EXPLORE York Libraries and Archives will play host to spoken-word artist Liv Torc’s online event, Haiflu Ever After, on November 10 from 7pm to 8pm.
Supported by Forward Arts Foundation, Torc will perform her poetry, discuss her pandemic poetry initiative, Project Haiflu, and invite audience members to share their own #haiflu in the chat panel.
Tuesday’s event forms part of Explore’s World Turned Upside Down 2020 #haiflu edition, where people in York are asked to send in haiku and doodles about their own experiences of lockdown since March.
These will be included in a limited-edition chapbook to be lodged in Explore’s archive as a record of this strange and challenging time.
Project Haiflu started in March 2020 when Torc asked her friends on Facebook to share how they were feeling about lockdown. This resulted in 12 weekly poetry films, combining original photography and music and a special event for libraries, all making for a compelling social history archive of these extraordinary days. Haiflu even ended up being featured on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Next, Torc intends to develop the project into a show to tour around British libraries and village halls, combining the haiflu films with her own poetry, which charts her experiences of lockdown, including a three-week hospital stay and a commission for the BBC Make A Difference campaign.
Online access to Haiflu Ever After is free but must be booked on Explore York’s Eventbrite page to receive a link to the Zoom meeting.
Who is Liv Torc?
LIVis a spoken-word artist, published poet and producer who “plunges the vast caverns and dormant volcanoes of the human and planetary condition”.
A BBC Radio 4 Slam winner, former Bard of Exeter and now co-host of The Hip Yak Poetry Shack, she runs the spoken-word stage at WOMAD, Project Haiflu and the Hip Yak Poetry School.
In 2019, her poem on climate change in the face of motherhood, The Human Emergency, went viral across the world, seen by 80,000 people. That year too, she performed at Glastonbury Festival on the Poetry and Words stage and represented Somerset for the BBC’s National Poetry Day celebrations.
In 2020 she was chosen as one of four Siren Poets by Cape Farewell for a commission on climate change in the time of Covid and wrote and filmed a poem for the BBC’s Make A Difference campaign.
Find out more at livtorc.co.uk.