SJ Fowler book launch in Bristol

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Arnolfini : Bristol – April Thursday 6th – 7pm : Free Entry.

The launch of SJ Fowler’s latest poetry collection ‘The Guide to Being Bear Aware’ from Bristol-based Shearsman Books, featuring performances and readings from Fowler and guest readers John Hall, Holly Corfield Carr, Paul Hawkins, Phil Owen & more to be announced.

“The Guide to Being Bear Aware offers advice for living in a world gone awry. Wry, violent, contemplative, political, intimate and raucous by turns, these are poems that laze on your lap only to get their claws in… Morphing into unfamiliar shapes beneath the watching eye, these refreshing, quizzical, well-traveled poems forge a world entirely their own: they won’t let you go of you easily.” Sarah Howe

More here.

A Future / No Future Poetry Experiment with Poetry Wales

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7 April at 7 PM. Jacobs Market, West Canal Wharf, Cardiff, CF10 5DB.

Cardiff Poetry Experiment will launch Poetry Wales’s new Future/No Future issue with an evening of live poetry at Jacob’s Antiques in Cardiff.

What happens to language when the future keeps getting cancelled?

Nathan Jones, Peter Finch, Ailbhe Darcy and Julia Rose Lewis will read and perform from the new issue which explores futurism, utopia, dystopia and the ‘lossy present’.

Organised by Poetry Wales and the Cardiff Poetry Experiment, supported by the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University.

Nikolai Duffy and Ian Seed book launches

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The Manchester Writing School, Number 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5NH. Entry free, but booking essential. 7 PM start.

The Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met is delighted to present this special event to launch Nikolai Duffy’s latest poetry collection, Up The Creek, published by Knives Forks and Spoons Press and Ian Seed’s short story pamphlet, Italian Lessons, published by Like This Press. More here.

The Dreamers

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Ameena Anjum, Ameera Al-Aji, Andrea Berry, Emma Bolland, Luke Chapman, Helen Clarke, Louise Finney, Rebecca Jagoe, Sharon Kivland, John McDowall, Debbie Michaels, Rachel Smith, Rachel Taylor, Lunzhao Wu
ISBN 978-1-910055-29-8
MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE
130 mm x 190 mm, 148 pages, perfect-bound
£10.00 / 12 euros
‘Writing, Walking, Dreaming… Walking (literally and figuratively, one might say sleepwalking) is explored herein. Walking and dreaming provide ways of knowing a place. They lead to encounters with strangers and with ourselves. The city is the stage for autobiographical encounters; where houses and memories meet; where the uncanny is both home and away; where the stranger leads us down the rabbit hole. There are drifts through Jacques Lacan’s Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’ and Walter Benjamin’s ‘A Berlin Chronicle’; urban nightmares; the homesick child; enigmatic staircases; snapshots of the past and lost objects; reflections on writing; seeing words as images; and prophetic dreams. Amsterdam slips into a New York bar, and a dystopian group recounts its anxieties.’
You can buy  The Dreamers online here.

Verbose

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Following a standing-room-only event in February, live literature night Verbose is back a week today, on Monday 27 March, at Fallow Café in Fallowfield, Manchester.

Hailed by the media as one of the best spoken word nights in Manchester, Verbose each month invites three headliners who share a link, be that a publisher or publication, a writing group or project, or a common writing-related place of work. This month, Verbose showcases three authors who are associated with the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester: Grace McCleen, Susan Barker and Beth Underdown.

Betty Trask Award-winner Grace McCleen is a writing fellow at the Centre for New Writing, author of three novels and former writer in residence at the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth. Jerwood Prize-winner Susan Barker teaches creative writing and is working on her fourth novel. Beth Underdown has just launched her debut, The Witchfinders’ Sister, to critical acclaim. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing, which is headed up by renowned author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson.

