Poetry and Everyday Sexism with Kim Moore

Following two sell-out events in 2020, poet Kim Moore invites you to join her again for an experimental, audience-directed, choose-your-own-adventure event using live polls to help navigate through the online reading of her PhD thesis text.

Directed by the audience, this online live literature experience really will be a one-off, as Kim utilises audience polls to select the paths of navigation through her thesis – for the past three and a half years, she has been a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University, exploring how to use lyric poetry to write about everyday sexism and female desire.

By asking the audience to decide what they would like to hear next, Moore draws inspiration from Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. The event is hosted by the Manchester Game Studies Network and chaired by Dr Nikolai Duffy from Manchester Metropolitan University.

“I thought I would take advantage of Zoom and create this experimental reading, where you, the audience, will decide what to hear next using polls”

An award-winning poet, her pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves was chosen as an Independent Book of the Year in 2012 while her first collection, The Art Of Falling, was published by Seren in 2015 and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Alongside her research, she is currently working on her second collection, All The Men I Never Married. One of the directors of Kendal Poetry Festival, she was a judge for the 2019 National Poetry Competition and for the 2020 Forward Prizes for Poetry, due to be announced on 25 October.

Kim explains the slightly off-kilter (but we like it!) approach to this event: “My thesis is a reader-directed text, inspired by the ‘choose your own adventure books’ by Ian Livingstone that I read throughout my childhood. It contains sections of prose and small groups of poems. At the end of each of these, the reader is presented with choices of what they would like to read next. Whilst this structure would be unwieldy to replicate at a real-life event, I thought I would take advantage of Zoom and create this experimental reading, where you, the audience, will decide what they would like to hear next using polls. The choices you will be presented with will sometimes ask you to pick the phrase you’re most attracted to. Sometimes they will ask you to reflect on your reaction to what you’ve just heard and then make your choice.”

The event will have live captioning via otter and the poems will be screenshared.

Please note: some of the material in this event will discuss sexual violence and trauma.