Hera Lindsay Bird’s poetry has enough space for love, death, supermarket queues, Bruce Willis, peeing in public, love, Martin Heidegger, bisexuality, and – love. tumblr. and Twitter are still full of quotes from her poem about Monica from “Friends”, whereas “Keats is Dead so Fuck Me from Behind” sees the poet thinking about the death of the legendary Romantics – Byron, Whitman, Keats – in a brutally romantic-comic situation. In H. L. Bird’s poems, Uber drivers talk about their favourite TV show characters, wine is drunk before bed and the relationship between art and suffering is openly questioned.
On 2 July, 7 pm Kaunas Artists’ House is very pleased to host an evening with Hera Lindsay Bird. The evening will feature poetry readings and a discussion on various subjects, ranging from love to art, from Monica to Heidegger, between the audience and the poet.
Beside Rupi Kaur, H. L. Bird is often called an ‘instapoet’. “People get so shitty about poetry on the internet or Instagram poetry, but I don’t know why everyone is so stressed out about it. Surely everyone has the capacity to understand that we can have multiple things in the world at once. It’s like you can’t watch a Tarkovsky movie every night, sometimes you want to watch an episode of Coronation Street – and both things don’t negate the other. Honestly, I think it’s people’s feelings being hurt. There are a lot of poets who see Instagram poetry going viral and they’re like ‘but I made seven references to Virgil in my book!’ But it’s not for them. I’ve been to a signing with a really famous Instagram poet and her line was like seven lines long out the door and all those girls in that line were so unbelievably stoked to be there and it’s like, why would anyone even bother being shitty about that? When you’re a girl that age you just want someone to tell you how it is and how to live and reading hundreds of pages of Wilfred Owen is obviously not as applicable as someone writing honestly about their life. There need to be writers for everyone at every point in their life because those are people you can connect with”, Bird says in an interview with the Skinny, the Scottish arts magazine.
Hera Lindsay Bird is a writer from Wellington. Her debut book of poems “Hera Lindsay Bird” is out with Victoria University Press and Penguin UK, and her chapbook “Pamper Me to Hell & back” was selected by Carol Ann Duffy for the Laureate’s choice series, published by The Poetry Business. She is an Arts Foundation New Generation award winner.
H. L. Bird is visiting Lithuania under the invitation of “Poetinis Druskininkų Ruduo” festival. The event is chaired by essayist and film curator Paulina Drėgvaitė.
Attending the event is free of charge. The event will take place in English.
Further information about the poet can be found here
