John Hall

Cardiff Poetry Experiment: Lisa Samuels, John Hall, Flo Fflach

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28th November at 7pm. Waterloo Tea (21-25 Wyndham Arcade Cardiff, Cardiff)
21-25 Wyndham Arcade Cardiff, Cardiff, CF10 1FH.

Lisa Samuels is the author of fifteen books of poetry, memoir, and prose—mostly poetry—including Wild Dialectics (Shearsman 2012), Anti M (Chax 2013), Tender Girl (Dusie 2015), and Symphony for Human Transport (Shearsman 2017). She also publishes essays and soundworks as well as editing books, collaborating with composers, and working with film. Living in Aotearoa/New Zealand since 2006 and having also lived in the Middle East, Europe, Malaysia, and the US, where she was born, has made transnationalism fundamental in her ethics and imagination. Lisa has a University of Virginia PhD and earns her living as an academic while also raising her son.

John Hall is a poet, retired teacher, essayist. He is author of several collections of poetry and of two volumes of essays. He also makes visual texts, mostly for domestic frames, and has been active in collaborations. He was closely involved in the formation of Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts. As a Said Place is his most recent collection of page-poems.johnhallpoet.org.uk

Flo Fflach AKA Maura Hazelden is a visual artist who has shifted to words/language, on the page & out of the mouth: poetic, abstract, lists. She studied dance, and later 2d design, and then fine art: timebased & photovisual [Caerdydd]. In 2009, she was accepted onto Dartington’s MA Performance Writing but had to defer, but took up a place at Falmouth. Works: PW12, Arnolfini; Noises of Art, Aberystwyth; Text Festival, Bury. Currently: Nid/Not Writer in Residence ArcadeCardiff. Making work that sometimes might fragmented have lost its original meaning; and lists.maurahazelden.blogspot.co.uk

SJ Fowler book launch in Bristol

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Arnolfini : Bristol – April Thursday 6th – 7pm : Free Entry.

The launch of SJ Fowler’s latest poetry collection ‘The Guide to Being Bear Aware’ from Bristol-based Shearsman Books, featuring performances and readings from Fowler and guest readers John Hall, Holly Corfield Carr, Paul Hawkins, Phil Owen & more to be announced.

“The Guide to Being Bear Aware offers advice for living in a world gone awry. Wry, violent, contemplative, political, intimate and raucous by turns, these are poems that laze on your lap only to get their claws in… Morphing into unfamiliar shapes beneath the watching eye, these refreshing, quizzical, well-traveled poems forge a world entirely their own: they won’t let you go of you easily.” Sarah Howe

More here.

Philip Terry and Emily Critchley new Crater pamphlets

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Two new summer Craters are now available:

Crater 33: August 2015. Philip Terry’s Du Bellay – Like Catalan Anarchy, with a lino-cut by Tim Atkins. Letterpressed broadside, three colours, £3 + p & p (run of 60).

Crater 32: August 2015. John Hall & Emily Critchley’s A Salutation to
Poetry. Letterpressed broadside, three colours, £3 + p & p (run of 70).

Available at www.craterpress.co.uk

Wor(l)ds in Collision

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words_collision

CLICK on the poster to enlarge

This exhibition concentrates on Wittgenstein’s insistence in his later writings on the usefulness of the concept of ‘games’ for thinking about language. There is no one quality that unites all the things we think of as games, and to play a game requires not only rules, but the possibility of testing, breaking, revising those rules. Rejecting the idea that language has one essential purpose, or that meaning is something fixed and transparent, the artworks here are engaged in various forms of play, translation or reconfiguration. Language is physical as well as symbolic. Our experiences lay claim to the traditions and practices that give them meaning, but can be turned back thereon to question and confuse what we might otherwise take for granted. We come to points where ordinary language seems inadequate, but this is not because we lack an adequately nuanced set of concepts, or because we need a better ‘theory’ of language, but because we have not paid enough attention to the particular and the familiar. What frameworks support our observations and convictions? The artwork here in some ways mimics the incompleteness of Wittgenstein’s writing, the unendingness of his philosophical project. Variously they show art as a process of discarding and reassembling, of repetition with variation, of careful attention to presentation and nested meanings, to the balance between authorial control and emergence, between understanding and opacity.

We are delighted to welcome you to this playful collaboration between poets, artists and philosophers, where the boundaries between words and images, meanings and material are plucked, strummed, exalted and trammelled.