Events
Chris McCabe’s The Real Southbank
Fantastic event! Book now.
What makes us love our city?
Three pioneering poets and writers of London life and history delve into the reality of the South Bank. They weigh up the story of the area, from its beginnings as a marshland to its 20th-century transformation into the city’s cultural quarter.
Hosted by Peter Finch – poet, writer and the editor of Seren’s Real Series? – this evening launches the book Real South Bank by Chris McCabe. Also in attendance is Iain Sinclair, who reads from his own work to help illuminate the past and present of the area. Sinclair has written about the South Bank in Lights Out for the Territory, and about the Thames in Downriver.
Together, these three writers explore the South Bank’s historical associations with criminality and outsiderness, and its appeal to poets like Blake and Rimbaud. Finally, they discuss what makes the South Bank so distinctive in the landscape of contemporary London.
Chris McCabe’s Real South Bank covers the area between Blackfriars Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge, and as far south as Elephant and Castle. The book includes chapters on Shakespeare’s original Globe, a night walk in the footsteps of Dickens, a stroll along the River Neckinger that runs beneath the streets of London and a visit to the site of ?the most notorious of the Elizabethan bear fighting pits. There are chapters on Southbank Centre and Royal Festival Hall, and a new series of poems about the broader South Bank entitled Liquid City.
6pm – 7.30pm
Level 5 Function Room at Royal Festival Hall
£10 includes wine
More here- LINK
From the vaults – Clive and Robin Fencott
July 2014
Martin Palmer – A Preview
Our next event takes place on 23rd June and features Sam Riviere, Sarah Kelly and Martin Palmer. Click HERE for more details.
Martin Palmer is based in Morecambe. A graduate of the Edge Hill Creative Writing programmes, his Deconstructivist poetry has featured on Robert Sheppard’s Pages, and in Question Mark and other works have been performed at events in Liverpool and Manchester. He blogs at Blogtastic.
Sarah Kelly – A Preview
Our next event takes place on 23rd June and features Sam Riviere, Sarah Kelly and Martin Palmer. Click HERE for more details.
Sarah Kelly is a poet and artist currently based in London. She is the author of Ways of Describing Cuts (with Steve Fowler) (KFS, 2012) and Locklines (KFS, 2010) and has published work in various journals, magazines and anthologies including Dear World and Everyone In It (Bloodaxe). Her recent work is primarily focused on the visual and textual and centres around her practice as a hand paper-maker and she featured in the Haywood anthology The New Concrete. She has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally and was the 2015 poet in residence at the University of Loughborough. She has co-edited the Spanish language poetry journal Alba Londres and is the director of Molino Editions. She is currently completing AHRC post graduate research into ‘the page’ at the Royal College of Art. www.sarahelizakelly.co.uk
Storm and Golden Sky
Storm and Golden Sky at the Caledonia FRIDAY 24th June 2016
Rachel Sills and Mark Greenwood
Up the stairs (at the back of the barroom, above the pub name, above) at the Caledonia pub, Catharine Street, in the Georgian Quarter, Liverpool,
£5, 7.30 pm spot-on start!
Rachel Sills lives in Manchester. She is a co-organiser of the Manchester-based poetry reading series Peter Barlow’s Cigarette, and has books and objects published by Knives Forks and Spoons Press, zimZalla and Red Ceilings Press.
Mark Greenwood is a performance artist/ writer originally from Newcastle but now based in Liverpool. He has presented work across the U.K, Europe and the United States as well as curating the RED APE; a performance platform dedicated to the preservation and legacy of provincial performance art practice in the U.K. Utilising indefinite durational practice and minimal actions as art forms, Greenwood’s interests lie in anthropomorphic puzzles and inter-textual folds.
Storm is run by Nathan Jones, Eleanor Rees, Michael Egan and Robert Sheppard.
Minimalism: Location Aspect Moment
Minimalism: Location Aspect Moment – 14-15 October 2016, Southampton
The Call for Papers in now live for Minimalism: Location Aspect Moment, which will take place on 14-15 October 2016, hosted by the University of Southampton and Winchester School of Art.
Proposals are due by June the 29th.
