The second English PEN Modern Literature Festival, curated by SJ Fowler’s Enemies Project, saw 30 contemporary UK-based writers present new works in tribute to writers at risk around the world at Rich Mix, London, on April 1st 2017. This film is of Hannah Silva, performing her piece for Narges Mohammadi. The rest of the films, more about the event and details of the important work of PEN can be found here.
Events
Arvon Experimental Poetry Course with Scott Thurston and Harriet Tarlo, & Maggie O’Sullivan as guest reader
Arvon Experimental Poetry Course
With Scott Thurston and Harriet Tarlo, & Maggie O’Sullivan as guest reader
Sep 18th – Sep 23rd 2017
Suitable for new poets and more experienced writers who would like to explore innovative poetic techniques, throw over old habits, or push their work further. You will be encouraged to explore a diversity of poetic forms and uses of language, such as open form, collage and juxtaposition. We will bring to bear our background in what is often referred to as the UK’s ‘innovative’ poetry scene, introducing you to the approaches of British and American experimental poets as a means of encouraging you to play and take risks in your own work.
More at the LINK
Amy McCauley recording at The Other Room – February 2017
Steven Hitchins recording at The Other Room – February 2017
SJ Fowler book launch in Bristol
Arnolfini : Bristol – April Thursday 6th – 7pm : Free Entry.
The launch of SJ Fowler’s latest poetry collection ‘The Guide to Being Bear Aware’ from Bristol-based Shearsman Books, featuring performances and readings from Fowler and guest readers John Hall, Holly Corfield Carr, Paul Hawkins, Phil Owen & more to be announced.
“The Guide to Being Bear Aware offers advice for living in a world gone awry. Wry, violent, contemplative, political, intimate and raucous by turns, these are poems that laze on your lap only to get their claws in… Morphing into unfamiliar shapes beneath the watching eye, these refreshing, quizzical, well-traveled poems forge a world entirely their own: they won’t let you go of you easily.” Sarah Howe
More here.
From the vaults – Tony Lopez interview
Other Other Room interviews are HERE
A Future / No Future Poetry Experiment with Poetry Wales
7 April at 7 PM. Jacobs Market, West Canal Wharf, Cardiff, CF10 5DB.
Cardiff Poetry Experiment will launch Poetry Wales’s new Future/No Future issue with an evening of live poetry at Jacob’s Antiques in Cardiff.
What happens to language when the future keeps getting cancelled?
Nathan Jones, Peter Finch, Ailbhe Darcy and Julia Rose Lewis will read and perform from the new issue which explores futurism, utopia, dystopia and the ‘lossy present’.
Organised by Poetry Wales and the Cardiff Poetry Experiment, supported by the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University.
Nikolai Duffy and Ian Seed book launches
The Manchester Writing School, Number 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5NH. Entry free, but booking essential. 7 PM start.
The Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met is delighted to present this special event to launch Nikolai Duffy’s latest poetry collection, Up The Creek, published by Knives Forks and Spoons Press and Ian Seed’s short story pamphlet, Italian Lessons, published by Like This Press. More here.
Other Room 9th birthday preview – Juxtavoices
Here’s a taster of Juxtavoices who’ll appear soon at our 9th birthday.
The Other Room
9th birthday and 9th anthology launch
Erkembode, Juxtavoices, William Rowe
Wednesday 5th April, 2017
The King’s Arms, 11 Bloom Street, Salford, M3 6AN
Free Entry
www.otherroom.org
Free Verse Magazine Fair
Early notice on this splendid looking event.
SJ Fowler and John Hall book launches
Shearsman book launches. Tuesday 11 April, 2017, 7:30pm. Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH. Launch of John Hall’s As a said place and SJ Fowler’s The Guide to Being Bear Aware. More details at the Shearsman site.
Verbose
Following a standing-room-only event in February, live literature night Verbose is back a week today, on Monday 27 March, at Fallow Café in Fallowfield, Manchester.
Hailed by the media as one of the best spoken word nights in Manchester, Verbose each month invites three headliners who share a link, be that a publisher or publication, a writing group or project, or a common writing-related place of work. This month, Verbose showcases three authors who are associated with the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester: Grace McCleen, Susan Barker and Beth Underdown.
