Tuesday, April 12, 2016

EUOIA: Cristòfol Subira by Alys Conran and Robert Sheppard in Poetry Wales

The collaborations between Alys and myself have just been published in Poetry Wales Spring 2016, Volume 51: Number 3.

Cristòfol Subira was born in 1957 in Barcelona. He worked for many years as a street performer and living statue in the tourist districts of the city. Between 1980 and 2007, Subira produced four collections of poetry, alternately in Catalan and Spanish, but since then, his poetry has not appeared in print except for several unattributed poems inscribed on the paving of cul-de-sacs in Barcelona, recently acknowledged as his work. There was one doubtful sighting in Brussels in the summer of 2010, i.e. at the end of A Translated Man, where he appears.

It was fun working with Alys because we’d not met and she was game for my strange collaborative project. She is a very tight writer and she kept me in order. We did meet in 2015 and read the poems in Bangor. See my account of that here, and watch the embedded videos of us reading the two poems.

See also an account of the EUOIA’s previous appearance in Poetry Wales here.