Performance: Illustrate, Ornament, Pattern - Lila Matsumoto with Shannon Kuta Kelly

The art critic Walter Pater wrote in his essay The Art of Giorgione, “Music seems to be always approaching to figure, to pictorial definition.” Pater’s observance of music as figuration can also be applied to poetry, in its capacity to illustrate, ornament, and pattern. 

Join us for this event at which poet Lila Matsumoto will perform a selection of pieces originally composed for Cloth, a band that she shares with Matthew Hamblin. 

As support, poet and translator Shannon Kuta Kelly will perform original piano interpretations of poems by Romanian writer Ana Blandiana to illuminate the ways that poetry and music interact with, inform, and expand one another, the benefits of constraint, and music’s ability to make language accessible. 

This event will be introduced by poet Stephen Sexton. 

Lila Matsumoto is a writer who works with music and art. Her poetry publications and pamphlets include Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water (Prototype, 2021), Urn & Drum (Shearsman, 2018) and Soft Troika (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2016) and Allegories from my Kitchen (Sad Press, 2015). She is in the bands Food People, Cloth, and Geranium Slips, and teaches creative writing and poetics at the University of Nottingham. Lila recently co-curated Pommel, an online programme of videos created by artists innovating at the intersection of textual, visual, and sonic performance. 

Shannon Kuta Kelly is a writer, translator, and musician based in Belfast. Her work has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, the Irish Times, Body Prague, the London Magazine, and in Poetry Jukebox installations across Europe. She has collaborated with the Romanian ConTempo String Quartet for events such as the Dublin Enescu Festival and performances in conjunction with the Embassy of Romania in Ireland. She is a doctoral student at Queen’s University Belfast researching poetry and censorship in Romania and Northern Ireland.

Stephen Sexton’s first book, If All the World and Love Were Young was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019. He was awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2020. He was the winner of the National Poetry Competition in 2016 and the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. Cheryl’s Destinies was published in 2021, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.