Betty Trask Award-winner Grace McCleen is a writing fellow at the Centre for New Writing, author of three novels and former writer in residence at the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth. Jerwood Prize-winner Susan Barker teaches creative writing and is working on her fourth novel. Beth Underdown has just launched her debut, The Witchfinders’ Sister, to critical acclaim. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing, which is headed up by renowned author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson.
Since its relaunch by prize-winning writer Sarah-Clare Conlon in January 2015, Verbose has welcomed many luminaries of the literature scene, including poets Richard Barrett, Anne Caldwell, Michael Conley and Rosie Garland, and prose writers Jenn Ashworth, Neil Campbell, Nicholas Royle and Emma Jane Unsworth. Man Booker Prize-listed authors Ian McGuire and Alison Moore have been guests, and February marked the launch of David Gaffney’s new novel All The Places I’ve Ever Lived. Upcoming events will feature Costa shortlistee Stephen May.
Taking place on the fourth Monday of the month at Fallow Café (2a Landcross Road, M14 6NA), entry is free and doors are at 7.30pm. See verbosemcr.wordpress.com. Open mic slots are three minutes; to perform, email via verbosemcr@gmail.com.
Electric Arc Furnace #3, with Nat Raha and Eley Williams
A new poetry reading series, in the centre of Sheffield, between the seven hills. Innovative poetries from the South Yorks hinterlands & further-flung.
Eley Williams is co-editor of fiction at 3:AM magazine with prose in Ambit, Night & Day, Structo and The White Review. Her collection Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx, 2017) was chosen by Ali Smith amongst ‘the best of debut fiction’ for this year’s Cambridge Literary Festival. She has a small book of poetry, ‘Frit’, forthcoming from Sad Press.
Nat Raha is a poet and trans / queer activist, living in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her poetry includes two collections: countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013), and Octet (Veer Books, 2010); and numerous pamphlets including ‘£/€xtinctions’ (Sociopathetic Distro, 2017), ‘[of sirens / body & faultlines]’ (Veer Books, 2015), and ‘mute exterior intimate’ (Oystercatcher Press, 2013). She’s performed and published her work internationally. She is undertaking a PhD in Creative & Critical Writing at the University of Sussex. Nat’s essay titled ‘Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism’ is due for publication in the South Atlantic Quarterly this spring, and she has recently started working with Scottish PEN on the Many Voices project.
Readings take place at La Biblioteka, 70 Pinstone Street, Sheffield. S1 2HP, Sheffield City Centre. BYOB. Doors 7pm. £4 waged / £3 unwaged / pay what you can. Proceeds to poets. All very welcome.
From the vaults – Caroline Bergvall
Bergvall reading 2008
Tribute reading for Geoffrey Hill
Fri 17 March 2017, 17:45 – 19:00. Great Hall, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, LEEDS, LS2 9JT. Free, but registration required.
Geoffrey Hill was knighted in 2012 for his services to poetry after a long and distinguished career as a poet and a scholar which included posts at the universities of Bristol, Cambridge, and Boston; and, more recently, his tenure as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. A graduate of Keble College Oxford, his academic career began at Leeds in 1954 with his appointment to a lectureship. He spent the next twenty six years at our University and was appointed to a Chair in English Literature in 1976. During this time, Geoffrey published four collections of poetry – For the Unfallen, King Log, Mercian Hymns, and Tenebrae – works which secured his reputation as one of the finest poets writing in the English language. The University of Leeds is proud of its long-standing association with Geoffrey – which includes the custodianship of his extensive archive – and would like to extend a warm invitation to family, friends, colleagues, and admirers to join in this tribute. Everyone is welcome.
Lightwave: New Performance in Lithuanian Literature
Wednesday March 15th / 6:30pm doors for 7pm start / Free Word Centre
60 Farringdon Road. EC1R 3GA : Free Entry but online booking requested here
60 Farringdon Road. EC1R 3GA : Free Entry but online booking requested here
A unique event celebrating Lithuanian’s new generation of literary artists, featuring brand new readings and performances by Gabrielė Labanauskaitė-Diena, Žygimantas Kudirka and SJ Fowler, a British poet connected to their innovative, collaborative practise.
Both Labanauskaite and Kudirka have carved out reputations across Europe for remarkable writing and live performances to match. This is a rare chance in London to witness poets who are breaking ground in the new European scene.
