James Davies

Junction Box Number 6

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Junction Box 6

Is Now Live

Peter Finch: Asheville
John Goodby: Translations from Pierre Reverdy
Steve Boyland interviewed by Scott Thurston
David Rees Davies: Human/Nature
Rhian Bubear: RS Thomas: ‘The Echoes Return Slow’ as a poet’s autobiography
Frances Presley: Dancing the Five Rhythms with Scott Thurston
Chris Paul: The Bosch Collective
Ric Hool: Last Fair Deal Gone Down
Chris Vine: Notes from Brazil
Wu Fusheng and Graham Hartill: Translating Chinese Poetry
John Freeman: Holiday Reading

TO SEE JUNCTION BOX 6, CLICK HERE: glasfrynproject.org.uk/w/category/junction-box/

Gareth Twose – a preview

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The next Other Room takes place on August 13th at The Castle in Manchester and starts at 7pm: see the middle panel for more. Readers are Gareth Twose, Alison Gibb and M J Weller.

Here’s a preview – part nine of his sequence Top Ten Tyres Ltd published by Red Ceilings Press

9.
Did prehistoric man have bone-music discos?
Saturday night femur? The funk-fracturing
of tibia and fibula in the caves of mutually
assured destruction, musical marathons
alternating blisters and bliss in the hard minutes
that follow the clinical cosh. The ear-y discharge
of erotic heat always with a potential for disaster.
Vital that the patient keeps the leg elevated
and doesn’t let it dangle, grinding down
the debts, low and slow, with iceflame austerity.

Blue Bus – Lawrence Upton, Sarah Kelly and Juliet Troy

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The Blue Bus is pleased to present a reading by Lawrence Upton, Sarah Kelly and Juliet Troy on Tuesday 15th July from 7.30 at The Lamb (in the upstairs room), 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1. This is the ninetieth event in THE BLUE BUS series. Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions).
Juliet Troy completed an MA in  Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway University in 2013. She has had poetry published in:  Poetry Salzburg Review, Fire no.33, and Fire No. 31, Neon Highway, Ver Poets ‘Unguarded Gold’ and 40th Anniversary Anthology, Ver poets Ten Liners and had a poem selected in the recent Ver competition. She is also published in Camden and Lumen’s  ‘Genius Floored – Alphabet of Days’, online on ‘Greatworks’, ‘Write Off’ and ‘Neon Highway’. Her Artists Book, ‘Pop up Temple’ was displayed at the ‘Visual Poetics’ exhibition at the Southbank’s Poetry Library.  Her  ‘Rhythm of Furrows Across a Field’ pamphlet was published by Kater Murr’s Press, in April 2013. She is a committee member of Ver poets and one of the Blue Bus organisers.  Juliet is especially interested in Ecopoetics and other innovative approaches that work towards communicating an eco/ethno -logical mindfulness.
Sarah Kelly is the author of ‘locklines’ (KFS Press) and has contributed work to many magazines, journals and literary reviews, including the anthologies ‘Better than Language’ (Ganzfeld Press) and ‘Dear World’ (Bloodaxe). Her text based visual work has been exhibited in the Saison Poetry Library, The London Poetry Festival, SoundEye and TARP Audio-Visual Poetry festival. She is an editor for the bilingual edition ‘AlbaLondres’ and her experimental translation work has been performed at Spain NOW! (London) and MACBA, (Barcelona). www.s-kelly.co.uk

Lawrence Upton: Poet; graphic artist; sound artist: curator. Recent publications wrack (2012); Memory Fictions (2012); and Unframed Pictures (2011). Co-edited Word Score Utterance Choreography in verbal and visual poetry (1998) with Bob Cobbing, with whom he wrote collaboratively (NB D.A.N. 1994-2000) . Commentaries on Bob Cobbing (2013). Journals: Artist’s Book Yearbook, Book Arts Newsletter, Emerging Language Practices, Experimental Poetics and Aesthetics, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Readings, Sounds Rite. Second solo exhibition “from recent projects” September 2012 St James Hatcham. Makes text-sound composition with John Levack Drever, Benedict Taylor, Tina Krekels & Jeff Cloke. photo, synthesis (for solo viola) commissioned by to  Benedict Taylor (2013), now being premiered. Convenes Writers Forum Workshop, directs Writers Forum . Visiting Research Fellow in Music, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Stephen Ratcliffe reads the whole of Continuum

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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

The Other Room 46 – review

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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

Stephen Emmerson’s Poetry Wholes

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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

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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

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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

Philip Terry’s Dante’s Inferno

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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