Alan Halsey rebooted

Technical problems have dogged this upload, but should be resolved now. This version of Alan’s reading at the very first Other Room on April 9th 2008 should take seconds rather than minutes to load.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Click here to open the film in a bigger screen.

Matt Dalby Reviews The Other Room 14

Interesting discussion of February’s readers and notions of performance in poetry and performance in general. Snippet below:

Despite snow there were around thirty people at The Old Abbey Inn for the latest Other Room reading on Wednesday. The readers were Steven Waling, Holly Pester and Rob Holloway. To be honest I found my attention wandering a lot throughout the evening so my account will be pretty unreliable. That wasn’t the poets’ fault, it’s just been a hazy kind of a week, but it may have contributed to some of the misgivings I had that will become apparent.

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Three events at Edge Hill

Via Robert Sheppard:

25th February 2010: Sean Bonney was born in Brighton and brought up in the north of England, and now lives in London. His books include Notes on Heresy (Writers Forum, 2002), Blade Pitch Control Unit (Salt, 2005),Document: hexprogress (Yt Communication, 2006), Baudelaire in English(Veer 2008) and Document: poems, diagrams, manifestos (Barque 2009). He co-edits the press Yt Communication.Together with other younger poets his work marks a progression and continuance of the British Poetry Revival. His ideological drive andenergetic performance style mark him out as a leading proponent of thisschool of poetry, so expect an explosive performance. Rose Theatre 7.30: £3.50

3rd March 2010 Jenn Ashworth was born in 1982 in Preston, Lancashire and studied at Cambridge and Manchester. She’s worked as a barmaid, a waitress, a Samaritan and a cleaner and she currently lives with her daughter in Preston and runs a library inside a prison. She writes a blog here: http://www.jennashworth.blogspot.com and her first novel waspublished with Arcadia in May 2009: A Kind of Intimacy Rose Theatre. 7.30: £3.50

Plus Open Poetry and Poetics meeting: Carrie Etter: 6-8.00 on 20thApril 2010, venue in Education Block; free

On her anthology Infinite Difference and her own poetry. Carrie Etter is an American poet resident in England since 2001. Previously she lived in Normal, Illinois (until age 19) and southern California (from age 19to 32). In the UK, her poems have appeared in, amongst others, New WelshReview, Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, PN Review, Shearsman, Stand and TLS, while in the US her poems have appeared in magazines such as Aufgabe, Columbia, Court Green, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, Seneca Review. Her first collection, The Tethers, was published by Seren in June 2009, and her second, Divining for Starters, containing moreexperimental work, is due for publication by Shearsman Books in 2011.She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing for Bath Spa University.

Bill Griffiths discussed on this coming Friday’s The Verb

Sean Bonney and I will be talking about Bill Griffiths’ Collected Earlier Poems on the BBC’s The Verb with Ian McMillan this Friday.

The programme is broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Friday 5 February at 21:15 GMT, and is available to listen to on the BBC iPlayer for a week thereafter.

Slightly more details at
http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/kens-blog/bill-griffiths-on-radio-3

 and more about the book at
http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/bill-griffiths.php

Via Ken Edwards

nick-e melville – selections and dissections

The first release of the year from the book publishing arm of Otoliths is a collection from Scottish concrete & visual poet, nick-e melville.

What nick-e melville creates within selections and dissections is text as experience, presenting us with different ways to look at visual language, different ways to understand the ubiquitous textscapes of daily living. The pages of this book are filled with games, but games of the most serious kind, games about the act of being sentient textual beings. Melville, a textual imagineer, examines the spaces between letters, the negative spaces between lines of text, and even the halftone atoms of printing, always looking for the surprise in the printed text. To read this book is to experience these acts of textual imagination as cinema, as vibrant and moving sequences of thought.Geof Huth

Check out a sample here and the Otoliths project – a magazine as well as a publisher – here.