About the conference
When the object comes to itself, abstracting can end, and so can expressiveness. This is one of the thoughts underpinning minimalism in art, but far from the only one, as minimalist sculpture, in particular, began reconfiguring the gallery space, or even the space in which art could happen. The minimalist impulse is to drive creativity into forms so simple, or more accurately, so formal they had to reflect upon themselves while reflecting the viewer in a specular frenzy under cover of nothing happening. The paradoxes of minimalism suggest an equal possibility of de-formation, of formless process. For some time, critics were not happy, understandably, given the rejection of reflection that the radically simplified objects presented. But a consensus has emerged, one that focuses on, and repetitively/compulsively reproduces, a unifying vision of American key artists (Judd, Morris, Flavin, Andre…) of the 1960s. Likewise, a seamless tie binds this art with American minimalist music (Glass, Reich, Adams); but the reality of artistic production across media and forms was far more varied and geographically widespread.
One of the purposes of this Minimalism: Location Aspect Moment is to expand our conception of what minimalism was, where it happened, who was making it, why, and how it extends through time until now. It is clear that the minimalist impulse happened in cross-national encounters (such as the 1967 show Serielle Formationen in Frankfurt) and that Europe was fertile ground for explorations in serial works, in playing with the prospect of singular forms and systematic thinking. Admitting the significance of the naming of the idea of minimalism in the 1960s, we want to look back to earlier versions of the reductionist, repetitive, singularising or multiplying intents of core minimalist endeavour. In short, we wish to see what an expanded field of minimalism looks like, sounds like.
Confirmed keynote speakers
Dr Renate Wiehager (Head of the Daimler Art Collection, Stuttgart/Berlin)
Professor Keith Potter (Reader in Music, Goldsmiths, University of London)
Professor Redell Olsen (Professor of Poetics, Royal Holloway, University of London) (Keynote Performance Lecture)
Call for papers
We want to hear about literature (& writing ABC), dance, building, interior design (& Good Design), gardens (& total fields), science, cybernetics, philosophy, painting, politics, installation, video, cinema, bodily exercise. We want to think about minimalism’s relation to modernism, and how exactly post-minimalism works. We want to think about the softening of minimalism in the 1980s, a twisting of modernist ideals into décor-discipline. We want to recognise the broad scope of projects of reduction, of elimination of the conformities of difference in favour of radical recurrence and stasis.
Contributions are sought from all disciplines; collaborative, creative and cross-media proposals are welcome.
Please send an abstract of under 300 words to minimalismLAM@gmail.com by June 29th 2016.
The conference is onceived and curated by Dr Sarah Hayden (English, Southampton), Professor Paul Hegarty (University College Cork) with Professor Ryan Bishop (Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton).
Forms of Criticism Conference
In the Editorial for the first issue of Art-Language (1969) Terry Atkinson raised questions about a possibility of combining creative and critical practice: ‘can this editorial,’ Atkinson wrote, ‘in itself an attempt to evidence some attributes as to what “conceptual art” is, come up for the count as a work of conceptual art?’ Forms of Criticism takes Atkinson’s idea as its starting point to engage with issues of criticism and form and interrogate limits between creative and critical practice during a one day event on 30th June 2016.
In poetry, fine art, film making, performance – in the creative sector – we are familiar with and applaud – or tolerate, in the very least – experiments which blur or transgress boundaries of genre, form, or creativity. Similar possibilities of formal experimentation remain significantly underexplored with respect to critical practice, although a growing interest in probing the limits of criticism can currently be observed. Forms of Criticism proposes to think about critical practice as a creative experiment with form in its own right and invites a re-examination of the relationship between research and forms adopted for presenting, communicating, and disseminating it. By considering diverse sites of critical and creative production the project focuses on experimenting with modalities of criticism and ways of addressing formal critical-creative hybridity.
The event brings together artist, curators, writers, critics and scholars addressing questions of creative-critical hybridity in theory and practice through talks, performances, screenings, readings and installations.
Forms of Criticism is organised by the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster and hosted by Parasol Unit.
