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The fragmentation of narrative was a key feature of early modernist poetry by poets such as Eliot, Pound and Stein. So what do contemporary poets, who continue to work in the modernist tradition, make of narrative? Yang Lian will read selected poems from the book-length work Narrative Poem, translated by Brian Holton, and will discuss how poetry can transcend and transform events in one’s own life into historical experiences, and become the narrative of everyone’s situation in the universe. Sandeep Parmar’s poetry is characterised by restlessness and curiosity; she is a formal innovator who continues taking the modernist tradition of writing in new directions, including work that draws upon myth and other kinds of rewriting, and creating modernist takes upon traditional forms. Holly Pester will read from her Forward-shortlisted collection Comic Timing, which both embraces and withdraws from narrative, proposes storylines and then complicates them, in an attempt to make space for the complex narratives which comprise contemporary life.

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