Alba Londres 6 – Contemporary Mexican Poetry

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This is a special issue that gathers a collection of contemporary Mexican poets. With an introduction by Yaxkin Melchy and poetry and translations by Juana Adcock, Paula Abramo, Sergio Ernesto Ríos, Sergio Loo, Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz, Dolores Dorantes and Yaxkin Melchy. Gloria Gervitz is translated by William Rowe; poems by Ámbar Past; Daniel Eltringham translates traditional Mexican songs and Juan José Bobadilla writes and article on Comtemporary Mexican Poetry. Cover by Mexican artist Tila Rodríguez-Past.

Visit the Alba Londres site for more information.

Next Other Room

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Thanks to all who came to last night’s performances by Joanne Ashcroft, Lila Matsumoto and EJ McAdams. Our next event is our 7th birthday and will be on Thursday 30th April, with Mark Greenwood, Sophie Herxheimer, Steve Boyland, JR Carpenter, Jerome Fletcher & Lou Rowan.

Cardiff Poetry Experiment

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Thursday, February 5, 2015
FRIDAY 13th FEBRUARY
Cardiff Poetry Experiment

Doors open at 7pm, readings promptly at 7:30pm
Free admission, followed by drinks and discussion

Butetown History and Arts Centre
4 Dock Chambers, Stryd Bute, Cardiff Bay

Featuring:
SMSteele
Cris Paul
Zoë Skoulding

SMSteele is a PhD researcher at Exeter, an installation artist and a widely published Canadian poet. She accompanied the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry as an official Canadian war artist – her country’s first poet to do so – from 2008-2010 on their road to war to Afghanistan. Suzanne is a founding member of eXegesis poetry collective, and librettist of the 270-person symphonic work, Afghanistan: Requiem for a Generation (2012). Her work has been broadcast internationally.

Cris Paul is a writer and artist from Wales, based in Caerphilly. His work could be described as ‘late modernist’, and through Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum workshop, his time living in South America, his outlook was shaped enormously. His poetry, journalism, and criticism have been published widely in the Guardian as well as vital small press publications (Skald, Openned, Bad Press, Greatworks, Onedit). He has contributed to Wales Arts Review and Poetry Wales. His first book, Mantras for the City from the City, was published by Writers Forum and his second, Stenia Cultas Handbook, by Veer Books.

Zoë Skoulding is a poet, translator, editor and critic. She has published four collections of poetry, most recently The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (Seren, 2013), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008). She has performed her work at many international festivals, often incorporating electronic sound in her readings as well as collaborating with musicians. Her monograph Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013, and she was editor of Poetry Wales from 2008-2014. She is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English at Bangor University.

Joanne Ashcroft: a preview

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Joanne Ashcroft will perform at the next Other Room on Wednesday 11th February at  The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester, M2 4PD, 7 PM start. The above film is an experimental, stylised reading of Joanne’s What the tree saw sequence, which incorporates elements of the early Medieval Ogham alphabet.  For more about Joanne, visit her own webpage or her entry at Robert Sheppard’s 25 Edge Hill Poets.

 

Blue Bus – John Welch, Jeremy Hilton and Kim Taplin

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The Blue Bus is pleased to present a reading by John Welch, Kim Taplin and Jeremy Hilton  on Tuesday 17th February from 7.30 at The Lamb (in the upstairs room), 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1. This is the ninety-seventh event in THE BLUE BUS series. Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions).

Jeremy Hilton’s poetry has been appearing in magazines and anthologies since the 1960s, worldwide as well as in the UK. He has published twelve collections in the alternative presses, the most recent being “Lighting Up Time” (Selected Poems 1991 – 2005, Troubador Press, Leicester, 2006). From 1995 to 2012 he edited and published the acclaimed poetry magazine, Fire. He has also written three novels, one of which, “A Sound Like Angels Weeping”, appeared from Brimstone Press in 2013. He also composes contemporary chamber music. He lives in North Oxfordshire with his partner, Kim Taplin.

Kim Taplin’s first book  The English Path (1979) explored the cultural significance of footpaths, and her first poetry pamphlet Muniments drew on the history and natural history of ten nuclear weapon sites. She has continued writing both prose, including Tongues in Trees, Life with Art and Walking Aloud, and poetry, with collections from Enitharmon, Redbeck, Flarestack and the Sixties Press.

Inner and outer journeys, and the relationship between human beings and the natural world, are central themes in all her writing.

