Acclaimed American-Ukrainian poet gives special lecture at Tung Auditorium
The poet Ilya Kaminsky visited the University of Liverpool on Monday 15 May to give a talk exploring his Ukrainian artistic heritage for the Allott Lecture / Poetry Society Annual Lecture 2023.
Kaminsky has been selected by the BBC as one of the 12 artists that changed the world, and his lecture explored poetry in a time of crisis, focusing on poets from Ukraine and including examples from many of the poets writing out of the current conflict.
A year on from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kaminsky has just published a new anthology of poetry, In the Hour of War, which is co-edited with Carolyn Forché. The lecture included a selection of poems from the anthology as well as some of Kaminsky’s own work.
Kaminsky is author of the award-winning collections Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic – poems which confront the atrocities of our time and our collective silence in the face of them. Deaf Republic was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Born in Odesa, Ukraine in 1977, he’s lived in the United States since 1993 when his family was granted asylum. He is Professor of Poetry at Princeton University.
The lecture will be printed in full in the June 2023 issue of The Poetry Review.
The annual Kenneth Allott Lecture, established by Professor Miriam Allott in the 1970s, in memory of her late husband, has attracted many distinguished scholars and poets to the university.
Frequently run now in collaboration with The Poetry Society, it enables an eminent poet to give a public talk and reading. The first lecture was given by Seamus Heaney 45 years ago. Subsequent lecturers have included Paul Muldoon, C.K. Williams, Rita Dove, Terrance Hayes, Denise Riley, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Anne Carson.
This year’s lecture was commissioned jointly by the University of Liverpool Centre for New & International Writing and The Poetry Society. The event was also hosted in conjunction with Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery as part of their HOME programme, which includes exhibitions, publications and poetry events in the gallery and across the Liverpool city region, commissioned by Culture Liverpool for EuroFestival Liverpool 2023.