Our next event (on 23rd August) is a one-off special, celebrating Robert Sheppard’s European Union of Imaginary Authors project. Amongst those performing will be Allen Fisher, helping to ventriloquise Finnish poet Minna Kärkkäinen. Above is Allen’s performance for us at the Other Room in 2014. 7 PM start for this event and free, as always.
Allen Fisher
Nature and Other Forms of That Matter
23rd June at 18:00. Royal Hoolway University, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RF.
Poetry reading and artist’s film
David Herd * Carol Watts * Allen Fisher (film)
Room 0-02 * Free entry.
David Herd * Carol Watts * Allen Fisher (film)
Room 0-02 * Free entry.
Full details here.
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David Herd’s collections of poetry include All Just (Carcanet, 2012), Outwith (Bookthug, 2012) and Through (Carcanet 2016). His recent writings on the politics of movement have appeared in Almost Island, Los Angeles Review of Books, Parallax, and PN Review. He is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent and a co-organiser of the project Refugee Tales.
David will be reading from Through. Written between 2011 and 2015, the book is an inquiry into the language of public space and human movement. Five extended poems set out to address the ways contemporary public discourse has been rendered officially hostile. What does it mean, the book asks, to inhabit a language that frames itself in such a hostile manner? How, it asks, might users of the language begin to re-occupy the terms? Considering the cost of such official hostility to human intimacy, the poems set out explore possibilities of solidarity. The picture they aim to present is of a language on a knife-edge. How, in the present moment, do we hear the term ‘through’?
Carol Watts’ poetry includes: Dockfield (Equipage, 2017), 56 a collaboration with George Szirtes (Arc, 2016), Sundog (Veer Books, 2013), Occasionals (Reality Street Editions, 2011), Wrack (Reality Street Editions, 2007). Her chapbooks include the series When blue light falls (Oystercatcher, 2008, 2010, 2012), this is red (Torque Press, 2009) and the sonnet sequences Mother Blake (2012) and brass, running (Equipage, 2006). She is the head of the school of English at the University of Sussex.
Carol will be reading from a number of her books, including her most recent publication, Dockfield (Equipage, 2017) in response to ideas of nature, ecology, landscape and the anthropocene.
We will also be screening Allen Fisher’s 2017 film ‘Y Gors Ddu: The Black Bog’ (5 mins) in which he describes his recent working process on Black Ponds a new collection of paintings, facture and gathering of drawings, paintings, in situ performances and presentations on y Waen Ddu, the Black Bog – a rare raised peat bog situated in the Brecon Beacons. The project is supported and assisted by Arts Alive Wales and BBC Waleshttp://www.allenfisher.co.uk/
Allen Fisher is a poet, painter and art historian. He has exhibited in many shows from Tate Britain to King’s Gallery York to Hereford Museum and Art Gallery. Examples of his work are in the Tate Collection, the King’s Archive London, the Living Museum, Iceland and various British and international private collections. His last single-artist show was at the Apple Store Gallery Hereford in 2013. He has over 150 single-author publications to his name. In 2016 new publications were: Imperfect Fit: Aesthetics, Facture & Perception from the University of Alabama, Gravity as a consequence of shape and a second edition of the collected PLACE from Reality Street Editions, and a reprint of Ideas of the culture dreamed of was published by The Literary Pocket Book.
This poetry reading and film showing is part of the project Nature and Other Forms of That Matter.
Alternate Gravities: Allen Fisher, Fran Lock, Vicky Sparrow
Wednesday, November 30 at 7:30 PM – 9 PM
CPRC, Birkbeck
Please join us for a poetry reading featuring Allen Fisher, Fran Lock and Vicky Sparrow. This reading is hosted by the CPRC, including some of Birkbeck’s PhD students working on contemporary poetry
Allen Fisher is a poet, artist and publisher, and the editor of Spanner magazine. He lives in Hereford, and is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. Altogether Fisher has over 150 publications in his name consisting of art documentation, poetry and theory. In 2015 his book of essays Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Facture and Reception , a companion to his work with essays by contemporaries and an Allen Fisher Reader were all published.
Fran Lock is writing her practice based Ph.D. on the relationship between the epistolary form in contemporary poetry and the use of letters in therapeutic contexts. She is the author of two poetry collections Flatrock (Little Episodes, 2011) and The Mystic and the Pig Thief (Salt, 2014). A third collect, Dogtooth, will be published by Out-Spoken Press in in February 2017.
Vicky Sparrow is writing her PhD on the poet-activist Anna Mendelssohn at the CPRC. Vicky’s poems can be found in datableed, Litmus, Kakania and Intercapillary Space and she’s currently finalising a chapbook to be published by Zarf Editions this Winter.
Bronaċ Ferran is first year PhD/MPhil at Birkbeck researching the work of poet, publisher and typographer Hansjörg Mayer. She’s writing a book about Mayer’s work in concrete poetry and other fields which will be published early next year by Walther König books. She also presents radio programmes on Resonancefm.
Storm and Golden Sky
Friday 25th November 2016. 7.30 (entrance £5) The Caledonia, (in Liverpool’s Georgian Quarter on the edge of Catharine Street and Caledonia Street: up the steep stairs at the back of the bar room).
Linda Stupart and Allen Fisher
Allen Fisher has been involved in performance and poetry since 1962. A poet, painter, publisher, editor and art historian, he has produced more than 140 chapbooks and books of poetry, graphic and art documentation. He currently edits Spanner, lives in Hereford, and is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has exhibited paintings in many shows, including one-man shows in London, 2003, and Hereford, 2013.
