Hosted by guest poet Antosh Wojcik, we are delighted to welcome the return of Poetry@JHG on Thursday 9 January 2025!

Inspired by our current exhibitions, we invite you to submit an original poem in response to the theme, Memory.

Ashokkumar D Mistry and Sonia Boué’s Las Gemelas: Arrival (a lexicon of unmaking) explores the almost 4,000 refugee Basque children who arrived in Southampton in 1937, as a consequence of the Spanish Civil War. Meanwhile, Sarah Pierce’s Scene of the Myth asks what it means to gather, reflect, and act in community through film, installation and performance.

Both exhibitions explore memory in all its guises: childhood experiences, memories within objects, ‘postmemory’, the memory of care, and the loss of memory. The artists invite us to consider which memories might be shared with us and which go unspoken.

Each poet will have up to 10 minutes for their performance, and we ask you to include how the poem relates to the exhibitions in your entry.

You can perform your poem in another language or using British Sign Language. If you would like to perform in another language, please provide an English translation with your submission.

If you wish to submit a poem, please email your submission to [email protected] by Monday 9 December 2024.

Successful applicants will be informed by Monday 16 December 2024.

Guest Poet

Antosh Wojcik is a poet, drummer and cross-disciplinary artist. He produces music as /weirdtoday and is a member of the collective FWRDMTN. His work explores memory, time & glitches.