SNOW: An Epic-in-Triptych

© Maxim Dondyuk, from White Series: Meditations on War #18, Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Winter 2024

SNOW: An Epic-in-Triptych

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Please note that access will not be permitted 15 minutes after the start of the event.

This event will be held in English.

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In this performance, Jason Allen-Paisant unveils SNOW, an epic-in-triptych pitched between trance, dream, prophecy, and the everyday. The poem crosses alpine glare and city hush, drifting from the Caribbean’s salt light to a wintry North, but it isn’t simply a life traced; it’s a barometer—taking the temperature of the present and its historical weather.

SNOW moves like a weather system: solitary yet polyphonic, unfolding through rhythm, vision, and chant. Languages rub and spark. Scenes flicker—hotel rooms, a ski station, mountain passes, chapels, checkpoints of the heart—then are buried and dug up again. What surfaces is something volatile: orientation and disorientation, the strange ethics of looking when the world is white-noised with snowfall.

With shifts of register from whisper to surge, SNOW asks what can still be heard when history muffles the air with its own returning—what must be said anyway.

Jason Allen-Paisant is a poet, scholar, and writer whose honors include the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is full professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. He has received fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, and the University of East Anglia. His books include the philosophical treatise Engagements with Aimé Césaire and the literary nonfiction work The Possibility of Tenderness. He is an associate editor of the literary journal Callaloo.

The Rendez-Vous de l’Institut Series is generously supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. You will find a full calendar of the Fellows’ Talks.

This event will take place in Reid Hall’s Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, built in 1912 and extensively renovated in 2023 thanks to the generous support of Judith Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc.

This event will be recorded and may be broadcast as part of our SNF Rendez-vous de l'Institut podcast series. By participating and asking questions, you consent to the use of your voice in this context.