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.