THE OTHER ROOM
Experimental poetry in ManchesterArchive for April, 2010
Counting Backwards website
Counting Backwards, a new event in Manchester organised by Richard Barrett, Matt Dalby and Gary Fisher, now has a website, here. The first Counting Backwards will take place on Thursday 3rd June at Fuel Cafe in Withington and will feature Mike Cannell, THF Drenching and Holly Pester.
Allen Fisher at LETTERBOMB
Allen Fisher reads at LETTERBOMB in Leeds on Wednesday 12 May at SMOKESTACK, 159a Lower Briggate, Leeds, LS1 6LY. 7.30 pm start. More here.
See Allen’s reading for The Other Room in June 2009 here.
Scott Thurston and Rob Holloway
Rob Holloway and Scott Thurston will be reading at Crossing the Line in London next Wednesday 5th May. It starts at 7.30 and it’s upstairs at The Leather Exchange on Leathermarket Street, nearest station/tube London Bridge. More here.
3am magazine presents contemporary Romanian poetry
Via Steven Fowler:
3am magazine presents contemporary Romanian poetry – Elena Vladareanu, Ruxandra Novac and Adrian Urmanov.
The Rich Mix arts centre, London (Shoreditch / Brick Lane) – Saturday May 29th – 7pm – Entrance free to all www.richmix.org.uk
For the first of the Maintenant interview series readings 3am magazine presents three of the most exciting and acerbic contemporary poets emerging from Romania since the millenium. Challenging, caustic and resolute, their poetry retains the dark humour so prevalent under dictatorship with the utterly modern vernacular of a generation that has come to fruition post-1989. Attacks on misogyny, sexual repression, political idealism and linguistic correctness are interspersed with exactingly crafted free poetry, literary and resounding, distinct for it’s energy and image, and despite a textual tendency to the climactic, this reading will remain very much literary in style. Performing as part of a national tour, this is a chance to see the brightest young talent from a distinct and vivid European poetical tradition.
Selections of their work have recently been published by Cleaves Journal http://www.cleavesjournal.com/issue2/romania/romania2.htm.
Interviews with each poet are available here at 3am, Cadaverine and Pomegranate magazines respectively.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-2-elena-vladareanu/
http://www.pomegranate.me.uk/submission/read/well-sing-for-the-third-millenium-an-interview-with-ruxandra-novac
http://web.mac.com/thecadaverine/Site/Interviews/Entries/2010/2/3_Adrian_Urmanov.html
this work im doin i dont kno what it is
this work im doin i dont kno what it is: poems for the eye, exhibited and hidden in the Henry Moore Institute Library by Philip Davenport
Philip Davenport’s poems insist on the importance of reading, but not as stiffness, or adherence to tradition – the opposite – the emphasis is on a kind of wayward thoughtfulness and imaginative investment. Davenport is conscious of his work neither being sacrosanct nor easily-absorbed signage. He carefully adds words up – omissions, divisions, extensions and provoking grammatical errors are as calculated as metric verse – and themes are both flashed cryptically between the text and conducted so as to cast a shadow over the whole, as if one needs to be at once at a distance and right inside the poems.
Spreadsheets of Light, Davenport’s most recent project, is debuted in this exhibition. These are poems as spreadsheets, with words substituting numbers. They present moral dilemmas as accountancy – war crimes, celebrity death, or the act of shopping – the impossible necessity of adding up atrocities and banality to come up with an adequate answer. Each spreadsheet is accompanied by what Davenport describes as a “word-abacus” – sculptural works whose dual role as poem and counting instrument reinforces the importance of form in these works. So, dozens of broken eggshells become symbols for smashed skulls; a poem is inscribed within these fragments. Davenport wants his poems to interfere with our expectations of the library space, yet their dual visual/literal nature also harmonises with the sculptural research setting.
Heart Shape Pornography is ‘found text’ written onto apples; extracted from pornographic material by cutting out a heart-shaped cross-section, and reproduced on an object itself heavily symbolic, with the sometimes prosaic, sometimes prurient, words literally on the flesh of the fruit. This fracturing of original text is continued in the Imaginary Missing People – made by collaging missing person’s notices with text from Davenport’s diary. The missing people are bookmarks hidden between pages at HMI library. Unexplained breaks suffered in personal narratives are a dark contrast to the minutely-researched histories of sculptors.
On 5 May Philip Davenport will be a ‘reader in residence’ in the library – looking at work from the Institute’s Special Collections and pleased to answer any enquiries regarding his work.
Exhbition runs 27th April-7 June 2010
Henry Moore Institute
74 The Headrow
Leeds
LS1 3AH
UK
Poem Talk on Robert Grenier’s Sentences
Five hundred cards in a box: on each is typewritten a few words or phrases of poetic writing. This is Robert Grenier’s Sentences. Al gathered Joseph Yearous-Algozin, Jena Osman, and Bob Perelman to talk about this complex work. As Jena notes several times, there’s something odd about producing an audio discussion about a oral reading or performance by Grenier from a work that was and is so closely associated with a material text-object. A text-object that indeed has become famously central to people’s response to the writing in it. So one question immediately is on that count: by performing the work (and by doing so with such comic pleasure, and even, at times, with such schtickiness), is Grenier signalling to us that our focus on the object is misleading–that Sentences is meant to be always somewhat and variously unmoored from the codex book and the normally printed-on-page poem? All the PoemTalkers, led by Bob, want to discuss in some way how and why Robert Grenier always forces us to think about the most fundamental qualities and definitions of poetry. And surely this is good in itself.
Counting Backwards
At last I can let you know about a new series of events in Manchester.
For a few weeks now Richard Barrett, Gary Fisher and myself have been working on a new series of text-sound-performance events called Counting Backwards.
