SPENT

Proof of registration, via a QR code on your phone or on paper, will be required to enter Reid Hall. Entry will be refused to those who are not registered.

Please note that access will not be permitted 15 minutes after the start of the event.

This event will be held in English.

To be notified of upcoming Institute for Ideas and Imagination events, we invite you to sign up for our monthly newsletter.

When I say spent,/I don’t mean they have no further coin.

– Mark Doty, ‘Spent’

An heiress from the 1930s who, having founded a radical community, is talking to her butler; a woman at an Italian villa confessing to a groundskeeper; a sitter imploring sixteenth-century Italian artist Sofonisba Anguissola to paint her in the garb of a nun; a man who takes mini-golf too seriously; the collective voice of a focus group for the UK Conservatives’ 2019 ‘Levelling Up’ agenda. For SPENT, Frears will share works from a new collection of poems taking the form of one-sided conversations with voices that are worn out, weary, exhausted, used up, or expired, while questioning the role of the poet in a world that seems to be hurtling on fire into the extremities of the century.

Ella Frears is a poet and artist originally from Cornwall, now based in London. She’s the author of Shine, Darling, shortlisted for the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Goodlord, a hybrid work which takes the form of one long email to an estate agent, also shortlisted for the Forward Prize. She was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at The Courtauld, and a Poetry Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Frears’ poems have been translated into Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Greek, Turkish, Slovak, and Cornish. She hosts Tears for Frears, a chat and music show on Soho Radio.

The Rendez-Vous de l’Institut Series is generously supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

This event will be recorded and may be broadcast as part of our SNF Rendez-vous de l’Institut podcast series. By participating and asking questions, you consent to the use of your voice in this context.