Connie Scozzaro, Contrapposto Action Queen

A new chapbook by Connie Scozzaro is emerging into the world totally unlike the hierophant retreating from his terrifying breakfast meeting with a bear princess.  Contrapposto Action Queen is an organic lyric movement towards a smackdown of the unwitting social damage of roleplay, is tender and funny, and resonates with a voice entirely its own.  These poems make no sacrifices for their wieldy topics of domesticity, love, and labour, all cast among a troupe of creeps, lovers, mothers, mermaids, Dante & Beatrice, cops, cornflakes, muses, Rousseau, and the EDL. More details at the Bad Press site.

Toothache Duets

Toothache Duets is a durational project that enables impossible collaborations.

It is an online platform that hosts a duet of two artists every week for a year.

We invite artists from all over the world to send a one-minute video of any topic/nature for the purpose of creating an online duet. Just upload your video on youtube and send us the URL. We will then collate the videos, and, as curators, we will choose two each week to create the duet. The videos most viewed will be exhibited in a gallery space in London at the end-of-year-celebration party!

Do you have an idea you always wanted to try out?

Have you always wanted to create work side by side with another?

Send your video link by email to info@toothacheduets.com

For further details please visit http://www.toothacheduets.com/call-for-videos

cris cheek: a preview

cris cheek will perform at The Other Room on June 27th at The Castle Hotel, 66 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LE. This film is of his performance at the Southwest Ohio Poets festival. For more, you can read some of his work at Jacket, this interview at the Poetry Foundation, or his Wikipedia page.

cris cheek: poet, artist, interdisciplinary performer and director of creative writing at Miami University in south-west Ohio, makes a rare visit to Manchester. He has a herstory of collaborative and transdisciplinary practice; as co-founder of Chisenhale Dance Space where he worked alongside Mary Prestidge and with Ghislaine Boddington with whom he founded Shinkansen and cocurated the Voice Over festival. For seventeen years he worked in various text-sound combinations with Sianed Jones, including Slant (with Phillip Jeck). He taught performance writing at Dartington College of Arts during which time he made a substantive body of performance writing with Kirsten Lavers under the moniker TNWK (things not worth keeping). Since then he’s been making and showing works in spoken and projected text-sound, such as Impluperfections and b a c k l i t. Most recent publications include the church, the school, the beer (Critical Document, 2007) and part : short life housing (The Gig, 2009).

The other performers will be Sarah Crewe and Lewis Freedman.

Two London events

Tuesday, 18 June: 7.00 at the Daniel Blau Gallery, Hoxton Square, London E:  Amid the Ruins. Kristen Kreider & James Leary, Allen Fisher, Becky Cremin and Stephen Willey. FREE

Wednesday, 19 June: 6.00 at the University of London Senate House: Contemporary Innovative Poetry Research Seminar. Richard Parker: ‘Ezra Pound: Belated Modernism and objectivist Verse’. All Welcome.

SoundEye 2013

 

The SoundEye poetry festival now in its 17th year will take place July 5th-7th. Details of readers can be found at the SoundEye site. Readers include Lila Matsumoto, Sophie Robinson, Joel Scott, Denise Riley, David Lloyd, Ulf Stolterfoht, Andrea Brady, Redell Olsen, Trevor Joyce and Catherine Walsh.

Latest Publications from Like This Press

Like This Press is delighted to announce the publication of three new titles: Blart & Kid by Andy Spragg, Neurotrash by James Russell, and When You Were a Mod I Was a Rocker by Robert Graham.

All titles can be purchased direct from Like This Press here:
http://www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/andyspragg
http://www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/jamesrussell
http://www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/robertgraham

Blart & Kid is a book-in-a-box comprising 1 x poetry pamphlet, 1 x photo book and 3 x postcards by Natalie Orme.

‘To Blart & Kid is a stop-start pile-up of angelically goofball, loosely metrical verse and a sharp chart of repetitive fear; a proprioceptive documentary-tale of an outrage only sometimes felt among the meek in a time of “well-pulped vocations and lost confidence”. Here between the clouds of overseer and overseen, Spragg shows you what’s yours and what’s not, and in the process enacts a kind of ontological crisis that is already blithely churned up by a cement-mixer, or “located in the foot-well of a minicab.’ – Amy De’Ath

‘To Blart and Kid sets itself the task of pushing a poetics of suburbia beyond a glib, broadsheet-endorsed clutch of epiphanies about the so-called ‘magic of the everyday’. The writing here edges into this territory, surveying the abandoned quarries, feeling out rents in the chainlink, sniffing ‘mildewed wood and/ stink leather’, but gradually enacts a landgrab, asserting itself over GCSE-syllabus verse via a frenetically inventive formal approach. Sure, there are rainswept cadences your average Faber wannabe would die for, but these are interspersed with notes of satirical belligerence which evoke nothing so much as Dada’s little-known Leatherhead branch. ‘Dozing and touching periphery’, Andy Spragg’s idiomatic cartography of the stockbroker belt is a remarkable phenomenological outing, in both senses of that word.’ – Joe Kennedy

Neurotrash seeks to to attend away from the popular neuroscience that envelops us, nodding to it in a distracted manner.  The idea that the brain sciences will dissolve deep mysteries is beyond parody and eventually it will go away. Meanwhile, we have the more serious and joyful business of poetry itself, which is capable of capturing the various nature of life and the way language can play in the deep waters.

