Edge Hill
Atlantic Drift at Edge Hill
Thursday 23rd November 7:30pm
Launch of the second title from Edge Hill University Press
Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics
TICKETS FREE, but booking required
7.00pm – Light Refreshments
7.30pm – Atlantic Drift Book Launch
Introduced by the books’ editors, Professor Robert Sheppard and Dr James Byrne
This reading will feature three poets from a new and groundbreaking publication of poetry and poetics and a brief Q&A.
Atlantic Drift publishes 24 poets from the UK, Ireland, USA and Canada in partnership with Arc Publications. This anthology seeks to highlight new and existing writing and to define/redefine the discussions between poets from both sides of ‘the pond’. By developing a dialogue between English-speaking traditions, Atlantic Drift will include some of the most exceptional poetry and poetics written in the 21st century.
Simon Perril at Edge Hill
A reminder about this event at Edge Hill on Wednesday 16th November, now with a flyer and more details.
25 Edge Hill Poets/Ian Seed
11th March 7.30 at The Rose Theatre, the Arts Centre, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk; £4.50
A Poetry Event of Two Halves
A Quick Fire First Set of Poetry to Celebrate 25 Years of Creative Writing at Edge Hill
Matt Fallaize
Alice Lenkiewicz
Bill Bulloch
Natasha Borton
Scott Thurston
Adam Hampton
Joanne Ashcroft
Tom Jenks
(All these poets are featured on Robert Sheppard’s blog. Go to for summary and links to all the poets
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/twenty-five-years-of-creative-writing.html
Followed by
11th March ROSE READING Ian Seed
Ian Seed teaches Creative Writing at the University of Chester. He has lived and worked in different countries, including Italy, France and Poland. His poetry, prose poetry, fiction, reviews and translations have appeared in such journals as Blackbox Manifold, Free Verse, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, The North, PN Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Wales, Shearsman, Stride and Tears in the Fence. Seed’s first full-length collection, Anonymous Intruder, was published by Shearsman in 2009. Shearsman have also published his collections Shifting Registers (2011) and Makers of Empty Dreams (2014).
http://www.chester.ac.uk/departments/english/staff/academic-staff/dr-ian-seed
Peter Jaeger at Edge Hill
Tuesday, 28th February 2012, 7:30pm
The Rose Theatre, Edge Hill University
Edge Hill’s Creative Writing Department present
An Evening with Canadian poet, Peter Jaeger, at the Rose Theatre.
Tickets £4.00 all
Peter Jaeger is a Canadian poet, literary critic and text-based artist now living in the UK. He is the author of five books of poetry, including Rapid Eye Movement (2009) and The Persons (2011). He has recently collaborated with the video artist Kaz to produce the film Nozomi, which was exhibited at the Bury Text Festival in 2011, and he is currently
working on a critical monograph on John Cage. Peter uses found texts to write through the words of others: those protagonists who have animated his imagination and left their traces in newspapers, emails, diaries, books (from literature to philosophy), and in all the countless ephemera with which the externalised inner drama of our lives plays out.
Peter Jaeger teaches poetry and literary theory at Roehampton University, in London. http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/staff/Peter-Jaeger/
His work includes the poetry collections Power Lawn (1999), Eckhart Cars (2004), and Prop (2007), as well as a critical study on contemporary poetics, entitled ABC of Reading TRG: Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, and the Toronto Research Group (2000). He currently divides his time between London and rural Somerset, where he lives with his family.
Recent book from Reality Street: Rapid Eye Movement follows a strict constraint: two bands of text run continuously throughout the book. The top band consists entirely of fragmented dream narratives recorded by historical and contemporary dreamers, while the lower band juxtaposes found material which includes the word “dream.” No two sentences taken from the same source follow each other. As an investigation of the sign “dream” across a number of social discourses, including literature, psychoanalysis, advertising, popular culture, song lyrics, philosophy and
religious literature, Rapid Eye Movement presents a record of our culture dreaming.
“Jaeger dreams of the day when forestry operations can use balloon-based, skidding devices that float above the treetops and winch trees out of the forest without damaging the woodland floor. Jaeger dreams up some interesting shots. Jaeger dreams of peace. His book of dreams is not too different from a hope chest. His dreams are getting better all the time.
His dreams are coming true.”
Christian Bök
Members of the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research group will be reading as a warm-up.
Tim Atkins at Edge Hill
Poetry Reading 19th October 2011 at The Rose Theatre, Edge Hill University, Orsmkirk, Lancaster, 7.30: £4.
Tim Atkins is the author of Folklore 1-25 (Heart Hammer), To Repel Ghosts (Like Books), 25 Sonnets (The Figures), Oriental Tapping (Penguin), Horace (O Books), and Folklore (Salt). Another volume, Petrarch, is available from Barque Press. His work to ‘translate’ the whole of Petarch is one of the most exciting poetic projects of our time. He calls them ‘versions & perversions of the love poems of Petrarch’. He is editor of the online poetry journal onedit, Senior Lecturer in creative writing at the University of East London, a practising Buddhist, practising father, and is lousy at multi-tasking.
Robert Sheppard and Daniele Pantano
Via Scott Thurston:
Two Edge Hill University lecturers have published four books and two pamphlets of poetry between them in the last few months.
‘To celebrate this we will be launching them with two short readings, a Q and A and a chance to buy the books!’