Participants: Peter Jaeger, Simon Morris, Nick Thurston, Kate Briggs & more
Parasol Unit
30th June 2016
10:00 am – 6:00 pm
More HERE
Phonica: Three
8pm, Wednesday 15 June 2016
Jack Nealons, 165 Capel Street, Dublin 1
Admission Free
Michelle Hall is a visual artist who works with a variety of materials and processes and her work often takes the form of video with scripted voiceover. Throughout her practice she uses objects, images, details and textures as catalysts for narratives that fall somewhere between fact, fiction and myth. She recently graduated from the MA Art in the Contemporary World programme at NCAD with a first class honours and received the Artist’s Support Scheme Bursary from Fingal Arts Office in 2014 and 2015. She also collaborates with other practitioners and has shown collaborative projects at IMMA, Triskel and Pallas Projects. She has exhibited work in group shows at Block T, MART, Draíocht, The LAB and Catalyst Arts as well as other venues across Ireland, France and the UK. She presented her first solo exhibition ‘The Lament of the Jade Phoenix’ at Steambox Gallery in January of this year.
Keith Lindsay is a Dublin based sound artist who works with a wide range of media including music, sound, projection, film, sculpture, and electronics. His recent projects include a solo exhibition “Soundscapes” at the Pallas Project Studios and a new sound works for the Nag Gallery Dublin. He is a member of the experimental arts collective ‘The Water Project’ in which he has performed with in Paris, London, Kiev, Cork & Dublin. His work as a sound designer has been featured in TV documentaries, feature films, short films and interactive media.
Aodán McCardle is a painter, a poet, gardener, tattooist, designer, maker, father, he has delivered babies warm in the dark and wrapped the dead in white hospital cotton. He is a co-editor at Veer Books. His PhD is on Action as Articulation of the Contemporary Poem though physicality and doubt are the site of meaning and the stance respectively where the action operates. His way into collaboration was as part of London Under Construction LUC. His current practice is improvised performance/writing/drawing as a finding out. He grew up in the mountains, moved to the city, lives by the sea.
Michael Naghten Shanks lives in Dublin and is editor of The Bohemyth. Recent publications include the special ‘Rising Generation’ issue of Poetry Ireland Review and The Best New British And Irish Poets 2016 anthology from Eyewear Publishing. In 2015 he was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize and selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. He has read his work at numerous events, most recently during the International Literature Festival Dublin. Year of the Ingénue (Eyewear Publishing, 2015) is his debut poetry pamphlet. He tweets @MichaelNShanks.
Dylan Tighe is a musician, actor and theatre-maker. His second album Wabi-Sabi Soul – a one-track gapless song-cycle was released in April. It was hailed by The Irish Times as “framing reflective music with remarkable eloquence”. His radio drama for RTÉ Record, based around his debut album of the same name, was nominated for the Prix Europa Radio Prize.
Suzanne Walsh is an audio/visual artist and writer from Wexford based currently in Dublin. She uses performative lectures, fiction and voice to explore various themes, sometimes around the relationships between animal/humans as well as querying the borders of the self. She also collaborates with film-makers, musicians and other artists frequently. She is part of the Hissen sound group performing in IMMA in June, and is taking part in an upcoming show in The Lab Gallery in November called ‘A Different Republic’. She is an editor of Critical Bastards magazine and is published recently in gorse journal.
More details here.
Sam Riviere – A Preview
Our next event takes place on 23rd June and features Sam Riviere, Sarah Kelly and Martin Palmer. Click HERE for more details.
Sam Riviere’s books include Kim Kardashian’s Marriage (Faber & Faber, 2015), Standard Twin Fantasy (Eggbox, 2015) and 81 Austerities (Faber & Faber, 2012), which won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He studied at the Norwich School of Art and Design, and holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from UEA and was a recipient of a 2009 Eric Gregory Award.http://samriviere.com/
Blue Bus – Giles Goodland, Alistair Noon, Juliet Troy
The Blue Bus is pleased to present a reading of poetry on Tuesday 21st June at 7.30 by Giles Goodland, Alistair Noon and Juliet Troy at The Lamb (in the upstairs room), 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1. This is the 113th event in THE BLUE BUS series. Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions). For the next reading in the series, please scroll down to the end of this message.
