The Debris Field

14 Apr 19:30 Blue Room, The South Bank Centre, London. The Debris Field is a new multi-media production written and performed by poets Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe. The evocative poetic text is accompanied by original music from Oli Barrett of Bleeding Heart Narrative, and film by Jack Wake-Walker. The poets will take you on a resonant tour of the cultural debris of this iconic event, exploring ideas of luxury and labour; courage and folly; life and loss; and human ambition in the face of nature’s power. A key historic event explored with striking poetic, musical and visual impact.

 

The death of conceptualism?

“Conceptualism is probably over now, even in its newest iterations. The generative energy has gone out of procedural work and gestures of appropriation, retranslation, transcribing, and other methods of production that take an idea as a point of departure and carry out its terms to whatever affectless effect can be realized.” Johanna Drucker.

“Johanna Drucker has suggested that Conceptual Literature has begun to enter the twilight of its eminence, on the verge of becoming yet another one of the exhausted movements in the history of the avant-garde. While I am happy to see Conceptual Literature discussed within the context of its historical precedents (even if only to suggest that such writing has merely rehashed the techniques of its more noteworthy precursors), I feel that Drucker might be underemphasizing the degree to which her own observations about the “death” of Conceptual Literature might be recycling historical complaints, no less “unoriginal,” no less “uncreative,” in their obituaries, which declare the death of a genre, long before its generative potentials have been fully explored or fully absorbed….” Christian Bök.

p.o.w. broadsheets

The artist Antonio Carvalho has just published the first in a series of poetry broadsides bases on Hansjorg Mayer’s futura editions from the  1960s. Writers include Peter Finch and Other Room reader Chris McCabe. p.o.w. broadsheets are available to buy from Studio Bookshop, Brighton, and can be bought via visa through email:studiobookshop@btconnect.com. They are £5 each or £25 for all 6 broadsheets.

BLUE BUS Reading 62: Elena Rivera, Scott Thurston and Melissa Buckheit

The Blue Bus is pleased to present a poetry event featuring Melissa Buckheit, Eléna Rivera, Scott Thurston, on Tuesday 17th April, from 7.30 at The Lamb (in the upstairs room), 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1. This is the sixty-second event in THE BLUE BUS series. Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions). For future events in the series, please scroll down to the end of this message. Forthcoming events will include Marcus Slease, Lesley McKenna and Fran Lock (15th May), D S Marriott, Sarah Kelly and Robert Sheppard (19th June), and John Muckle and tba (17th July).

Melissa Buckheit is a poet, dancer, photographer, English Professor and Bodywork Therapist. She is the author of Noctilucent (Shearsman Books, 2012), Arc, a chapbook, (The Drunken Boat, 2007), and her poems, translations, photography, interviews and reviews have appeared in nth position, Blue Fifth Review, The Drunken Boat, Sinister Wisdom, Cutthroat, Bombay Gin, Pirene’s Fountain, A Trunk of Delirium, Spiral Orb, Shearsman Magazine, and Sonora Review. She translates the poet Ioulita Iliopoulou from Modern Greek, and her poetry has also been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She holds an M.F.A. from Naropa University and a B.A. from Brandeis University. She has taught at University of Arizona, Pima College and SUVA. Melissa is the curator of Edge, a monthly reading series for emerging and younger writers at Casa Libre en la Solana in Tucson, AZ.

Scott Thurston lectures at the University of Salford where he runs a Masters in Innovative and Experimental Creative Writing. He co-runs The Other Room reading series in Manchester, edits The Radiator, a little magazine of poetics, and co-edits The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry with Robert Sheppard. He is the author of Hold, Momentum, Internal Rhyme, and Of Being Circular.

Eléna Rivera was born in Mexico City and spent her childhood in Paris, France. She is the author of Remembrance of Things Plastic (LRL-e Editions, 2010), Mistakes, Accidents and the Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006), The Perforated Map (Shearsman) and translator of Secret of Breath (Burning Deck Press, 2008) poems by Isabelle Baladine Howald. She won the 2010 Robert Fagles prize for her translation of The Rest of the Voyage by Bernard Noël, which will be published by Graywolf Press in November 2011. She was also awarded a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation, and a 2009 Fundacíon Valparaíso Poetry Residency in Mojácar, Spain.