Since its relaunch by prize-winning writer Sarah-Clare Conlon in January 2015, Verbose has welcomed many luminaries of the literature scene, including poets Richard Barrett, Anne Caldwell, Michael Conley and Rosie Garland, and prose writers Jenn Ashworth, Neil Campbell, Nicholas Royle and Emma Jane Unsworth. Man Booker Prize-listed authors Ian McGuire and Alison Moore have been guests, and February marked the launch of David Gaffney’s new novel All The Places I’ve Ever Lived. Upcoming events will feature Costa shortlistee Stephen May.

Taking place on the fourth Monday of the month at Fallow Café (2a Landcross Road, M14 6NA), entry is free and doors are at 7.30pm. See verbosemcr.wordpress.com. Open mic slots are three minutes; to perform, email via verbosemcr@gmail.com.

Walter Benjamin’s lost diagrams

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In ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ (1932) Benjamin describes a lost diagram:
I was struck by the idea of drawing a diagram of my life, and I knew at the same moment exactly how it was to be done. With a very simple question I interrogated my past life, and the answers were inscribed, as if of their own accord, on a sheet of paper that I had with me. A year or two later, when I lost this sheet, I was inconsolable. I have never since been able to restore it as it arose before me then, resembling a series of family trees. Now, however, reconstructing its outline in thought without directly reproducing it, I should, rather, speak of a labyrinth. I am not concerned here with what is installed in the chamber at its enigmatic centre, ego or fate, but all the more with the many entrances leading to the interior. These entrances I call primal acquaintances; each of them is a graphic symbol of my acquaintance with a person whom I met, not through other people, but through neighbourhood, family relationships, school comradeship, mistaken identity, companionship on travels, or other such hardly numerous- situations. So many primal relationships, so many entrances to the maze. But since most of them—at least those that remain in our memory—for their part open up new acquaintances, relations to new people, after some time they branch off these corridors (the male may be drawn to the right, female to the left). Whatever cross connections are finally established between these systems also depends on the inter-twinements of our path through life.
Walter Benjamin, ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, 1932, in One-Way Street: And Other Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London: Verso, pp. 293–346
We are looking for submissions of diagrams in response to this description. A selection of submissions will be published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE in June 2017, and presented at MISS READ: Berlin Art Book Festival 2017, July, Haus der Kulturen der Welt. The book will include essays by Sam Dolbear and Christian Wollin with an introduction by Helen Clarke, and is edited by Helen Clarke and Sharon Kivland.
The publication will be a perfect bound paperback, page size 140 mm x 205 mm, portrait format. The scale of page must be considered when submitting: that is, as a double-page image in a landscape format, or single page portrait format. If submitting in landscape format ,please work to a page size of 205 mm x 280 mm and allow for a small gutter loss.
Submissions should be made to lostdiagrams@gmail.com. Only a single submission may be made. Please note that submissions must comply with the following in order to be considered:
• Image: black and white ONLY
• Image: sent as a TIFF
• Deadline of 31 March 2017 (midnight)
Applicants will be notified by 15 April 2017, if their submission has been selected for publication.
The editors and publisher very much regret that they are unable to offer a fee. Each contributor will receive a copy of the book.
The Lost Diagrams Facebook page can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/LostDiagrams/

Electric Arc Furnace #3, with Nat Raha and Eley Williams

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A new poetry reading series, in the centre of Sheffield, between the seven hills. Innovative poetries from the South Yorks hinterlands & further-flung.

Eley Williams is co-editor of fiction at 3:AM magazine with prose in Ambit, Night & Day, Structo and The White Review. Her collection Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx, 2017) was chosen by Ali Smith amongst ‘the best of debut fiction’ for this year’s Cambridge Literary Festival. She has a small book of poetry, ‘Frit’, forthcoming from Sad Press.

