Out now from Knives, Forks and Spoons Press
Cabaret Hrabal
One of the boundless figures of late 20th century Czech literature, Bohumil Hrabal was a novelist, a drinker, a bon vivant, an avant gardist, a railway dispatcher during the Nazi occupation, a traveling salesman, a steelworker, a recycling mill worker, a stagehand… His novels, which include Too Loud a Solitude, Closely Observed Trains, and I Served the King of England, were censored under the Communist regime, yet have since been translated into nearly thirty languages. A survivor of both the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Czechoslovakia, much of Hrabal’s work juxtaposes the darkness of history to the comic, human-scale happenings of the every-day. His oeuvre is as inimitable as his novels are unforgettable.
Through a half-dozen brand new commissions from some of the most exciting UK based poets, artists, conceptualists, theatre makers and dramaturges, Hrabal will be evoked and enveloped, transposed into some of the most exciting literary experimentalists of contemporary London.
Featuring Zoe Skoulding (sound poetry), Sarah Kelly (book sculptures), Joshua Alexander (film art), Stephen Emmerson (conceptual performance), Marcus Slease (poetry), Tom Jenks (literary experiments), Eva Danickova (stage reading) and Lucinka Eisler (theatre), this is a chance to discover, or rediscover, a great European writer through new and exciting works that pay their debt to the remarkable achievements of Hrabal in the essence of their happening.
Read more at the Czech Centre London site.
SCREE/Syndicate
An evening of experimental poetry, music and visual art at Out of the Blue Drill Hall, 36 Dalmeny St, Edinburgh, EH6 8RG. Saturday 14th June 2014.
ANAK-ANAK + SARAH HAYDEN + ROBERT KIELY + RICHARD TAYLOR + ILIOP
This evening raises its glass to Dick Higgins who said: ‘The idea has arisen, as if by spontaneous combustion throughout the entire world, that these points are arbitrary and only useful as critical tools, in saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry. This is the intermedial approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media… As with the cubists, we are asking for a new way of looking at things. We do not ask any more to speak magnificently of taking arms against a sea of troubles, we want to see it done.’
More here.
Crabtree
Crabtree lived here and his father before him,
but neither of them built the pyramid.
40 poem chapbook by Tom Jenks, out now on The Red Ceilings.
Stephen Emmerson’s Poetry Wholes
Poet Stephen Emmerson worked with if p then q to create the incredible Poetry Wholes. This was a limited edition of 11 copies, all of which have now been sold. However they are available to use in both The Poetry Library or at The University of Buffalo Special Collections. The Poetry Wholes are made of high quality laser cut Perspex and come housed in a box with a set of instructions. Each Poetry Wholes contains 5 templates which you can use to make instantaneous poetry in a range of styles. Choose from the following:
Minimalism
The Sonnet
‘Vito Acconci’
The Ballad
The ‘Slash’
For more see IF P THEN Q
The Blue Bus – Helen Calcutt, Robert Vas Dias and Sophie Herxheimer
The Blue Bus is pleased to present a reading by Helen Calcutt, Robert Vas Dias and Sophie Herxheimer on Tuesday 17th June from 7.30 at The Lamb (in the upstairs room), 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1. This is the eighty-ninth 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.
Sophie Herxheimer is an artist and poet. She works prolifically, on large and small scale projects, across several forms.A fluency with colour, language, drawing and performance informs her practice. The Thames Festival commissioned Feast Linen (2008) a 300metre screen-printed tablecloth for several thousand diners spanning Southwark Bridge.In 2011, Radio 4’s Food Programme dedicated an episode to Sophie’s ‘Pie-Days’ project, a Margate regeneration commission. Recent publications include Ghost Hotel, Hurricane Butter and london. Residencies includeLIFT, London Printworks Trust, Transport for London. Exhibitions include The Whitworth, National Portrait Gallery, The Poetry Library.Sophie teaches and collaborates extensively.
Robert Vas Dias, an Anglo-American born and now resident in London, has published eleven collections in the UK and USA, the most recent of which are Arrivals & Departures, Shearsman 2014, London Cityscape Sijo, Perdika, 2012, and Still · Life and Other Poems of Art and Artifice, Shearsman, 2010. A broadsheet, Stalker, appeared in the p.o.w. series this year. His poetry and criticism have appeared in over 100 magazines, journals, and anthologies in both countries. A festschrift, Entailing Happiness, with contributions by 35 poets and writers, appeared in 2011. A collaborative artist’s book with Julia Farrer, Syntax of Bridges, will be published later in 2014. He was founder-director of the Aspen Writers Workshop in Colorado and General Secretary of The Poetry Society in London. He teaches for The Poetry School in London. www.robertvasdias.com
Helen Calcutt is a poet, dance artist and journalist. She is the author of ‘Sudden rainfall’, her first collection of poetry, published by Perdika Press in 2013. Helen’s creative and critical work has been published globally, featuring in journals such as Equinox, The London Magazine, Poetry Scotland, Fused, and the Wales Arts Review. Her new project ‘A Bodily Writing’ launches at London’s Southbank Centre this summer, and explores dance &poetry as a unified art-form. She is currently working on her second full-length collection under the working title ‘Blue Warrior’.
