Thanks to all who came along last night for a hot and sultry Other Room. Our next event is in the cool of early October and it’s a really special one. We’re very pleased to be hosting Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee, over from the US. Maggie O’Sullivan completes the line-up to make a real power trio. Hope to see you there.
Unfortunately, David Kennedy won’t be able to make it to our next event on Thursday 23rd August. But we’ve still got three great performers: Joey Frances, Wanda O’Connor and James Wilkes, back at our usual haunt of The Castle Hotel , Oldham Street, Manchester. 7.00 start, free entry as always. Hope to see you there.
Sunday 21st August, 10:00–13:00. Unit 12 The Long Shop, Merton Abbey MIlls, London, SW19 2RD.
This workshop breaks down language-making into three components: sound, movement and mark-making. These components are used as prompts for an embodied encounter with a tree: how do we understand a tree through sound, movement and mark-making?
Not me and the landscape, but a kind of oneness (Maitland 2009)
This workshop offers a series of embodied and perceptually attentive interactions with a tree in order to discover how it is that marks, movements and sounds are made by and with a tree. Each participant will be encouraged to engage their full body and all of their senses in this exploration and to use these findings to devise a short language performance to share with the group (as you wish). The aim of the workshop is to use this creative exploration as a practical stimulus for discussion of what it might mean to make a language that emerges between organisms rather than viewing human language as something that emerges in isolation.
Duration: 3hrs
Participants: up to 10
Other requirements: Mobility is required either by wheels or on foot. We will be going out and about to Morden Hall Park and along the river Wandle, so wear comfortable footwear. Some experience of writing and/or performance would be beneficial – although all are welcome.
This workshop is Part 1 in a series of two workshop, Part 2 follows in the afternoon. They may be booked seperately or together. See Part 2 here:https://www.facebook.com/events/479604888910147/
Adults (16+) £16, Students £14
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About Camilla Nelson
Camilla Nelson is a poet, artist and researcher, currently based in Somerset. She successfully completed a PhD in Reading and Writing with a Tree: Practising ‘Nature Writing’ as Enquiry, at Falmouth University. Her text work has been featured in Amy Cutler’s exhibition Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig (London, 2013) and Karen Pearson’s outdoor exhibition in Yarner Wood, Assemblage (Dartmoor, 2012). As well as appearing in several magazines and journals, her poems have been anthologised in The Apple Anthology (Nine Arches) and Dear World & Everyone In It (Bloodaxe)
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About Object Book
Object Book is an alternative book makery and book arts studio, in residency at Merton Abbey Mills, run by artist Chloe Spicer with support from The Wandle Studio Prize (UAL Wimbledon College of Art and Office Estates Ltd).
This workshop is one of many bookish workshops, screenings and events scheduled over 2016.
www.chloespicer.co.uk
Twitter: @Object_Book @ChloeSpicerArt
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Accessibility: Object Book is a ground floor wheelchair accessible studio (1 table space) with disabled parking spaces. Run by a dyspraxic artist, Object Book is committed to accessibility for the book, please contact book@objectbook.org to discuss any needs/adjustments.
‘Reading as Art’ will be on public display from Saturday 27 August through to Saturday 19 November 2016. The works included in the exhibition find different means to foreground and to investigate the activity of reading: the forms it can take (silent reading, reading aloud, spontaneous reading, purposeful reading, and so on), the matter of reading (the book, the screen, the space of the page), the bodies that engage in it and the contexts in which it occurs. All of the works are concerned to make reading manifest in some way; in so doing, they each show – differently – how reading is its own form of making.
The image on the invitation is Fact by Craig Dworkin, 2016. The text records the relative molecular weights of the neurotransmitters activated when it is read.
Please save this date, Friday 7th October 2016 for the private view of the exhibition from 6-9pm with live performances from Jérémie Bennequin and Carol Sommer. Also, Kate Briggs’ Paper Size Poems will be performed…everyone is very welcome.
** THE SAD PRESS SUMMER BUNDLE **
Your friends are all telling you this is normal and fine and even a gesture of friendship but you’re not so sure. Anyway you may have them ALL for £30 (c.$1.07) including P&P at http://sadpress.wordpress.com, & they will be posted to you as they’re published between now and December.
