Peter Jaeger at Edge Hill

19/02/2012 at 8:00 am · Filed under Events and tagged: Edge Hill, Peter Jaeger, Robert Sheppard, Tom Jenks

Tuesday, 28th February 2012, 7:30pm

The Rose Theatre, Edge Hill University
Edge Hill’s Creative Writing Department present

An Evening with Canadian poet, Peter Jaeger, at the Rose Theatre.

Tickets £4.00 all

Peter Jaeger is a Canadian poet, literary critic and text-based artist now living in the UK. He is the author of five books of poetry, including Rapid Eye Movement (2009) and The Persons (2011). He has recently collaborated with the video artist Kaz to produce the film Nozomi, which was exhibited at the Bury Text Festival in 2011, and he is currently
working on a critical monograph on John Cage. Peter uses found texts to write through the words of others: those protagonists who have animated his imagination and left their traces in newspapers, emails, diaries, books (from literature to philosophy), and in all the countless ephemera with which the externalised inner drama of our lives plays out.

Peter Jaeger teaches poetry and literary theory at Roehampton University, in London. http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/staff/Peter-Jaeger/

His work includes the poetry collections Power Lawn (1999), Eckhart Cars (2004), and Prop (2007), as well as a critical study on contemporary poetics, entitled ABC of Reading TRG: Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, and the Toronto Research Group (2000). He currently divides his time between London and rural Somerset, where he lives with his family.

Recent book from Reality Street: Rapid Eye Movement follows a strict constraint: two bands of text run continuously throughout the book. The top band consists entirely of fragmented dream narratives recorded by historical and contemporary dreamers, while the lower band juxtaposes found material which includes the word “dream.” No two sentences taken from the same source follow each other. As an investigation of the sign “dream” across a number of social discourses, including literature, psychoanalysis, advertising, popular culture, song lyrics, philosophy and
religious literature, Rapid Eye Movement presents a record of our culture dreaming.

“Jaeger dreams of the day when forestry operations can use balloon-based, skidding devices that float above the treetops and winch trees out of the forest without damaging the woodland floor. Jaeger dreams up some interesting shots. Jaeger dreams of peace. His book of dreams is not too different from a hope chest. His dreams are getting better all the time.
His dreams are coming true.”
Christian Bök

Members of the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research group will be reading as a warm-up.

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