Nat Raha is a poet and trans / queer activist, living in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her poetry includes two collections: countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013), and Octet (Veer Books, 2010); and numerous pamphlets including ‘£/€xtinctions’ (Sociopathetic Distro, 2017), ‘[of sirens / body & faultlines]’ (Veer Books, 2015), and ‘mute exterior intimate’ (Oystercatcher Press, 2013). She’s performed and published her work internationally. She is undertaking a PhD in Creative & Critical Writing at the University of Sussex. Nat’s essay titled ‘Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism’ is due for publication in the South Atlantic Quarterly this spring, and she has recently started working with Scottish PEN on the Many Voices project.

Readings take place at La Biblioteka, 70 Pinstone Street, Sheffield. S1 2HP, Sheffield City Centre. BYOB. Doors 7pm. £4 waged / £3 unwaged / pay what you can. Proceeds to poets. All very welcome.

Para-text reading – Eleanor Chandler, Amy Evans, Jazmine Linklater and Matthew Welton.

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We’re delighted to launch the third issue of para·text on Tuesday 28th March at Iklectik, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, London, SE1 7LG
Readings from Eleanor Chandler, Amy Evans, Jazmine Linklater and Matthew Welton.
7pm for a 7.30 start, £2 suggested donation. All welcome.
The magazine will be on sale at a reduced price on the night but if you’re unable to come you can purchase copies online at paratext.bigcartel.com.

Colin Herd, Iain Morrison, and Vicky Sparrow in Nottingham

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Poetry Performance Evening: Colin Herd, Iain Morrison, and Vicky Sparrow

Location
Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham
Date(s)
Wednesday 29th March 2017 (19:00-20:30)
Contact
fiveleaves.bookshopevents@gmail.com

Colin Herd is a poet, fiction writer and critic based in Edinburgh. His first collection of poems too ok was published by BlazeVOX in 2011 and a second full-length collection Glovebox was published by Knives Forks and Spoons Press in 2013. Colin’s work has been anthologised in the Forward Book of Poetry 2015 and Dear World and Everyone in It (Bloodaxe, 2013).

Currently based in Edinburgh, Iain Morrison  has a frequently collaborative practice as a writer, working in poetry and live literature. Projects have included Subject Index a durational installation of the complete poems of Emily Dickinson developed in residency at Forest Centre+ and toured to Berlin’s SOUNDOUT! New Ways of Presenting Literature Festival in 2014, and a night of drag queen poetry at Scottish Poetry Library in 2016 which bagged him a Creative Edinburgh award. Publishing includes MARQUE, a pamphlet with If A Leaf Falls Press (2017), and poems in anthologies and magazines including Kakania (Austrian Cultural Forum 2015), HOAX and Gutter. A first collection comes out with Vagabond Voices later this year.

Vicky Sparrow is completing a PhD on the poet-activist Anna Mendelssohn at Birkbeck,  ersity of London. Her writing can be found in datableed, Kakania, Litmus and the Literateur and she serves as reviews editor for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. Her first pamphlet Notes to Selves is published by Zarf.

Admission for this event is £3 and refreshments will be available. Booking is recommended. To attend this event, please RSVP to fiveleaves.bookshopevents@gmail.com

Tribute reading for Geoffrey Hill

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Hill

Fri 17 March 2017, 17:45 – 19:00. Great Hall, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, LEEDS, LS2 9JT. Free, but registration required.

Geoffrey Hill was knighted in 2012 for his services to poetry after a long and distinguished career as a poet and a scholar which included posts at the universities of Bristol, Cambridge, and Boston; and, more recently, his tenure as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. A graduate of Keble College Oxford, his academic career began at Leeds in 1954 with his appointment to a lectureship. He spent the next twenty six years at our University and was appointed to a Chair in English Literature in 1976. During this time, Geoffrey published four collections of poetry – For the Unfallen, King Log, Mercian Hymns, and Tenebrae – works which secured his reputation as one of the finest poets writing in the English language. The University of Leeds is proud of its long-standing association with Geoffrey – which includes the custodianship of his extensive archive – and would like to extend a warm invitation to family, friends, colleagues, and admirers to join in this tribute. Everyone is welcome.