Latest issue of the superb online magazine featuring poetry and reviews:
Readers
Midamble by Peter Jaeger out now from if p then q
Peter Jaeger’s stunning new book, Midamble, is out priced at the snip of £12.
420 pp
£12.00
LINK to purchase and sample pages
About the book
Midamble is a long poem that concerns Peter Jaeger’s interest in walking practice; in particular his travels on a variety of pilgrimage routes. A prose poem, it comprises two bands of text: the top level is a list of walking experiences whilst the bottom re-appropriates materials from comparative religion texts. Midamble is a poem that is clearer than crystal, and possesses a musical quality that is comparable to seminal and contemporary minimalist music.
The poem also has a life in durational performance. When read live Midamble demonstrates its consistency as well as its diversity. In such performances listeners are invited into a collective experience in which they can engage with ideas for as little as a moment or as long as several hours. Indeed, perhaps its most enduring feature is its quality of having no fixed entry or exit point.
About the author
Peter Jaeger is a Canadian poet, literary critic and text-based artist now living in the UK. His recent publications include John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics (Bloomsbury 2013) and 5404 (University of London Veer Press 2014). He has also published A Field Guide to Lost Things with if p then q. Jaeger is Professor of Poetics at Roehampton University in London.
Surrey Poetry Festival 2018
Full line-up now confirmed…
Clémentine Bedos is a multidisciplinary artist whose recent shows include a solo exhibition at the Constance Howard Gallery, London ‘Contagious Hystories’. Currently exploring themes of identity, binaries and the Other. https://www.clementinebedos.com/
Emma Bennett’s recent performances include durational piano pieces, an exploration of pining for soft things, and interpreting the words of birdsong. https://emmabennettperformance.wordpress.com/
Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose work explores the slippage between writing on page, to performance in time, between still and moving image, between individual and collective action. http://not-yet-there.blogspot.co.uk/
Rebecca Cremin draws on traditions of live art, Fluxus, performance writing and site-specific work using language as an object to expose, to investigate, to locate. http://www.veerbooks.com/Rebecca-Cremin-LAY-D
Amy Cutler is a multi-disciplinary practitioner with a special interest in geohumanities – the engagement between geography and arts/humanities. https://amycutler.net/
Tina Darragh is one of the original members of the Language group of poets. Her work explores class, race and ecology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Darragh
Rob Holloway is currently exploring sonnets and prose poems, and has been a DJ on Resonance FM. https://vimeo.com/9383523
P. Inman is associated with language and minimalist poetry. His work has been described as ‘thick with meanings that never quite complete themselves; full of social ironies and a sly and biting humor’ http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/inman/
Peter Jaeger will perform a durational version of his latest book Midamble, on the lawn at G Live. The book concerns his recently completed walk on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG1EUZusDTY
Sharon Kivland is an artist who has recently been called a poet, five times, to her surprise. Her work considers what is put at stake by art, politics, and psychoanalysis. http://www.sharonkivland.com/
Lila Matsumoto’s poetry explores dailyness through allegory and literalness. http://www.shearsman.com/browse-poetry-books-by-author-Lila-Matsumoto
Tom Jenks is often verbivocovisual and always hilarious. https://www.zshboo.org/
Philip Terry uses Oulipian methods and translation to examine the crimes of bureaucracy and management. http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781847772206
Scott Thurston’s current work responds to ongoing encounters with various dance and movement practices including Five Rhythms, Movement Medicine and Open Floor work. http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Thurston.php
Students from The University of Surrey have been exploring a range of poetic strategies during the workshop series Making Things Happen including the use of diaries, minimalism, Oulipo and collaboration.
Tickets go on sale April 4th – available from G-Live.
Running order TBC.
There will be a wine and cheese reception at 5pm.
An evening soiree takes place at 6.30, with the Poetry Festival joining The New Writer’s Festival (also taking place at G Live) and features a variety of readers including Tom Jenks.
Preview of Pascal O’Loughlin for the Other Room 10th birthday
Pascal O’Loughlin will perform alongside Vicky Sparrow, Amy De’Ath & Camilla Nelson on 18th April, 7pm at the Other Room. Free entry as ever. It’s our tenth birthday! Here’s a performance by Pascal and also one of the four posters for the night below that, which shows our readers over the years:
New Hix Eros review
Hix Eros: Poetry Review is published jointly by Sad Press and Hi Zero.
The latest issue is #8, published in March 2018, covering work by Sean Bonney, Lisa Robertson, Linda Kemp, Lila Matsumoto, Jennifer Pike Cobbing, Mike Saunders, Holly Pester et al., Sarah Hayden, Nicky Melville, Sophie Mayer, Calum Gardner, Juha Virtanen, Jèssica Pujol, Millie Guille, Sophie Seita, Caitlín Doherty, Corina Copp, Eleanor Perry, Daisy Lafarge, Vala Thorrods, JH Prynne, Colin Herd, and Peter Manson.
The Advance of the Avant-garde
In the 1960s a group of writers set about shaking up the polite conventions of the British realist tradition through a whole range of experimental approaches.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tybwl
10 years of if p then q
Another big night in the not too distant future from James Davies’ publishing house if p then q. Wang it in your diary.
Surrey Poetry Festival 2018
Early notice of this event which is organised by The Other Room’s James Davies, current Poet in Residence at the university. The day will feature a number of amazing poets. Get the date in your head now! Guildford is just 30 minutes from London Waterloo. More on where and how to buy tickets soon but should be around £5.
Calum Gardner: a preview
Calum Gardner will perform at the next Other Room on Wednesday 21st February at The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester, alongside Edmund Hardy and Jazmine Linklater. 7 PM start, free, as always. Here is Calum performing with another Other Room reader, John Goodby.
