Online at VerySmallKitchen.
Readers
Jo Langton: a preview
Jo Langton will perform at the next Other Room on Thursday, 15th August at The Castle Hotel, 66 Oldham St., Manchester, M4 1LE. 7pm start, admission free. The film above shows Jo performing with Sarah Crewe at SJ Fowler’s Enemies event in Manchester earlier this year. You can also read some poems at Ofi Press, watch her perform at the DEPT/zimZalla event in 2012, or watch another performance with Sarah Crewe at the Manchester Poets for Pussy Riot event.
The other readers are Harry Gilonis and Elizabeth James.
Jo Langton is the author of ZimZalla object #015, PoeTea, consisting of handmade bags with text instead of tea. Her work has appeared in Department, 3.A.M, Otoliths, and Catechism: Poems For Pussy Riot. She also sub-edited and appeared in The Dark Would language art anthology, and has a MA in Experimental Writing from the University of Salford. Fill the Silence was published by erbacce press in 2011. She might have a cheeky chapbook before autumn, providing koi carp and terror cats don’t steal her soul along the way.
Elizabeth James: a preview
Elizabeth James will perform at the next Other Room on Thursday, 15th August at The Castle Hotel, 66 Oldham St., Manchester, M4 1LE. 7pm start, admission free. Visit her site for more information, including some links to poems. The other readers are Harry Gilonis and Jo Langton. A preview of Jo will appear tomorrow.
Elizabeth James is one of the dodgy tribe of librarian-poets. She has had poems published in magazines, small press pamphlets / chapbooks, on the web, and once as a CD sleeve note. She has often worked collaboratively with other poets including Frances Presley (‘Neither the One Nor the Other’ published by Form Books] and Peter Manson (Two Renga’, published in a Reality Street ‘Four Pack’); with Jane Draycott she made a series of audio works combining poetry and other material, for independent and BBC radio; at the turn of the millennium too she experimented briefly with electronic poetry, including an early hypertext collaboration with Miekal And, still online. Her solo chapbook, ‘Base to Carry’ was published by Barque Press. A selection of work can be heard on the Archive of the Now. Has done other kinds of writing, including occasional art criticism and essays, and has a career as a librarian and curator at the National Art Library, a public research and reference library within the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Harry Gilonis – a preview
Harry Gilonis will read at the next Other Room on Thursday, 15th August at The Castle Hotel, 66 Oldham St., Manchester, M4 1LE. 7pm start, admission free. For a flavour of his work, try this clip of him reading at Xing the Line last year. You can also read his Remarks on Poetry and Violence at the Militant Poetics site, read 3 poems at the eleksographia site, or watch him perform with Tim Atkins at last year’s Camarade event.
Previews of the other readers, Elizabeth James and Jo Langton, will appear soon.
Harry Gilonis is a poet, editor, publisher, and writer on art, poetry and music. His last appearance in Manchester was in a debate at Manchester Metropolitan University, opposing the curious proposition that “art is art and everything else is everything else”; his last reading in Manchester was at a squat in Rusholme. His activity is often collaborative; he has co-published a renga written collectively with Tony Baker, from far away (Oasis Books) as well as several collaborations with visual artists. There are a couple of very small collaborations with Elizabeth James, one published in a recent issue of the Anglo-Catalan magazine Alba Londres. His most recent publications include a book of “faithless” Chinese translations, eye-blink (from London’s Veer Books), and a poem accompanying the solo CD, Whitstable Solos, by Evan Parker (Psi).
‘flick invicta’ by Sarah Crewe
Sarah Crewe’s poems are deliberately resistant. flick/invicta raises the question: does a poetry which comes from outside, or which challenges, dominant ideology also need to come outside of normal syntax, to exceed normal registers? Does poetry need to challenge our modes of interpretation before it challenges anything else? Some of the poems in the pamphlet become so obfuscated as to resemble catalogues of private obsessions, and seem like the “secret code” mentioned in ‘bridge’. Others are, in context, remarkably conventional. But the best are hair-raising and subversive, breaking language up to “bring the vowels back” and “prise consonants/apart”.
Other Room reader Sarah Crewe’s flick/invicta reviewed by Charles Whalley at Sabotage.
Change of line up for June Other Room
Sadly, Corina Copp is unable to read for us on June 24th as previously advertised, but happily, Sarah Crewe can. The changed line up is now cris cheek, Sarah Crewe, and Lewis Freedman. Previews of all three readers will appear on the site over the next few weeks. An amended flier can be found in the ‘Upcoming’ section in the centre column.
Patrick Coyle performing at The Other Room, April 2013
All media resources are archived in the middle section of the website.
The House of Zabka by Marcus Slease
“The House of Zabka” by Marcus Slease
A Polish folk tale meets Kurt Vonnegut’s surreal science fiction. A visionary, oracular original fairy tale that follows a butcher’s daughter to the deepest, darkest, strangest depths of the forest. A playful walk with a sausage-dog companion past sex shops and donuts, including a plastic dragon that will breathe fire if you text message it.
Each chapbook is roughly 4.25″ x 5.5″, handmade in a limited edition of 60. Stapled with handmade endpapers. Endpapers for “The House of Zabka” are marbled metallic multicolored Nepalese Lokta papers. Available from Deathless Press.
