May 6, London – Rhyme and Reason: The Poetry of Climate Change

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his event will explore how poets and spoken word artists can help to create change through their writing and performance, contributing to the debate around climate change and raising awareness and understanding through art as activism. It showcases the talents of poets who are inspired to write and perform about one of the biggest and most complex issues of our time, with the Polish writer Jas Kapela – Weather Stations artist in residence at Krytyka Polityczna in Warsaw – who will be joined by British-based poets Inua Ellams and Victoria-Anne Bulley.

[mark]Wed 6 May 2015, 6:45pm
Free Word Lecture Theatre[/mark]

This event is part of ‘Weather Stations’, a project made possible with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

Jaś Kapela is a poet, novelist and columnist, as well as a member of the Krytyka Polityczna team. He is a proud left-winger who, in his darkly comic work, focuses on the conflict of a traumatised individual with a hostile society which heads straight to hell. His work often takes a form of a social performance. In 2013 Kapela participated in Live Green, a campaign for ecological lifestyles led by the Green Cross, Poland. Kapela is the author of Stosunek seksualny nie istnieje (Sexual intercourse Does Not Exist) and Janusz Hrystus (Janus Hrist). His third novel Dobry Troll (The Good Troll) will be published in May 2015.

Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams is a cross art form practitioner, a poet, playwright & performer, a graphic artist & designer. He is a Complete Works poet alumni, a playwright-in-resident at Soho Theatre, resident at the Southbank Centre’s Poetry Library, and a graphic designer at White Space Creative Agency. Across his work, Identity, Displacement & Destiny are reoccurring themes in which he also tries to mix the old with the new: traditional african storytelling with contemporary poetry / pencil with pixel / texture with vector images. His first two books of poetry are published by Flipped Eye, and several plays by Oberon.

Victoria-Anne Bulley is a British-Ghanaian poet and writer based in London. As a new alumna of the Barbican Young Poets and member of the Burn After Reading collective, she has featured at a variety of London events and was most recently commissioned to perform her work at the Royal Academy of Arts. Currently a full time MA student at SOAS, University of London, her poetry is at once an oral and literary exploration of the limits of knowledge and the body, cultural origins, and a continual search for wholeness. She is working towards the completion her first collection.

---

Weather Stations is an international project that places literature and storytelling at the heart of discussions about climate change.

Five partners in Berlin, Dublin, London, Melbourne and Warsaw have each appointed a Writer in Residence to work together to explore how literature can inspire new ways of living in the context of the most fundamental challenge facing humanity today – our changing climate. They are also each establishing a Substation at a local school, where they will work with teachers and pupils to discover how we might nurture responsible young citizens with the knowledge, motivation and tools to fight for a more sustainable future.

Photo by Ariel Mancini, cc, flickr.com