Past event
StAnza 2023 - Various
StAnza isn't known for playing it safe, and this year that's more true than ever as the festival explores wildness in all its many forms.
What does wild mean to you? You can be assured to find it, and many other surprises, in St Andrews and online at this year's festival. Environmental and landscape poetries. Unrestrained performances. Poetics which resist or re-wild existing forms. Poetries which challenge cultural and political norms. Wildly out-of-the-box, boundary-defying thinking and writing (because well might we need it…) Work which contests notions of ‘wildness', ‘wilderness' and ‘re-wilding', and how these terms have been used (e.g. postcolonial writings which resist assumptions behind terms like ‘the wild west'). Involving poets and artists from across Scotland, the UK and overseas, we'll explore this and more in a wild, long weekend of poetry, which will once more be delivered in hybrid form.
This year's festival cover image illustrates some of these dynamics in the context of the Harris landscape – a place some might consider wild, but which to the people of Harris is a working and worked landscape (in fact, more broadly in the context of climate change, you might rightly question whether ‘wilderness' exists anywhere these days). Meanwhile, the interpretation board seeks to educate us about the landscape, but in the process tames it. There's the wild incongruity of the office chair – resisting our expectations (and the wildly changeable weather!) – and the bus stop symbolizing how language is always a journey in progress… a journey which will stop by St Andrews and the Fife coastline, and our YouTube channel, between 9th and 12th March 2023. We'll see you there!