Holly Pester – Bark Leather book review
Holly Pester, Bark Leather, Veer, £5
Holly Pester’s poetry is somewhere in the tradition of Edward Lear, Gertrude Stein, Harold Pinter, Monty Pynthon and Holly Pester. If you’ve seen Holly Pester leather her poems you can hear her bark in lots of Holly Pester.
This book, from Veer, by Holly Pester, Bark Leather, has a cover image of, what else, but a leather-tree, barking out the word, or sound, ‘leather’ with an all scrunched up face. Bark and leather are of course almost the same things. Read any online dictionary and you will see that both come from the trees since you can peel them both off. And of course cow is as dog is: three letters long, ‘o’ in position 2 and ‘c’ comes before ‘d’. Keep thinking.
The opening poem, Digg Beff, is enough for the purposes of this review to demonstrate how good this collection had on me. If you are ready to join in then bark out loudly and quickly ‒ ‘Dig Beff, Dug Bet, Duck Break, dark bed, dit belly, drag bull. Point and flak.’
WOOF WOOF, WOOF OOWF, OOWF OOWF, FOW FOW, WOF WOF, OOF OOF. Point and flak.
‒ until they sort of deteriorate and sort of come back up into sight again.
If you look up these string of words quoted from Digg Beff on Wikipedia or even Yahoo Answers you will find that they form an etymological chain spanning the Vikings (Dig Beff) to The Superbowl (drag bull). If you enter them into search engines such as Youtube, where glitching is strictly forbidden, it berates you when it says: ‘An error has occurred, please try again later.’ This makes you feel some bit good ‘cause the world again has fissures.
Bark Leather contains super 8 poems which will made you laugh and will made you cry. The poems are perfect for writing aloud with your friend and include tongue twisters, homophonic plumbing and oven seal shanties.
Talk proper Holly. Twice nightly. Barking.
Jade Massive
Lisa Robertson & Zoe Skoulding
Monday, 9th June, 18:00 F02, Firth Court, Western Bank
Free Entry. All are Welcome
Readings by Zoe Skoulding and Lisa Robertson followed by a Conversation with Lisa Robertson
Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet now living in France.With Matthew Stadler she edited and annotated Revolution: A Reader, a 1200 page guide to how to live in the present. Her books include Debbie: An Epic and The Weather, both co-published in the UK by Reality Street Editions, a collection of essays Nilling (Bookthug, 2012), Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Coach House, 2004), Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House, 2009) and RE28099s Boat (University of California Press, 2010). Cinema of the Present is forthcoming from Coach House, and Enitharmon is to publish a new edition of The Men (Bookthug, 2006). She was the Bain Swigget visiting Lecturer in Poetry at Princeton University, and teaches in the MFA programme at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.
ZoeSkoulding is a poet, translator, editor and critic. She has published four collections of poetry, most recently The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (Seren, 2013) and Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008), poems from which have been widely translated. She has performed her work at many international festivals, often incorporating electronic sound in her readings as well as collaborating with musicians. She is Senior Lecturer in the School of English at Bangor University.
Dear World & Everyone in it in Sheffield
20/06/2014, 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm.
A reading from contributors from the Bloodaxe anthology, Dear World & Everyone in it, including Nathan Hamilton, Steven Fowler, Kate Kilalea and Sam Riviere as part of the Midsummer Poetry Festival at Bank Street Arts, Shefiield.
The Other Room – tonight
Harriet Tarlo and Judith Tucker: Tributaries
Since October 2011, Harriet Tarlo and Judith Tucker have been collaborating on a series of walks, drawings and poems around the cloughs and becks of the Holme River. Their work conveys a sense of the symbiotic shaping of land and water both by each other and by human interventions, as well as their own conversations with the landscape and with each other. Work from Tributaries has been shown at the Holmfirth Arts Festival, 2012 and 2013; Closer to Home: Artists Re-consider the Local, East Street Arts, Leeds, 2012; Shadows Traces, Undercurrents Catherine Nash Gallery Minneapolis, 2012; Arts and Geographies Exhibition, Lyon, 2013; Landscape, Art and Uncertainty Southampton City Art Gallery 2013-14; Plymouth University, 2014 and North Norfolk Nature Festival, Greshams, 2014.
