The Poet’s Quest for Peace: Contemporary Voices Across the Faiths

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. Rumi

The All Day Pass includes all events, lunch and supper and entry is with ticket from 1pm.The Evening Pass runs from 6.15pm and includes the buffet supper (no food can be brought into the venue).

Special Promotion 2 for 1 on £42 All Day Pass

 stay all day, or dip in and out 1pm to 10pm - includes vegetarian lunch and supper for two

2 for 1 on £22 evening pass (limited number)

 Special £25 Ramadan ticket 2 for 1 All Day without food 

if bought online in advance

 The synagogue is open to all from 9.45am for coffee & tea before the main service – 11.00am to 12.30pm – which will include contributions on the theme of Peace from poets. Visitors to the LJS for The Poet’s Quest for Peace are warmly invited to join the congregation in the synagogue for the Sabbath morning service. 

1.00 – 2.00 pm LUNCH for all ticket holders (vegetarian)

2.00 – 3.45 pm READING: Sasha Dugdale, Ziba Karbassi, Maitreyabandhu With a European sensibility and rich cross-cultural influences, Sasha Dugdale illuminates the mysterious solitudes of individual lives and brings a wry intelligence to her haunting explorations of time and place. Ziba Karbassi equates breath with language and is renowned for the emotional power of her live readings and for the lyric intensity of her dramatisations of life’s horrors and joys. She reads with her translator Stephen Watts. Ordained Buddhist Maitreyabandhu evokes people and places, events and memories with quietly engaging attentiveness, seeing poetry as simply another strand of his spiritual practice: ‘in one sense as a distillation of peak experience, in another as finding meaning in the everyday.’

4.00 – 4.15 pm CLOSE READING: George Szirtes scrutinises Derek Mahon’s The Snow Party, a poem specially chosen to address the Quest for Peace theme of the day.

4.30 -5.30 pm DISCUSSION: How might poetry contribute to peace processes? In whatever setting – domestic, local, national or international – achieving and maintaining a state of peace requires authentic communication and mutual understanding. And if language is the door that can open (or close) the necessary dialogue between us, could poetry offer a creative and potent tool in conflict resolution? Illuminating cross-cultural perspectives from Choman Hardi, Maitreybandhu, Agi Mishol and George Szirtes, chaired by fellow poet and writer Raficq Abdulla who received an MBE for his interfaith work between Jews, Christians and Muslims.

5.45 – 6.00 pm CLOSE READING: Sasha Dugdale scrutinises July 1914 by Anna Akhmatova, a poem specially chosen to address the Quest for Peace theme of the day.

6.15 – 6.45 pm IN CONVERSATION: Peace is not a comfort zone – is poetry? Poet, translator and emergency medicine doctor Fady Joudah has intimate knowledge of the way poetry can offer survival strategies when faced with a range of extreme situations – political, social, cultural. His poems scrupulously collect the evidence of extraordinary lives endured in refugee camps in war-torn countries. Lawyer Dr Mohamed Keshavjee is a highly-respected expert and trainer in alternative dispute resolution and mediation, with over 30 years of international experience. Together, they will explore the common ground and challenging territories of their respective endeavours to tackle ‘difference’ through durable peaceful exchange.

or 6.15 – 6.30 pm CLOSE READING: Maitreyabandhu scrutinises For Once, Then Something by Robert Frost, a poem specially chosen to address the Quest for Peace theme of the day.

6.30 – 6.45 pm CLOSE READING: Ziba Karbassi with Stephen Watts scrutinise Lights of relationship are darkened by Forugh Farrokhzad, specially chosen to address Quest for Peace theme of the day.

6.45 – 7.30 pm BUFFET SUPPER for all ticket holders (vegetarian)

7.45 – 9.30 pm READING: Choman Hardi, Fady Joudah, Agi Mishol,
George Szirtes A refugee from Kurdistan, Choman Hardi gives voice to the severely dispossessed in fearless records of personal and political oppression: plain-spoken private sto- ries, brutal yet tender laments. In his coherent, fierce, com- passionate and acutely ‘present’ narratives, Palestinian/American Fady Joudah engages with the timeless universality of human suffering and our individual and collec- tive responsibilities. The daughter of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, now one of Israel’s leading and most popular poets, Agi Mishol believes that poetry serves ‘as a kind of alarm clock that reminds people of their origin, or of themselves, or of their conscience’. She reads with her English translator Joanna Chen. Inventive, provocative, haunting and insightful – Hungarian-born George Szirtes writes poems to try to make sense of the world: ‘Poetry's only obligation is to the truth. Whether this truth is widely popular or not is irrelevant. It should be the best truth possible and that is the only quality that gives it any hope of survival.’

9.30 – 10.00 pm Book signings & refreshments 

Readings and the Discussion will take place in the Synagogue

Close Readings will be an opportunity for the shared scrutiny of a specially chosen historic or contemporary poem on the main theme

Poetry Bookstall run by Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves Bookshop (Nottingham)

With the participation of English Pen; Exiled Writers Ink; Jewish Renaissance; Modern Poetry in Translation; Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam (Oasis of Peace); Tea & Tolerance.

