James Davies

Flarf is 10

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“In 10 years, the 30-odd people who wound up coming and going on the list published dozens of books and chapbooks, held a number of festivals in New York, Philadelphia, DC, Baltimore and elsewhere, and put on high-profile readings at the Denver Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center and the Whitney (with our rivals and closest peers, the Conceptual Writers). Collections of flarf appeared in the online magazine, Jacket, and—scandalously—in Poetry magazine, our second and last appearance with the Conceptual Writers before their attempted hostile takeover. We were written about in numerous alt weekly papers, as well as in Poets & Writers and the Wall Street Journal. The BBC, Wired and NPR covered our activities—as well as the anger our very existence seemed to incite.”

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Writer’s Forum North

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Madlab
36-40 Edge St
Manchester, United Kingdom
 
Saturday, June 4 · 2:00pm – 5:00pm

WFW(N) is an opportunity for innovative/experimental poets to present their work for feedback in a mutually supportive atmosphere. Ideally, please bring along copies of the work you intend to read for the other group members. Anyone who wants to come along but doesn’t want to read is also very welcome.

Sound and Dark: Geraldine Monk, Adeena Karasick, bill bissett, Iris Garrelf

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The Text Festival rounds off its performance series with Sound and Dark (2)
Featuring Geraldine Monk (UK), Adeena Karasick (USA), bill bissett (CAN), Iris Garrelf (UK)

@ The Met Arts Centre
Market Street,
Bury, BL9 0BW

3rd June 2011 / 7.30pm

Continuing the Festival’s unique mix of sound and poetry with an evening:

Adeena Karasick is a poet, media-artist and the award-winning author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory. Marked with an urban, Jewish, feminist aesthetic that continually challenges normative modes of meaning production, and engaged with the art of combination and turbulence of thought, her work is a testament to the creative and regenerative power of language and its infinite possibilities for pushing meaning to the limits of its semantic boundaries. She is Professor of Global Literature at St. John’sUniversityin New York.

Geraldine Monk is one of the most exciting and provocative writer-performers on the British scene. Her readings a witty, warm and dynamic drawing on a prolific career which has spawned fourteen major works in the last twenty five years.

bill bissett is a famously anti-conventional Canadian poet with more than 60 books to his (uncapitalised) name immediately identifiable by the incorporation of his artwork and his consistently phonetic (funetik) spelling. As an energetic “man-child mystic,” bill bissett is living proof of William Blake’s adage “the spirit of sweet delight can never be defiled.” His idealistic and ecstatic stances frequently obscure his critical-mindedness, humour and craftmanship.

Iris Garrelf is a composer/performer intrigued by change, fascinated with voices and definitely enamoured by technology. She often uses her voice as raw material, which she transmuted into machine noises, choral works or pulverised “into granules of electroacoustic babble and glitch, generating animated dialogues between innate human expressiveness and the overt artifice of digital processing” as the Wire Magzine put it.

A vital part of her work, be it using voice or other sound material, is improvisation and the use of random elements, the ephemeral fragility and risk implied in giving up control to me moment, a sonic singularity.

Ticket Prices:
£8 / £4

The Text Festival 2011, Opening Performances

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The Other Room was asked to film the opening performances of 2011’s international Text Festival. This represents less than a quarter of the events took place.

On Saturday 30th April The third international Text Festival opened. The montage at the beginning shows a small percentage of the art on display in three galleries around Bury, Manchester. There are performances here by Marco Giovenale, Helen White & Moniek Darge, Marton Koppany, Helmet Lemke & Hans Specht and Sarah Sanders. The Lemke/Specht performance was a durational piece of four hours. What is captured here is only a small portion of that fabulous piece.

The Text Festival 2011 Opening Performances from The Other Room on Vimeo.

Click Here to see the video in a larger screen

Neu Reekie!

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Neu! Reekie! is a night of avant-garde poetry, music and film fusions.

The night promises to shock and stun, playing host to the abstract and abstruse, the sinister and sanguine.

Post four suitably seismic shows, Michael Pedersen and Kevin Williamson bring you the fifth part in the N! R! movement.

This is a a collaborative night with Darran Anderson of 3:AM Magazine who are putting up three literature heavyweights as readers!

Also includes a Raffle of the Absurd; Avant-garde Animations; House Band Emelle, plus Pete the Barman and his £2 tonics.

Friday, May 27 · 7:00pm – 9:30pm

Location Edinburgh
Scottish Books Trust, Trunk’s Close, 55 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1SR Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Fluxus reader

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 A free pdf has been made available of essays edited by Ken Friedman:

Fluxus began in the 1950s as a loose, international community of artists, architects, composers and designers. By the 1960s, Fluxus has become a laboratory of ideas and an arena for artistic exprmentation in Europe, Asia and the United States. Described as ‘the most radical and experimental art movement of the 1960s’, Fluxus challenged conventional thinking on art and culture for over four decades. It had a central role in the birth of such key contemporary art forms as concept art, installation, performance art, intermedia and video. Despite this influence, the scope and scale of this unique phenomenon have made it difficult to explain Fluxus in normative historical and critical terms. The Fluxus Reader offers the first comprehensive overview on this challenging and controversial group. The Fluxus Reader is written by leading scholars and experts from Europe and the United States.

