About this Event
This event celebrates global queer history, desire and creativity by launching two poetry chapbooks: Hongwei Bao’s Dream of the Orchid Pavilion (Big White Shed, 2024) and Gregory Woods’ They Exchange Glances: Gay Modernist Poems in Translation (Hercules Editions, 2024). Informed by different cultural traditions and composed in distinct styles, these poems testify to the persistence of queer desire even under difficult circumstances and the richness of queer history and heritage around the world.
The title poem of Dream of the Orchid Pavilion is a contemporary rewriting of a fourth-century classical Chinese text, rediscovering forgotten homoerotic traditions in ancient China. Drawing on Bao’s life experience of being a queer Chinese migrant living in the UK, the pamphlet ruminates upon love, intimacy, memory, heritage and identity. It takes readers from gay bars and drag shows in Nottingham to haunted city streets in Prague, from Beeston high street to Brighton Pier. It asks what it means to be queer and Chinese today.
Hongwei Bao is a queer Chinese researcher, writer and poet based in Nottingham. He teaches media studies at the University of Nottingham. His academic work documents queer Chinese history, culture and activism. His creative work explores queer desire, transcultural encounter, East Asian heritage, and diasporic positionality. His debut poetry collection The Passion of the Rabbit God has recently been published by Valley Press.
They Exchange Glances presents a selection of poems celebrating gay love, and lamenting its loss, translated by Gregory Woods, one of the UK’s leading gay poets. As men pass each other in public spaces, sustained eye contact may lead to either extreme pleasure or pain. Enclosed, rented rooms may provide safe privacy or constrictive isolation. Subject to intense social stigma but refusing to be silenced, poets such as Lorca and Cavafy, Umberto Saba, Luis Cernuda, Salvador Novo, Mikhail Kuzmin, Antonio Botto and Vicente Aleixandre proudly defied convention while dodging censorship.
Gregory Woods is the author of six poetry collections from Carcanet Press, the latest being An Ordinary Dog (2011) and Records of an Incitement to Silence (2021). His cultural histories include Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987), A History of Gay Literature (1998) and Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World (2016), all from Yale University Press. He is Emeritus Professor of Gay & Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Carousel, 25 Hockley, Nottingham, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