Saturday 27 August, 2016, 2:15 PM. Free. Nunhead Cemetery, Linden Grove Entrance, London SE15 3LP
Who was known as the ‘Laureate of the Babies’? Who was sent off to tour the world by Charles Dickens? Who welcomed Garibaldi to her home in Peckham? Who introduced a magazine called ‘Fun’ to a Victorian readership? Find out on this free tour of Nunhead Cemetery, enjoying the beautiful surroundings and hearing more about why the Victorians moved their cemeteries to the suburbs. A perfect way to find out more about poetry and experience London’s heritage. Meet at 2.15pm at the Linden Grove entrance to the cemetery.
The tour is led by Tim Stevenson of the Friends of Nunhead Cemetery and Chris McCabe. More here.
The South West Poetry Tour was a groundbreaking collaborative poetry initiative bringing together over 70 poets connected to the region moving through Cornwall (St Ives & Falmouth), Devon (Dartington) and Somerset (Bruton & Bath) in August 2016. As well as core touring poets JR Carpenter, John Hall, Matti Spence, Annabel Banks, Camilla Nelson and SJ Fowler, the project featured many dozens of well-known poets of south westerly counties and an open call for participation. Films are now online here, including the above featuring Other Room readers Tony Lopez and Elizabeth-Jane Burnett.
The Blue Bus is pleased to present a reading of poetry on Tuesday 16th August at 7.30 by Keith Jebb, Phillip Rowland and Cathy Weedon. PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF VENUE the reading will still be in Lambs Conduit street but slightly further up at:
The Perseverance (pub)
63 Lamb’s Conduit St,
London
WC1N 3NB.
This is the 115th event in THE BLUE BUS series. Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions). For future readings in the series, please scroll down to the end of this message.
Keith Jebb teaches Creative Writing at the University of Bedfordshire, he published ‘hide white space’ and ‘tonnes’, both from Kater Murr’s Press, and has been in numerous poetry magazines over the years, including Folded Sheets, Fire and Poetry Salzburg Review. He also co-edited New Poetry from Oxford, and is one of the organisers of The Blue Bus.
Born in south-west London in 1970, Philip Rowland is a long-time resident of Tokyo ‘Something Other Than Other’, (Isobar Press) is Philip Rowland’s most recent collection an excerpt can be found at: http://isobarpress.com/?page_id=1281.
Philip has published two previous collections and is the founding editor of NOON: journal of the short poem; he is also co-editor of the anthology Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013).
Cathy Weedon was born in Stoke-on-Trent and moved to Luton in the 1970s. She recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Bedfordshire. Previously she has created thematic visual poetry. Her recent book is ‘1-50’ (Blart Books 2015). She has read at the Blue Bus and in 2015 she contributed to SJ Fowler’s Mahu exhibition at the Hardy Tree Gallery. In February 2016 she read at the Institute of English Studies as part of a symposium for Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK.
The South West Poetry Tour runs through Cornwall, Devon and Somerset from 1st-7th August 2016, curated by Camilla Nelson and SJ Fowler. Over the course of 5 evenings 70 established and emerging poets from across the southwest perform 50 new language works in 50 collaborative pairs. Beyond producing some wonderful, energised and innovative nights of collaborative poetry, the aim of the tour is to forge creative links between poets, artists, arts organisations and audiences locally and regionally. The 6 core touring poets are JR Carpenter, John Hall, Matti Spence, Annabel Banks, Camilla Nelson and SJ Fowler.
The first event is Mon 1st August – 7pm : Tate St Ives
Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. Barnoon Hill, St Ives, Cornwall, TR26 1AD : Free with entry to the museum £6/£5 – limited places
Booking: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/barbara-hepworth-museum-and-sculpture-garden/special-event/south-west-poetry-tour or +44 (0)1736 796 226
For full details and more information about the rest of the tour, visit http://www.theenemiesproject.com/southwest
2 August, 19:00–22:00, Iklektik, ‘Old Paradise Yard’, 20 Carlisle Lane ( Royal Street corner ) next to Archbishop’s Park, London, SE1 7LG. A London launch for the Out of Everywhere 2 anthology. Readings by Carol Watts, Elizabeth James, Frances Presley, Carrie Etter, Sophie Mayer, Sophie Robinson, Jennifer Cooke, Elizabeth Jane Burnett and Emily Critchley. This is a London launch for the book following the northern launch in Manchester, hosted by The Other Room in December 2015.
