Events
Peter Barlow’s Cigarette 23 – O’Sullivan, Thorogood, Williams, Matsumoto
Peter Barlow’s Cigarette #23 – ft. Lila Matsumoto, Maggie O’Sullivan, Luke Thorogood, Chrissy Williams
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An afternoon of alternative poetries
Saturday, June 24, 4.00 – 6.00, Waterstones, Deansgate
Free entry, free wine
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LILA MATSUMOTO ~
’s publications include Soft Troika (If a Leaf Falls Press) and Allegories from my Kitchen (Sad Press). Lila’s poetry and criticism have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies including Jacket2, Tripwire, Zarf, and Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. She has performed at places such as SoundEye Festival and Little Sparta garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Lila teaches creative writing at the University of Nottingham, where she she convenes the Nottingham Poetry Series:https://nottinghampoetryseries.wordpress.com/
MAGGIE O’SULLIVAN ~
‘s page at Pennsound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/OSullivan.php) is a primary resource for online recordings of her readings/performances. Her website is www.maggieosullivan.co.uk
LUKE THOROGOOD ~
writes about and through the ‘other’, using created characters to explore voice and form. He previously edited Three and a half point 9, and is currently the artwork editor for the Black Market Review. He is completing a masters in Creative Writing at Edge Hill, focusing on writing as created poets. He writes and creates for, along with a group of other writers, part of The Pollyverse, a multimedia extended story world around the adventures of Polly St. Irene.
CHRISSY WILLIAMS ~
is a poet and editor living in London. She has published various poetry pamphlets and her first full collection BEAR has just been published by Bloodaxe. She is director of the annual Free Verse: Poetry Book Fair and currently works as editor on the bestselling comic The Wicked + The Divine. twitter.com/chrissywilliams
Zarf 8
Out now with Juha Virtanen, Jessica Tillings, Scott Thurston, Andrew Taylor, Rob Kiely, Linda Kemp, Justin Katko, James Goodwin, John Goodby, Joey Frances, Dan Eltringham, Sarah Crewe, Tessa Berring & Kathrine Sowerby, and Tim Allen. Plus: Tom Betteridge Reviews Nat Raha and Daisy Lafarge Reviews Camilla Nelson. More here.
Peter Barlow’s Cigarette open mic – new date
Now on Monday 12th June.
SJ Fowler: Brexit shaped elephant and a European love poem
Three new performances for the Bucharest International Poetry Festival and the European Poetry Night events in London and Norwich.
Land of Scoundrels
A new play exploring the life and death of one of Russia’s greatest poets. Mayakovsky was commissioned by Rich Mix Arts Centre as part of their centenary commemoration of the Russian Revolution, #Revolution17, in cahoots with the brilliant Dash Arts. Mayakovsky is part of a night of new theatre entitled Land of Scoundrels which features a unique sculptural set design by Thomas Duggan and new music by The Dirty Three. Tickets now on sale. More information here.
Sarah Jacobs – An Accumulation of Fictions
I have lived quietly in this house for most of my life.
Books accumulated and a space had to be cleared. 100s of volumes of fiction — novels and tales — were selected for the cull.
Before I could dispose of the books I took images of 384 of the volumes and placed them, together with other information, in spreadsheets.
The spreadsheets are a repository for the data.
I also collected text from each volume, following an algorithm which was intended to ensure that I was not just picking out favourite bits, or suppressing parts I did not like.
An Accumulation of Fictions is an aggregate formed from the collected text.
Out now on Colebrooke Publications. The book will be launched on 22nd June with readings from it by M.J. Weller and Richard Makin: Cass Art, 66 Colebrooke Row, London, N1 8AB., 5PM – 8pm.
Nia Davies book launch
30th June at 7 pm. IKLEKTIK ‘Old Paradise Yard’, 20 Carlisle Lane, Royal Street corner, Archbishop’s park, London, SE1 7LG. Nia Davies launches her new collection, published by Bloodaxe Books.
Thomas A. Clark: A Preview
The poetry of Thomas A. Clark has been consistently attentive to form and to the experience of walking in the landscape, returning again and again to the lonely terrain of the Highlands and Islands.