Beginning Thursday 3 June 2010, Counting Backwards will take as its starting point contemporary text-sound practices that question semantics and received traditions, and emphasise performability.
Counting Backwards takes place at Fuel Cafe Bar in Withington on the first Thursday of alternate months. Entry is free. The flyer for our launch event is below.
Via Matt Dalby
Wallace Stevens now on PENN sound
We are pleased to announce a new PennSound author page – that of Wallace Stevens. We begin by making available two recordings made in Boston – a project in collaboration with the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard. New Stevens recordings will be added to this page in the coming months:
Matthew Welton – In with the drizzle
From Matthew Welton’s reading for The Other Room, 7th April 2010.
Click here to open the film in a bigger screen.
Maintenant live event
To mark the tenth edition of the Maintenant interview series…
The 3am magazine Maintenant series aims to evidence, through discussion with Europe’s most exceptional young poets, the continued pertinence of poetry for a new generation of talent from a diverse selection of European poetic traditions. The interviews, and the poetry that accompanies them, have shown the slow dissolution of stylistic recalcitrance, internal bias to gender and race, methodological snobbery and poetical jingoism. The fusion of poetic expression inevitable in a world of increased communication, access and political freedom is remarkable and cause for optimism where so often there is pessimism in poetry circles. The range and depth of poetry on display, and it’s standard, is a small representation of what each nation is producing.
The Maintenant dictum is to introduce poets that might lie outside of the Anglo-American scene, or be overlooked until they have reached the prominence of middle age. Though not an orthodoxy, we also aim to introduce poets who might be considered experimental or seminal.
The series is published each Sunday at www.3ammagazine.com and features an extensive interview coupled with a selection of poetry of the poet’s choosing in English translation. The first ten editions can be found below, with links to both interview and poetry.
The first Maintenant reading to accompany the series will take place Saturday May 29th at the Rich Mix arts centre in London, located near Brick Lane. www.richmix.org.uk Three Romanian poets – Adrian Urmanov, Ruxandra Novac and maintenant featured Elena Vladareanu will be in attendance to read recent work. Entrance is free and the event begins at 7pm.
More about Maintenant here.
Third Text Festival – Calls For Submissions
Project proposals and submissions are invited – in any artform (sound, media, poetry, visual art, etc) using language in innovative ways. As I have mentioned over the last few months the shape of the next festival has been forming, with some great things in place already. There are more venues and new approaches. In addition to the open call, you can submit ideas in response to 4 projected exhibition themes:
1.Duchamp
2.Sentences
3.Visual Poetry
4.Artists’ Books
t.trehy@bury.gov.uk
or by mail to
Text Festival
Bury Art Gallery
Moss St
Bury
BL9 ODR
Via Tony Trehy
Openned Zine #1
The Openned Zine is setting out with one intention: to provide poets, publishers and organisers with a space to publicly present explanations, thoughts, ideas and opinions that may not necessarily be representative of a final response.
The intention is to draw attention to how poetry and the thoughts and activities based on and around it are an ongoing and necessarily ever-changing set of boundaries and equivalent freedoms, which provide a shifting map of communities of poets.
Now available to view in Online > ePubs, featuring:
- Alex Davies on eBooks and the Small Press
- Alec Newman & Richard Barrett on Knives, Forks & Spoons Press
- Boris Jardine on Cambridge Literary Review
- Tom Jenks, James Davies & Scott Thurston on The Other Room
- Marcus Slease on Istanbul
- Linus Slug on FREAKLUNG
- Mike Weller on Home’Baked books
- Steve Willey on Writers Forum
Available in full-colour PDF or an easy-to-print black and white version.
Via Openned
Scott Thurston – Internal Rhyme
Published today.
BUY from SHEARSMAN
Poems at:
Review at Silliman’s Blog
Silliman’s blog – Internal Rhyme
Videos
Cannibal Spices 4
Openned publish issue 4 with Jeff Hilson, Ken Edwards, Timothy Thornton & Linus Slug:
Islington Mill Art Academy
“Islington Mill Art Academy is a free self-organised art school based in Manchester, UK. It was set up in 2007 by a group of art foundation students, dissatisfied with the quality and standards in University fine art courses open to them at that time.
The Academy exists to experiment with what an education in art can be, where it can take place and how it can be paid for. It is open to anyone who would like to be an artist and who is interested in taking responsibility for, and direction of the way in which they intend to do this. The artists in the group take all of the decisions related to their personal learning process and put these decisions into practice themselves.
The group invites visiting artists to talk about their work and to give feedback on the work of artists from the Academy on a regular basis. Academy artists organise residencies and research trips to other parts of the UK and abroad for all members of the group. In 2008, we visited Glasgow, Bristol and Sheffield and held residencies in Berlin and the Lake District.”
More here.
Letterbomb 12
The Leeds reading series celebrates its first birthday. Guest poet Tom Jenks. Smokestack, Lower Briggate, Leeds. Wednesday 14th April, 7.30 PM start. More here.
Maggie O’Sullivan and Bob Cobbing: Poetry as Haptic Allegory
Maggie O’Sullivan and Bob Cobbing: Poetry as Haptic Allegory with “a drawing where but not” by Todd Thorpe and Patricia Farrell is in eklelsographia wave two, March 2010 here.
Knives Forks and Spoons second event
We will be holding another of our massively popular book launches. It will take the form of a seminar at the Crescent pub in Salford. Bring a poem if you fancy.
Tuesday 13th April Starts 7pm
Readers:
Matt Dalby,
Simon Rennie,
Alec Newman.
There will also be a bookstall of proportions as yet unseen by mankind. It will have an old headscarf on it!
via Alec Newman
