Month: April 2011

Maintenant #57: Tomas S. Butkus

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The impression left on the audience attending the Maintenant Lithuania events held over the weekend of April 8th only served to confirm Tomas S. Butkus’ reputation as one of the most complex and creative poets currently at work in the unusually healthy Lithuanian poetry scene. Sometimes seen as an irreverent and idiosyncratic poet, due perhaps his use of many mediums (text, video, sonic art, collage), his membership in an experimental art performance collective or his distinctive use of surrealist imagery – his work in fact continues the revolutionary underground spirit of creativity that underpinned some of the greatest poetry Europe produced while Lithuania was under Soviet occupation. Perhaps rather Butkus’ work stands out from a certain contemporary style (reformed, controlled and meditative) by virtue of its energy and individuality. And without doubt, as the people attending Europe House and the Rich Mix arts centre discovered, the man is equal to his work. Celebrating the Maintenant Lithuania project and our 57th edition, we welcome Tomas S. Butkus,
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-57-%e2%80%93-tomas-s-butkus/

Accompanying the interview are five of Tomas’ poems, translated by Kerry Shawn Keys, Edgaras Platelis, Becka Mara Mckay, Gerrie Fellows & Jake MB Levine

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/five-poems-tomas-s-butkus/

Huge thanks to everyone who attended and performed at Europe House in Westminster and the Rich mix arts centre in Brick Lane for the Maintenant Lithuania events last weekend. Both nights were fantastic, memorable for the quality of the work on display and the atmosphere generated by those who were kind enough to attend. Pictures and sound recordings of both events will be online soon, and the Rich mix event was filmed by the BBC for an upcoming cultural arts feature program. Special thanks to Gabriele Labanauskaite, Tomas Butkus, Donatas Petrosius and Daiva Parulskiene. Our next event looks to be in June, most likely Maintenant Slovakia.

The Ground Aslant

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“Over the past 40 years or so, British poets have been remaking the pastoral. It has been a violent business. What Raymond Williams once severely called the old “enamelled world” of pastoral poetry has been worked over, its certainties cracked and shattered. Long gone are those shepherds and shepherdesses idly enacting class hierarchies. Toxins have seeped into Arcadia; “nature” is a mess of our own manufacture. Out of the static conservatisms of an ancient form has come a series of countervailing modes: the anti-pastoral, the counter-pastoral, the radical pastoral, the post-pastoral.”

The Ground Aslant, a new Shearsman anthology edited by Other Room reader Harriet Tarlo and featuring Other Room readers Zoë Skoulding and Carol Watts, reviewed in The Guardian, here.

The Language Moment – tonight

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Last minute reminder for this excellent event tonight at The Green Room in Manchester:

Featuring Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Maggie O’Sullivan, Phil Minton and Ben Gwilliam & Phil Davenport, Sarah Sander, and Sarah Boothroyd

@ The Green Room, Manchester

Friday 15 April 2011

In a pre-festival partnership event with the Green Room, Manchester, the Text Festival presents an evening of virtuoso vocal performance and groundbreaking sound art.

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is an Icelandic poet and author of three novels. He works with performance and sound-poetry, and regularly appears at poetry and music festivals, as well as dabbling in the dark arts of the concrete. In the recent years he has explored the possibilities inherent in the European and North-American avant-garde traditions, and focused on disassembling language into its visual, social and linguistic units. Nothing can prepare you for the power and dexterity of his performance, the sonically richness of his sound poems, and his amazing control of his material. His huge contortions twist his mouth to stun the audience.

Phil Minton is a dramatic baritone with a free-form style of “extended techniques” that are extremely unsettling. His vocals often include the sounds of retching, burping, screaming, and gasping, as well as childlike muttering, whining, crying and deep-throated drones; he also has an ability to distort his vocal cords to produce two notes at once. Phil Minton’s voice occupies a category apart, as joyously accessible as it is radical.

For over thirty years, Maggie O’Sullivan has been one of the leading figures of British innovative poetry. An international performer and visual artist, she is committed to excavating language in all its multiple voices and tongues, known and unknown, in visceral gestures that collage and pulverization at the service of a rhythmic vortex.

Phil Davenport & Ben Gwilliam are artists engaged in collaborative practice across different artforms: Davenportthe poet and Gwilliam the sound artist merge experimental language through the infrathin processing of the silence between sounds.

The event will also feature specially commissioned sound art interventions in various Green Room Spaces.

More here.

AVENIR

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The next zimZalla object will be AVENIR by Julius Kalamarz.

AVENIR is a series of synesthetic (grapheme → color) interpretations of color fields. The interpretations, and their corresponding colors, are presented on 24 cards housed within a box. The monochromes of Yves Klein inspired the concept, while the Event Scores of George Brecht inspired its presentation.

The anticipated release time for this object is May 2011. Click here to visit the zimZalla site and view a sample.

CUBE GIVES AWAY LATEST INSTALLATION – FREE TO THE FIRST 100 VISITORS!

