The Poetry Weekend

Papers presented at conferences have been my regular current engagement. This has kept the voltage high, figuratively speaking, after a period of low emotional intensity which followed the termination of classroom teaching and research based on literature. After five presentations at local and international conferences in Lithuania in 2008, four papers given at international conferences in Milan, Szczecin, Warsaw and Brno in 2009, three presentations awaited me in 2010. The paper I gave at the 4th international conference of the Lithuanian Association of Language Teachers in May 2010 at the Kaunas University of Technology focused on social and cultural interests in  foreign language teaching. The year was drawing to a close, but before I gave a paper on new words in English at the 4th international conference at the Pedagogical University of Vilnius on 18 November 2010, which was very well received, an exciting event was to double this accent at the end of the year. It was an international conference, The Contemporary Poetry Weekend, organized by the Literature, Media and Cultural Studies Special Interest Group (LMCS SIG) of the IATEFL and hosted by the British Council, Spring Gardens, London. The Poetry Weekend took place on 6-7 November 2010. It was a chamber event in a kingdom, which “had a very pleasant atmosphere about it”, as the Organiser of the Conference later put it.