Harriet and Judith are showing a small selection of drawings and poems from their Tributaries collaboration at Bank Street Arts, Sheffield from 6-28 June 2014.
The free Launch of the festival and Private View of the work takes place on 6 June from 6.00pm and will feature Geraldine Monk’s Midsummer Mummery directed by Alan Halsey. Please see invite attached.
You can book here for Harriet and Judith’s talk/reading about the Tributaries Collaboration on 13 June, 8.00-9.00pm — http://www.midsummerpoetryfestival.co.uk/events/harriet-tarlo-and-judith-tucker/
Rivet II
POLYply > 30 BIG CONTEMPLATIVE UTOPIA
Petrarch -a Celebration of Tim Atkins
Sat 28 June, 7pm at Rich Mix, 35 – 47 Bethnal Green Road, London, E1 6LA.
Launching the remarkable collected Petrarch poems by Tim Atkins, clocking in at over 400 pages and published by Crater press, over 20 poets read from the book to celebrate this groundbreaking British poet.
Long heralded as one of the leading lights of the British 21st century avant garde poetry, here the work of Tim Atkins is revealed and celebrated by the key figures in the contemporary British vanguard of experimental writers.
Philip Terry’s Dante’s Inferno
Out now from Carcanet
Halfway through a bad trip
I found myself in this stinking car park,
Underground, miles from Amarillo…
Following his irreverent Oulipian reworking of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in his new book Philip Terry takes on Dante’s Inferno, shifting the action from the twelfth century to the present day and relocating it to the modern ‘walled city’ of the University of Essex. Dante’s Phlegethon becomes the river Colne; his popes are replaced by vice-chancellors and education ministers; the warring Guelfs and Ghibellines are re-imagined as the sectarians of Belfast, Terry’s home city. Meanwhile, the guiding figure of Virgil takes on new form as Ted Berrigan, one-time visiting professor at Essex and a poet who had himself imagined the underworld: ‘I heard the dead, the city dead / The devils that surround us’ (‘Memorial Day’). In reimagining an Inferno for our times, Terry stays paradoxically true to the spirit of Dante’s original text.
The lineation speeds along at a nice articulated pace, the Dantesque pitch is right and propulsive, the cast of villains is energising, the balance between language and lingo, the allusive and the obscene just right… Berrigan the perfect shambling guide…
Seamus Heaney
It is brilliant… the pattern and rhythm very forceful and the lingo just stunning.
Marina Warner
Other Room dates for your diaries
A busy 2014 summer period from The Other Room and also the beginnings of a winter programme for your diaries.
4th June 7.00 @ The Castle, Oldham Street, Manchester with Leanne Bridgewater, Allen Fisher, Agnes Lehoczky & David Miller
15th June 3.30 @ Bank Street Arts, Sheffield: The Other Room presents The Other Room as part of The Midsummer Festival (Scott Thurston, James Davies & Tom Jenks)
2nd July 7.00 @ The Castle, Oldham Street, Manchester with Hazel Smith&Roger Dean and Clive&Robin Fencott
13th August 7.00 @ The Castle, Oldham Street, Manchester with Gareth Twose, Mick Weller & Alison Gibb
15th October 7.00 @ The Castle, Oldham Street, Manchester with Emma Cocker, Matt Falaize & Ulli Freer
Dramatis Personae
Dramatis Personae is an ebook selection from the five collaborations written by Chris McCabe and Tom Jenks for SJ Fowler’s Camarade project between 2011 and 2013. Out now on The Argotist Online.
Uptight
Roll for the Soul, Unit 2, St Lawrence House, Quay Street, Bristol, BS1 2JL.
TYPEWRITER ART : A Modern Anthology
TYPEWRITER ART : A Modern Anthology by Barrie Tullett
176 pages, 260 illustrations
Laurence King £19.95.
The first typewriter artist to find fame was Flora F. F. Stacey, with her butterfly drawing of 1898; but since the very beginning of the typewriter’s existence, artists, designers, poets and writers have used this rigorous medium to produce an astounding range of creative work.
This beautiful book brings together some of the best examples by typewriter artists around the world. As well as key historical work from the Bauhaus, H. N. Werkman and the concrete poets, there is art by contemporary practitioners, both typewriter artists who use the keyboard as a ‘palette’ to create artworks, and artists/typographers using the form as a compositional device. The book will appeal to graphic designers, typographers, artists and illustrators, and anyone fascinated by predigital technology.
if p then q reviews round up
if p then q books operate in an interesting corner of the poetry publishing spectrum, embracing a range of experimental and ‘sound-based’ writers of differing persuasions and distinctions.
Steve Spence reviews books by David Berridge, Geof Huth, Derek Henderson, Tim Atkins, Holly Pester and P. Inman
Read more HERE
otherroom.org 