LINK

Writing (the) Space

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Wild Pansy Press Project Space
4 May – 19 May 2011 (Mon-Fri 9-6)
Old Mining Building, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT

‘If I hammer, if I recall in, and keep calling in, the breath, the breathing as distinguished from the hearing, it is for cause, it is to insist upon a part that breath plays in verse which has not (due, I think, to the smothering of the power of the line by too set a concept of foot) has not been sufficiently observed or practiced, but which has to be if verse is to advance to its proper force and place in the day, now, and ahead. I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressure of his breath.’ Extract, Projective Verse, 1950.

Charles Olson’s Projective Verse invites writing to be considered spatially, as OPEN, or as FIELD (of) composition in three dimensions. His proposition is one of text as space of action, of breath as punctuation, and of the bodily pressures of writing in which ‘form is never more than an extension of content’.

WRITING (the) SPACE presses down on and around this unique poetics of writing in contemporary performance related practice – in particular, the possibilities of performance writing in spatial and physical terms. WRITING (the) SPACE is conceived as a period of action research within the Wild Pansy Press Project Space

For WRITING (the) SPACE, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker present a new iteration of their ongoing collaborative project Re –, which essays the relationship between performance/document, live/recording, writing/written through the collision of spoken, textual and gestural languages. This iteration of the project addresses the emergent grammar of Re-, exploring the spatial and physical possibilities of writing. Extracted fragments from earlier conversations rub against mute utterances of a finger diagramming, nails pink; a spoken text of dislocated phrases; partial scores awaiting activation; punctuation, the space of breath. Re– (WRITING (the) SPACE) is open to the public from 4 – 19 May, 9-6pm Mon-Fri.

WRITING (the) SPACE Event, 19 May 09.30am – 8pm

Drawing together the practices of diverse artists and writers, this day-long event attempts to further explore notions of physical and spatial writing, drawing on the installation Re – (WRITING (the) SPACE) and Olson’s notion of Projective Verse.

09.30-6pm: > OPEN > < OLSON > < OPEN <.
A laboratory exploring practice based examples of Olson’s OPEN text. Presenting: David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Victoria Gray, Claire Hind and Mary Paterson. Audience space is limited so booking is essential, please email rachellois@opendialogues.com.

6-8pm : How is Art Writing?
Dinner, drink, conversation and live performance by Giles Bailey on the last day of the exhibition as part of the In a word…artists’ dinner series. All welcome but booking essential, click on In a word… to book online.

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WRITING (the) SPACE is developed by Rachel Lois Clapham (Open Dialogues) in partnership with New Work Yorkshire and supported by In a word…

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In a word… is a research programme profiling an ecology of radical writing practice in, around and from Yorkshire. http://writingencounters.squarespace.com/in-a-word/

Open Dialogues is a UK collaboration, founded by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, that produces writing on and as performance. http://www.opendialogues.com

New Work Yorkshire is a proactive, engaged and mutually supportive collection of individuals who aim to develop a vibrant and diverse New Work sector in Yorkshire.

Wild Pansy Press is an art collective, a small publishing outfit affiliated with Leeds University Fine Art and a public venue for experimental works which use the practices of reading, writing and publication as their medium and/or content. wildpansypress.com

James Davies’ Plants reviewed

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Much of Davies’ work occupies a place between poetry and conceptual art. His poetry is shot through with references to the work of artists as wide ranging as Franz Kline, Vija Celmins and Thomas Fehlmann. Lines such as “next we masticated to Jeff Koons’ record collection”. Formally, his work responds in different ways to that of these artists. His chilly, wet and monotonous poem ‘The Weather’, made up of four identical tercets describing the weather, each tercet ending in the line “I wonder what it will do tomorrow” seems to be a response to the centreless, representational graphite Sea and sky drawings by Celmins.

Colin Herd reviews James Davies at 3am Magazine.

Alec Finlay at the Tuesday talk series

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11.00am – 12.30pm, Whitworth Art Gallery Manchester, free , no booking necessary

The Tuesday Talks series invites leading artists, thinkers and curators to explore the driving forces, influences and sources of inspiration within contemporary art. The series is programmed by Professor Pavel Büchler and Bryony Bond, and is supported by the Manchester Metropolitan University.

10 May

Tuesday Talk: with Alec Finlay

Artist and poet Alec Finlay offers an insight into his work, through his own driving forces, influences and sources of inspiration.

LINK