To celebrate National Poetry Day, pressfreepress put on four impromptu performances of THE NOTECARDS (text and objects by seekers of lice, performance by pressfreepress) in various locations around the Southbank Centre. Watch the clip above to see their performance.
Tuesday, 15th October, 19:30. The Lamb, Conduit Street, London.
Out now. More HERE,
The Other Room’s next event is a northern launch of the anthology The Dark Would which takes place October 16th at The Castle Hotel in Manchester, 7pm. For more information see the poster in the middle column of this page.
Laurence Lane is an artist and curator. In June 2000 he co-founded The International 3, a gallery space in city centre Manchester that developed out of the city’s artist-led activity. He has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, and as a curator he has commissioned, produced and presented work by many artists involved in a broad range of contemporary art practice.
Networks have structured our social – and media – development long before the emergence of the “network society.” From the letter-writing networks of the proto-Italian aristocracy to the electrical networks that facilitated industrialization; from the spread of woodcuts, pamphlets, and ballads that supported the Protestant Reformation to the twentieth century emergence of broadcast radio and television networks, media have always been situated in the matrices of networks of circulation and distribution, facilitating historically specific modes of connection. These histories often remain disconnected from research on digital networks, the latest to re-shape our socio-technical environment into a mesh of interconnecting nodes. An archaeological approach, one that routes between contemporary and historical networks, Alan Liu argues, has the potential to regenerate a sense of history that would temper the presentism of digital culture, all too often experienced as instantaneous and simultaneous.
This special issue of Amodern features original research, initially presented in 2012 at the “Network Archaeology” conference at Miami University of Ohio, on the histories of networks, the discrete connections that they articulate, and the circulatory forms of data, information, and socio-cultural resources that they enable. Drawing from the field of media archaeology, we conceptualize network archaeology as a call to investigate networks past and present – using current networks to catalyze new directions for historical inquiry and drawing upon historical cases to inform our understanding of today’s networked culture. In this introduction, we elaborate how network archaeology opens up promising areas for critical investigation, new objects of study, and prospective sites for collaboration within the productively discordant approach of media archaeology.
Juliana Spahr, David Buuck, City Lights Publishers.
A picaresque experimental novel, An Army of Lovers is the story of Demented Panda and Koki, two friends trying to be political poets in a time when poetry has lost its ability to effect social change. Their collaboration unleashes a torrent of consumerist excess that morphs into a Gitmo-style torture camp. Our heroes struggle to avoid complicity in the spectacle, yet are unable to overcome it through poetry. Instead it invades their bodies, manifesting itself through blisters and other symptoms, as the poets attempt to move beyond this impasse. Absurdist, fantastic, conceptual, Army is a novel for the Occupy generation.
Launch of issue one of ZONE. Readings by contributors Tim Atkins, Natalie Bradbeer, Amy Evans, Ollie Evans, Nancy Gaffield, Ben Hickman, Jeff Hilson, Doug Jones, Dorothy Lehane, Richard Parker, Will Rowe, Juha Virtanen, Steve Willey.
Other Room reader and Reality Street author Philip Terry has been shortlisted for the new Goldsmith’s Prize.
Taking as its starting point marginal images in the Bayeux Tapestry, which have been left largely unexplained by historians, Terry retells the story of the Norman Conquest from the point of view of the tapestry’s English embroiderers. Combining magic realism and Oulipian techniques, this is a tour de force of narrative and language.
Read more HERE
The Other Room’s next event is a northern launch of the anthology The Dark Would which takes place October 16th at The Castle Hotel in Manchester, 7pm. For more information see the poster in the middle column of this page.
Carolyn Thompson is an artist whose interests lie in developing pre-existing narratives into new adaptations that reference the original in either content or form. She uses found objects, images and printed matter (text, books, maps and diagrams) as source material, in order to evoke a sense of memory, history, nostalgia and humour. The resulting adaptations are new visual versions in the form of artist’s books, collages, drawings and installations that reflect, or work in contrast to, the stories, histories or language of the original ephemera, whilst responding to sculpture, drawing and architecture. http://www.carolynthompson.co.uk/
University College Cork, 13 December 2013.
The year 1913 was a momentous one in art. From Proust to Stravinsky, Duchamp to Malevitch, Modernism was to recalibrate the way the world was seen; Futurism offered to change the way the world was heard. One hundred
years ago, Luigi Russolo published his manifesto, L’arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noises), announcing a new way not only of conceiving music but also how we would hear the world around us. In the future, noises would be the material of music. Russolo’s manifesto, and his strange intonarumori devices, have been fantastically influential in the intervening century, and this event seeks to capture some of those connections, in both discursive and performative modes.
