Publications

Thus &: An Erasure of Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets out now from if p then q

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

Ted Berrigan’s seminal The Sonnets is renowned for its famous use of cut up technique and reconfiguration throughout the sequence. Derek Henderson’s erasure Thus & eliminates all words and typographical duplications. In addition to the strikingly beautiful, often minimalist, sonnets created by Henderson, Thus & asks new questions of each Berrigan sonnet and the sequence as a whole. Thus & reveals (conceals) not only the clusters of phrases/lines that were cloned by Berrigan but also words which he repeated; many obviously subconsciously. What is left in Thus & is part skeleton, and underbelly, of maître-sonneteer Berrigan’s The Sonnets and part alien remix by techno-magician Derek Henderson.

Sampler & Concordance
THUS&_sampler
THUS&_Concordance

LINK TO BUY FROM IF P THEN Q

Maintenant #52: Cia Rinne

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

A poet whose work is as multifaceted and wide-ranging as her own European character, Cia Rinne is an unforgettable poet, artist and thinker. Born in Sweden, raised in Germany, before living for over a decade in Finland and then Denmark, her aptitude for languages includes writing in French and English, as well as speaking Greek, Romanian, Spanish, Italian… and on the list goes. Her unique and cultivated ability to utilise such a multitude of languages creates an idiosyncratic poetic idiom, one that is truly refined and multifarious at its root. She matches this sensitivity with a remarkably immediate visual poetic style. If we had to choose a representative for the Maintenant series and it’s aims, perhaps the true intricacy of Cia Rinne’s work would make her one of the most viable candidates.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-52-cia-rinne/<

Accompanying the interview are five of Cia's poems.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/five-poems-cia-rinne/

Here too is the sixth of the bi-monthly article series with Nthposition.com focused on unjustly overlooked European poets, this edition, the Sicilian symbolist Lucio Piccolo. http://www.nthposition.com/reilluminations6lucio.php

We have finalised the next Maintenant reading program, as part of the Lithuanian Declassified Arts project. http://www.lithuanianembassy.co.uk/index.php?-157739503

3am magazine & the Maintenant series presents in conjunction with Europe house presents

Nauja Poezija: Young Lithuanian & British poets in collaboration

April Friday 8th – 7pm – Entrance free to all (32 Smith Square, London SW1P)

We welcome three of Lithuania’s finest young poets to London with a reception at Europe House and an exchange of poetry from some of the finest native poets the city has to offer. Alongside Donatas Petrošius, Gabriele Labanauskaite and Tomas S. Butkus, a half dozen resident poets, featuring Agnes Lehoczky, Jeff Hilson, Jon Shaw, Tim Atkins, Kate Kililea and more will read short excerpts from their work.

3am magazine & the Maintenant series presents in conjunction with the Rich Mix presents

Declassified: Lithuanian & British poets in collaboration

April Saturday 9th – 7pm – Entrance free to all

(35 – 47 Bethnal Green Road, London, E1 6LA www.richmix.org.uk)

Tim Atkins & Tomas S. Butkus
Donatas Petrošius & Chris McCabe
Jeremy Reed & Gabriele Labanauskaite

A unique evening of exchange and collaboration between six of the finest poets in Europe communicating the rare command of their poetry, highlighting their shared engagement along with their own distinctive understanding of what is poetic.

http://www.maintenant.co.uk

http://www.youtube.com/maintenantpoetry
http://soundcloud.com/maintenant

the Songs of Salvador Sanchez

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

In a limited edition of 40, the Red Ceilings presents the Songs of Salvador Sanchez, the 20th cycle in SJ Fowler’s “Fights” series. The Red Ceilings began as a poetry blog for both new and established contemporary poets and quickly expanded into publishing an ebook series of online and downloadable booklets. They have now started their latest venture – a series of limited edition A6 pocket sized chapbooks. They welcome submissions for the ebook series, chapbooks and blog and like innovative, experimental and avant-garde poetry in particular. For more information email Mark Cobley at theredceilings@gmail.com

http://www.theredceilingspress.co.uk/
http://www.redceilings.blogspot.com/

 

Maintenant #51: Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

An iconic poet in Scandinavia, Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson, or UKON, as he is often known, has established a remarkable reputation in the literary culture of Sweden at large, despite being a challenging and innovative poetic practitioner. A resident of Gothenburg, and a winner of the prestigious Göteborgs-Posten literary prize, he is a practising psychologist and psychoanalyst as well as a poet, and his prolific poetic output advocates the level of intellectual engagement and complexity that his chosen profession would suggest. It is hardly surprising that he also a deft satirist, lacing his writing with a black humour worthy of the great European tradition he maintains. For the 51st edition of Maintenant, Sweden’s UKON.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-51-ulf-karl-olov-nilsson/