When the Collected Poems Volume 3 (1992-96), the third volume in Reality Street’s vital edition of Griffith’s poetry over three decades, arrived in the post, it became evident that it would make no sense to review it in isolation. And so, what follows is a review of all three volumes, or rather a survey of Bill’s poetic career up to 1996. Griffiths is, in my view, a major poet, one of the towering figures of late 20th and early 21st century British poetry.
Read more HERE
Announcing the launch of Amodern 6: Reading the Illegible
An issue guest-edited by Nick Thurston
Amodern 6: Reading the Illegible
Nick Thurston
“Anthology of the Illegible: Poésie de Mots Inconnus, 1949, Paris,
Edités par Le Degré 41”
Johanna Drucker
“Reading the Signs: Translations: Multilingualism, and the New Regimes
of Attention.”
Michael Cronin
“On Trying: André Hodeir and the Music Essay”
John Mowitt
“Dredging the Illegible: Photogram, Phoneme, Ph…ontology”
Garrett Stewart
“Style in Quotation Marks”
Diana Hamilton
“Story the Story in It”
Kate Briggs
“Glitched in Translation: Reading Text and Code as a Play of Spaces”
Matt Applegate
“Reading the Redacted”
Stephen Voyce
“Approaching the Contemporary: On (Post-)Conceptual Writing”
Luke Skrewbowski
Currents:
“Thinking with Zoe: An Interview with Rosi Braidotti”
Heather Davis and Rosi Braidotti
Other Room reader Philip Terry has a new book out now from Carcanet HERE
In Quennets Philip Terry develops a sonnet-like form invented by the Oulipian poet Raymond Queneau. Across three sequences, the ‘quennet’ is reworked and refigured in response to three perimiter landscapes. The first sequence, ‘Elementary Estuaries’, is inspired by a series of walks along the Essex estuary, the poems’ appearance on the page suggesting the landscape’s expansive esturine vistas, its pink sail lofts and windswept gorse, beach huts and distant steeples. In the second sequence, written after a series of walks around the Berlin Wall Trail, or Mauerweg, the form changes to reflect the physical, almost bodily tension of the wall as an architectural and social obstruction. The final sequence, ‘Waterlog’, retraces the steps of W. G. Sebald through Suffolk, and here the quennet’s newely elongated shape and ragged margin evoke the region’s eroding coastline, its deserted piers and power stations, electric fences and waterlogged fields. Terry’s project is bold in scope, his poems subtle in effect, a mix of sign and song, concerete and lyric, Oulipo and psychogeography. It is a work about boundaries, political, social, and natural, and about the walk as a critical apparatus through which these fields are shown to connect.
The two presses recognised a common interest in publishing the poetry of what I once termed the “parallel tradition”: its various formations in the UK being the British Poetry Revival (Eric Mottram’s term), the Cambridge diaspora, and what has sometimes been called “linguistically innovative” poetry – all overlapping categories. There was also a common interest in post-New American Poetry, Language Writing and related North American fields, as well as adventurous poetry in other English-speaking regions and from other languages and cultures.
Read more HERE
At the Everyman Playhouse, Liverpool.
Iain has a frequently collaborative practice as a writer and performer, working within live literature and live art contexts. Projects have included sung staging of texts by women Beat Generation writers, a lecture presentation and performance with classical musicians for New Media Scotland’s Syndicate series, and Subject Index a durational installation of the complete poems of Emily Dickinson developed in residency at Forest Centre+ and toured to Berlin’s SOUNDOUT! New Ways of Presenting Literature Festival in May 2014. Publishing includes poem-responses to fin de siècle Vienna included in the Kakania anthology (2015), published by Austrian Cultural Forum London and edited by S.J. Fowler and work in serial publications such as HOAX, Soanyway and Scree Magazine. In his role as Enterprise Manager at The Fruitmarket Gallery, he works within a commercial framework to grow new audiences and bring them into dialogue with the Gallery’s exhibitions programme through events and other activity.
Please note that a change in circumstances means that our next event will not be at The Castle Hotel as usual, but will instead be at The Wonder Inn, 29 Shudehill, Manchester, M4 2AF. This is just a few minutes walk from The Castle. More information here.
otherroom.org 