Writing Poetry while war
Seminar: Writing Poetry in Times of Catastrophe or War
About the Seminar
On Thursday and Friday, June 11 and 12, Wekalet Behna hosted a seminar: "Writing Poetry in Times of Catastrophe or War", proposed and coordinated by writer and poet Huda Omran. The seminar set out from an attempt to think through and open a dialogue on the conditions of poetic writing and its possibilities in times of catastrophe, annihilation, and devastation, under the dominance of today's systems of material and symbolic violence production.
The seminar sought to interrogate the place of poetry and writing in the face of the violent transformations the world is witnessing, and to explore the ways in which language and poetic experience respond to the realities of annihilation and catastrophe. This unfolded through a series of discussions and talks involving a number of writers, poets, critics, and cultural figures concerned with questions of literature and writing, among them poet and writer Alaa Khaled, poet and writer Iman Mersal, writer Haytham El-Wardany, poet and translator Abdelrahim Youssef, and curator and critic Ali El-Adawy, alongside a number of participants and attendees.