Thomas A. Clark will read with Matthew Welton at our next event on June 14th at The Castle Hotel, Manchester. More details HERE
Here are two examples of his work:
Quiet
from coire fhionn lochan
lapping of the little waves
breaking of the little waves
spreading of the little waves
idling of the little waves
breaking of the little waves
spreading of the little waves
idling of the little waves
Read more HERE
Echoes of the Mersey Sound
Diisonance – paul hawkins & Steve Ryan
Bank Street Arts, Sheffield June 21-24
Diisonance is a collaboration, part of a jigsaw, the genesis of which is shared experiences; Steve and paul met in the early nineties squatting in Claremont Road, east London at the height of anti-road protests, poll-tax riots and dissent. They’ve tried to piece together the past from the future, making sense of the ghosts that stay with them and the trust they offer one another helps clarify the feelings of confusion and love for their entwined topics; faltering, broken and rebuilt many times over. paul has written extensively on his experiences of squatting/protesting against the building of the M11 Link Road through east London, most recently in Place Waste Dissent (Influx Press 2015), which ‘plots the run-off, rackets and 90’s resistance to the proposed M11 Link Road; text experiments and collage from Claremont Road to Cameron. Memory traces re-surface the A12’ which features Steve’s photography. In Diisonance Steve’s starting point is a 21st century response to the collage/text of Place Waste Dissent and/or/with further memory travels. paul tries to look to the future in responding to Steve’s response to paul’s response(s), peacing the past from the future.
Diisonance Workshop June 23 14.00 – 16.30
paul hawkins & Rowan Evans are running a Creating Experimental & Collaborative Poetry on Friday June 23 2.00pm – 4.30pm. The cost is £5.00 per person. Enquiries and booking: hesterglock@gmail.com. All participants will be invited to read any new work created in the evening, joining some specially commissioned performances.
Diisonance Poetry June 23 18.30 – 21.00
Ten poets have been collaborating in pairs to produce new poetry to perform this evening. Their only guide is that they start from the word Dissonance, and that their performance be no longer than six minutes. This event is free, and begins at 6.30pm.
All new Dissonance work will be published by Hesterglock Press in a book to mark the exhibition and events.
Bios
Steve Ryan
Driven forward by scary monsters, haunted by the notion of chaos, London artist Steve Ryan’s work tries to pin down the slippery essence of ’the stuff’. Peripatetic by design, he’s recently experienced the joy of being tethered which has grounded him long enough to start production of a project over 30 years in the making, and with a bit of luck it will be finished in a little less time, but probably not.
paul hawkins
paul hawkins is a bristol-based poet, text artist & word-processor. paul studied the art of sleeping standing up and drinking lying down with nearly disastrous consequences. He’s the author of Claremont Road, Contumacy (both Erbacce Press) & Place Waste Dissent (Influx Press 2015). he collaborates with Portugese text artist/poet bruno neiva, co-authoring Servant Drone (KF&S Press 2015) and The Secret of Good Posture (Team Trident Press 2016). At the last count paul has moved on average every 11 months, but only ever owned one tent. Collages of text/art from Place Waste Dissent were exhibited at Bank Street Arts in 2016. paul co-runs Hesterglock Press and is a Spike Associate.
Chrissy Williams book launch
Chrissy Williams launches her new book Bear, with Ed Doegar, Richard Scott and Anna Selby.
Karen Mac Cormack & Steve McCaffery in Sheffield
An evening poetry reading: Independent Publishers Book Fair, Sheffield
Saturday 10th June, 2017, Bank Street Arts, 32-40 Bank Street, Sheffield. S1 2DS 7:30pm, free entry.
