Meet our resident writer

Philippe Beck

Philippe Beck is one of the most prolific and compelling contemporary poets in the French language. His poetry is both erudite and playful, grappling with its own formal questioning, through encounters with the other arts and engagement with a wealth of cultures and literary traditions, both European and non-European. His poems are ‘handshakes’ inviting their readers to let themselves be guided towards the frontiers of literature and other fields of enquiry: history, philosophy, anthropology, musicology, the visual and sculptural arts…, etc.

Philippe Beck’s poetic practice has won him numerous awards and it has been described as ‘complex, haunting, and profoundly literary’ in The Guardian (2016). His work has been translated into English, German, Chinese, Korean, Dutch, and Flemish. He has himself translated Walter Benjamin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, F.W. von Schelling and Karl Philipp Moritz.

His residency at St Andrews will be the chance for students and researchers to hear more about his latest publications, especially Ryrkaïpii (Flammarion, 2023) as well as forthcoming books: Documentaires and Abstraite et plaisantine (both with Le Bruit du temps, Autumn 2024).

Upcoming events

Wednesday 25 September, 2-4pm, Buchanan 216

‘Poetry and the other arts’

a Masterclass with Philippe Beck
(open to UGs, PGs and researchers)

 ‘Poetry is here or there. Not everywhere./ It depends on a sortie.’
(Opéradiques, Flammarion, 2014)

In this masterclass we will address the relationship between poetry and the other arts. The following questions will be discussed:

• How does poetry approach the plurality of other arts?
• Through which formal explorations can poetry understand the reality of other arts and the conflicts not only between them but also within each one of them?
• Through which kinds of reconfigurations can the poem question the hierarchy of the arts?
• What spaces or new scenes open up to poetry as it confronts the other arts?
• What is at stake in poetry’s encounter with the other arts, both in terms of its own existence and its ability to make a difference in the world and to the possibilities of sociability?

This event is free but booking is required at https://events.st-andrews.ac.uk/events/poetry-and-the-other-arts/

Wednesday 25 September, 6-8pm, Parliament Hall

Poetry Reading by Philippe Beck

Philippe Beck will read a selection of poems(French with English translations), including some from his latest collection, Ryrkaïpii (Flammarion, 2023).

This event is free but booking is required at  https://events.st-andrews.ac.uk/events/poetry-reading-by-philippe-beck/

Thursday 26 September, 5.15-7.30pm, Hebdomadar’s room

‘Poetry and “Ecoanthropology”’

Research seminar with Philippe Beck

Inspired by an article published in December 2019 relating how polar bears were dangerously approaching the village of Ryrkaïpii, on the edge of the Arctic banks of the Choucotka River at the north-eastern tip of Russia, the one hundred poems that form Ryrkaïpii (Flammarion, 2023) invite readers to follow both non-human and human animals in their various crossings. Joseph Kabris, a key character in the ethnographers’ libraries, is one of the figures to which the poems keep returning. His full-body tattoos not only testify to his encounter with the societies of the Pacific Ocean after his shipwreck in 1795, but it also opens up the possibility of new texts and writings, and to the amplification of poetry’s own gestures and formal developments.

An examination of the relationship between poetry and modern anthropology suggests that poetry is not simply an object, or a possible object, of cultural anthropology but that it is perhaps its inner object insofar as poetry is at work in the didactics of anthropology. One might even say that poetry has taken the place of anthropology, while anthropology has had to clarify its relationship with poetry. This reassessment of the relationship between poetry and anthropology is all the more necessary since ‘[t]he modern paradox is a need for “ecological connection”’. In a context in which we have been increasingly separated from Nature’, the destruction of that from which we have been cut off, paradoxically, affects us more than ever. If poetry appears inseparable from ecology, the ‘ecological connection’ we can hope to create is not a kind of ‘imitative harmony’, but requires the ‘necessary re-inscription of “natural elements” in the modalities of form itself.’ (Documentaires, Le Bruit du temps, forthcoming in 2024). This is what Ryrkaïpii exemplifies.

This event is free but booking is required at https://events.st-andrews.ac.uk/events/poetry-and-ecoanthropology/