As a part of the celebration of Verse of April’s 10th year, we are proud to invite you to a special roundtable discussion and reading with guest contributors Lénaïg Cariou, Malik Ameer Crumpler, Alison Grace Koehler, Kristin Sanders, and Jason Stoneking on Saturday, April 26th from 13h-16h. We will be gathering festively and poetically at Rerenga Wines — the natural wine and militant book store in the 10th — to delve into conversation about the ethical and artistic stakes of writing and making art in response to the poets and other poetries — through time, through literature and expression at large. What do these gestures imply about the act of art-making, about our relationality to each other, to the histories writing themselves in poetry? Do these actions suggest a poetics — of the individual or of our time? How do we perceive our acts of creation as informed or deformed or isolating from other poetries? How might we risk the vitality or change the access to someone else’s art by “erasing” it with or subjecting it to our interpretation, so relative and inevitably limited? We will aim to get at the heart of our own project by speaking with writers in Paris who appear to us to be uniquely engaged in such research, through their own processes of creation and being in communities.
Please feel free to bring your own poets-of-influence in hand for your attendance. It would be nice to fill the room with voices in poetry from any era, any language, any aesthetic. Space for this event is limited. If you plan on coming, please let us know, so we can best host you. All inquiries and requests should be sent to verseofapril@gmail.com.
THE ROUNDTABLE
Lénaïg Cariou is a poet, translator and critic. As a poet, she published À main levée (LansKine) and La poésie n’est pas une bonne fille (Le Coin de la rue de l’Enfer, with Liliane Giraudon and Maxime Hortense Pascal) ; her third book, les dires, is forthcoming. With Limited Connection Collective, she translates North American poetry into French and vice versa; together, they translated works by Cole Swensen, Mónica de la Torre, Eleni Sikelianos, Laura Vazquez, Adrienne Rich, and Kay Gabriel. Her critical work focuses on French and American contemporary poetry; she is a PhD candidate at Université Paris 8 / Université Paris Cité, and received the Young Researcher Prize from Fondation des Treilles for her current research on poetry.
Malik Ameer Crumpler is a poet, composer, curator, editor & professor involved in over 70 albums, several GlitchArt films, too many Artbooks, literature anthologies, magazines & 9 books of Poetry. Currently, he is Editor-at-Large for The Opiate while teaching Creative Writing & Advanced English at SciencesPo Paris, Paris College of Arts, and Université Leonard De Vinci. Malik’s 2024 Artbook, ...&? is exclusively available at The Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore Paris, along with an experimental sonic EP premiered & archived by Lumpen Station.
Alison Grace Koehler is a stained glass poet. She uses fragments of glass and text, both discovered and created, to make windows, poems, and performances. She has two books and accompanying spoken word albums, Stained Glass Poetry (2020, Paris Heretics) & Stained Glass Arrangements (2023, Paris Heretics), and Secret Space with Benjamin Dwyer (2024, Farpoint Recordings). Alison has performed and exhibited at international festivals and art centers including POUSH, the James Joyce Center, Vilniaus Dailės Academija, la Cité Internationale des Arts, Iruzzioni, and the Edinburgh Arts Festival. Born in Chicago, Alison currently lives and works in Paris, France.
Kristin Sanders is the author of Cuntry, a finalist for the 2015 National Poetry Series, and two poetry chapbooks. Her work has been included in Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press), Longreads, Lit Hub, Columbia Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Bitch Magazine, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Originally from California, she is currently based in Paris.
Jason Stoneking is a writer, artist, and performer originally from the United States, who has made his home in Paris. He has published several collections of poetry and essays, and has been performing internationally for more than 30 years, at venues ranging from the main stage at Lollapalooza to the Pont Neuf in Paris and the rooftops of Cairo. His current practice focuses on the live creation of handwritten and site-specific texts, as in his recent series, Portrait Sittings, for which he observes his subject as a painter might, while composing their portrait in handwritten words.