Karen Mac Cormack is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry. Titles include Quirks & Quillets, The Tongue Moves Talk, At Issue, Vanity Release,TALE LIGHT: New & Selected Poems 1984–2009, and AGAINST WHITE (Veer Books, London, 2013). Her poems have appeared in such anthologies asMoving Borders, Out of Everywhere, Another Language, Prismatic Publics, and have been translated into French, Portuguese, Swedish and Norwegian. An extended interview with her appears in Scott Thurston’s Talking Poetics (Shearsman, 2011). Born in Zambia, of dual British/Canadian citizenship, she currently lives in the USA and teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Steve McCaffery has been twice nominated for Canada’s Governor General’s Award and is twice recipient of the American Gertrude Stein Prize for Innovative Writing. He is the author of over 40 books and chapbooks of poetry and criticism. An ample selection of his poetic explorations in numerous forms can be savoured in the two volumes of Seven Pages Missing (Coach House Press). As well as Panopticon, Tatterdemalion (Veer Books), Alice in Plunderland (Book Thug), Revanches (Xexoxial), and Parsival (Roof). His book-object-concept A Little Manual of Treason was commissioned for the 2011 Shajah Biennale in the United Arab Emirates. A founding member of the sound poetry ensemble Four Horsemen, TRG (Toronto Research Group) and the College of Canadian ”Pataphysics and long-time resident of Toronto he is now David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the University at Buffalo. Born in Jessop’s Hospital Sheffield, he is listed, along with John Ruskin, Margaret Drabble, Eric Clapton and Patrick MacNee, as one of the top 100 people who were born or lived in that city.
Zarf – Nia Davies, Lila Matsumoto
6 June at 7 pm. Wharf Chambers, Ground Floor, 23 – 25 Wharf Street, Leeds, LS2 7EQ.
Zarf magazine presents –
The THIRD Zarf reading in Leeds …..
P O E T R Y (and similar)
readings by
NIA DAVIES
LILA MATSUMOTO
and more tbc
Edge Poetics
A Symposium on Innovative and Speculative Creative Writing Practices in Higher Education
4th November 2017
10.00-17.30, with a public reading at 18.00
Venue: University of Bedfordshire, Luton Campus
With keynotes from Professor Robert Sheppard (Edge Hill University) and Nicholas Royle (Manchester Metropolitan University), and contributions from Dr Helen Marshall (Anglia Ruskin University) and Dr Daniel Watt (Loughborough University).
In the late essay, ‘Literature and Life’, Gilles Deleuze expands on ideas from his earlier work about the ways literary writing can open up ‘a kind of foreign language within language, which is neither another language nor a rediscovered patois, but a becoming-other of language, a minorization of this major language, a delirium that carries it off, a witch’s line that escapes the dominant system.’
Till relatively recently, Creative Writing in Higher Education has been dominated by a set of techniques and tropes derived from realism, and also by the expectations of mainstream literary fiction. Increasingly, however, aspects of innovative and speculative poetics are finding their way into the classroom.
This one-day symposium will ask: what are the benefits for the pedagogy of Creative Writing of writing practices drawn from experimental and fantastic traditions; and what does it mean to be a writer interested in such traditions who also teaches Creative Writing in academe? Is there a value in teaching students to find the kind of delirium Deleuze writes of? It will bring together writers, teachers of Creative Writing, and others with an interest in the field, to discuss these questions.
Suggested topics for papers might include but are not limited to:
Creative Writing pedagogy and innovation; Creative Writing pedagogy and writing in genre; all forms of creative writing that work at the borders of genre in the Creative Writing classroom; blurred lines between theory and creative practice
Conference organisers Tim Jarvis, Keith Jebb, and Lesley McKenna (University of Bedfordshire) invite abstracts of 350 words for 20-minute papers; please submit along with a short biographical note, by 4th August 2017, to edgepoetics@gmail.com.
William Rowe Collected Poems Launch
18 May at 18:30–22:00. May Day Rooms, 88 Fleet St, London, EC4Y 1DH.
Four poets will read from their new books of anti-capitalist poetry. Helen Dimos’s No Realtor Was Compensated for This Sale takes readers out of socially controlled time into real time. Stephen Mooney’s Ratzinger Solo mixes the voices of Trump, Pope Benedict XVI, and Han Solo in order to investigate crossovers of how they present themselves as characters immune to criticism. William Rowe’s Collected Poems assert resistance against oppression as a necessary form of art. Verity Spott’s forthcoming Click Way Close Door Say exposes ways in which the language of institutional care traps us.
Free.
Peter Barlow’s Cigarette poetry open mic
Peter Barlow’s Cigarette are deviating from their usual formula of booking our favourite experimental poets, and hosting a poetry open mic on Tuesday 23rd May, at Terrace Bar on Thomas Street, Manchester, from 7pm. More details here.
European Poetry Night: films
Anathema
Wonderzoo Presents
Including Other Room reader J.R. Carpenter.
otherroom.org 