Giles Goodland has published several books of poetry including A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001), Capital (Salt, 2006), What the Things Sang (Shearsman, 2009), Gloss (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2011) and The Dumb Messengers (Salt, 2012) and in collaboration with Alistair Noon) Surveyors’ Riddles, Sidekick Books.
Alistair Noon’s most recent publications are The Kerosene Singing (Nine Arches Press, 2015) and Surveyors’ Riddles (Sidekick Books, 2015), a collaboration with Giles Goodland from which they’ll be reading at this event. He has also published a dozen chapbooks of poetry and translations from German and Russian from various small presses, and appeared in anthologies including Sea Pie, Lung Jazz and The Best British Poetry 2013. His hobby is translating Osip Mandelstam. He lives in Berlin.
The Kerosene Singing available from Nine Arches Press
http://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/thekerosenesinging.html
Surveyors’ Riddles, with Giles Goodland, available from Sidekick Books
http://www.sidekickbooks.com/surveyorsriddles.php
Juliet Troy is an anglo/guyanese poet and one of the organisers of the Blue Bus. Her work includes Rhythm of Furrows across a field, 2013 – Kater Murr and Motherboard, 2015 – Knives Forks and Spoons – one of these poems was displayed in last Autumn’s Blackpool illuminations. She has had work published most recently in Snow Lit Rev, Spring 2016 – Allardyce, Barnett.
The next reading at the Blue Bus will be by Peter Larkin, Joanne Ashcroft and tbc on Tuesday July 19th at 7.30.
Enjoy Your Homes Press 2nd event with Stuart Calton, Sarah Crewe and Becoming Debbie
More at The Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/events/880393688737100/
The Poetry School Camarade
Weekend course on collaboration.
Venue: Rich Mix, 35 – 47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA
Date: Saturday 16 & Sunday 17 July
Time: 1 – 6pm, plus 7.30pm performance on Sunday
Level: open to all
Camarade readings are the primary collaborative poetry events of the Enemies project, and have taken place 21 countries with over 150 events with over 500 poets and artists since 2012.
The Poetry School Camarade – Sunday July 17th
Venue 1: Rich Mix Arts Centre – 7.30pm – Free Entrance
Alex MacDonald & Mark Waldron / Tamar Yoseloff & Alison Gill / John Canfield & Joe Turrent / Rishi Dastidar & Ali Lewis / Ella Frears & Lavinia Singer / SJ Fowler and more.
Saturday’s July 16th 2016 workshop
1pm – Introduction to the possible methods of collaboration in poetry and text.
2.30pm – Facilitated group writing exercises and practise performances.
3.30pm – Facilitated breakout sessions for collaborations in pairs.
5pm – Group discussion on the process, final pairs confirmed and feedback.
Featuring a discussion of the philosophies behind collaborative writing, the diffusion of the poet’s identity in collaboration and the consequences of that for solo writing. Extended explorations of the notion of the reading versus the performance, group writing, conceptual writing, constraint writing, improvisation and more literary methods like line-to-line and stanza-to-stanza. Features both talks, discussions and exercises.
Sunday’s July 17th workshop
1pm – The history of collaboration in poetry featuring source materials provided to the participants, covering a selection of salient examples from 20th century poetry, including movements like the Surrealists, CoBrA, The Beats and assorted examples from the likes of Ian Hamilton Finlay and John Furnival, Ron King and Roy Fisher, Anne Waldman and Joe Brainard.
2.30pm – An analysis of a host of collaborative performances from The Enemies Project video archive with footage screening and discussion.
4pm – Facilitated rehearsal of group collaborations and final paired works, with feedback.
More here.
The Other Room website rebooted!
The Other Room website has been running the whole duration we’ve been running our nights and has started to bulge and bulge. So we decided to do a bit of a spring clean in order to make it easier to navigate. We’ve also tidied up all those inevitable missed links which Mick Weller celebrates HERE.
If you’re old or new to the site have a look around our massive archive of blog/news posts, video archive from most of our readings, video and print interviews, book reviews, reviews of our events, poster archive and photos. Don’t forget of course to check out our upcoming events and annual anthology.
