Visions & Revisions

Poets Bella Li and Lucy Van think through poetics, histories, and how to wield language on one’s own terms. Hosted by James Jiang. 

Each work that engages with history (and all do, to some degree or another) raises questions about how our visions and revisions of the past … inform the ways in which we live now, the ways we make sense of and treat each other, the ways we see beyond our individual moments to broader fractures and allegiances, collective memories or amnesias. – Bella Li, Liminal Interview #73 (2018)

Poems are inevitably entangled in our fraught and fraying histories. Projecting such visions and revisions of the past, a poem is an assemblage, a translation, a palimpsest. As Lucy Van writes in The Open: 'Each day here is different. But say that each day here is the same. In this way, each day has no history. In this way, desire.’

A poem as history’s cracked mirror; a kind of opening; a rock thrown into a lost lake. Hosted by Sydney Review of Books editor James Jiang, this event sees Bella Li and Lucy Van think through histories, poetics and how to wield language on one’s own terms.  

Supported by the Sydney Review of Books  

Presented in partnership with Liminal