Pierre Joris, Nicole Peyrafitte, Habib Tengour, and Madeleine Campbell:
Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre welcomes Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte
A presentation:
Poems for the Millennium: Volume Four
The University of California Book of North African Literature
Followed by Domopoetics
Tuesday 14 May, from 7pm, Room 253, Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Square London, WC1.
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/maps/interactive
Free and all welcome
Robert Sheppard has given this book over to his own invention, the fictional Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch. Apparently writing in both Flemish and Walloon, and translated and edited by entities as shadowy (and dodgy) as himself, Van Valckenborch’s split oeuvre derives from the linguistic and cultural divide within contemporary Belgium. By the time Van Valckenborch disappears into poetic silence he seems an enigma of his own making, a comic figure with tragic attributes, a mystery to all swept up in his apparition. When his story is finished he leaves behind the deliberately discontinuous evidence of a dual poetic adventure – one half siding with history and opting for a breathlessly recurring triplet verse, the other obsessing over place and space and restlessly and increasingly playing with experimental forms. Behind and within them all, Sheppard is extending his formal and referential range: from homages to film-makers to Twitterodes, from accounts of tribal masks to cuboid quennets, and poems about Belgium of course. Above all, he is exploring the limits of the author-function. This is an imaginary collection with real poems in them. Out now from Shearsman.
New vispo work by David Kelly at 3am Magazine.
Stephen Emmerson & Chris Stephenson.
Available now from Dark Windows Press.
Emmerson and Stephenson’s non-connotational word tennis match, No Ideas But In Things, is a mass scale invention of possible objects in the future: ‘WAG chaingangs’, ‘special needs fireworks’, ‘ewok sponsorships’. And a cataloguing of the trivia that invades our lives in the present: ‘pop star wheelchair’, ‘princess diana wet wipe’. Not least an exercise in creating the wondrous and beautiful: ‘lucozade onions’, ‘telephone chairs’, ‘barrack obama pyjamas’. Rather than playing this game in the psychiatrist’s chair they played it via text message – and it’s worked to their advantage, they get all the wrong words right. (James Davies: Editor ‘if p then q’)
Tuesday 21st May, 6.45pm – 9pm
Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB
Syndicate hopes you’ll join us on 21st May for multimedia poetry, electronic music, zesty discussion over carbonated drinks and performances from Pierre Joris, Nicole Peyrafitte, Samantha Walton and Sean Williams under the theme: SWARM.
Pierre Joris has moved between the US, Great Britain, North Africa, France & Luxembourg for 50 years, publishing some 50 books of poetry, essays & translations. Recent publications include Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj (Chax Press, 2012) and Diwan Ifrikiya: The University of California Book of North African Literature (Volume 4 in the Poems for the Millennium series), co-edited with Habib Tengour. Forthcoming are Barzakh (Poems 2000-2012) from Black Widow Press, & The Collected Late Poems of Paul Celan, translated & annotated by Joris, from Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. He lives in Sorrentinostan, a.k.a. Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, multimedia performance artist and writer Nicole Peyrafitte. For more information: www.pierrejoris.com/blog.
Nicole Peyrafitte, is a Gasco-Rican pluridisciplinary artist born and raised in the Gascon-French Pyrenees. Her eclectic background & her experiences in shaping identity across two continents & four languages informs her multifaceted works. Peyrafitte’s texts, voice, paintings,videos, & cooking were displays in, among others: Ninon; The Bi-Continental Chowder/La Garbure Transcontinentale; Whisk Don’t Churn. Her latest projects are “Basil King: MIRAGE,” a 2012 film she co-directed with Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, & “Bi-Valve: Vulvic
Spave/Vulvic Knowledge,” a series paintings, bi-lingual texts & performance (Stockport Flats, 2013). Her solo or collaborative work has been presented and/or performed in such venues as The Metropolitan Museum, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the University of Bordeaux, Birbeck College at the University of London, Poets House NYC, The Poetry Project NYC, Festival Occitania in Toulouse, Estivada de Rodez. For more information: www.nicolepeyrafitte.com.
At Syndicate, Joris and Peyrafitte will be performing:
DOMOPOETICS: Personal & Shared Artistic Practices
Domopoetics is a performance that meanders dialogically between Pierre Joris’ poems, translations & thinking, & Nicole Peyrafitte’s drawings & videos, voice- & textual work.
