In Defence of Poetry

A joint event with Cadaverine Magazine & The Poetry Business 

Wednesday 10 March 2010, 6:15pm (for a 6:30 start) to 8:30pm

Conference Room 1, The Carriageworks, Millennium Square, Leeds, LS2 3AD.

Following the censoring of Carol Ann Duffy's poem Education for Leisure from the school curriculum, poets, critics, teachers and students will debate the significance of this ban.

Should children be protected from controversial literature? Should works be studied because of their literary merit or as springboards to discuss particular issues? Should students be taught to analyse poems in order to understand their meaning or should they be asked to provide a personal response? How important should poetry be in teaching English? Who should determine the content of the school curriculum and according to what criteria? What are the roles of the poet, the critic, the teacher and the reader in upholding the importance of poetry? And what, if any, is the role of government?

Speakers:

George Szirtes

George was born in Hungary in 1948 and came to England with his family in 1956 after the Hungarian Uprising.  His first poems began appearing in the early 1970s and his first book The Slant Door (1979) was awarded the Faber Prize.  Since then he has written thirteen other books of poetry that have won various awards, including the TS Eliot Prize for Reel (2004).  His New and Collected Poems appeared in 2008.  His latest work, The Burning of the Books and Other Poems (2009) is, at the time of writing, also shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

George has also produced a series of prize-winning translations of poetry form the Hungarian.  He is a fellow of the Royal Society and of the English Association and has written extensively about poetry for the press.  He is a Reader in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Ronan McDonald 

Ronan is the author of  The Death of the Critic (2008). Born in Dublin and educated there and at the University of Oxford he is now Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Reading and the director of the Samuel Beckett International Foundation. From April 2010, he will take up a post as Professor of Modern Literature at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

His other works include Tragedy and Irish Literature (2002) and The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (2007), together with numerous essays and articles.  He has written for national newspapers including The Observer, The Guardian and The Irish Times and is a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement.  He is currently working on a book on Darwinism and Degeneration in Irish Modernism.  He has an ongoing interest in the 'values' of literary criticism and is organising the conference The Good of Criticism: The Value of Literary Studies, to be held at Reading University on 19-20 March 2010.

Andrew McMillan

Andrew is a young poet who splits his time between Barnsley, where he was born and raised, and Lancaster, where he currently studies.  His work has appeared widely in print and online magazines, including The London Magazine, The North, The Reader and Cadaverine magazine.

The publication of his first poetry pamphlet Every Salt Advance (Red Squirrell Press, 2009) saw him dubbed 'a poet of ingenious and rare power' - a claim Andrew disputes but has accepted under sufferance.

Andrew is currently editing Cake magazine alongside Martha Sprackland at Lancaster University and is collaborating on a new opera to be performed at the Glasgow Plug Festival in March.  His poetic heroes include Thom Gunn, Allen Ginsberg, Adrian Mitchell and Geoff Hattersley.  He is currently working on his first collection.

Michele Ledda 

Michele was born and grew up in Italy.  He came to Leeds in 1994 to study English and Latin at Leeds University, where he completed an MA by research on James Joyce's Ulysses and Petronius' Satyricon.  He is an English teacher and runs two subject-centred Saturday schools for the think tank Civitas.

Michele is a Leeds Salon organiser.  A member of the Institute of Ideas Education Forum, he campaigns for a knowledge-centred as opposed to child-centred education system.  He has written widely on education and is the author of the chapter on English teaching in The Corruption of the Curriculum (2007).  Author of the Hands Off Poetry! petition against the censoring of Carol Ann Duffy's Education for Leisure, he has recently written on Banning Dangerous Poems in British Schools, criticised the children's services and schools regulator Ofsted as part of a failing 'system of accountability' and commented on the Conservatives' proposals to raise the status of teaching. 

Chair:

Wes Brown 

A Leeds Salon organiser, Wes is a 24 year old writer and editor based in Leeds.  His poetry has appeared in numerous journals online and in print, including Route Compendium,Culture Wars, Roundtable Review, Poetcasting.co.uk and Freedom in a Puritan Age.

Wes's debut novel, Shark, will be published by Fruit Bruise Press in 2010. Following successful work placements with Penguin and Route, he launched Cadaverine Publications where he is Editor-at-Large.  He is marketing manager for The Poetry Business.