Possible themes: New sounds; new instruments; celebration of speed, war, or the modern city in music, visual art and poetry; Futurist manifestos; music and sound art; connections to other artworks and artists in 1913; influences of Futurism in music and other arts.
Proposals are invited for papers on any of the suggested themes, in the form of an abstract or outline of not more than 300 words. Proposals are also invited for art works – especially performances, installations, sound sculptures, compositions which are specifically designed to address the themes suggested. The proposal should outline the projected artwork, and should be accompanied by an abstract of not more than 300 words that details the relationship of the work to the themes of the symposium. The proposer will be responsible for supplying all equipment/special resources required for the creation or display/performance of any accepted proposal.
Please send your proposal by 5pm, October 31st by email to phegarty@french.ucc.ie. The selection panel will meet as soon after this date as possible and inform selected contributors forthwith.
The next Peter Barlow’s Cigarette features The Other Room’s James Davies and previous reader Chris McCabe as well as Anna Percy and Sheila Hamilton.
Peter Barlow’s Cigarette
James Davies, Anna Percy, Chris McCabe, Sheila Hamilton
12th October, 8.30
Town Hall Tavern, Manchester
Free
Shadowtrain Carriage 41:
Artisan Bar, 35 London Rd., Edinburgh, EH7 5BQ. Friday, 11 October 2013, 19:00.
ALEC FINLAY
Alec Finlay is an artist & poet based in Edinburgh. He has adopted such innovative poetic forms such as the mesostic, embedded-poem, and circle-poem. Recent poetic works include today today today (Playspace, 2013), A Company of Mountains (morning star, 2013) Be My Reader (Shearsman, 2012), Question Your Teaspoons (Calder Wood Press, 2012) Mesostic Remedy (morning star, 2009), Mesostic Interleaved (morning star & The University of Edinburgh, 2009), and Says You (Oystercatcher Press, 2009). Finlay established morning star in 1990, a press specialising in collaborations between artists and poets, including the award-winning pocketbooks series (1999–2002). He has published over twenty books and has won two Scottish Design Awards. In 2010 Finlay was shortlisted for the Northern Art Prize. He blogs regularly at www.alecfinlay.com.
SAMANTHA WALTON
Samantha Walton: has published — Amaranth Unstitched (Punch Press), City Break Weekend Songs (Critical Documents), tristanundisolde (Arthur Shilling Press); co-organises the techno-poetry night Syndicate; most recently published in/on — Black Box Manifold / Veersomes / Hi Zero / Archive of the Now; working on a book about madness, law and crime fiction (not bloody poetry).
JAMES OATES
James Oates has gained a reputation in the North of England for quality performances on the poetry circuit for over 25 years, more recently gaining the accolade of being one of the most consistently dynamic performers of poetry in the North today. This culminated recently in his representation of the North East in the 2009 Radio 4 Poetry Slam Semi-finals. He won the ‘East Durham Writer of the Year’ competition in 1997 in the
Prose (Open) category and has been featured on Amazing Radio. James had his first full Poetry collection published in 2007 (Wideyback) by Red Squirrel Press and has several pamphlet publications by other publishers.
The Sutton Gallery, 18a Dundas Street, Edinburgh, EH3 6HZ. Monday, 30th September, 19:00.
Join us for an evening of poetry at The Sutton Gallery on Monday 30th September from 7pm. There will be wine and other refreshments available and there will also be a last minute chance to look at works by Peter Standen and Yoshishige Furukawa in the gallery. And it’s all absolutely free.
