Thursday, May 03, 2018

Celebrate Poland’s Constitution Day with European Union of Imaginary Authors poet Jaroslav Biay

Celebrate Poland’s Constitution Day with European Union of Imaginary Authors poet Jaroslav Biay who was co-created by myself and Anamaria Crowe Seranno. A most extraordinary creature, I must say. And a most satisfying collaboration.

See here for more on Anamaria and here for more on Jaroslav.

As many of my regular readers know, I worked in collaboration, over a number of years, with a team of real writers, to create a lively and entertaining body of work of fictional European poets.

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. All the collaborators are accessible via links here.

Accompanied by biographical notes, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own; they are collected now in Twitters for a Lark, published by Shearsman.   


More on Twitters here and here

This collection marks a continuation of the work I ventriloquised through my solo creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here ).

I see these two books as the first two parts of a fictional poetry trilogy. So what will follow these? My ideas (as you'll see if you follow the other national holidays I've been trailing) waver between resurrecting Rene Van Valckenborch; trying to animate more work out of the 4 remaining poets I invented single-handed in A Translated Man who also feature in Twitters for a Lark (thus providing a LINK between the three parts); or (ignoring the link) diving into a completely different form of fictional poetry: the Manx modernists, the fictional 'Robert Sheppard', or (even) delving into time rather than space, and writing a historic fictional poetry. (I've no even fuzzy notion of how I would do this last one.) All options are capable of producing kitsch (though I've never been afraid of that) and need careful consideration. I will be posting more about future possibilities on Europe Day, next week.