Arctic Events in Oxford

You are warmly invited to come and celebrate the launch of my (small) UK tour at The Albion Beatnik in Oxford on 30 October. I will be joined on stage by the magnificent MacGillivray, of whom more below. (Other readings will happen in Newcastle, Brighton, Bristol, Bedford and London this winter.)

The Albion Beatnik
34 Walton St, Oxford, OX2 6AA
30 October 2014
7.30pm
Free entry
Wine bar available

MACGILLIVRAY has walked in a straight line with a dead wolf on her shoulders through the back streets of Vegas into the Nevada desert, eaten broken chandelier glass in a derelict East Berlin shopping mall, headbanged in gold medieval stocks in Birmingham allotments, burnt on a sun bed wearing conquistador armour in Edinburgh’s underground city, breast-fed a Highland swan in Oxford and regurgitated red roses in Greenland.

She remains the clan chief.

Arctic Events in Newcastle

In November the Lit & Phil in Newcastle-upon-Tyne will host two events as part of the series Quujaavaarssuk and the Queen of the Sea. The Lit & Phil is a venue full of character, which possesses - among other things - a mesmerising collection of early literature on the Arctic - I spent several months researching in the stacks on my return from Upernavik in 2010. 

Ice and the Imagination


Tuesday 4 November 6pm


FREE


This wintery workshop will take classic works of polar exploration and natural history from the Lit & Phil collection as a starting point for new writing about ice, snow and the environment. Poet Nancy Campbell will introduce work by contemporary writers on the subject and guide you through prompts to create your own poems and stories.

Seven Words for Winter: Arctic Poems


Monday 17 November 7pm


FREE


In this reading Nancy Campbell will evoke the atmosphere of ‘the most northern museum in the world’ on the remote island of Upernavik in Greenland. These poems describe the disappearing arctic language and environment and retell the colourful myths of the Inuit coastal community. The evening will open with readings of new work from writers who participated in the Ice and the Imagination workshop.

Numbers are limited so booking is advised for both these events.

Please contact The Lit & Phil, 23 Westgate Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 1SE
 

Tel: 0191 232 0192 

Email: library@litandphil.org.uk

Thanks to Arts Council England for supporting these activities

The Arctic Book Club

‘Our words are a kind of rescue team on a relentless mission to save past events and extinguished lives from the black hole of oblivion, and that is no easy task; along the way they are welcome to find some answers, then get us out of here before it is too late. Let this suffice for now, we’ll send the words on to you, those bewildered scattered rescue teams unsure of their task, all compasses broken, maps torn or out of date, yet you should welcome them. Then we shall see what happens.’ From Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson

This winter you are invited to explore the Arctic … in five books.

Starting in October, the Arctic Book Club will meet every month in Oxford. Over a traditional Greenlandic kaffemik (cakes, coffee and chat) each month we’ll read and discuss a recent piece of writing about the Arctic, from fiction and travel writing to poetry and essays, including Barry Lopez’s classic Arctic Dreams and Hannah Kent’s highly-acclaimed recent novel Burial Rites.

No specialist knowledge required – this will be a fun and friendly way to learn more about the growing genre of writing on the polar regions. As well as the main titles, I can offer suggested background reading for super-keen or speedy readers.

These meetings are free. Places are limited so booking is essential. Email me (nancy@nancycampbell.co.uk) for more information or to secure your place.

Dates:


Monday 6th October
 - Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (novel)

Monday 10th November - Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez (natural history) 


Monday 8th December - A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu (novel) 


Monday 12th January
 - True North by Gavin Francis (travel)

Monday 9th February - Open forum. Bring your own favourite Arctic reads to discuss and recommend. (I'll bring a selection of recent poetry collections on Arctic themes by British poets, and read some traditional Inuit poems - in Tom Lowenstein's excellent translation.)

I am grateful to Arts Council England for a Grant for the Arts to support this activity

Poems for summer

Here’s some summer poetry reading recommendations (with a narcissistic twist).

