C o n t i n u u m, written between January 5, 2011 and September 30, 2013, is the fourth book in Stephen Ratcliffe’s ongoing series of 1,000-page books, each written in 1,000 consecutive days.
Stephen Ratcliffe reads his 1,000-page book “Continuum” in 10 hours. Listen to some or all of the recording, now at PennSound
Lines from Ron Silliman’s ‘Tjanting’, tweeted in random-ish order.
Clive Fencott and Robin Fencott will perform at the next Other Room on Wednesday 2nd July for a special evening of digital poetics at The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester, M2 4PD. 7 PM start. Biographical details below. The video above shows Clive performing Restringing a Rotary Clothes Line at The Other Room in 2012. The other performers will be Hazel Smith & Roger Dean.
Bios.:
Clive Fencott is a writer-researcher, cybertext artist and sound poet who has published and performed his work since 1975. In 1974 he started attending the experimental poetry workshops organised by Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society in London and from this developed an enduring interest in improvised vocal performance. He was a founder member, with cris cheek and Lawrence Upton, of the performance group JGJGJGJG. In the 1970s and 1980s he performed extensively with Bob Cobbing and with him founded both the electronic vocal group Oral Complex, with John Whiting, and the improvisation group Bird Yak, with Hugh Metcalf. In the 1990s he wrote and performed with Bill Griffiths. His interest in digital media began in the early 1980s when he collaborated with saxophonist and computer programmer Steve Moore on the early cybertext project The Manual of the Permanent Waver. This led on to a parallel career in computer science and over 50 publications on such subjects as virtual reality, video games, virtual storytelling and, latterly, cybertext theory. He has created many cybertext works and is currently researching augmented cyber/texts as dynamic entities in live performance with his son Robin Fencott. http://www.fencott.com/Clive
Robin Fencott’s artistic practice crosses the boundaries of music, computer programming, sound art, electronics and installation. His pieces have included interactive installations, home-made instruments, software for musical collaboration, heavy metal albums and bespoke interfaces for musical performance. His work uses a variety of technologies and has been showcased in contexts as diverse as gallery installations, music festivals, public museums, nightclubs and electro-acoustic concerts. In an academic capacity Robin has published research on group musical interaction and computer interface design, and has presented on these subjects at various international conferences. In 2012 he chaired and an international digital arts exhibition as part of the SuperCollider Symposium, and he has contributed to a wide range of projects that engage with the intersections of arts, performance and technology. Robin lives in London, where he works as independent computer programmer specialising in mobile applications, micro-controller electronics and bespoke software development.http://www.robinfencott.com/
Out now on Knives Forks and Spoons.
Hi Zero magazine number(ed) 27. On sale. Features poems/prose by Juha Virtanen, Danny Hayward, John DeWitt, Purdey Lord Kreiden, Christina Chalmers, Michael Thomas Taren, Sam Langer, Verity Spott, Timothy
Thornton, Ed Atkins, Lisa Jeschke and Florence Warner. Cover designed by Robbie Dawson, edited by Joe Luna. UK £4 incl. p+p; ROW £6.
Ten Zones by Joe Luna. 18-panel Z-fold concertina pamphlet. Designed and (ltd. number) hand-painted-on by Ed Atkins. Edition of 200. UK £6 incl. p+p; ROW £8.
Contact hizeroreadings@gmail.com to purchase and query.
The next meetings are August 16th, October 25th and 13th of December. 2-4pm at the function room above Terrace bar, in Edge Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester. Organised by Gareth Twose, WFW(N) is an opportunity for innovative/experimental poets to present their work for feedback in a mutually supportive atmosphere. Ideally, please bring along copies of the work you intend to read for the other group members. Anyone who wants to come along but doesn’t want to read is also very welcome.
The Leslie Scalapino Award for innovative women performance writers. The winner will receive a $2,500 cash prize, print publication of the winning text by Litmus Press, a staged reading of the piece this autumn at the The New Ohio Theatre in New York, by Fiona Templeton’s company The Relationship; and a full production of the work in the following year. Deadline 4th July. More here.
Up the stairs (at the back of the barroom) at the Caledonia pub, Catharine Street, in the Georgian Quarter, Liverpool, £4, 7 pm spot-on start!
