Season 3: The Poetics of Sight & Blindness

In 2025, we hosted two creative writing workshops with visiting Northern Irish and Irish poets; in total, we have organized six two-day workshops, in addition a dozen outreach lectures and writing sessions. Additionally, our two current outreach and accessibility projects offered participants a pragmatic application of sensory hospitality: first we collaborated with Volkshochschule (VHS) Stuttgart to produce a collection of multilingual audio guides for visually-impaired visitors to the art exhibition Überraschen lassen…, which aired on HORADS 88,6 and is still accessible on our SoundCloud curation. Second, our project of collaborating with Stuttgart cultural institutions continues with the Staatsgalerie: as creative, ekphrastic responses to the visual arts, we are in the process of creating multilingual audio guide tour of 25 paintings from the permanent collection that will be available at the beginning of 2026.

Our target audience was composed both of Literary Studies students enrolled in seminars on ‘The Poetics of Vision and Blindness’ and ‘The Blind Witness: Poetry & Painting’ (as mentors) and 9^th and 12^th graders from the bilingual Dillmann-Gymnasium (as mentees).

In the final School for Talents outreach workshop on Friday, the 27th and Saturday, the 28th of June 2025 at the University of Stuttgart, as part of the Sensing Sight in Literature Faculty Project at the English Literatures & Cultures Department, Jessica Bundschuh, together with two visiting writers from the Republic of Ireland, Molly Twomey and Christodoulos Makris, led 55 participants in making collective Exquisite Corpse poems and poems about the fragility of identity with an emphasis on the sense of sight and the ways in which we see the world and the world sees us.

This outreach workshop, in which University of Stuttgart students mentored 9^th grade Dillmann-Gymnasium pupils deliberately stretched the boundaries of what it is to make a poem. On Friday, Christodoulos Makris, asked participants to set poetry in relation to music and sampling, and then engaged in the fruitful task of collage to draw from contemporary media sources as ‘seeds’ for emerging poems. Molly Twomey’s exercises on magic and radical realism, fantasy, and memory, with prompts from Rebecca Hawkes and Gustav Parker Hibbett, brought us into a new world. By Saturday, we were ready to expand our conception of poetry to include pop icons and wishes for ‘when and I grow up’ with Chen Chen’s “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities”: “To be a cyclone / of laughter.” The workshop concluded with a public reading of creative works, in particular the 132-lined exquisite corpse poem in which each participant wrote three lines.

And later that afternoon, we recorded a podcast for HORADS of six translations into German and Ukrainian from our two visiting poets. Here are our visiting poets with each of their three translators, a continuation of our Poet Translation Project from the Poetry Jukebox in which six visiting poets met their poet translators in spring 2024.

In a School for Talents outreach workshop on Friday, the 24^th and Saturday, the 25^th of January 2025 at Dillmann-Gymnasium and the University of Stuttgart, as part of the Sensing Sight in Literature Faculty Project at the English Literatures & Cultures Department, Jessica Bundschuh, together with two visiting writers from Belfast, Bebe Ashley and Stephen de Búrca, led 80 participants in making Braille poems and assessing the boundaries of sensory storytelling.

This outreach workshop, in which University of Stuttgart students mentored Dillmann-Gymnasium 11^th grade pupils, explored topics of inclusion, empathy, and sense integration. On Friday, Stephen de Búrca shared his translations from the Irish of poems by Antaine Ó Raiftearaí and Laoighseach Ní Choistealbha, leading to a chain of multi-sensory group haikus. Then, on Saturday, Bebe Ashley taught us how to use Braille slates and styluses to write Braille poems in the tradition of the DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark’s “Self-Portrait.” The resulting poems were performed at the conclusion of the workshop by each group as ‘extra-sensory’ readings in which they incorporated the senses of smell, touch, and sound, alongside their textual Braille poems.