Born in London in 1942, John Welch has been living in Hackney since the early 1970s. In 1975 he founded The Many Press which, over the next twenty seven years published a great many pamphlets and full length collections of new poetry, as well as two magazines. His most recent collection, ‘Its Halting Measure’, appeared from Shearsman in 2012. Shearsman published his Collected Poem in 2008. He has written extensively on  his personal experience of psychoanalysis and its relationship to his writing. He has recently been working with the Iraqi poet Abdulkareem Kasid on English versions of his poems and a collection of these will appear later this year. 

Otoliths 36

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Volodymyr Bilyk, George McKim, Lakey Comess, Stephen Bett, Greg McLaren, Philip Byron Oakes, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Robert Lietz, Stephen C. Middleton, Nick Ravo, Chase Gagnon, Owen Bullock, Caleb Puckett, Kyle Hemmings, Despo Magoni, Craig Cotter, J. Crouse, Michael Martrich, Bryan Young, Halvard Johnson, dan raphael, Jeff Dahlgren, Jeff Dahlgren & John Lowther, John Lowther, Pete Spence, Howie Good, A. J. Huffman, John M. Bennett, Jim Leftwich & John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett & Vittore Baroni, Thomas M. Cassidy & John M. Bennett, Thomas M. Cassidy & Cheryl Penn & John M. Bennett, John M. Bennett, j4, Felino A. Soriano, Andrew Topel, Jürgen O. Olbrich & Andrew Topel, Jack Galmitz & Fotis Begetis, Joel Chace, Mark Melnicove, Sally Evans, James Sanders, Joe Balaz, John Martone, Raymond Farr, Carol Shillibeer, Carol Stetser, Natsuko Hirata, Cecelia Chapman & Jeff Crouch, Stuart Barnes, Michael Caylo-Baradi, Ric Carfagna, Nurul Wahidah, Anne Elvey, Jeff Harrison, Robert Sheppard, Stephen Nelson, Cyriaco Lopes & Terri Witek, Daniel John Pilkington, Eryk Wenziak, SS Prasad, sean burn, Jonel Abellanosa, Michael O’Brien, Mark Pirie, Márton Koppány, Willie Smith, Kit Kennedy, Toby Finch, Naomi Buck Palagi, Marcello Diotallevi, Stu Hatton, Brendan Tang, John Pursch, Charles Freeland, Paul Pfleuger, Jr., Luc Fierens, Angad Arora, PT Davidson, Steven Alvarez, George J. Farrah, bruno neiva, Bob Heman, Richard Kostelanetz, Bogdan Puslenghea, hiromi suzuki, Tony Beyer, nick-e melville, Marilyn Stablein, Ria Masae, Susan Gangel, Michael Brandonisio, Katrinka Moore, Gian Luigi Braggio, Texas Fontanella, Aditya Bahl, Tom Snarsky, & Trijita Mukherjee.

Out now.

Launch event: The Paper Nautilus + Materials

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Friday 6th February, Judith E Wilson Drama Studio, prompt 7.30pm start

A joint launch event for the fourth issues of The Paper Nautilus (eds. Kilbride / Van Hensbergen) and MATERIALS (eds. Jeschke / Grundy). This new issue of TPN is a translation issue, featuring translations of, among others, Clarice Lispector, Friederike Mayröcker, Sophie Podolski, Anne Portugal, Amelia Rosselli and Monique Wittig. The new issue of MATERIALS is subtitled ‘Economic Ophelia’ and features work from Rob Halpern, Kevin Killian, Nina Power, Connie Scozzaro, Cathy Wagner and others.

The night will feature performances, poetry readings, lectures and presentations in fitting and unfitting arrangements by the following:

  • Lucy Beynon
  • Eleanor Careless
  • Gareth Farmer
  • Rosa Van Hensbergen
  • Lisa Jeschke
  • Laura Kilbride
  • Hannah Proctor
  • Will Stuart
  • Marina Vishmidt
  • Naomi Weber
  • + potentially others TBC

As well as TPN and Materials 4, copies of the following new books and pamphlets from MATERIALS will be on sale:

 

  • Merry Hell by Sara Larsen
  • Watch-Fires by Tom Allen
  • A Comradeship of Heroes from Around the World
  • Lights Out to Love in HD by Rosa Van Hensbergen

http://www.thepapernautilus.co.uk/

http://material-s.blogspot.co.uk/

New from MATERIALS

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MATERIALS # 4: ECONOMIC OPHELIA

…contains 126pp of work from Lucy Beynon, Elana Chavez, Corina Copp, Kathryn Griffiths, Rob Halpern, Jeremy Hardingham, Lisa Jeschke, Camille Kame trans. Rosa Van Hensbergen, Evan Kennedy, Kevin Killian, Isolde Mayer, Nina Power, Hannah Proctor, Nat Raha, Connie Scozzaro, Verity Spott, Will Stuart, Marina Vishmidt, Cathy Wagner, Alli Warren, Naomi Weber and Ronaldo V. Wilson.

“Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”

“So why assume she is a woman.” “A house was on fire” – “I rip apart the instruments of my imprisonment”. “Sickos continue to disparage / our abolition of a gendered body but” we continue to be interested in “gender as a critical praxis”, in those who are “more than [their] line of work”. “Electric Blinker on / I profess Jobless” – “because I couldn’t find the words,” “you sit there and write”, whether “allegori[es] of bodies at the hands of power” or breaths decapitated “to activate | in flashes […] this breath we have located and endowed with locations”, in “societal abjection”, in the beating of a “constitutively economic” heart-machine, in “depressed precacarity becom[ing] a threat capable of effective disruption”. “Angry with homophobic and cowardly bullies”, “I’m hysterical today” – “I have become an alcoholic drink / On which you feast / Your hogs”. To “suffer the tough meat”, “they barely conceive / of me as a person […] so reliable”.

“Would Love / rescue me”, “screaming at my enemies to be beautiful”, “the total fuckups we all are” – “I thought about tenderness and when you’re inside it […] what an astonishing atonement that is” – I thought about “signs of deteriorating”, about where it is “possible for the pain caused by walls that limit our possibilities to be overcome without breaking the walls that keep us intact” – “a material action”, “its own unproductive labour”, “a vortex of instruction”, “with permission and with violence”.

Prices (incl. shipping):
£3 UK
£5 Europe
£6 Rest of World

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SARA LARSEN – MERRY HELL

Sara Larsen is a poet based in Oakland, CA.

Her previous publications include NOVUS, A,a,a,a,a, The Hallucinated, After Sappho and All Revolutions Will Be Fabulous.

With David Brazil, she produced over sixty issues of the Bay Area zine Try!

She is involved in the organizing committee for the Bay Area Public School, an autonomous free school at the Omni Commons in Oakland.

MERRY HELLL is dedicated to Helen of Troy, to the women of the Paris Commune, and “to my friends, now.” Commons and communes past and present come up against patriarchal law, capitalism, military and police violence, logics of cash and sacrifice, in lines that spread out, that elongate in notated waves of sight and breath. The poem is urgent, witty and this only an excerpt – the full book will appear from Atelos Press in 2015.

24pp, card covers, side-stapled.

Prices (incl. shipping):
£3 UK
£5 Europe
£6 Rest of World

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TOM ALLEN – WATCH FIRES

38pp, card covers, side-stapled

This is Tom Allen’s first book: a long poem with a Coda for Diane Di Prima. Inside, stones, clocks, fires, rivers, screaming pigs, the singing dead, ein guter mensch, Hell approached across a series of lines and pages in various potential or actual manifestations and angles. At times the poem’s lines seem to approach or gesture towards the quality of aphorism, but also to place that quality in a different and more fraught, tautly-held suspense, chiselled and “slow. slow”, yet far from decorous: fully freighted and fully forceful.

Prices (incl. shipping):
£3 UK
£5 Europe
£6 ROW

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ROSA VAN HENSBERGEN – LIGHTS OUT TO LOVE IN HD

My transmissions have been hacked. Upfront as I am.

Lights out to Love in HD is a 126-page work in prose. Split figures are figured by an unnamed narrator; watched and watching, on the screen, in the room: there are eyes on me, not only my own, but all eyes in the gloom; shadowy forces drag into shadow and bright night-lit glare, at home, in the supermarket, on the computer screen which holds out indifferently, levers hierarchy of emotion.

