February 11: an evening of poetry and music with Zoë Skoulding and Victor

at Carr’s Pub, 1 rue du Mont Thabor, 75001 Paris
Métros: Tuileries and Concorde

Drinks upstairs from whenever you like, poetry starts downstairs at 19:30

Zoë Skoulding is a poet, translator, editor and critic. She has published four collections of poetry, most recently The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (Seren, 2013) and Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008), poems from which have been widely translated. Her own translations include a collection by the Luxembourgish poet Jean Portante, In Reality (Seren, 2013). From 2009 to 2011 she was, in partnership with Literature Across Frontiers, director of Metropoetica, a collaborative project on translation, gender and city space. Her critical work includes Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She is a member of the collective Parking Non-Stop, whose CD Species Corridor, combining experimental soundscape with poetry and song, was released in 2008. She is Senior Lecturer in the School of English at Bangor University, and has been editor of the international quarterly Poetry Wales since 2008. She is currently living in Paris for a three-month residency at Les Récollets.

Currently &#fb01;nishing a PhD in art history that led him to live between Paris and Berlin, Victor is also a clandestine pop culture amateur. As a self-taught guitar player and former member of several jazz bands, Victor performs regularly in Paris’ English poetry scenes, covering calypso songs from the 1930s and constantly digging for musical diamonds in the recorded heritage of the 20th century. For Poets Live, Victor will perform excerpts from his Des Yoyos aux Yéyés: A Brief History of Postwar French Popular Music, which is a cultural studies lecture in verse. Framed as a poem in tight English alexandrines, it is punctuated with live French renditions of the referenced songs. The audience can expect a subjective, somewhat insolent and completely out-of-the-box analysis of the French musical tradition; a sweeping portrait from the underground scene in the cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés to the contemporary music industry. The poem is an homage to the vibrant, multi-faceted musical heritage known as la chanson française, a heritage intimately tied to the French language itself and covers a tight selection of songs from the linguistic gymnastics of Boris Vian to France’s Anglo-Saxon pop-star wannabes, by way of Dick Annegarn’s fantastical themes and the fully-rounded, delectable work of Serge Gainsbourg (whose legacy represents the backbone of the series). This night of academic sing-along is an entry ticket into the world of French pop-culture in all its double-edged glory.

Next Poets Live reading: March 25, 2014