Accompanying the interview are five of Ulf Karl’s poems, translated by Fredrik Hertzberg, Karri Kokko, and Leevi Lehto.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/five-poems-ulf-karl-olov-nilsson/

Maintenant #50: Frédéric Forte

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

It is rather apt, or rather remiss, that for the fiftieth edition of Maintenant we present our first French poet. The first of many no doubt. It is all the more appropriate, given our dictum, that our first French subject is the youngest, and 35th, member of Oulipo. As the most contemporary representative of that legendary group of writers and poets, it goes without saying Frédéric Forte is an adroit, inventive and certain presence in the ever-lively and rich French poetry scene. We are extremely pleased to mark our half-century featuring a poet who epitomises our commitment to urbane, intelligent and important poetry which is still evolving into its own distinguished completion.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-50-frederic-forte/

Accompanying the interview are eight of Frédéric’s poems, translated by JJ Poucel and Michelle Noteboom.

LIKE by Colin Herd review

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

LIKE by Colin Herd
Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 16pp
Reviewed by James Davies

• I LIKE the way found-texts are written which aren’t quite found-texts

• I LIKE the voice

• I LIKE the alleviated status of the trash written about without that puke-ingusting feeling that you are ‘viewing everyday objects in an extraordinary way’

• I LIKE the condemnation of capitalism

• I LIKE the grotesque & squiggy imagery; esp the mushyness of George Bush Sr. Do sculptures at Madame Tussaud’s get melted down like the Wicked Witch of the West or do they go into storage at the Tate Gallery?

• I LIKE the way the art criticism is done here

• I LIKE the juxtaposition of magik and humanism: see Franz Kline poem

• I LIKE Franz Kline any day of the week

• I am sorry Denise Levertov was so mean to Colin Herd but kinda glad also

• I enLIKED to hear him growl. Thank you so much for teaching me how to growl

• There is this woman I LIKE a bit (she’s so naff), who I’ve seen advertising non-aging cream, but I had never heard of Jane Rafter before but I am GLAD that I have done now

• Just LIKE Colin Herd I enjoy watching crap TV sometimes and I LIKE to satirise it. Crap TV is one of many things that needs to be satirised and is evidence enough to agree with Adorno’s threadlike arguments

• I LIKE Colin Herd’s poem about Eva Longoria even though I don’t know who the hell she is: I’m not going to google her but will no doubt get told who she is subsequent to this review

• I LIKE to laugh; laughter is both the happiness and sadness of the people, our escapism and our warning

• I LIKE the way Colin Herd does détournement

• I LIKE to start my day with Nescafe (LIKE hell I do)

• I LIKE ‘LIKE’

Rob Holloway, Flesh Rays from Crater Press

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

The Crater Press is pleased to announce a new articulated double-sided broadside by Rob Holloway from his sequence-in-progress Flesh Rays. The pamph./side contains 7 brain-squeezers; here’s some explanation:

Crater XI samples from the early stages of Rob Holloway’s new prose sequence ‘FLESH RAYS’ that one day will stretch to 107 such sections. One sentence reads ‘All sun’s got inside breath, soft as a head without a ghost.’ Another, ‘Shift left red sun, I’m cutting out a girl of paper.’, so perhaps it’s all about the sun. Then again, we’re instructed to ‘Rinse roads as if bricks were still wrapped in their towels’ so best we head for the hills. The ‘two Asian women soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie’ mentioned in the section ‘Moulded Books’ are real. ‘Reassembling the central crabapple’ is the ultimate purpose of the sequence.

