Poets online work based on unsustainability of flying to literary events
John Kinsella and Melanie Challenger collaborate on new web-based commission

Poets Melanie Challenger and John Kinsella are creating a new online poetry work for the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre based on their decision to abandon long-haul flying for ethical reasons.

Set up by the RSA in 2005, the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre supports and catalyses artistic initiatives that respond to the environmental challenges of our time. The Centre has commissioned Challenger and Kinsella to produce an exchange of poems that grow out of their exchange of thoughts on air travel. The result is a multi-part work, Dialogue between the body and the soul, which will evolve on the RSA Arts & Ecology website over coming weeks.

The first part of Dialogue between the body and the soul is published today. Opening by John Kinsella can be read here:

tinyurl.com/dialoguepoems

Chris Meade, Director of the cultural think tank if:book, (www.futureofthebook.org.uk) comments: "This beautiful project uses the web to nurture an intimate intercontinental poetic collaboration, and great poetry can take us to new places  without any increase in carbon footprints."

Michaela Crimmin, Head of RSA Arts & Ecology says, "Whether to travel or not to an event can be a real dilemma for artists. It's great to read two great poets tackling the subject in such an original way."

Background | In October 2007 Challenger and Kinsella were invited to meet at a reading at the Harold Clurman Center for Poetry, Poetic Language, and the Spoken Word in New York. John had edited Melanie’s debut poetry collection, and this would have been their first opportunity to share their work in person. Earlier that year, Melanie had cancelled a flight to New York for environmental reasons but had not made the final decision against using stratospheric flights. On the other side of the world, John had already made the decision that such air travel was no longer justifiable. Via emails, they discussed why they could not meet for the reading. That was the starting point for this exchange, Dialogue between the body and the soul.

Biographies | Melanie Challenger & John Kinsella

Melanie Challenger’s first collection of poems, Galatea, won an Eric Gregory Award and was nominated for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. From 2007-8, she was Artist in Residence for British Antarctic Survey. She spent four months in Antarctica, sub-Antarctic islands, Falkland Islands and Chile, researching for her non-fiction work, Extinction, a comparative study of industrial, cultural, and ecological endangerments and extinction. She is Creative Fellow at the Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London, and is currently an Associate Artist at Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy.

John Kinsella is the author of more than forty books of poetry, prose, and criticism. He is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and was appointed the Richard L Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in the United States for 2001, where he was Professor of English until 2005. He is also Adjunct Professor to Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, where he is a Principal of the Landscape and Language Centre, and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. His most recent collections of poems include Shades of the Sublime and Beautiful and Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography, the latter described as a 'distraction' of Dante's original, and set in wheatbelt Western Australia. He has worked collaboratively with many poets, fiction writers, musicians, and artists.

For more information contact RSA Arts & Ecology
email William Shaw
+44 (0) 207 451 6845

www.rsaartsandecology.org.uk
www.artsandecology.rsablogs.org.uk