FRIDAY, 10 March

Poetry Reading

Michael Heller, Jeff Hilson, Redell Olsen

Michael Heller has, for many decades, been an important American poet and critic. In 1985 he established himself as an expert on the Objectivist poets with his book, Convictions Net of Branches, and he has subsequently published separate works on George Oppen and Carl Rakosi. His critical work has also addressed contemporary avant-garde poetry, Jewish and post-Holocaust poetry and poetics. He published Uncertain Poetries (2005), a collection of essays on twentieth-century poetry. His own poetry has been widely published and collected in Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2003) and This Constellation is a Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010 (Nightboat Books, 2012).

Jeff Hilson has been a prominent figure in London poetry since the 1980s. His publications include stretchers (Reality Street, 2006), Bird Bird (Landfill, 2009) and In the Assarts (Veer, 2010). He edited The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008) and runs the reading series Xing the Line. He teaches at the University of Roehampton.

Redell Olsen is a poet and visual artist whose work includes performance, writing and installed texts. Her recent publications include Secure Portable Space (Reality Street, 2004), Punk Faun (Subpress Books, 2012) and Film Poems (Les Figues, 2014). She was, for many years, the editor of the influential online journal HOW2 (How2journal.com), which promotes modernist and contemporary innovative poetry by women. She was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge for 2013-14, and she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Royal Holloway.

7.00-8.45     11 Bedford Square, London WC1