FRIDAY 27th June 2014
Holly Pester & Evan Jones
Holly Pester is a sound poet, archive-curator and researcher based in London.She has recently completed a practice-based PhD in poetics at Birkbeck, University of London titled, ‘Making Speech-Matter: Recurring Mediations in Sound Poetics and Its Contemporary Practice’. Her practice-work experiments in frequencies of speech, song and articulated noise through performance and installation. She has performed at art events including the Prague MicroFestival 2012, Text Festival 2011 and Serpentine Poetry Marathon 2009, and was a writer in residence at dOCUMENTA 13. Holly Pester’s poetry collection, Hoofs, was released with if p then q press in 2011. See (or rather hear): https://soundcloud.com/#holly-pester
Evan Jones was born in Toronto. A dual citizen of Canada and Greece, he has lived in Britain since 2005. He has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Manchester and has taught at York University in Toronto, and in Britain at the University of Bolton and Liverpool John Moores University. His first collection, Nothing Fell Today But Rain (2003), was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is co-editor of the anthologyModern Canadian Poets (Carcanet, 2010).He is working on a new translation of Cavafy for Carcanet. Did you know Cavafy lived just round the corner from tonight’s venue? Evan did.
See http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781847771377
Born of a Liverpool taste for variety and drama, Storm and Golden Sky offers literary high style from across the poetic landscape. Programmed by a collective of Liverpool-based poets, Michael Egan, Nathan Jones, Robert Sheppard and Eleanor Rees.
Includes a review by James Davies of Miller’s Collected Poems Reassembling Still and an interview and tribute by Rupert Loydell
Out now on Veer Books.
Opened in 1837 and inspired by the Pere Lachaise in Paris, West Norwood became known as the Millionaire’s Cemetery. But within its opulent grounds there are twelve buried names whose currency is language: these are the dead poets of West Norwood.
In the first instalment of a project to map the Magnificent Seven, Chris McCabe takes us off the main track of London writing and asks why the works of Hopkins, Tennyson and Dickinson are still read above those buried in this suburban enclave of South London. Join McCabe on the hunt for a great lost poet, as he walks the winding Gothic paths of the Cemetery and makes an unexpected discovery underground in the catacombs. The stories of those loved and dismissed by Charles Dickens are carefully uncovered; those who influenced Lewis Carroll and Winston Churchill; and those whose burial in the common ground has not been enough to silence them.
A startling and original work of literary detection, In the Catacombs is written in a hybrid form – part literary criticism, part Gothic fiction- and places West Norwood Cemetery and its dead poets back into the foreground of the London psyche.
Out now on Penned in the Margins.
More details HERE
An Oulipian treatment of John Stuart Mill, out now on Knives Forks and Spoons.
A taste of what is to come at The Other Room on July 2nd for our evening of technopoetics, as described by Clive Fencott:
“The text as a catalyst for performance, the poem/piece realised through performance, the text thus lost in performance rather than an end in itself, has been of particular interest to and a way of working for sound poets and others for many years.
The ergodic text, and in particular the cybertext, the dynamic presentation of lexia, selections/creations of a text in response to the reader’s interaction with it through digital means, has been a growing phenomena for over 3 decades now.
This performance is an exploration of the augmented cyber/text as a dynamic entity in performance; the use of both the real and the virtual as augmentation. For instance, the the tactile interaction with the text, in the process of perception, generates data for the augmentation, the digital completion of the audible and/or visual performance.
In this process the text reasserts itself in performance: becomes a player in amongst the performer(s).”
The other performers are Hazel Smith and Roger Dean. Full previews to follow.
Black & BLUE is pleased to present ILLUMINATIONS, a radical new exhibition showing at The Crypt Gallery, London, from the 19th – 21st June. The exhibition explores textual art through a
variety of different media; sculpture, photography, film, painting, ceramics, textiles and works on paper. Featuring works by Robert Montgomery; Julius Kalamarz; Lara Popovic; Anna Pickles Harvey; Hyeran Han; Celia Wickham; Andie Mckenzie Meadows; Lillian Wilkie; Dario Srbic; Kerry O’connor; Simone Barnes; Lindenberg Munroe; Anna Klimentchenko; Christabel Macgreevy; Emma Kelsey; Lewis Lazar; Dane Weatherman; Charles Ogilvie; Stephen Emmerson; Kirsty Andrew; Daniel Leyland; Alice O’Neill. Click on the image to read the catalogue.
How do you feel about experimental poetry? And who defines it anyway? As an amateur listener in this field I went to the latest evening of performance at The Other Room in Manchester in some trepidation. The setting – in a back room with possibly the most amazing wooden ceiling in any Manchester pub – is superb, and hosts Tom Jenks, Scott Thurston and James Davies welcomed a packed house to hear (and see) three very different writers.
READ MORE from Judy Gordon
No Press is proud to announce the publication of Ulysses by Jacqueline Valencia.
Published in a limited edition of 50 copies (only 25 of which are for sale), Ulysses is available for $3.50 including domestic postage (+ $1 non-Canadian postage).
otherroom.org 