When You Were a Mod I Was a Rocker is Like This Press’ first fiction title: a book-in-a-box comprising 7 individually bound short stories and 1 collection of flash fiction, with original illustrations by Hannah
Dickinson.

All enquiries to: nikolai@likethispress.co.uk

Manchester: August 16th & 17th 1819

The first part of John Seed’s ‘Manchester: August 16th & 17th 1819′, written in 1973 but previously unpublished, applies the citational method of Reznikoff’s Testimony to historical materials on the so-called ‘Peterloo Massacre’ to construct a sequence from historical witness statements of two days in August. The new ‘Afterword’ provides a poetics and statement of method, going on to reflect on this method while noting convergences to some recent discussions around ‘uncreative writing’ and ‘conceptual writing’.
 
 
Intercapillary Editions 2013, £8.75 plus p & p

Sarah Crewe: a preview


Sarah Crewe will perform at The Other Room on June 27th at The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester. For a flavour of her work, watch this clip of Sarah performing with Jo Langton at the Enemies of the North event in Manchester in March 2013. For more of her work, try her poems in Litter and Peony Moon, or samples from her recently published collection flick invicta at the Oystercatcher Press site.

Sarah Crewe is from the Port of Liverpool. Her chapbooks include flick invicta from Oystercatcher and Signs Of The Sistership with Sophie Mayer, from Knives Forks and Spoons. She is one third of Stinky Bear Press and her work has featured in Shearsman, Tears In The Fence and Litter magazines. She also starred as the little girl in the Trio biscuit advert.

The other readers will be cris cheek and Lewis Freedman. Previews of both to follow.

David Gaffney and Gregory Norminton book launches in Manchester

6.00 for 6.30, Thursday 13 June, Takk café, Tariff street, Manchester
In addition to short readings from both authors there will be a unique spoken word DJ set by Monkeys In Love, and drinks supplied by the amazing Barefoot Wines.
David Gaffney, More Sawn-Off Tales
‘Evanescent moments of connection and happiness. One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others.’  The Guardian
In his fourth collection of short stories, David Gaffney reprises the format of his critically acclaimed Sawn-Off Tales; a brand-new set of pieces exactly 150 words long, each aiming to contain the breadth and depth of an epic. In stories that are laugh-out-loud funny, cringingly weird and desperately sad, Gaffney introduces the possibility of momentary actions that change everything; a swimming man sees a hundred glass eyes at the bottom of a river; a broken vase causes a couple to re-examine their place in the universe; a zoo with only three animals makes a man reconsider the value of everything; and a comedian decides to express himself through the medium of smell. Relationships begin, stutter, then crash to earth, each mundane transaction peeling away the everyday to reveal a canyon of emotion. An expert miniaturist with the ability to stuff an elephant inside a flea.
Gregory Norminton, Thumbnails
‘A writer who relishes every sentence, and gives it moral weight, and yet still manages to come up with a page-turner.’ Prospect Magazine
Thumbnails consists of forty-eight stories short enough to fit into the nooks and crannies of our distracted lifestyles. A Portuguese naturalist loses his life’s work to Napoleon; sexual love flourishes briefly in a retirement home; a grief-stricken father searches the Australian outback for signs of an extinct lizard; Mephistopheles answers his critics and explains the real origins of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; a roguish life is reduced to endnotes in a biography; an Anglo- Saxon bard despairs of his vocation. Myth, social comedy, tragedy and speculative fiction follow one another in tales that vary widely in form and content – united by the task of conveying a complete narrative with the greatest possible economy.

Tributaries – Harriet Tarlo and Judith Tucker

The 2013 Holmfirth Arts Festival sees the culmination of a two-year commission of poet Harriet Tarlo and artist Judith Tucker whose collaborative project focused on the land between Digley Reservoir and Black Hill, in particular the intricate convergences of the tributaries of the Holme River. Since last year’s festival, work from the project has been shown and acclaimed in places as far afield as Lyon, France and Minneapolis, U.S. Now their final showing of old and new work, covering all seasons and featuring new perspectives on this familiar landscape, comes back home to “upstairs at Up Country”, showing in shop hours throughout the festival. More at the Holmfirth Arts Festival site.

The Paper Nautilus

The Paper Nautilus Magazine is seeking for contributions for a dual-translation issue featuring translations of contemporary or recent experimental women’s poetry in any foreign language. Please get in touch with proposals, submissions and suggestions of poets or translators for consideration by June 15th. The publication date is expected to be early Autumn. More about previous issues and the magazine here.