Daniele Pantano and Robert Sheppard
Reading on Thursday 5th May 2011
at 5.30 in B005 (ground floor Business Centre, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk campus)
Senior Lecturer Daniele Pantano, who is Programme Leader for the BA Creative Writing, has published The Oldest Hands in the World, a new book of poems about exile, translingualism and writing one’s way home, as well as The Possible Is Monstrous, a collection of poems in English translation by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who is seen not only as the most prominent Swiss novelist, playwright and essayist of the twentieth century but as one of the most influential authors of modern literature.
Both books are published by Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books, New York.
Professor Robert Sheppard, who is Programme Leader of the MA Creative Writing, has published a new book of poems, Berlin Bursts. Themes covered include the troubled history of Berlin, Riga and other places ravaged by history. There are poems about poems and a sequence about the doomed attempt to create a hologram poet. His critical book When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry is a history of alternative British poetry and deals with major figures like Iain Sinclair, Tom Raworth and Maggie O’Sullivan. Both books are published by Shearsman Books.
They both have pamphlets out from the enterprising local Knives Forks and Spoons Press–one of our Creative Writing students is currently serving as an intern there. Robert’s book, The Given, is an anti-autobiography, telling his life via events in his diary he cannot remember and others that he’d rather forget. Daniele’s book, Mass Graves (XIX-XXII), is an excerpt from a new collection of poems he’s currently writing that examines the lives, events and connections between an unknown Swiss poet and the savage murder of one of Egon Schiele’s young girls.
Daniele and Robert work together to teach Creative Writing within the English and History Department at Edge Hill.
Book details and links:
1. Robert Sheppard
Berlin Bursts (poems)
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/sheppardBB.html
When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry (criticism)
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/sheppardWBT.html
The Given (anti-autobiography)
www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk
2. Daniele Pantano
The Oldest Hands in the World (Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books)
The Possible Is Monstrous: Selected Poems by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books) both at:
www.blacklawrence.com/pantano.html
Mass Graves (XIX-XXII) (The Knives, Forks and Spoons Press)
The Poetry and Poetics Research Group at Edge Hill
Thursday 31st March at 6.30 (till 8.00) in E21 at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire L39 4QP
The OULIPO writers have been fascinating readers for many years now, whether through the novels of Italo Calvino or the masterpieces of Raymond Queneau, the teasing novels of George Perec or the poems of Jacques Roubaud. Experimenting with constraints (‘Write a novel without using the letter e’ or replace every noun with the seventh word after it in the dictionary’, through to complex mathematical systems) they have been slowly changing the way much mainstream writing is written. The results are often hugely funny.
The main practitioners are French and it is appropriate that the best British writer to follow this school is also one of its most adept translators into English. Now Philip Terry will be visiting Edge Hill for the first time to talk about his versions of Shakespeare’s sonnets. This hallowed work of literature is ransacked and re-written before our eyes. Come and see Philip read from, and talk about the work.
Philip Terry was born in Belfast in 1962. He has taught at the universities of Caen, Plymouth and Essex, where he is currently Director of Creative Writing. His fiction, poetry and translations have been widely published in journals in Britain and America. His books include the celebrated anthology of short stories Ovid Metamorphosed (Vintage, 2000), Fables of Aesop (Gilliland Press, 2006) and the poetry collection Oulipoems (Ahadada, 2006). In 2008 Carcanet published his acclaimed translation of Raymond Queneau’s Elementary Morality. His latest Carcanet collection Shakespeare’s Sonnets was published in 2010.
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a Smirnoff ad?
Thou art more shimmering, more full of zap;
Icy winds do freeze the Russian steppes,
And vodka’s high hath all too short a date:
Sometime too cold the eye of Yeltsin shines,
And oft is his bleached complexion dimmed;
And every drunk through drunkenness declines,
By cancer of the liver or septicaemia untrimmed:
But thy eternal glimmer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that zip thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou sup in his shade
When in immortal lines like these thou glowest:
So long as men can drink and take a piss,
So long lives thine in this.
See also his anthology of English language Oulipo-influenced work at http://ekleksographia.ahadadabooks.com/issuethree/
Jeff Hilson at Edge Hill University
Thursday 23rd April 2009, 6.30-8.30 E24 at 6.30-8pm. (upstairs) FREE.
Fresh from his brilliant reading of Bird Bird at the Runnymeade Festival:
Jeff Hilson will be talking about his work.
Jeff Hilson’s works include A Grasses Primer (2000), Stretchers (2007), Bird Bird (2009), and In the Assarts (ongoing). He teaches at Roehampton University, London. With Sean Bonney and David Miller, he co-founded Crossing the Line, a reading series based in London.
Sampled in various small press editions over recent years and aired in live performances in London and elsewhere, Jeff Hilson’s Stretchers comprise three fast moving sequences of (more or less) 33-line poems. “Each stretcher contains a story, and each story contains other stories.” “A stretcher mis-uses that which it stretches into. Reading down the column, which stands immaculate among the ruined vocabularies. The idea of a stretcher works so well that every reading simply multiplies – by dint of new stretcher-ideas – whatever Hilson scraps together. How far can a lie stretch?” Edmund Hardy, Intercapillary Space
He is also the editor of the well-received and controversial Reality Street Book of Sonnets With no fewer than 84 contributors, this is a truly groundbreaking anthology. There are plenty of modern sonnet anthologies around; but none that have delved so thoroughly into the myriad ways poets have stretched, deconstructed and re-composed the venerable form, including visual and concrete sonnets. We take as our time frame 1945 to the 21st century, with poets ranging from Edwin Denby (b. 1903) to those currently in their twenties. Jeff Hilson, the editor, contributes an introductory essay.
Via Robert Sheppard
otherroom.org 