Jessica Smith reviews this wonderful looking object. get your pennies out of your pockets.
The amazing thing about Spell/ing () Bound is how fully conceived it is. There’s not a false step, but there are many surprises. I’m not sure how closely the collaborators worked together or what their parameters were when writing their three individual parts, or whether the magic came together in the editorial process, but it seems like each combination brings off a new meaning and metacommentary.
It’s a mere 6o days until the next Other Room on October 7th, so you really should start preparing. Why not get acquainted with the work of Michael Haslam, who will be one of the readers? Links to Crag Dworkin, the other October reader, coming soon.
Michael Haslam’s homepage here.
The latest issue of the excellent Streetcake magazine is now online, featuring:
New exhibition opens August 1st featuring text artist Anne Charnock and others at Bury Art Gallery. (Preview 31st July)
Following his fascinating talk at the Corridor8 launch at Urbis, you can download Iain Sinclair’s audio commentary on his walk across Manchester from the Urbis site.
The seventh of Matt Dalby’s 12 CD-R releases for 2009 is now complete and will be available shortly. Read more about Matt’s project to produce a CD of sound poetry every month throughout 2009 on his site.
Steve Willey has had to pull out of The August Other Room reading but will be scheduled again in the near future.
Any last questions for Caroline Bergvall who will answer your questions in issue 4 of if p then q due out in September 2009. If you have anything to ask her please email James Davies at ifpthenq@fsmail.net . The sublime is encouraged. The format is taken from a regular Q magazine feature of which there are many examples on the web.
Thanks, James
Frances Kruk will be reading at the August 5th The Other Room. Explore her work here on her blog Dark Mucus.
“Celebrate the launch weekend of MIF by lining the Deansgate mile to witness a free and uniquely Mancunian procession, created by Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller.”
TREADING WATER – a perambulatory poem in Otterspool Park, Liverpool: July 12 2009 1pm
This poem-performance has been commissioned by Gaia Project and Living at the Edge for HIGH TIDE – an Environment Agency-funded project which is bringing together ten UK based multi-media artists to interpret and explore the theme high tide, in collaboration with Dr Jason Kirby (Liverpool John Moores University) and Prof Philip Woodworth adviser to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, Liverpool).
Treading Water will explore the prehistory, geology, human and natural history of Otterspool Park in order to imagine distant times, images and stories. Staged as a series of posts throughout the park, the piece will unfold as a poem sequence accompanied by dramatic and visual interventions.
Otterspool’s history, like Liverpool , has been shaped by water. Its stream was formed by melting glaciers 18,000 years ago which carved a path through red sandstone: the remains of ancient sand dunes. Known as Otirpul in medieval times it was originally a tidal creek, which may have been a Viking landing stage in the tenth century, and was famed for the quality of its fishing and abundance of otters. Later on the creek was used to drive watermills and until the 1930s an old fisherman’s cottage still stood on the banks of the Mersey. The astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks (1618-1641) was born and died here in the now demolished Jericho Lodge. He was a major figure in early British Astronomy and the first person to correctly predict and observe the transit of Venus across the Sun. He later began making the first ever tidal measurements to assist his study of the moon’s orbit.
The poem will attempt to come to terms with Horrocks’ achievements and consider their relevance to our contemporary view of nature. Creating this imaginative space will crucially enable a confrontation with the future of the park, and, by extension, the future of Liverpool and beyond in the context of climate change.
Check out the High Tide wiki at:
http://high-tide.wetpaint.com/
Otterspool Park on Google Maps:
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&q=otterspool%20park%20liverpool&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl
Five recordings from Tina Darragh’s reading at the University of Maine New Writing series in January 2007.
Stan Apps reads some bad ass stuff in Poetry Magazine
Is this about flarf or is it about bad poetry? – you decide.
“I am fascinated by the latest issue of Poetry Magazine, which I picked up because I knew it included some Flarf poems, Conceptual Writing, and related materials. I was excited to get it, among other reasons, because it could be bought at Barnes & Nobles in Tampa FL, for cash. Imagine, buying poetry with an internet connection and a credit card!”
read more at this Link
Absolute Elsewhere is a collaborative mixed media project by Joy As Tiresome Vandalism (poet and The Other Room co-organiser James Davies and photographer Simon Taylor). The project is updated monthly in text or image form. The lastest instalment, a photograph by Simon Taylor, is online now.
Almost a decade after its creation, the experimental poetry movement Flarf—in which poets prowl the Internet using random word searches, e-mail the bizarre results to one another, then distill the newly found phrases into poems that are often as disturbing as they are hilarious—is showing signs of having cleared a spot among the ranks of legitimate art forms. Despite the group’s penchant for shocking content and outrageous titles (Sharon Mesmer’s “Annoying Diabetic Bitch,” for example, or Gary Sullivan’s “Grandmother’s Explosive Diarrhea”), many in the literary world are taking the poems seriously.
Via David Bircumshaw
Read more HERE
June 21: Jeff Hilson + Ian McLachlan + Johan de Wit
3-5 pm, Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London E8 3DL £4 entry.
Expect rigorous, radical and really quite astonishing performances at this event, with a set from two of Britain’s most uncompromisingly experimental poets performing with a well-established multi‑instrumentalist improvising musician, himself with a strong connection with poetry.
Exeter and its surroundings is a truly wonderful place to be and in the summer too…
Skylines is an exhibition, a festival, and academic forum. An innovative project with an international focus bringing together work in the interdisciplinary fields of creative writing and ecology. Mixed media work including site-specific installations, paintings, text, and video, will be displayed in and around the gallery throughout the duration of the project, while the launch day on June 7th, and festival day on June 20th, will see a wide range of diverse artists coming together in performance, enquiry, and celebration. A focus on new media and writing with digital technologies helps to re-position the subject of Ecopoetics within a contemporary landscape. Workshops will engage young people and charities in the local community.
Performers:
All posters by Alex Davies are now held in the column to the right. Here is the poster for the first ever night.
With the first issue to be published in September 2009, we are pleased to announce that you can now subscribe to the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry online.
otherroom.org 