LINK

Maintenant #48: Morten Søndergaard

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment
Representative of a golden generation of Danish poets, Morten Søndergaard is as versatile a poet as there is currently writing in the synthesised Northern European style of the 21st century. Having gained a wide reputation across Europe and the US for his organic adaptation of poetic form, his output over the last few decades has been varied and remarkable. A true blueprint for the future of European letters, he is as comfortable with verse as with sound poetry and his highly humourous, ethical and sensory poetry is a major contribution to Northern European poetics. In a typically generous interview, we present the 48th of the Maintenant series


Accompanying the interview are four of Morten’s poems, translated into English by Barbara Haveland

Two new books by Robert Sheppard

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

Two new books by Robert Sheppard from Shearsman

BERLIN BURSTS (poems)

These new poems feature territories as dispersed as Sheppard’s local Capital of Culture and the global city of division and political murder of the title poem. Yet a series of metapoems brings agency and wonder to the idea of the poem, always seeing the world as well as itself, in perceptual double-takes that tease away at the meaning of the poetic act
At the centre of the collection is ‘Six Poems Against Death’ whose lyric imperative hovers before the portals of the unknown to embrace human unfinish as the condition of our survival.

Ian Davidson in Poetry Wales called Sheppard’s Complete Twentieth Century Blues ‘a major poem of serious intent’; Alan Baker in Litter called Warrant Error ‘political poetry of the first order’, and John Muckle wrote of ‘this brilliant, disquieting book.’

“Robert Sheppard . . . composed a few words around Liverpool’s status as City of Culture. ‘Their shit’s verdure but that’s OK/ This isn’t a nature poem.’ Sheppard’s near twenty-year epic, Complete Twentieth Century Blues, outweighed the Ringo returns, the showbiz art: he cooked slow and long, with tangy sauces and bits that break the teeth. The city
averted its eyes . . . As if it were the poet’s fault that we want our meat pre-chewed.” -Iain Sinclair

Order from the Shearsman online store and read more at:
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/sheppardBB.html

Order from amazon.co.uk
Order from The Book Depository
Order from amazon.com
Order from Barnes and Noble.com (USA)

WHEN BAD TIMES MADE FOR GOOD POETRY (criticism)

This study presents an episodic history of an epic period in British poetry, when bad times forced political subversion and textual impaction upon its central figures and provisional institutions. Episodes cover the Poetry Wars of the 1970s; the centrality of Bob Cobbing as poetry activist and the SubVoicive poetry scene in 1980s London; he also writes individual chapters on the poetry and poetics of Allen Fisher, Tom Raworth, Iain Sinclair, John Hall, Ken Edwards, and Maggie O’Sullivan.

“A landmark study.” -Benjamin Keatinge reviewing The Poetry of Saying in The European English Messenger

Order from the Shearsman online store and read more at:
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/sheppardWBT.html
Order from amazon.co.uk
Order from The Book Depository

Maintenant #47: Anatol Knotek

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment
Following in the footsteps of some of Europe’s greatest poetic innovators in the 20th century, the work of Anatol Knotek is the latest chapter in the visual / concrete / conceptual poetry legacy that has emerged from Austria, and most specifically, the city of Vienna. It is often suggested that concrete and visual poetry reached it’s apex in the 1950’s to 1970’s and since then has declined somehow. It is probably true that the vitality and power of the original movement, (led, outside of Austria, by the likes of Bob Cobbing, the de Campos brothers, Henri Chopin, Edwin Morgan, Andras Petocz, Shimpei Kusano…) could not be sustained and attention from a wider readership waned. However, it is clear when poets as young as Knotek produce work of this superlative quality the medium is not lacking, it is in resurgence and rather some of the very best poetry in Europe is part of this tradition. At it’s forefront sits Knotek and we are pleased to present a poetic artist whose work will no doubt become a focal part of the European poetic landscape for years to come.

Accompanying the interview are eight of Anatol’s poems

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/eight-poems-anatol-knotek/

Alex Davies – How Vivid the Claret

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

Other Room founding member Alex Davies has a pamphlet out with Arthur Shilling press. Check it out:

£1.80 (UK & EU only), Arthur Shilling Press, 2011 (24 pages, A6, first 20 copies have unique cover images taken from “Stories for Boys”, the remaining 10 copies are reproduced prints)

To purchase from outside the UK/EU, please contact the editor Harry Godwin

LINK

Maintenant #45 – Aleš Šteger

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment
Undeniably one of the most engaging and enjoyable poets currently writing in Europe, Aleš Šteger is a cultivated and often brilliant poet whose work demands rereading for its fluency and lumination. He maintains an air of philosophical sophistication while imbuing his work with a laconic satire and aberrant minimalism that makes it distinct in the memory. A leading light in the rich Slovenian poetry community, we are very pleased to introduce Aleš Šteger as Maintenant edition Forty Five.

Accompanying the interview are nine of his poems.

Special thanks to Jan Wagner for his assistance with this interview.

http://soundcloud.com/maintenant