Two poems from my Greenlandic series have been accepted by The Rialto, one of my favourite magazines – notable for its glorious artwork (the exuberant cover to this issue is by Angie Lewin). You can buy The Rialto in all good bookshops, and here. From Norfolk to Melbourne, where How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic features in Australian Poetry Journal 3.2 – this is a special full-colour edition of the journal devoted to Concrete poetry. I discovered several exciting new writers and artists in its pages. Another arctic poem ‘Fragment’ will appear in Magma 59, on the theme of breakages. Finally, an extract from my long poem The Course of Empire, set in Massachusetts, appears in Stravaig, the journal of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, edited by Elizabeth Rimmer. It is available online to all for free here.

Arctic Encounters

Dr Simone Abram reads Itoqqippoq

The groundbreaking research project Arctic Encounters: Contemporary Travel/Writing in the European High North invited me to exhibit a selection of artists' books at a conference on The Postcolonial Arctic at the University of Leeds in May. The exhibition represented a selection of work created during the last five years, both my own books and those featuring my poems designed and printed by Roni Gross and Peter Schell of Z'roah Press in New York.

Arctic Encounters describes itself as 'an international collaborative research project that looks at the increasingly important role of cultural tourism in fashioning 21st-century understandings of the European Arctic. The project’s general objective is to account for the social and environmental complexities of the High North – an area which incorporates some of Europe’s most geographically extreme regions – as these are inflected in the mutual relationship between a wide range of recent travel practices and equally diverse representations of those practices framed in both verbal and visual terms (e.g. travel writing and documentary film).' I encourage readers to read about the project's progress on their blog.

The conference was an exciting opportunity to exchange ideas with leading international thinkers on many aspects of Arctic life. I learnt a great deal, and my conversations helped me develop ideas for future projects. I'm grateful to the Arctic Encounters team and the School of English at the University of Leeds for their warm hospitality.

Kaffemik: Discussing the (Icelandic) weather with Ingrid Medby and Michael Leonard

A talk on my work in the Alumni Room (under the watchful eye of Jon Silkin)

Vantar | Missing At Lady Margaret Hall

My year as Visual & Performing Artist in Residence at Lady Margaret Hall is drawing to a close, and this month the building was transformed by the appearance of Icelandic snowscapes: my new work, Vantar | Missing. Rather than turning one of the grand function rooms into a conventional exhibition space, Vantar | Missing was installed in the winding corridors at the heart of the college, which corresponded to the zigzag paths of the avalanche defences featured in the work. 

The avalanche is a subject that has haunted me since I first spent time in Iceland in 2012. Avalanches caused 198 deaths in Iceland during the twentieth century, but it was not until 1999 that avalanche defences were built around Siglufjörður, the small town at the northernmost tip of the island where I was living. Now, these subtle feats of engineering Stóri-boli (Big bull) and Litli-boli (Little bull) have become part of the mountain landscape, a barely perceptible human intervention dividing the town’s remaining inhabitants from the wilderness. 

This project has led to the publication of a new book and a print series, in which diptychs record changes in mountain snow cover and domestic interiors. The Icelandic word ‘vantar’ refers both to a lost object or person and to the experience of loss. People lost in the mountains are a frequent trope of Icelandic literature, from the sagas to contemporary crime fiction. I wanted to consider this theme from the angle of the people left behind.

Arts Council Award

My application to Arts Council England's Grants for the Arts programme for funding for the year-long project Arctic Poems: Quujaavaarssuq & the Queen of the Sea has been successful.

This project supports the completion of my poetry collection, and an associated programme of events in London, Brighton, Oxford, Bristol and Newcastle.

This collection surveys the culture of arctic Greenland from prehistory to the present, with a focus on the hardships experienced by indigenous communities under colonial rule during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The poems address the tensions between modern life and traditional means of subsistence in the Arctic, and explore themes of cross-cultural communication, cultural and species extinction, landscape and climate change. Many of the poems use forms that are strongly linked to oral performance such as ballads and pantoums. The sequence entitled Quujaavaarssuq and the Queen of the Sea retells the legendary journey of the Greenlandic hero Quujaavaarssuq to beg forgiveness from the Queen of the Sea, who destroyed the ice as an act of revenge on the humans who pollute her waters.

The poems will be performed at five readings around the UK during 2014 and 2015. An associated series of six free workshops (The Library of Ice) held in Oxford this winter will introduce new audiences to contemporary writing on environmental themes. Details of these events will be announced over the summer.