HAUS FÜR POESIE

Ingo Vitman Öri is the non-binary person to publish a poetry collection in Slovenia. The book is entitled Sin svoje roke (Škuc 2024), which translates roughly as Son of One’s Own Hand. Critic Hana Samec Sekereš writes that the collection’s fundamental source of cohesion is love, understood as friendship, as a bond between people that creates a safe space, especially in the ongoing conflict with right-wing youth and homophobic family members. The poems Öri will read are from this debut. Always written close to his own body, they are texts by an at times desperate flaneur. They speak of running out of air in the middle of the week, marinating oneself in one’s anger, of crickets in Ljubljana’s darkness, ferns on the streets, and those little stumbles that give a poem its rhythm until the final stumble brings us back to the text’s beginning. Here, the whole world is sometimes encapsulated in a parking lot between the convention center and the theater. Öri writes of lights gradually going out in the house, of counting almonds and warming himself with an iron, and he describes what it is like to be a perpetual sheep for smoking shepherds. In the end comes the realization that no sacredness is possible without transgression.

Verity Spott (born 1987 in Manchester) is a poet, blogger, musician, and publisher of the independent Iodine Press. Spott also organizes Horseplay, a monthly series that combines music and poetry. Spot also runs the blog Two Torn Halves. Spott’s written work frequently draws on experiences of working in social care, supporting the disabled and homeless, and thus entails a political commitment rooted in practice. While advocating for a self-assured stance of resistance, the cis-normative narrative of transition imposed on the trans community is problematized in the texts. Aesthetically, Spott is closer to the experimental Cambridge School than with a tradition represented by poets such as Philip Larkin or Ted Hughes. Influence is drawn from a wide variety of sources, including voices like Keston Sutherland, Frances Kruk, or Anna Mendelssohn. In the most recent books, Spott translated fragments from Sappho and morphed them into the sonnet form. The book Hopelesness from 2020 is already considered one of the most important British poetry books in recent years. On this occasion, Verity Spott will read aubades, modern, light-flooded morning songs, which, like the poems of Ingo Vitman Öri, were translated especially for this event.

Ingo Vitman Öri & Verity Spott in conversation with Biba Oskar Nass

The event will be interpreted into German and English. With kind support by ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen.
Kindly supported by: Slowenisches Kulturzentrum SKICA Berlin
The event takes place in the Atelier space at silent green.