This is an LJS event, curated by Naomi Jaffa [former Director of The Poetry Trust/Aldeburgh Poetry Festival] and organised by Harriett Goldenberg and Sue Bolsom

The organisers reserve the right to change or cancel the advertised programme

There is a crack in everything that’s how the light gets in’ (Leonard Cohen) 

THE POETS & THINKERS  

Raficq Abdulla (born 1940) Writer, poet, essayist, translator, public speaker and broadcaster.  He has been a Trustee of the Poetry Society and English PEN, and a non-Executive Director of South West London & St. George's Mental Health (NHS) Trust.  He was the University Secretary of Kingston University between 1996 and 2006. He was awarded an MBE in 1999 for his interfaith work between Jews, Christians and Muslims.  He has published two books of poetry based on the poems of the Muslim mystics Rumi and Attar.  This year, he will be giving readings from his sonnets in answer to the sonnets of Shakespeare in London and elsewhere in the UK.  He is presently co-writing a book on Islamic law which will be published in 2017. 

Sasha Dugdale is a Sussex-born poet, playwright and translator specialising in both classic and contemporary Russian drama and poetry. She worked for the British Council in Russia and set up the Russian New Writing Project with the Royal Court Theatre in London. Since 2012 she has been editor of Modern Poetry in Translation (co-founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort) and to date she has published three poetry collections – most recently Red House (2011).

Choman Hardi was born in Kurdistan and lived in Iraq and Iran before seeking asylum in the UK in 1993. She was university-educated at Oxford (BA, Philosophy & Psychology), London (MA, Philosophy) and Kent (PhD, Mental Health) and her post-doctoral research about women survivors of genocide in Kurdistan-Iraq (supported by the Leverhulme Trust) became the subject of her second poetry collection in English, Considering the Women (2015). In 2014 she moved back to her home-city of Sulaimani where she is chair of the department of English at the American University of Iraq.

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American medical doctor and formerly a field member of Doctors Without Borders. The son of Palestinian refugees, he was born in Texas, grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia, and lives with his family in Houston. The Earth in the Attic – the first of his three poetry collections to date – won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, and he is also the award-winning translator of leading contemporary Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan.

Ziba Karbassi was born in Tabriz in north-western Iran from where, as a teenager, she had to flee with her mother and sisters. London has been her adopted home for much of the last 25 years and she first gained attention with ‘Sangsar’ / ‘Death by Stoning’, a poem concerning the public death of a relative. Increasingly known for her astonishing live readings, her poetry is banned in Iran. She writes in her shared mother tongues of Farsi (Persian) and Azeri and works closely with her London-based champion – the internationally-published translator, editor and poet Stephen Watts whose own recent books of poetry and prose are Ancient Sunlight (2014) and Republic Of Dogs/Republic Of Birds (2016). The first dual-language full-length collection of her poems is due for UK publication from Arc in 2017.

Mohamed Keshavjee is an Ismaili Muslim, a barrister and a global specialist on international cross-cultural family mediation. He has worked for 30 years with His Highness the Aga Khan’s Secretariat in France, and the Aga Khan Development Network. An author, teacher and peacemaker, specialising in Alternative Dispute Resolution, he has trained family mediators in 27 countries in dealing with cross-border child abduction, as well as training pastors and imams in the USA and the UK in conflict resolution. He received The Gandhi King Ikeda Award for Peace in April 2016 in Atlanta, Georgia – to mark the 48th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King.

Maitreyabandhu was born Ian Johnson in 1961, in Warwickshire, and initially trained as a nurse and then studied fine art at Goldsmiths College (alongside Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst). He started attending classes at the London Buddhist Centre (LBC) in 1986 and was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order in 1990. Since then he has lived and worked at the LBC, teaching Buddhism and meditation and writing three books on the subject, including Life with Full Attention: a Practical Course in Mindfulness (2009). In 2010 he founded Poetry East, a London poetry venue exploring the relationship between spiritual life and poetry. And since 2010, he has published two prize-winning pamphlets and two full collections of poems, most recently Yarn (2015).

Agi Mishol is one of Israel’s leading contemporary poets. Born in Transylvania in 1947, Mishol is the daughter of Holocaust survivors who arrived in Israel in 1950. She has published 17 books of poetry in Hebrew and she is the recipient of numerous awards including the inaugural Yehuda Amichai Prize for Hebrew Poetry in 2002 and the Lerici-Pea Prize in Italy in 2014 (former winners including Seamus Heaney, Adonis and Yevtushenko). Mishol received an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University. As well as English, her work has been translated into at least 11 languages and publications in translation include the best-selling Look There: Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2005), Journal du Verger (Caracteres) and Sheherezada (Institutul Cultural Romania). She lives in an agricultural community and directs the Helicon School of Poetry in Tel Aviv, where she teaches creative writing. Her translator Joanna Chen was born in London and lives in the Ella Valley of Israel. A leading literary translator – from Hebrew and Arabic – she is a widely-published poetry essayist and has a column in The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is also a regular contributor to Garnet News and has written for Newsweek, The Daily Beast and The Millions. 

George Szirtes was born in Budapest and came to England with his family as refugees after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He lives in Norfolk and is a freelance writer, having retired from teaching at the University of East Anglia. Educated in England (and originally trained as a painter), he has always written in English but also translates and edits Hungarian literature. A prolific and prize-winning poet – his New & Collected Poems (2008) numbers over 500 pages; Reel (2004) won the T.S. Eliot Prize – he has made a major contribution to post-war literature and his new collection Mapping the Delta will be published this year.