16 October 2019: The Poetry on the Move Festival returns in its fifth year this week and continues to be an influential voice in promoting poetry and its benefits to the wider community.
The 2019 festival will see 35 leading poets take part in a range of activities throughout Canberra including workshops, poetry readings, and conversation sessions between Poets-in-Residence.
The Poets-in-Residence include the award-winning Tricia Dearborn, Alvin Pang and Mani Rao.
This year’s theme, ‘Small Leaps, Giant Steps,’ playfully appropriates Neil Armstrong’s historic utterance as a way of exploring how contemporary poetry uses or harnesses knowledge of various kinds, and the avenues of exploration that poetry enters.
The festival is run by the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) which is part of the University of Canberra’s Centre for Creative and Cultural Research (CCCR), itself part of the Faculty of Arts and Design.
The festival will be hosted at four locations across Canberra.
“The poetry festival is significant for the University to engage with the wider community by recognising and supporting poetry as a vitally important and very human endeavour,” said Festival Director Shane Strange.
“Poetry is sustaining and enjoyable to a wide variety of people, and part of the fabric of our society.”
The festival attracts people to the nation’s capital from across Australia and the world and supports the local poetry community.
“Over the past five years, we’ve enjoyed bringing significant international poets to Canberra which is enjoyed by our local poetry community and those from across the country,” said Mr Strange.
“Our aim is to engage visiting poets in a number of significant conversations around poetry, to hear from scholars and researchers of poetry, and of course, to hear poets do what they do best, through a series of reading events.”
Mr Strange said the festival will be focusing on how poetry can help people understand the changes going on in the world today and how it can act as a form of knowledge.
The event has generated significant interest, with many festival events already fully booked.
For more details on the program, visit the Poetry on the Move Festival website.