More here.

Eléna Rivera: a preview

Eléna Rivera will read at the next Other Room on Thursday 19th April. For a comprehensive overview of her work, visit her own site and her author page at Shearsman, including details of her most recent collection The Perforated Map. You can also find examples of her work at Little Red Leaves 4 and Sky Press.

Please note that this event is on a different day (Thursday) to our usual day (Wednesday) and is also at a different venue: the Basement Bar of the Deaf Institute just off Oxford Road, Manchester.

The other two readers will be Becky Cremin and Tony Lopez. There will also be a video performance by Paula Claire.

Maintenant #89 – Eric Suchère

To many what was once the most expansively influential European tradition of poetry has now become one of the most hermetic. Yet within France there remains singularm emergent figures whose invention, and whose brilliance, marks them out as some of the most innovative in the world. Eric Suchère is one of them, art critic and art historian, he has created a remarkable oeuvre of conceptual, prose and written poetry over the last few decades and holds a rightful place as a leading light in the current French scene. For the 89th interview in our series, Eric Suchère.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-89-eric-suchere/

Accompanying the interview is an extract from Eric’s longer work Set, Winterwreck, translated by Lisa Robertson.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/eric-suchere-setwinterwreck/

Summer 2012 with The Other Room

Why go to Spain…

Our summer programme is making some progress. Here is what we’ve got so far. Take note that we’re no longer at our 4 year home The Old Abbey Inn but at some cracking new venues.

12th June, @ The Castle, Oldham Street, Manchester with Ira Lightman, Marcus Slease & TBA

19th July, @ Leeds Gallery, http://www.leedsgallery.com (not Leeds Art Gallery) with Hazel Smith and TBA

14th August, @ The Castle, Oldham Street, Manchester with Frank Kuppner, David Gaffney & Nathan Jones

the little society

Visual poetry by Philip Davenport, at Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, Wigan, UK. April 2-14. This exhibition questions the idea of a BIG society by focusing on the voices of the little and the lost.

Davenport’s poems APPEAL IN AIR and POLLINATORS OF EDEN erupt from the page into dizzy sequences of word/space disjuncts spilling across the large gallery.

APPEAL IN AIR is a celebration of quiet voices, the people at the fringe –- and the songs of birds. Texts bend into the shape of birds and weave through a city skyline. Children mimic birdcalls as a soundtrack for the space. Language morphs into code: Davenport’s “Liquid morse.” APPEAL celebrates the many voices and languages that make up a world – including those that get lost in noise.

POLLINATORS OF EDEN replays the form of a child’s educational book, complete with an instructional animation of a drowning shark. The piece documents encounters with people in North Manchester, an area of stark economic hardship, and is cartoonishly illustrated by local school pupils, in bright counterpoint to the dark tone of the poem.

Much of the material in the show derives from Davenport’s recent book APPEAL IN AIR, published by Knives Forks & Spoons Press.

Davenport’s debut was published by seminal avant-garde press Writers Forum in 1999; his heartporn/poems written on apples were shown at the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. His work has been variously billposted and exhibited throughout Europe and in China. Davenport curated the largest survey exhibition of Bob Cobbing’s work for Bury Text Festival in 2005 and the first posthumous gallery exhibition of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s work in 2006. He often collaborates with other artists and writer, including Ben Gwilliam, Lee Patterson, Tom Jenks. His current sequence of spreadsheet poems have been exhibited in the Henry Moore. APPEAL IN AIR is published by Knives Forks and Spoons press, UK whose list includes many British avant-garde poets.

