Chingonyi, Kayo

Betonhalle | 15/10 € Anthology included Tickets

This summer, we are celebrating a night of poetry for the 25th time in Berlin. According to the annals of the capital’s media, the first edition on Potsdamer Platz in 2000 coincided with the sudden onset of a summer cold spell. It was way too dark to read into the anthology, and yet an enthusiastic audience held out until two in the morning.

Opposed to that night’s mythological inception at the turn of the millennium, there are not only warm rooms at Weltklang, but also reading lamps. Since 2023, German and English translations of all the poems read have been published in an anthology that is traditionally limited to people in attendance.

The eight poets from different parts of the world who are taking the stage this evening will read and perform in their original languages, showcasing the intensities that poetry can generate not only in silent reading but also in the spoken word, in the concentration of a poetic voice.

Brassinga, Anneke • Chingonyi, Kayo • CAConrad • Ekhtesari, Fatemeh • Hwang, Yuwon • Kandé, Sylvie • Kiyanovska, Marianna • Vlada, Miruna

Atelierraum | 7/5 € Tickets

This conversation brings together two of the most celebrated and headstrong poets of today’s British poetry scene:

Fran Lock (born 1982) writes political poems in an emphatic manner that start with the body and read like condensed essays where thoughts collide. One of them is a late-capitalist diatribe dedicated to the late poet Sean Bonney who died young as a form of solace; it expresses hope that somewhere a language exists “for the conditions and the thoughtless finitude of fear.” In another text, Lock considers the possibility of “repair” while also posing existential questions about writing itself: “if writing moves me neither further from my pain nor closer to my death, then where and when is this writing but inside of pain, inside of death?”

The early poems of Kayo Chingonyi (born 1987 in Mufulira, Zambia) recount coming of age in a satellite town north of London and an initiation in the absence of the “original culture” (as the author notes). He speaks of the influence of music (“The songs we wanted to hear/ lived on tapes of pirate radio sets/ or in the first-hand crackle of vinyl”), the color of James Brown’s scream, and his beginnings as a “garage emcee” until the emergence of Eminem ruined everything. The more recent poems move from Zambia to Leeds to London, outlining a genealogy of his family that stretches back to his pregnant great-grandmother. At the same time, a short, very intimate sonnet cycle recounts the history of the emergence and spread of the AIDS virus, which the poets’ parents fell victim to.

Lock, Fran • Chingonyi, Kayo