The Mediated Self at The University of Stuttgart + a broadcast on HORADS 88.6
Last summer I travelled to Stuttgart on an invitation from Dr Jessica Bundschuh of the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at The University of Stuttgart, where over Friday 27 and Saturday 28 June 2025 I led a series of generative poetry workshop sessions in partnership with Cork-based poet Molly Twomey for around 60 participants composed of University students and 5th grade students from Dillmann Gymnasium.
The title of our collaborative workshop project was 'The Mediated Self' and it consisted of three individually-led sessions each: mine focusing on sampling, collaborative writing, ekphrasis, collaging, and related poetics.
My session 'Find a Pop Icon' in particular, spread over two days, was the source of much discussion, amusement, tumult and creative engagement from the students. My reading of the 132-line long collaborative, communal 'exquisite corpse' poem in its entirety, which I set for the class at the outset and which was contributed to by each and every student in their own handwriting on a long paper scroll across the duration of the workshop - and which functions as a visual-textual document of the time and place of the project - concluded proceedings.
'The Mediated Self' was the second of a two-part project titled 'The Poetics of Sight and Blindness', itself the final chapter of a 3-year cycle of biannual engagements with Irish poets at the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at The University of Stuttgart, pioneered by Jessica Bundschuh.
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In addition to commissioning the workshops, Jessica had arranged for poetry by Molly and myself to be translated into German by some of her senior students. Significantly, Mariia Liashenko volunteered to translate my poem 'insert name here', first published in Granta, and taken from my 2023 book Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document, into Ukrainian, with a version in German also produced by Max Schmid. Max also translated into German a two-page excerpt from my new long poem 'A Challenge' - the excerpt recently published in issue 55.2 of Irish University Review. And Virgil Wiegand translated section 18 from my 2019 book this is no longer entertainment, first published in 2016 as a standalone poem in Poetry Ireland Review 118 ('The Rising Generation' issue).
And while in Stuttgart I was interviewed on record in Jessica's office by Mariia, Max and Virgil for a podcast which finally aired on the University of Stuttgart radio station, HORADS 88.6, on 13 May 2026 as a 60-minute broadcast with title 'Irish Poetry'. The broadcast included an introduction by Jessica contextualising the overall project. The recording also features readings of the three translated poems: by myself in their original version in English, and by each of the translators in their respective versions.
You can listen back to the full broadcast here, or below:
My thanks to Jessica for the invitation and for the generous hospitality. Thanks also to Sui Lung for the project framework, assistance while in Stuttgart, and podcast production, and to Lion Oeding, programme director at HORADS 88.6. And of course thanks to the three translators of my work.
Last but not least, it was a real pleasure to spend time and to work with Molly in Stuttgart.
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