For further information contact TURNPIKE GALLERY (+44)1942 404420

EXHIBITION FACEBOOK PAGE http://www.facebook.com/#!/media/set/?set=a.257496341008638.59781.208328225925450&type=1

APPEAL IN AIR isbn 978-1-907812-77-4 available from http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk

West House Books

Steve McCaffery PANOPTICON. BookThug rev. edn. 2011. £15

Taking its inspiration from Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon Papers’, McCaffery’s Panopticon shatters all omnivision in a tour de force of formal innovation, theoretical comment and narrative critique. In Panopticon narrative stutters, repeats itself, sequence is deranged and complicated by a multimedia presence on the page of grids, film bands and acoustic channels. On its first appearance Charles Bernstein hailed the book as ‘perhaps the exemplary “antiabsorptive work” and William McPheron claimed it as “an extraordinary act of revolution and charity”. Out of print for more than twenty years, this new edition has been revised extensively and is accompanied by an afterword written by McCaffery himself.

OPEN LETTER 14.7, Fall 2011: Breakthrough Nostalgia: Reading Steve McCaffery Then and Now. Ed. Stephen Cain. 172pp. £10.50

W/ contributions by Geoffrey Hlibchuk, Stephen Voyce, Gregory Betts, Tim Conley, Jason Starnes, Alessandra Capperdoni, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Matt Carrington, Lori Emerson, Andy Weaver, Christian Bök, Derek Beaulieu, Alan Halsey, Peter Jaeger + new poetry & prose by SMcC.

Allen Fisher PROPOSALS, 1-35. Poem-image-commentary. 76pp incl. 35 images in colour. Spanner 2010. £9.50

Allen Fisher STROLL & STRUT STEP. 16pp + 3 images in colour. Spanner 2004. £7.50

Post-free in UK. Payment by cheque or Paypal.

Orders to info@westhousebooks.co.uk

www.westhousebooks.co.uk

Becky Cremin: a preview

Becky Cremin will read at the next Other Room on Thursday 17th April. For a flavour of her work, see this film of her reading with Ryan Ormonde at Openned, her page at Veer, her blog, Perform-A-Text and her other blog  Revelation Nation. Check out also the press free press project.

The other readers will be Tony Lopez and Elena Rivera. You can find a preview of Tony’s work here, with a preview of Elena to follow next week. Please note the change of location for this event owing to the closure of our usual venue. The reading on 19th April will be in the Basement Bar of the Deaf Institute, just off Oxford Road, Manchester.

BROKEN AND REDUCED

Thursday 29 March 2012
Room B20, Birkbeck main building on Torrington Square, London WC1

6.00-7.30pm
“I lost my mother tongue more than thirty years ago and am still searching for it.”

Hungarian visual poet MÁRTON KOPPÁNY talks about his work, and projects images. Introduced by Holly Pester.

quarter after

quarter after, a new journal for art and its reasons, is up and running with the recent release of Issue no. 1. 

Adam Fieled * Chad Scheel * David Berridge * Michael Farrell * Jane Joritz-Nakagawa * Tiffany Monroe * Felino A. Soriano * Vernon Frazer * rob mclennan * Donna Kuhn * Merlin Flower * Christina Baker-Jones * David Harrison Horton * Lawrence Upton * Ric Carfagna * Roger Sedarat * Seekers of Lice * James Sanders * Linda Neiswender

LINK

Nathan Thompson: The Visitor’s Guest

“Who is looking at, listening to and leaning on whom? And what is left of looking, listening and leaning in what is ironically referred to as the post ultimate glade? Thompson, with understated assertiveness, doesn’t answer these questions, but the poems in The Visitor’s Guest changed the way I had to walk around the block this morning. Thompson’s writing opens up a space with which I’m half familiar—perhaps it’s the sense of honesty which underlies his slanted lyrical stance— but which continues to surprise. Many of these poems engage with ‘love’, as a perception, as a verb, but to say so underestimates them. Visceral, tangential, with a genuine sense of belief / refusal to believe. You might think that you’ve arrived but, most of all, how interesting it is trying to get there.” —Lucy Burnett

More information at Shearsman.