss and cultures of silence in Ireland.
Thank you, StAnza 2022!
Review published in Magma No. 81 ‘Anthropocene’ 2021.
Buried Gods Metal Prophets (2021) is published by the Guillemot Press, edited by Luke Thompson and Sarah Cave, illustrations and design: Antonia Glücksman. The book is available here.
For Printed Poetry Symposium Andrew Morrison and Maria Stadnicka have documented the process of making a collaborative print – a dialogue between poet (who also draws) and letterpress artist (who also writes). The poem reaches towards appropriate visual form as letterpress variations are passed between the two. Maria and Andrew have worked together on a number of projects involving written/spoken word and visual arts; most recently Andrew’s letterpress collages made in response to Maria’s poems from Buried Gods Metal Prophets (Guillemot Press, 2021).
Printed Poetry Symposium is organised by Angie Butler for the Centre for Print Research, UWE, Bristol. and takes place on Thursday, 14th October 2021, 2pm at Arnolfini, Bristol.
The event includes talks by: Nancy Campbell, Johanna Darque (Small Press), Antony Dunn (the People Powered Press), Leonard McDermid, Andrew Morrison, Maria Stadnicka, Ndukwe Onuoha, Pat Randle, and Barrie Tullett. Tickets are available here.
© Maria Stadnicka, October 2021.
This is a fragment from ‘Domestication’ created by Andrew Morrison and Maria Stadnicka. The video follows the poem ‘Domestication’ (© Stadnicka, 2021) and it is a reflection on how the notions of work, writing and collaboration have changed during the lockdown in the UK, following the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
‘Domestication’ was produced for the Printed Poetry Project, organised by Angie Butler for the Centre for Print Research, UWE, Bristol.
The video and discussion will feature on Thursday, 14th October 2021, 2pm at the Printed Poetry Symposium, Arnolfini, Bristol.
The symposium will include talks by: Nancy Campbell, Johanna Darque (Small Press), Antony Dunn (the People Powered Press), Leonard McDermid, Andrew Morrison, Maria Stadnicka, Ndukwe Onuoha, Pat Randle, and Barrie Tullett. Tickets are available here.
© Maria Stadnicka, September 2021.
Forthcoming ‘Domestication’: film collaboration with the book artist and printer Andrew Morrison for Arnolfini Bristol.
© Maria Stadnicka, September 2021.
Maria Stadnicka 