Calum Gardner is a poet, critic, editor of Zarf magazine, and teaches at the University of Leeds. Recent poems can be found in publications such as amberflora, 3:AM, Datableed, and Poetry Wales.
Edmund Hardy: a preview
Edmund Hardy will read at the next Other Room on Wednesday 21st February at The Castle Hotel, Oldham St., Manchester. Here he is with Camilla Nelson at last year’s Museum of Futures exhibition opening. The other readers are Jazmine Linklater and Calum Gardner. 7 PM start, free, as always.
Edmund Hardy is a poet and polemicist. His book Complex Crosses (2014) is an experimental work of philology and philosophy. He’s currently working on a novel called Motley Apostles.
Redell Olsen – A Preview
Our next event takes place on December 6th at The Castle Hotel, 7pm and is free as ever – hope to see you there. It features Sharon Kivland, Redell Olsen and David Steans. Here’s a little preview of Redell Olsen:
say I and you London land marks
say I and you in London mark land
say London land is marked by you and I
say I and you make marks in London’s land
say I and you mark lands in London
say I and you marked by land
say London land marks
say long done land marks
say long done marks in land
say land in long marks in language
from Film Poems. See more HERE
Tom Crosher’s photos from The Other Room – Davies, Mooney, Thurston
Tom Crosher took a number of photos of our night in October. Super thanks. There are more photos via the link under these photos.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/RMBMb2hxWiZ6MOYQ2
The Crater/Sharon Borthwick Advent Calendar 2018
Via Richard Parker…
This year Sharon Borthwick’s done our advent calendar! The Borthwick Riot Calendar contains all sorts of incendiary material, 25 poems, a colour collage and lots of Xmas cheer – it’s also definitely NSFW. £5 and P&P, it’s on the website now: www.craterpress.co.uk Copies will be sent out about the middle of November – orders from outside of the UK may not receive their copies before December/advent.
Also, there’ll be an Cratery Xmas party on the 1st of December at The Field, 385 New Cross Road, London, where we’ll celebrate Sharon’s advent intervention and yuletide cheer. Sharon will read, there’ll be an Xmas performance from the Ninnies and there’ll be a bunch of other stuff too.
Merry advent one and all!
Change of line-up for 31st October
Unfortunately, Pascal O’Loughlin is unable to read at our our next event on Tuesday 31st October. His place will be taken by Scott Thurston, who will be reading from his brand new book Poems for the Dance. See above for a film of Scott performing with Steve Boyland and one from our own archive.
The other readers will be James Davies and Stephen Mooney. We will still be at The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester and the Other Room will still be, as always, free. We hope to see you there.
Scott Thurston is a poet, mover and educator working in higher education in Manchester, UK. He has published twelve books and chapbooks of poetry, including three full-length collections with Shearsman: Hold (2006), Momentum (2008) and Internal Rhyme (2010). More recent work includes Reverses Heart’s Reassembly (Veer, 2011), Figure Detached Figure Impermanent(Oystercatcher, 2014) and, just out, Poems for the Dance (Aquifer, 2017). He edited The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk (2007) and in 2011, Shearsman published his collection of four long interviews with the poets Karen Mac Cormack, Jennifer Moxley, Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Brady, called Talking Poetics. Scott is founding co-editor of the open access Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and co-organizer of the long-running poetry reading series The Other Room in Manchester. Since 2004, he has been developing a poetics integrating dance and poetry which has seen him collaborating with dancers in Berlin and New York as well as in the UK.
Poems for the Dance (Aquifer Books, 2017) contains an essay and poems occasioned by Scott’s engagement with Five Rhythms and other improvised dance and movement practices over more than a decade. The book is a multi-faceted enquiry into the relationship between poetry and movement, exploring the shared vitality dynamics of both artistic forms as it seeks for personal, social and political truths. With an introduction by Camilla Nelson and photographs by Roger Bygott.
Tim Allen – Under The Cliff Like out now from if p then q
Tim Allen’s latest book is out now from if p then q.
‘Under The Cliff Like’ is constructed from the ‘Title And First Line Index’ in the 1962 edition of ‘Granger’s Index To Poetry’ (Columbia University Press. U.S.A.) which was found in a junk shop. It was written in 1996. In alphabetical order all entries beginning with ‘Like’ are juxtaposed with the equivalent number of entries beginning with ‘Under’. There are no alterations other than elimination of commas and the capital letter of the juxtaposed line plus the insertion of full stops at the end of each pairing.
196 pages
£8.00 (£5.60 with discount until end September via the link below)
stack – James Davies
Out now – LINK
pickles & jams by cris cheek
‘pickles & jams’ is out now from the excellent BlazeVOX [books]. Beautifully designed, it contains 99 lyrics and is shipping now. You can order direct through BlazeVOX: http://www.blazevox.org/…/pickles-and-jams-by-cris-cheek-4…/. A clutch of responses to the work are on the BlazeVOX page to wet your appetite.
$4 postage for buyers in the UK and EU . . . making the book worth the price of postage alone. Book and postage for a round $20.
Gramophone Raygun 7
Everyman Bistro, Hope Street, Liverpool City Centre, 29 June, 8pm, £3.
Gramophone Ray Gun is a ‘live’ series of events celebrating experimental approaches to writing, poetry and music. Alternating between the page, performance, sound and text, Gramophone Ray Gun is a regular ‘live’ platform commissioned by The Dock Road Press.
The seventh event includes a special set from the renowned sound artist Philip Jeck as well as poetic readings from Joanne Ashcroft, Jazz Linklater and Bill Bulloch, each punked up on esoteric language and strange magic. As per usual, the evening will unfold to a crepuscular soundscape of unearthly samples and music excavated from a U.F.O crash site in Formby.
The Other Room Tonight – Clark & Welton
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
otherroom.org 