Poetry has profound uses and potential – this multimedia talk looks at this ancient art form and explores how it is being used to make genuine change. From the Hot Poets movement, which puts poets on the ground at top UN climate meetings, to youth programmes which use poetry to help kids take emotional risks, to viral campaigns, to testimony from the rubble of Gaza, poetry can speak – and allow people to listen – in ways normal language cannot. Our Artivist in Residence Erin Fornoff offers this look at the power of poetry.
Erin has published a poetry collection Hymn to the Reckless (Dedalus Press) shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award, as well as a chapbook Folk Heroes (Stewed Rhubarb Press). She has performed her poetry at hundreds of events including three times at Glastonbury Festival, RTE Culture Night at Dublin Castle, national Irish tours with Danez Smith and Hollie McNish, and performed at Hozier and James Taylor concerts. She has featured on BBC3 and her poems have been included in Best New English and Irish Poets 2016. Her essays have been featured in The Journal, The Irish Times, Architecture Ireland and Winter Papers. Her film poem ‘Home’ won the Beats and Rhymes category in the Berlin Underground Film Festival. She wrote and performed We Are An Archipelago in Dublin Fringe Fest 2022, a one-woman poetry show set to a live score, which told the semi-true story of a 99-year old man moving to the island of his birth, which received a four-star review in The Irish Times. The text of the play will be published as a poetry collection in late Spring 2025. She has served as the inaugural Writer in Residence for Ireland’s Inland Waterways. She is currently finishing her first novel, a satire based in the nonprofit sector.
“Erin Fornoff is blazing a trail as a non-traditional poet.” The Gloss
“Her words have a tendency to conjure immersive scenes, all tactile detail, full of colour, taste, and a way of making the meaty feel delicate. The result is an intoxicating nostalgia, filled with a love of people and place.” The Irish Times Magazine
“She excels in word portraits in a few spare words. She talks about loss in such a fluid, beautiful way that it
eases it, somehow.” Glastonbury Festival
“Of all the poetry I read, it is lines and images carved by this brilliant woman that stay with me and that I find myself quoting to friends whenever I’m allowed to talk poetry!” Hollie McNish
“Erin’s poems are each a blast of sensory magic conjuring intoxicating images of lost American summers of youth and memory; there’s sadness here for life and loss and poems of Ireland filled with love of friends … She makes the quotidian spellbinding and mesmerising in equal measure.” Emmet Kirwan
“Ultimately, it’s Fornoff’s show, her evocative – and often very funny – prose poem brought to live by her entrancing performance.” ★★★★ Mick Heaney, Irish Times
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