Joris’ nomadic writerly processes & their insistence on a “barzakh” — a navigable archipelago of “in-betweens” — & Peyrafitte’s concept of “Vulvic space” — a homeomorphic topology or transformable conceptual space enhancing the exchanges between self & other(s) — come together in what can be called a “diastolic flux.” Theoretically describable as moving between a somewhat Deleuzian energy of plateaus & stages & a more Irigaray-ian awareness based on difference and infiltration, while always anchored in a processual practical poetics & art making, the couple’s collaboration started in the early 90s, & includes a range of duo multimedia performances, many book covers & illustrations, & the raising of two sons.
Samantha Walton is a poet and one third of Syndicate. Her recent project comes out of a creative residency at the ESRC Genomics Forum working on the relationship between lyric poetry and the life sciences and co-generating TTAGGG – an open source poetry sequence – with the help of social science researchers.
Sean Williams is a sound designer, recordist, and electronic and electroacoustic music composer and performer. He is currently a Leverhulme scholar at the Reid School of Music in Edinburgh, documenting historic electronic music performance practice.
A novel, out now.
A group exhibition realised by Sarah Sanders and developed into a collaborative project with Julie Del’Hopital, Ian Irvine and John Lynch.
Carefully chosen artists have been invited to respond to the theme Android, originating from the Greek words ‘andro’ meaning man (or human) and ‘eidos’ meaning like or likeness. These new artworks are varied in media and together create an intense visual and audio experience to captivate the viewer.
Confirmed artists: Matthew Bamber, Tom Baskeyfield, Sandra Bouguerch, Margaret Cahill, Nina Chua, Julie Del’Hopital, Paul Dodgson, Pat Flynn, Daniel Fogarty, Evi Grigoropoulou, Ben Gwilliam, Antony Hall, Ian Irvine, Laurence Lane, John Lynch, Daksha Patel, Evangelica Spiliopoulou, Beth Ward. Denis Whiteside and Jacqueline Wylie.
Live Performances from Naomi Kashiwagi and Sarah Sanders plus an artist talk will take place on 8th June, 2-4pm.
The next Other Room is a one off event on Saturday 18th May at The Town Hall Tavern, 20 Tib Lane, Manchester, M2 4JA. The readers will be derek beaulieu, Tom Jenks and Holly Pester. For a flavour of Holly’s work, see this performance from the September 2012 if p then q event at The Betsey Trotwood in London, or visit her website.
“The House of Zabka” by Marcus Slease
A Polish folk tale meets Kurt Vonnegut’s surreal science fiction. A visionary, oracular original fairy tale that follows a butcher’s daughter to the deepest, darkest, strangest depths of the forest. A playful walk with a sausage-dog companion past sex shops and donuts, including a plastic dragon that will breathe fire if you text message it.
Each chapbook is roughly 4.25″ x 5.5″, handmade in a limited edition of 60. Stapled with handmade endpapers. Endpapers for “The House of Zabka” are marbled metallic multicolored Nepalese Lokta papers. Available from Deathless Press.
Chrissy Williams’ Angela Lansbury poem and Thatcher bingo from last month’s Other Room birthday party. Patrick Coyle and Rhys Trimble recordings to follow soon.
Conventional wisdom would suggest when a poet leaves their country of birth at a young age, for a new nation, they might bring to bear both traditions upon their writing. Perhaps it is possible, though arguably reductive, that the poet in question would be of neither nation truly – forever an immigrant in one and a stranger to another. What seems assured though, is that this sense of displacement, ambiguity of tradition and identity, this fundamental plurality of language and culture, would seem to find its proper place in the intangibility at the heart of a forceful and considered poetic, where such equivocality is not only welcome but perhaps necessary. At the core of the last century’s European poetry tradition lies the notion of trace, of multiplicity, invention, migration and these are the defining characteristics of George Szirtes’ oeuvre. His body of work, 40 years in the making and prolific in that time, has carried across forms, mediums, language and tones. It is the poetry of a singular individual extolling individualism, a poet whose responsibilities towards generosity and openness of spirit seem gracefully self-imposed across writing, translating, teaching, editing and anthologising. Moreover, it is the not the work of a man trapped between nations and histories, but one who has been emancipated by a lifetime’s fidelity to poetry, never bound by a national dualism, despite the complications of being explicitly Hungarian and implicitly English. Author of over 20 collections, winner of numerous prizes including the TS Eliot, the Cholmondeley, the Gold star of the Hungarian republic and the best translated book award, George Szirtes is an immense poet and undoubtedly the greatest translator of Hungarian into English of the last century, if ever. In an wide ranging and generous interview, we present the 96th edition of Maintenant.