PLACE was Allen Fisher’s now somewhat legendary poetic project of the 1970s. Originally published over several years as a series of interconnecting books, virtually all of them now unobtainable, it incorporated influences from Blake, Olson, Pope, Wordsworth, Robert Kelly, Walter Benjamin, Jung, Dickens, Foucault, Wilhelm Reich, Marxism, the Situationists, conceptual art and researches in mythology, linguistics, psychology, mathematics, immunology, topography, zoology and much else – and yet remains unclassifiable.
The poems in the sequence Gravity as a consequence of shape, composed in the period 1982-2006, were previously issued in many journals and small publications and then eventually in three succinct volumes. This collected edition brings all of the poems from the sequence together for the first time into one volume.
Linda Stupart: Artist/Writer/Educator
Virus, her debut Novella, published by ARCADIA_MISSA, is available to buy here & read an excerpt of it here
OTHER RECENT PUBLICATIONS: Hito Steyerl in Hito Steyel in Parkett. Vol 97/Sex Acts in How to Sleep Faster #6, Arcadia Missa /Walking the Street: Slutwalk and the Street in Return to the Street. Edited by Sofie Fuggle and Tom Henri. Pavement Books. / Chris Kraus and the Empathetic Exchange of Objects in You Must Make Your Death Public: selected writing on Chris Kraus. Edited by Mira Mater. Mute./ Things Like Us and Them in …ment Journal. /Rematerialising Feminismadia Missa Press. in Rematerialising Feminism. ARCADI_MISSA/ National Velvetin Eros: Woman Edition. Eros Press/ Untitled piece in Oh Wicked Flesh! Edited by Joseph Noonan-Ganley. South London Gallery./ Friday in Idioglossia: an Art Writing Glossary. Edited by Joseph Noonan-Ganley. Hato Press. Old Wounds, Fresh Meat: A Year in South African Art in Art Review, September 2012./ Entanglement: A Love Story Set at dOCUMENTA 13. Art South Africa, Vol 5: issue 3.
Allen Fisher’s Gravity out now in full from Reality Street
Allen Fisher and Bill Griffiths books are Reality Street’s final titles
From 1982 to 2005 Allen Fisher’s major work (following his previous project of the 1970s,PLACE, published in its entirety by Reality Street in 2005) was a sequence of poems that went by the overall title Gravity as a consequence of shape. Taking their titles from an alphabetical list of jazz dances, and using scientific vocabulary and collage practices – erudite, funny and expansive – they were published in several stages over the years.
Now – as with PLACE – Reality Street is publishing the entire sequence in one sumptuous paperback edition.
Charles Bernstein has described this as “a masterful work in the project of undoing mastery”.
The book is on general sale from today, 27 June. Supporter subscribers in the UK should have received their copy by now. Supporter subscribers in the rest of the world – please be patient, your copy will be on its way in the next couple of weeks.
Bill Griffiths’ Collected Poems Volume 3 was published in May. All subscribers should now have their copies.
Together, these two titles by poets we have long championed bring the Reality Street project to a fitting conclusion. The press was launched in 1993 by Ken Edwards and Wendy Mulford, and has been run for the past 18 years by Ken Edwards, who will now devote more of his time to his own writing. All current titles will be kept in print for the foreseeable future, but no new ones are planned. Many thanks for your support of and interest in the press over the years.
Cardiff Poetry Experiment
Amy De’Ath, Graham Hartill, Allen Fisher
Amy De’Ath’s poetry chapbooks include ON MY LOVE FOR gender abolition (Capricious 2016), Lower Parallel (Barque 2014), Caribou (Bad Press 2011), and Erec & Enide (Salt 2010). With Fred Wah, she is the editor of a poetics anthology, Toward. Some. Air. (Banff Centre Press 2015). Her criticism has appeared in Women: A Cultural Review, Anguish Language (Archive Books 2015), and Cambridge Literary Review, and is forthcoming in After Objectvism: Reconfiguring 21st-Century Poetry and Poetics (U of Iowa P 2017). She is a PhD Candidate at Simon Fraser University and lives in Vanco…uver, on unceded Coast Salish Territories.
Graham Hartill’s latest collection is Chroma (Boiled String, 2013). He also publishes collaborative translations (with Wu Fu-Sheng) from classical Chinese and essays on poetics and creative writing in health and social care settings. He works as a writer in residence in HMP Parc and teaches on the MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes for the Metanoia Institute.
Allen Fisher is a poet, painter, publisher and art historian, lives in Hereford, UK. Emeritus Professor of Poetry & Art at Manchester Metropolitan University; over 150 single-authored publications of poetry, graphics, aesthetic theory and art documentation; exhibited in many shows from Tate Britain to King’s Gallery York. Examples of his work in the Tate Collection, The King’s Archive London, the Living Museum, Iceland and various British and international private collections. Last single-artist show was at the Apple Store Gallery Hereford in 2013. Two recent books of poetry and image were: TIP REGARD, and SPUTTOR. A second edition of the collected PLACE books of poetry was published earlier this year, the collected GRAVITY books are scheduled for publication in autumn, 2016. There is a book of essays on poetry and art, IMPERFECT FIT, due from University of Alabama Press also this autumn.
Doors open at 7pm, readings promptly at 7:30pm
Free admission, accompanied by discussions
Refreshments available for purchase
Waterloo Teahouse
Wyndham Arcade,
Cardiff City Centre,
CF10 1FH
(enter opposite Central Library)
Karawa.net: poetry in translation
Issue 8 of Karawa.net features German translations of Other Room readers Sean Bonney, Allen Fisher and SJ Fowler, plus others. More at the Karawa.net site.