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COLLECTION AVAILABILITY: 12am – 5pm, Monday 18th April – Tuesday 19th April

For a limited period only, CUBE is giving visitors the opportunity to own a part of their current exhibition osa/MERZEN.

The monumental installation by osa (Office for Subversive Architecture), as featured in international architecture publications AJ and Blueprint magazine ends on Saturday 16th April. The exhibition is the first time the osa, renowned for their public realm works have worked in a gallery setting, with CUBE challenging them to ‘subvert’ the gallery space in response using the collage by Schwitters, YMCA Flag Thank-you Ambleside, made by the artist whilst in exile in Cumbria.

The exhibition has proved popular with visitors commenting “Wonderful, fascinating exhibition, excellent to see what can be done with imagination and discarded materials” and “Excellent, very brave, thought provoking, thank you” (Andrew J. Holland).

A unique window of opportunity has been provided by CUBE that will allow the first 100 people who arrive to own their very own piece of an International commission.

CUBE Staff will be on hand to assist the first 100 people who visit the gallery with their selection on Monday 18th and Tuesday 19th April between 12 – 5pm.

All materials left at the end of the give away period will be recycled, reclaimed or reused.

CUBE 113-115 Portland Street Manchester M1 6DW
Tel: 0161 237 5525 fax 0161 236 5815
http://www.cube.org.uk
email info@cube.org.uk

The Other Room 23 reviewed

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Interesting discussions from Matt Dalby and Steve Waling

It was an ambitious programme this time. Derek Henderson read via live stream from Utah – and the other readers (Carrie Etter, Alec Finlay and Ken Edwards) were streamed out to the wider world. The venue was pretty packed and there were a number of new faces.

Derek Henderson reading from the recently released if p then q collection Thus & was the highlight of the evening for me. The collection is described as ‘a systematic erasure of Ted Berrigan’s 1964 collection The Sonnets.’

READ MORE at Santiago’s Dead Wasp

The last Other Room was a really terrific night – to think that it’s already got to three years is quite stupendous. Derek Henderson live-streamed from Utah was one of the highlights, as was seeing the poet and editor Carrie Etter reading from her Shearsman book, Divining for Starters. Ken Edwards was also good, as was Alec Finlay. It was an interesting evening that brought up some issues.

READ MORE AT BRANDO’S HAT

18s edited by Mark Cobley review

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Colin Herd reviews at 3 am magazine:
From Raymond Queneau’s audacious sequence Hundred Thousand Billion Poems to Jerome Rothenberg’s radical reimagining of the Hebrew Mystic number system in Vienna Blood, Ronald Johnson’s 99-section long poem ARK, Ron Silliman and Inger Christensen’s use of the Fibonacci sequence and Jackson Mac Low’s systematic ‘diastic’ poems, numbers and counting have been an important structural element in the work of many of the Twentieth Century’s most radical and experimental poetics. With potential for chance procedures, and taking the poem’s structural locus away from the subjective perspective, numerical systems and constraints have often slicked the engines of what William Carlos Williams famously called ‘machines made of words.’

READ MORE

The Other Room Anthology 3

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Out now, featuring work from Neil Addison, Richard Barrett, derek beaulieu, Adrian Clarke, Emily Critchley, Ian Davidson, Stephen Emmerson, Allen Fisher, Susana Gardner, Ben Gwilliam, Jeff Hilson, Peter Manson, Craig Marchington, Nicole Mauro, Chris McCabe, Maggie O’Sullivan, Posie Rider, Jeffrey C. Robinson, Jerome Rothenberg, Zoe Skoulding, Linus Slug, Nathan Thompson, Joseph Walton and Justin Katko, and Louise Woodcock.

Click HERE to buy a copy for £6 including postage within the UK or HERE to buy a copy for £7 including postage anywhere else.

SJ Fowler book launch at the Blue Bus

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Red Museum with Knives, Forks & Spoons press

www.sjfowlerpoetry.com

www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk

April Tuesday 19th 7.30pm
at The Lamb, 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1N 3LZ<

'A tremendous and persuasive surge of the red and the black: conflicted doctrines, scorched paper. Gothic scripts and plague-year screenplays for an apocalyptic cinema. Death chess. Heretical crusades. Hurt flesh. Fire angels. Madness. A grimoire for a haunted river-city. The poetry lies in the interpretation of malfated woodcuts. It is sinewy, knotted, persistent. And true.'

Iain Sinclair

also to be released, the chapbooks:

Fights XIX: Johnny Tapia with Oystercatcher press
www.oystercatcherpress.com

Fights XX: the Songs of Salvador Sánchez with the Red Ceilings press
www.theredceilingspress.co.uk

Thus & live stream details for performance at The Other Room, 6th April

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Derek Henderson will be live streaming from Utah to the Other Room on 6th April at 7.30 UK time and 12.30 Utah time. For other places in the world check conversion times from the UK time. This reading will feature a number of his sonnets from Thus &: An Erasure of Ted Berrigan’s the Sonnets published by if p then q

This is the link for anyone who can’t make it but would like to watch.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/thus1