It is in this way, not sure what corpse or shade I sit in, that I walk the aisle…Searching back to source, the narrator sets out to trace the core anguish, scout the worm – we flash back, faces on the screen watch and are watched, language sinuous insinuates in rhyme and polyglot ease an ease of style belying surveilled unease. In other words, address the problem areas around knowing / not knowing. Guzzle in their origin. Meat and flesh, sex or death, taut or taught, in control or out, imposed in infantile pose, react, controlled or abject, the skin stretched as paper over the head, the grass false or real, virtual, organic, socially made, evolve, dissolve, revolve, go glitch; in the stifling courtyard enclosed, in the city a cell, with infinite free drinks, the packs of produce, a body in a bed, the weight of stone rocked to nuclear, collapsing into pollen, minute detail of the body gesture danced or forced, reeling, unsure in fact of where was back and where was home, and of where located their relation to one another…To know your place, where that placement is uncertain and hidden, rifled over and shot through in machine and in social code: Held distended in distance that home dissociates, pixel display.

This is a book in which reformulative technique, a melting and rewelding of the associative structures of language lies at the heard and fold of my detective strategies.

My transmissions have been HACKED.

120pp, covers, side-stapled.

Prices (incl. shipping):
£3 UK
£5 Europe
£6 Rest of World

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ALSO in existence is:

A COMRADESHIP OF HEROES FROM AROUND THE WORLD
Photocopied / stapled zine to coincide with the RIVET XMAS reading in London given by Connie Scozzaro, Danny Hayward, Jack Frost and Christina Chalmers on Saturday 20th December 2014. Poetry by Scozzaro, Hayward, Frost, Chalmers, David Grundy, Toby Huttner, Lisa Jeschke, Ed Luker, Richard Owens, Nat Raha, Verity Spott, Sam Wilder. 40 pp. Christmas tree made of skulls.

FREE with any other order.

More at the Materials site.

CAESURA #28

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Edinburgh’s monthly night of experimental words and performance featuring writers and artists from across the UK and abroad. Avant jive for the masses.

For the first event of 2015 we’re back in Summerhall’s Demonstration Room with a Welsh word-terrorist, a Newcastle-based dictaphone tickler and vocal goof, a Bath-based innovative poet and academic, and a local modernist poet and multimedia merchant.That is:

Rhys Trimble
Posset
Samantha Walton
Rodney Relax

£5 entry (£4 concessions)
7.30pm for 8pm start.

Summerhall, 1 Summerhall, Edinburgh, EH9 1PL. More here.

WF(N)

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The WF(N) reading and workshop group organised by Gareth Twose is meeting on Saturday 31st January,  2-4 pm in the function room above Terrace bar in Edge Street, Manchester M2. Bring photocopies of poem you like (by someone else) – and one of your own.

The Other Room reviewed in Corridor 8

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“When a poetry evening attracts as varied an audience as this, aged from twenty-odd to fifty-something, and with latecomers crowding in at the back, you know something interesting is going on. The Other Room is free, and held in the marvellous wood-panelled, high-ceilinged performance space at the Castle Hotel on Oldham Street, Manchester, so its location is ideal. But the surprise lies in the number of poets who have so far taken part, and the health of the stylistic field it specialises in, which is defined as “experimental”.”

Read more of this review by Bob Dickinson of our November event featuring Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery and Claire Potter at the Corridor 8 site.

Poetry and Experiment course at The Arvon Centre with Scott Thurston and Harriet Tarlo

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Nov 23rd – Nov 28th 2015
Lumb Bank

During the week, participants will be encouraged to explore a diversity of poetic forms and uses of language, such as open form, collage and juxtaposition. We will bring to bear our background in what is often referred to as the UK’s ‘innovative’ poetry scene, introducing you to the approaches of British and American experimental poets as a means of encouraging you to play and take risks in your own work. Suitable for new poets and more experienced writers who would like to explore innovative poetic techniques, throw over old habits, or push their work further.

Single room price: £725
Shared room price: £680

Kakania III

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The reverberations of the intellectual, artistic and creative tumult of the end of the Habsburg era are often evoked by contemporaries in the myriad of fields that the period profoundly changed, if not founded. The purpose of the Kakania project – over 4 events, over two dozen new commissions, over 4 locales, 4 publications, a vast array of artists – is not just to evoke that era, but to envelope it, to transpose it. To relive it in new colours. New artists making new work, paying their debt to that remarkable period of Austrian history in the writing, performance and artworks they are making, acknowledging that debt by being faithful to the methods and modes of the now.

The Horse Hospital, London,  Thursday 19th February.

Caroline Bergvall on Gustav Klimt
Martin Bakero on Arnold Schoenberg
Colin Herd on Oskar Kokoschka
Marcus Slease on Max Kurzweil
Damir Sodan on Gustav Mahler
Joerg Zemmler on Karl Kraus
Stephen Emmerson on Rainer Maria Rilke