MacGillivray is a Scottish writer and artist. As a musician she has supported The Fall, Arthur Brown and Arlo Guthrie, performed internationally as well as being featured on BBC Radio 3 Late Junction and The Verb. Her third album Horse Sweat Chandelier is released October 2013. MacGillivray’s poetry has been published in ASLS New Scottish Writing and Magma; her art criticism in Performance Research and several editions of Art Monthly. She has performed alongside writers such as Alan Moore, Don Paterson, Brian Catling and Iain Sinclair. Her first collection, Last Wolf of Scotland will be published in October 2013 and treads a fine line between surreal reality and imaginative abstraction, in order to trace the violence through which national mythologies are forged and perpetuated, from the wilderness of the Scottish Highlands to the piratical showmanship of the wild west. http://www.kirstennorrie.com/
Andrew Spragg is a poet and critic. He was born in London and lives there currently. His books include The Fleetingest (Red Ceiling Press, 2011), Notes for Fatty Cakes (Anything Anymore Anywhere, 2011), cut out (Dept Press, 2012), To Blart & Kid (Like This Press, 2013) and A Treatise on Disaster (Contraband Books, 2013). His writing was also included in Dear World & Everyone In It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe, 2013). http://www.archiveofthenow.org/authors/?i=138
The Other Room’s next event is a northern launch of the anthology The Dark Would which takes place October 16th at The Castle Hotel in Manchester, 7pm. For more information see the poster in the middle column of this page.
Nigel Wood is a poet and musician based in Manchester, where he edits and publishes Sunfish, a magazine of exploratory poetics. His chapbook, N.Y.C. Poems, was published by Knives, Forks & Spoons Press in 2011. More recent poetry has been published in Department,Gammag, blankpages and The Red Ceilings.
Read an interview with Nigel HERE
Summer stock, lit journal for humanimals:
Fri September 27th, 2013
7.30pm prompt start: £ Free
Snig Hill Gallery
24 Snig Hill Sheffield S3 8NB
Sheffield’s own antichoir Juxtavoices is now in it’s third year of surprising both itself and its audience in locations across the region.
We’re delighted to be performing (30 minutes 7.30pm – 8.00pm ) on the opening night of Foster-M’s latest solo art show in Sheffield.
Foster-m is a Sheffield (united kingdom) born artist. Working out of his F28b studio based in a disused machine factory in the old industrial part of the city. Using mixed media, not just on canvas but on any materials he can salvage or reclaim from his surrounding environment, wood, boards, old shop signs, roofing-felt, concrete sheets and numerous found objects. Having been brought up on the notorious KELVIN FLATS COMPLEX his works portray a cold alienation and social estrangement, so at first glance his paintings come across as violent, dark, self-destructive, full of chaotic lines, decaying figures, coded symbols and abstract texts which he refers to as primitive metaphors. But scratch the surface of the multi-layered work and you start to unlock a real warmth, a brutally honest social comment on his life and hostile environment, a life he describes as in isolation. You would expect this vision to leave you stone cold but that’s the great appeal to this artist and his work. …
The Other Room’s next event is a northern launch of the anthology The Dark Would which takes place October 16th at The Castle Hotel in Manchester, 7pm. For more information see the poster in the middle column of this page.
Jo Langton is the author of ZimZalla object #015, PoeTea, consisting of handmade bags with text instead of tea. Her work has appeared in Department, 3.A.M, Otoliths, and Catechism: Poems For Pussy Riot. She also sub-edited and appeared in The Dark Would language art anthology, and has a MA in Experimental Writing from the University of Salford. Fill the Silence was published by erbacce press in 2011. She might have a cheeky chapbook before autumn, providing koi carp and terror cats don’t steal her soul along the way.
A twitter haiku poem made from Iraq/Afghanistan war reportage, intercut with quotes from cult leader Charles Manson, will tweet 1st Oct onwards from: https://twitter.com/CharlieSayzz
The poem draws comparisons between psychopathology and foreign policy.
“An American nightmare, with its condensation of Holy Spirit + Charles Manson + War + haiku (a Japanese form that could recall of course another war)… Another voice among the voices, a way to explore trauma… Poetry should do this.” (Steve Giasson)
Charlie Sayzz is constructed from incorrect 18-syllable haiku, to be transmitted one per day for the next year. The haiku is a much-abused and appropriated short (17-syllable) Japanese form, often meditative and peaceful. It is chosen here for its very in-appropriateness as a vehicle for war poetry. And yet under the placid surface, haiku surely is angry, because it is now such a colonised poetry. The extra syllable in these ‘bad’ haiku is to create dissonance (in old numerology, 9 is the number of aggression; 18 syllables = 1+8 = 9).
The poem was devised by Philip Davenport and co-written by him with Richard Barrett, Steve Giasson, Tom Jenks, Michael Leong, copland smith and Steve Waling. Tom Jenks programmed the twitter feed and shaped many of the verses as visual poems.
This project is a parallel to Davenport’s novel Charlie Says (2013)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Charlie-Says-ebook/dp/B00DDU1R6A
otherroom.org 