From Lithuania’s powerful lyrical and formal tradition has grown a culture of experimentation and in this event curated for the London Book Fair, the Lithuanian Culture Institute brings to light the best of Lithuania’s new generation of poets and performers. More here.
The English PEN Modern Literature Festival 2017
The 2nd English PEN Modern Literature Festival : 30 writers, poets, novelists, playwrights and artists come together to continue English PEN’s relationship with innovative contemporary literature over one extraordinary day. The writers will present brand new poetry, text, reportage & performance, each celebrating and evidencing the struggle of a fellow writer from around the world, currently supported by the English PEN writers-at-risk programme. More here.
Craig Dworkin at the ICA
Craig Dworkin talks about his critical work, No Medium at the ICA.
15 MARCH
18:30 – 20:00
Join poet and author Professor Craig Dworkin looking at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent. Examined closely, these ostensibly ‘contentless’ works of art, literature and music point to a new understanding of media and the limits of the artistic object. Dworkin argues that we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but only and always a plurality of media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed space.
In partnership with Leeds Beckett University.
Tickets are £5 / £3 for #ICAMembers
More here – https://www.ica.art/whats-on/craig-dworkin-no-medium
Cardiff Poetry Experiment
Holly Corfield Carr is a poet based in Bristol and Cambridge where she is completing a PhD in site-specific writing practices in contemporary poetry and sculpture. She is currently a 2016/17 Visiting Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and previous residencies include the Curfew Tower, Spike Island, the British Ceramics Biennial, the Wordsworth Trust and the Bristol Poetry Institute. Her poems have been commissioned for passenger ferries, orchards and car parks and broadcast on BBC Radios 3 and 4. She received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2012 and the Frieze Writer’s Prize in 2015.
Childe Roland is a fictional character with some basis in historical fact. His quest for the dark tower across a wasteland mirrors his attempts at spanning the frigid landscape of the blank page with a line of over-extended alliteration and faulty reasoning and disruptive grammar. Published works include Six of Clubs, Stars, Trees, and the play Ham and Jam from Hafan Press.
James Wilkes writes poetry and makes installation and performance work. Recent performances/installations have taken place at The Other Room, Manchester; Godsbanen, Aarhus; Wellcome Collection, London; Battersea Arts Centre, London. His poetry and prose has been published in Datableed, The Wire, Gorse, The White Review, Torque #2, Litmus and Poetry Wales. Until recently he was Associate Director of Hubbub, a collective of researchers and artists exploring rest and its opposites – including noise, work and mindwandering – as the first recipients of The Hub Award at Wellcome Collection.
POETRY PERFORMANCE SERIES # 3: JESCHKE / BEYNON~~SPOTT~~KEMP~~TBA
POETRY PERFORMANCE SERIES # 3: JESCHKE / BEYNON~~SPOTT~~KEMP~~TBA
LISA JESCHKE & LUCY BEYNON
Have made theatre together since 2007, in Cambridge, London, Berlin, etc. Some of it has been published, including David Cameron (Shit Valley Press, 2015).
VERITY SPOTT
Is a poet and musician based in Brighton, and the author of Trans* Manifestos (Shit Valley, 2016) Gideon (Barque Press, 2014), Balconette (Veer Books, 2014), Dear Nothing and No One In It and Effort to No (Iodine, 2013). She runs Iodine press and Horseplay. Click Away Close Door Say has just been published by Contraband Books, and another book of lyric poems, written with Tim Thornton, is due from Face Press. Verity is also editing the poetry of Arlen Riley Wilson.
LINDA KEMP
Is a poet and musician based in Sheffield. Her book Lease Prise Redux was published by Materials last year. She is the founder of the DIY publishing press and record label enjoy your homes press.
PAIGE SMEATON
Is a poet based in Cambridge. She has worked with the poet Vahni Capildeo on Perfomance Art Events ‘The Bacchae’, ‘Maenads of Necessity’ and ‘Azure Noise’. Work appears in Botch magazine.
Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio, English Faculty, University of Cambridge
Friday 3rd March 2017, 7.30pm
Book table
Email Rosa Van Hensbergen, Janani Ambikapathy, David Grundy (rv252@cam.ac.uk, ja555@cam.ac.uk, dmg37@cam.ac.uk)
otherroom.org 