James, Scott & Tom
Action Poetry
Oui Performance – Action Poetry
Karen Mac Cormack & Steve McCaffery
Thursday 9th June 2016
York Medical Society, Stonegate, York
7pm – 8:30pm
Karen Mac Cormack is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, most recently AGAINST WHITE (Veer Books, London, 2013). Her poems have appeared in a number of anthologies including ‘Moving Borders’, ‘Out of Everywhere’, ‘Another Language’, and ‘Prismatic Publics’. Her texts have been translated into French, Portuguese, Swedish and Norwegian. An extended interview with her appears in Scott Thurston’s ‘Talking Poetics’ (Shearsman, 2011). Of dual British/Canadian citizenship she currently lives in the USA and teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Steve McCaffery is the author of more than 40 books of poetry and criticism. His most recent books are ‘Tatterdemalion’ (Veer Books, 2014); ‘Alice in Plunderland’ (Book Thug, 2015) and ‘Revanches’, a collection of visual and concrete poetry (Xexoxial, 2015). English born and a long-time resident of Toronto, he was a co-founder of the Toronto Research Group (TRG), the sound poetry ensemble Four Horsemen, and the College of Canadian Pataphysics. Since 2004 he has been the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters and Director and member of the UB Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo.
More here.
The noise and voices of objects
Thursday 30 June 2016, The Reynolds Room and Life Room, Royal Academy of Arts.
Other Room reader Paula Claire will present seven pieces at the An Aside to On Stage event including improvisations with ammonites, lunaria, black treacle and the text/ures of savoy cabbage leaves. Convened by artist Sarah Jones, this one-day symposium brings together lookers and listeners from art and theatre to consider the noise and voices of objects. More here.
States of Mind
Three events at the Wellcome Collection organised by SJ Fowler:
The Poetry of Consciousness
Thursday 7 July, 19.00-20.30
FREE | TICKETED at Wellcome Collection
From the perspective of the neuroscientist, the poet, the translator – a discussion of the role of language in constituting our consciousness, presenting talks and newly commissioned works for performance on the night.
Featuring: Daniel Margulies, SJ Fowler, Noah Hutton & Jen Calleja.
The Sound of Consciousness
Thursday 14 July, 19.00-20.30
FREE | TICKETED at Wellcome Collection
This event asks what role sound takes in shaping our experience and understanding of consciousness and offers artist’s reflections on the pivotal role sound has in the firmament of our daily lives, drawing from the worlds of neuroscience, anthropology, film, composition and sound poetry.
Featuring: John Gruzelier, Nick Ryan, Vincent Moon & Maja Jantar.
The Narrative of Consciousness
Thursday 21 July, 19.00-20.30
FREE | TICKETED at Wellcome Collection
Within and without language, how does the notion of narrative define our experience of the world through consciousness? An event featuring some of the most dynamic contemporary artists, neuroscientists and writers, exploring how narrative interacts with consciousness and what happens when this begins to break down, whether through trauma or conditions like aphasia.
Featuring: Lotje Sodderland, Srivas Chennu, Sam Winston and Barry Smith.
The South West Poetry Tour: Call for Poets
The Enemies Project, in partnership with Singing Apple Press, presents a brand new collaborative poetry initiative across South West England. The proposed South West Poetry Tour will take place in the first week of August 2016. It will include 6 nights of collaborative poetic performance from poets across the region, moving through Cornwall (St Ives & Falmouth), Devon (Dartington), Dorset (Lyme Regis) and Somerset (Bruton & Bath).
Poets local to the area are asked to produce new language works, in pairs, for performance each night. This innovative and exciting model of new writing has been pioneered by The Enemies Project across the UK and the world, with over 600 poets in 21 countries participating so farwww.theenemiesproject.com Beyond producing some wonderful nights of collaborative poetry, the aim of the tour is to forge creative links between poets, artists, arts organisations and audiences locally and regionally.
This is an open call for poets, local to any of the above areas, to be involved in the project. Over 100 poets will participate in the tour. The only requirement will be that you work with an assigned collaborator to produce a poem or language-based performance (experimentation is welcome), lasting no more than 5 minutes, at the venue most local to you.