SJ Fowler on The Verb
Steven Fowler will be on Radio 3’s The Verb tonight at 10pm, talking about his commission for the upcoming Electronic Voice Phenomena tour. The programme will also be available as a podcast for a week after broadcast.
derek beaulieu: a preview
The next Other Room is a one off event on Saturday 18th May at The Town Hall Tavern, 20 Tib Lane, Manchester, M2 4JA. The readers will be derek beaulieu, Tom Jenks and Holly Pester. For a flavour of derek’s work, try this film of him discussing theft, ownership and remixing language, the film of his first Other Room reading in 2010, or derek’s own site, which has a lot of links to his work.
Chrissy Williams: a preview
Chrissy Williams will read at the next Other Room on Monday, 8th April at The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester. Her site has details of all of her published work, including the above pow broadside Murder She Wrote, plus links to her work online.
The other readers will be Patrick Coyle, Sarah Crewe and Rhys Trimble.
Rhys Trimble: a preview
Rhys Trimble will perform at the next Other Room on Monday 8th April at The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester. For a flavour of this work, try this clip of Rhys at work with his bardic staff. You can also read a selection from his collection Kapita at the Knives, Forks and Spoons site. Rhys’ other publications include Skine, also Knives, Forks and Spoons, Trace Agents, published by Department Press, and mynydd, reviewed by Michael Peverett at “Intercapillary Space”.
The other readers will be Patrick Coyle, Sarah Crewe and Chrissy Williams.
Sarah Crewe: a preview
Sarah Crewe will perform at The Other Room on April 8th at The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester. For a flavour of her work, watch this clip of Sarah performing at Manchester Poets for Pussy Riot on 2012. For more of her work, try her poems in Bone Orchard Poetry and Peony Moon, or samples from her recently published collection flick invicta at the Oystercatcher Press site.
The other readers will be Patrick Coyle, Rhys Trimble and Chrissy Williams.
Marcus Slease reading at The Other Room, February 2013
Marcus Slease’s recent reading at The Other Room
Patrick Coyle: a preview
Patrick Coyle will perform at the next Other Room on Monday April 8th at The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester. For an indication of his singing skills, try this clip of Patrick performing with Holly Pester at SJ Fowler’s Camarade event in 2011. For more of his work, visit his site or his YouTube channel. The other readers will be Sarah Crewe, Rhys Trimble and Chrissy Williams. Previews of all three to follow over the next few weeks.
Grzegorz Wroblewski and Marcus Slease
Imminent Other Room reader Marcus Slease performs some of Polish writer Grzegorz Wroblewski’s poems in English at the Jacket2 site. Marcus will perform at The Other Room on Wednesday 6th February with Linda Black and Nikolai Duffy.
Ryan Ormonde reading and interview from June 2012’s The Other Room in Leeds
Videos from Ryan Ormonde’s performance in Leeds for The Other Room
Ryan Ormonde reading
Ryan Ormonde The Other Room Interview
Seekers of Lice: a preview
Seekers of Lice will perform at The Other Room on Wednesday 5th December, at the Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester. 7 PM start. Free entry. The other performers are Alec Newman and Nat Raha. Previews of both will appear on the site over the next few week.
Bio.
seekers of lice proposes art as an insect bite, infecting the blood through proximity, anecdote, annexation, colonisation, infection, inoculation: scratch the itch & itch the scratch.
seekers of lice creates material interventions, sometimes of an ephemeral nature, which find gaps and spaces in which to operate. Its practice is concerned with objects and text.
Works range from interventions, participation in curated projects and exhibitions in galleries to book publishing and multiples.
In 2012 work by seekers of lice has been published in Soanyway 13, quarter after, VerySmallKitchen, Rattle 3 and VLAK 3. The most recent book is THEATRE OF OBJECTS published by VerySmallKitchen in November 2012.
Links:
Theatre of Objects at VerySmallKitchen.
Artist profile at the Axis site.
A Minor Poet of the Twenty-First Century: text.
Leaves, read at X Marks the Bökship.
The Bride of L’Amor-mor-l’amor at onedit.
Text pieces in quarter after.
Peter Jaeger reading and interview at The Other Room June 2012
Interview
Reading
* not suitable for domestic sublimation – Jennifer Cooke
not suitable for domestic sublimation is Jennifer Cooke’s first poetry collection and features poems written over the last six years that engage in various ways with radical politics; gender norms; personal and corporate self-actualisation (and Cooke’s hatred of such discourses); sexuality; town centres; and some of the ideas of the French Freud, Jacques Lacan.
The books includes “Steel Girdered Her Musical: in several parts”, originally made for performance with music by Adam Robinson. This twelve-part poem-sequence at the heart of the collection centres on the possible impossibility of a revolution beginning at South Mimms Service Station, a motorway convenience situated on the M25 and the A1 (M) near London. Passionately, irreverently, obliquely, it explores the relationships between theory and praxis, art and revolution, anonymous space and potential resistance, and the force of rhetoric operating within these fields, themes that are also echoed by other poems in the book.
Available now from Contraband Books.
otherroom.org 