From the Earthly to the Mythical, Poetry Masterclass on Rilke with Karen Leeder 22/10/26

Rainer Maria Rilke is one of the twentieth century's most iconic and influential poets. Countless thinkers, artists, musicians and poets since have felt compelled to get the measure of him and his work in translations, versions and reworkings (although he did not know English and even despised some aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture).

We couldn't have a better workshop facilitator. Karen Leeder, recognised as one of the leading authorities on Rilke's work and a brilliant German translator herself, will discuss Rilke’s singular voice and explore translations and versions though close readings of key and lesser-known poems.

We’ll look at Rilke's early explorative, existential poetry, his use of colour and form in his revolutionary ‘thing poems’ (New Poems); and the blending of myth and the earthly in his marvellous late work, focussing on how life becomes art, form and feeling, and the proximity of translation/adaptation and writing, among many other themes. 

There will an opportunity to explore Rilke’s energies in our own writing through writing exercises, as well as plenty of group discussion.

Marina Tsvetaeva called Rilke the very ‘embodiment of poetry’. His life is the stuff of myth: being raised as a girl, his many liaisons with gifted women, his work as secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin, ten years of agonising silence, the way the Duino Elegies appeared to him as if from a storm, his existential homelessness and his early death of leukaemia - which for a long time was thought to the result of being scratched by the thorn of a rose.

Karen Leeder is a writer, translator and academic, and Schwarz-Taylor Chair of German at the University of Oxford. She writes especially on modern and contemporary poetry and edited the Cambridge Companion to Rainer Maria Rilke (with Robert Vilain 2010), and Rilke and Ecology which will appear in November 2027. Her translations of Rilke and Elisabeth Ephrussi will be published by Chatto in Edmund de Waal’s How to Begin this Autumn.  As a translator, she has won many awards, including the Schlegel-Tieck Prize and the Frederick Nims Memorial Prize. Most recently she was awarded the Griffin Prize 2025 for her translation of Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005-2022 (Seagull, 2024).  She is also a prizewinning critic who has written books on Volker Braun, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Michael Krüger, Durs Grünbein, Evelyn Schlag, Ulrike Almut Sandig, and Raoul Schrott.

2.5 hours long

Start time: 9.30am UK time // 4.30pm Perth Australia // 7pm Adelaide //  6pm Darwin // 6.30 pm Brisbane //  7.30pm Sydney, AEST // 10.30am Berlin & Cape Town

You can also buy a RECORDING if the timing doesn't suit you (for example NZ or USA timezones are too late or too early in the day)

 You can check your timezone against London UK time here: https://greenwichmeantime.com/time-gadgets/time-zone-converter/

Cost £30 GBP (with cost effective exchange via STRIPE)

Zoom link and materials will be sent by email at least 2 days prior. If you don’t receive it get in touch with me.

More events here https://www.cathdrake.com

This event will be recorded. Our workshops are intended as live and interactive. However, there are a small number of tickets for those keen to come, but who cannot make the date of this workshop that are 'recording only' tickets to be purchased in advance ONLY for those who can't make the date. If you buy a live ticket and don't turn up on the day, you can't access the recording – sorry, it's not a fall back. You need to buy a live OR recorded ticket. This is because we primarily want poets to participate in live workshops. 'Recording only' tickets allow access to listen to a recording of the workshop during the 3 weeks following the workshop. (Note that we may share the recording at a future time to new participants.)