The Other Room is putting on a one off extra event on Saturday 18th May at The Town Hall Tavern, 20 Tib Lane, Manchester, M2 4JA. For a preview of Tom Jenks, who will be launching his new collection items at this event, try this film from the if p then q event at The Betsey Trotwood in London last September, or visit his website. For a preview of derek beaulieu, click here. A preview of Holly Pester will follow shortly.
Tapestry Room, Firth Court (Western Bank), University of Sheffield. 6pm Friday 17th May.
Peter Riley (born 1940) is a contemporary English poet, essayist, and editor. Part-time M.A. thesis on Jack Spicer at the University of Keele, supervised by Roy Fisher. In 1978 he moved to the far, eastern, side of the Peak, getting a stone cottage in a small village called Bolehill which clung to the valley side overlooking the town of Wirksworth. Riley was an editor and major contributor to The English Intelligencer. He is the author of ten books of poetry, and many small-press booklets. He is also the current poetry editor of the Fortnightly Review and a recipient of the Cholmondeley Award in 2012 for “achievement and distinction in poetry”. Publishes also with Sheffield’s Longbarrow Press. His collections include Passing Measures, Selected poems 1966–1996 (Carcanet, 2000), Messenger Street (Poetical Histories, 2001) The Dance at Mociu (Shearsman, 2003), Alstonefield: a poem (Carcanet, 2003), The Day’s Final Balance: uncollected writings 1965–2006 (Shearsman, 2007), The Llyn Writings (Shearsman, 2007), Greek Passages (Shearsman, 2009), The Derbyshire Poems (Shearsman, 2010), andThe Glacial Stairway (Carcanet, 2011)
David Herd works in the area of modern literature, with emphasis on poetry and its relation to questions in politics and philosophy. His books include All Just (Carcanet, 2012), Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature and John Ashbery and American Poetry. He is currently writing a book on modern poetry and the state of exception, editing a collection of essays on Charles Olson (Contemporary Olson) and his chapbook, Outwith, will come out soon with Bookthug. His essays and reviews have been widely published in journals, magazines and newspapers. Recent writings on poetry and politics have appeared in PN Review, Parallax and Almost Island. Alongside Simon Smith he has collaborated with both Jack Hues and The-Quartet on the project ‘Rote-Through’, and with Sam Bailey, Evan Parker and Matt Wright on the project ‘Feedback’. He is a co-founder of the Sounds New Poetry festival and currently directs the Centre for Modern Poetry in the School of English.
The CPRC Birkbeck welcomes Karen Mac Cormack and Steve McCaffery.
Thursday 6th June 2013, 7.30 pm, with a reading of new work by both poets, and the launch of Karen Mac Cormack’s new Veer book, AGAINST WHITE
The Peltz room exhibition space in the School of Arts, Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD. Click here for a map link. All welcome – free entry.
Items is the amazing new collection out by Tom Jenks from if p then q. Go to IF P THEN Q to find out more.
The next Other Room is a one off event on Saturday 18th May at The Town Hall Tavern, 20 Tib Lane, Manchester, M2 4JA. The readers will be derek beaulieu, Tom Jenks and Holly Pester. For a flavour of derek’s work, try this film of him discussing theft, ownership and remixing language, the film of his first Other Room reading in 2010, or derek’s own site, which has a lot of links to his work.
Tuesday, May 15th. Barbican Library, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS.
Readers: Joe Cullen, Angela Cleland, Carrie Etter,
Derrick Porter, Helen Moore, Chrissy Williams, Martina Thomson, David Miller, Matt Haw, Patrick Early, Tim Dooley,
Ian McEwan. & Salah Niazi with David Andrew
Refreshments. Free Entry
otherroom.org 