Please send two poems or pieces of language art (links or attachments – pdfs rather than word docs are preferred), your address and a short bio to info@singingapplepress.com The work you send can be in any form and experimental or avant-garde poetry is encouraged. Our aim is to be inclusive.
The provisional schedule is:
St Ives 1st August
Falmouth 2nd August
Dartington 3rd August
Lyme Regis 5th August
Bruton 7th August
Bath 8th August
NB these dates may be subject to change. Deadline for applications 31st May 2016.
The South West Poetry Tour is curated by Camilla Nelson and SJ Fowler and supported by Arts Council England, Tate St Ives, Falmouth University, Schumacher College, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, The Clearing, Trail Mix, SoundArt Radio and Francis Boutle Publishers.
More at the Enemies site.
Sophie Mayer and Jeff Hilson at Storm and Golden Sky
Storm and Golden Sky at the Caledonia FRIDAY 27th May 2016
Up the stairs (at the back of the barroom, above the pub name, above) at the Caledonia pub, Catharine Street, in the Georgian Quarter, Liverpool, £5, 7.30 pm spot-on start!
Sophie Mayer and Jeff Hilson
Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Her poetry has been translated into Russian, Greek, Dutch, and Japanese, and has appeared on poster hoardings in Dublin and as part of Yoko Ono’s Meltdown 2013. With Mark Burnhope and Sarah Crewe, she developed the recent wave of UK poetry activism, including the Sabotage Award-winning Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot, Binders Full of Women, and Morning Star award-winning Fit to Work: Poets against Atos. She works with English PEN, and was the Archive of the Now’s first Poet in Residence. Previous collections include Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman, 2009), The Private Parts of Girls (Salt, 2011), Kiss Off (Oystercatcher, 2011) and signs of the sistership(with Sarah Crewe, KFS, 2013). (0) is published by Arc.
Jeff Hilson has written stretchers (Reality Street 2006), Bird bird (Landfill 2009) and In The Assarts (Veer 2010). He also edited The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street 2008). He is currently working on a sequence called “Organ Music” parts of which will appear in a comprehensive selection of his poems to be published by Egg Box in 2016. He runs the reading series Xing the Line and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton, London.
More here: http://www.modernpoetry.org.uk/introjh.html
Harriet Tarlo and Geraldine Monk reading in Sheffield
Centre for Poetry and Poetics presents: a poetry reading with
Harriet Tarlo and Geraldine Monk
Lecture Theatre 5, Hicks Building (Hounsfield Road, main entrance and downstairs), University of Sheffield
18.00, 24th of May, 2016
Geraldine Monk’s poetry was first published in the 1970’s. Her main collections include Noctivagations and Escafeld Hangings both published by West House Books andSelected Poems by Salt Publishing. In 2012 she edited Cusp: Recollections of Poetry in Transition, Shearman Books. Her latest book They Who Saw The Deep was published by Parlor Press/Free Verse Edition in April 2016. She is an affiliated poet at the Centre for Poetry and Poetics, The University of Sheffield.
Harriet Tarlo is a poet and academic. Publications include Poems 1990-2003(Shearsman 2004); Nab (etruscan 2005); Field (forthcoming) and, with Judith Tucker,Sound Unseen and Behind Land (Wild Pansy, 2013 and 2015). She is editor of The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011). Recent critical and creative work appears in volumes published by Edinburgh University Press., Salt, Palgrave, Rodopi and Bloodaxe and in the following journals: Pilot, Jacket, Rampike, English and the Journal of Ecocriticism (JoE). Her collaborative work with Judith Tucker has been shown widely, at galleries including the Catherine Nash Gallery Minneapolis, 2012; Musee de Moulages, Lyon, 2013; Southampton City Art Gallery 2013-14; The Muriel Barker Gallery, Grimsby; The Scott Gallery, Plymouth, 2014 and New Hall College Art Collection, Cambridge, 2015. She teaches at Sheffield Hallam University where she is Reader in Creative Writing.
otherroom.org 