Month: December 2013

Steven Fowler’s Maintenant Course at The Poetry School is now open for booking

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This tremendous course starts in January…

Explore contemporary innovations in European poetry in Steven Fowler’s company and discover how their remarkable explorations in the written word often compliment, rather than antagonise, more formal writing practice. Over 5 sessions, 5 great poetic movements will be used as references to springboard you into new writing techniques, stressing the possibility amidst the history. Covering OULIPO, Austrian modernism, Concrete poetry, CoBra and the British poetry revival, this course – with the energy, dynamism and invention of the movements it explores – will enrich anyone’s poetry horizons. Steven will organise a post-course reading for students on this course.

Some more details, direct from Steven …I’m delighted to announce that in 2014 I will be teaching a course for the Poetry School http://www.poetryschool.com called Maintenant! exploring post-war & contemporary European avant-garde poetry. It’s a bi-weekly course, five lessons over ten weeks, aiming to elucidate traditions that might be occluded in the UK, and explore how their innovations in writing can compliment people’s poetry in the now. The onus is on how these great moments in modern poetry can enrich writing practise, rather than dense historical analysis. It’s a rare chance to excavate avant garde work in such a setting, please sign up below if interested & in London.

http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/maintenant.php

Week One: January tuesday 28th – OulipoGeorges Perec, Jacques Roubeau, Raymond Queneau up to Frederic Forte and British Oulippeans like Philip Terry. The constraints that emancipate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo

Week Two: February tuesday 11th – Austrian postwar modernismThomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek. How to deal with the legacy of Fascism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Handke

Week Three: February tuesday 25th – Concrete poetryHansjörg Mayer, Bob Cobbing, The Vienna Group, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Marton Koppany up to Anatol Knotek. The visuality of the poem as its meaning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_poetry

Week Four: tuesday March 11th – CoBrAAsger Jorn, Christian Dotremont, Pierre Alechinsky. Dutch, Danish, Belgian & beyond, poetry as art revolt & primitivism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBRA_(avant-garde_movement)

Week Five: March tuesday 25th – British Poetry RevivalTom Raworth, Bill Griffiths, Maggie O’Sullivan & many many more.

Those every British poet should know, our immense late 20th century Vanguard heritage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_poetry_revival & near the end of the course, on March 15th 2014, at the Rich Mix arts centre, the students will get a chance to read some of the work they’ve produced during Enemies: Fjender, which explores contemporary Danish avant garde poetry in collaboration, with Cia Rinne, Martin Glaz Serup and Morten Sondergaard, who will also be exhibiting his remarkable Wordpharmacy http://www.wordpharmacy.com Here is the interview series that inspired the course http://www.maintenant.co.uk/ all 97 editions so far.

See more at: http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/maintenant.php#sthash.zt47atrZ.dpuf

Rachel Smith: a preview

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In a change to our previously advertised programme, Rachel Smith will perform at the next Other Room on Wednesday, 4th December at The Castle Hotel, 66 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LE, 7 PM start, free entry. The other readers are Sandeep Parmar and Robert Sheppard.

Bio.:

Rachel Smith is an artist engaged in durational drawing processes, text art and guerrilla writing. Her artist’s statement is as follows:

“writing: reading–language–speaking :drawing

My practice involves predetermined algorithmic methodologies; generative constraints. These processes embrace the limit and freedom of restriction. The durational aspect of my artwork implies endurance and the processes are habitual, obsessive and repetitive.

Drawn lines delineate materiality, bodily presence and temporality.

The white noise din of information drive a drawing practice where the artist acts as a conduit, filtering language and re-presenting it. Readable narratives are often disrupted, creating non-communication, where intuition is used as a set of random number generators and mathematically sequenced illegibility questions our logic.

Despite never deviating from the procedural process, once it is set in motion, the visual form remains key as a document of the time spent.”

Some links:

Rachel’s blog

The Incredible Sestina Anthology

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The first anthology of the poetic form of sestina. Here, 100 writers—from John Ashbery to David Lehman to Matt Madden and Patricia Smith—offer their sestinas. A 39-line poetic form, the sestina is the one form all poets agree can exist in a free-verse world, as formalists and avant-gardes love sestinas for their ornate, maddeningly complicated rules of word repetition.

More HERE