“Appeal in Air is a poem for lost voices — a suicide overheard; a list of posts; a valedictory call of bird-names. Davenport uses the spreadsheet as poetic form, collaging lines, random data, birdsong.” Out now from Knives Forks and Spoons.
philip davenport
@tweetfromengels Manchester, UK
Snapshots in text of homeless lives. Engels wrote about the harshness of 19 Century Manchester; people today who live a comparable existence are the homeless.
This project with homeless people in Manchester, UK is run by arthur+martha arts organisation in partnership with the Text Festival. Other partners were The Big Issue in the North, The Red Door (Bury Housing Concern),
Brighter Futures, The Booth Centre, The Lowry, LOVE Creative, the BBC. Poets and writers who’ve been involved include Steve Giasson, Geof Huth, copland smith, Anna MacGowan. Editors Philip Davenport and Rebecca Guest. The resulting long poem will be tweeted over the coming weeks.
Follow here.
arthur+martha: BLOOM
Via Philip Davenport:
The current arthur+martha project in Four Acre, St Helens has been short-listed for the national Bloom Awards. The Bloom Awards are for excellence and innovation in improving the quality of life, dignity and well-being of older people receiving care and support. We would really value your support. To register and to cast your vote on the various projects in the awards please follow this link http://lemosandcrane.co.uk/home/index.php?id=213425 and look for St Helen’s Council- Arts Service: Art of the Unexpected. Voting closes 24th June (5pm)
Poems about succumbing to temptation iced onto cakes, childhood memories painted onto plates, or poverty stitched onto tablecloths, bunting that questions etiquette, fading memories written on doilies, ‘sugar’ graffiti that evokes long gone childhoods, hardship and friendship. We have been invited older people in the an economically-deprived area to make a mix of poetry and art, celebrating their lives and visions. We’re trying to reach those who might not normally join in with art activities, by taking our workshops to the local Bingo night, housebound people’s homes, the doctors surgery, Tescos, a day centre for people diagnosed with dementia, a local library…
To read the latest about the project visit http://arthur-and-martha.blogspot.com/search/label/Four%20Acre%20St%20Helens
More photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/arthur-and-martha/
The Text Festival 2011, Opening Performances
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
The eq of revolution
Sound project featuring, amongst many other good things, Philip Davenport’s The eq of summer, a track sung by shamanic vocalist C. Johnson. This track comes from the CD Constellation of Luminous Details, which invited various sound artists to make variants on Davenport’s found poems (Ben Gwilliam, Lee Patterson, Gareth Bibby and others). Material from the CD is also to be used in an installation at the Text Festival by Holly Pester.
Wave us Goodbye: today in Manchester at Screen at the Triangle
Poetry films on the BBC Big Screen in Manchester will commemorate the Holocaust, bringing together the memories of older Jewish people.
The project, titled BRING LIGHT TOWARDS YOU, is one of many arts projects run by the arthur+martha arts organisation. In the build-up to Holocaust Memorial Day on 27th January, poetic texts created by the older people, most of whom are Holocaust survivors, will be displayed ‘in lights’ on the Screen at The Triangle in the city centre. These films will screen in ‘sets’ roughly every half an hour between other shows and run for a week.
The Holocaust has often been linked to trains: millions of people, particularly Jews, were taken to concentration camps by train before being killed in the notorious Nazi ‘Final Solution’ during the Second World War. These 30-second films give fragments from accounts of their journeys: to destruction and journeys of escape.
Artist Lois Blackburn and poet Philip Davenport worked with older Jewish people living at The Morris Feinmann Home, Manchester, exploring issues related to the Holocaust. “To hear these stories has been a powerful, haunting experience,” said Davenport. “The poems are little pockets of emotion that bring alive one of the most notorious events in recent history. It’s hard to imagine the reality of the Holocaust because it was so huge, so brutal. What these tiny moments of remembering do is connect to ordinary people’s experience.”
Lois Blackburn added: “As in all our projects, we talked to people about the small details of their experience, because it is people’s everyday lives that collectively make history. It’s the sandwiches your mum made, or the look on your sister’s face as you said goodbye. The fact that we’ve been able to help people transform these memories into messages that will be seen my thousands is an extraordinary privilege.”
Maria Turner, Activities Co-ordinator at the Morris Feinmann Home, described arthur+martha’s work as: “Sensitive and caring.”
Some of the pieces were shown on the electronic billboard in Piccadilly Railway Station on Holocaust Memorial Day 2009, but this is the first time that the whole sequence has been seen. arthur+martha have continued to develop the project in partnership with Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, working with young people with special needs, Roma children and many others.
THE FULL SEQUENCE OF TEXT ANIMATIONS CAN BE VIEWED AT
http://www.arthur-and-martha.co.uk/pages/kindness%20samples.htm
Counting Backwards 5
Ben Gwilliam and Philip Davenport
Technical difficulties delayed the uploading of this, but footage of Ben Gwilliam and Phil Davenport’s August 2010 performance for The Other Room is now available:
Ghosts move about me patched with histories
Philip Davenport and Nicola Smith
Chinese Art Centre, Manchester 9 – 17 December
Artists’ Talk: 9 December 5.30- 6.30pm
Preview Evening: 9 December – 6.30pm – 8.30pm
Tour dates: 9 – 11 December
Ghosts move about me patched with histories is an immersive text/art experience, designed by poet Philip Davenport and performance artist Nicola Smith. Both have previously taken part in artist residencies in Chongqing and will use the exhibition to reflect on their experiences in China. The exhibition counterpoints the freedom of being in a strange environment with the limits imposed by social control.
Davenport’s text installation is a poem written into wallpaper, covering one side of the gallery. Nicola will act as a deliberately misleading tour guide, taking visitors through the environment created by the pair, including a pause for snacks, some trashy TV and a computer that rewrites Davenport’s words with infinite variations, programmed by poet Tom Jenks. A live chicken will be ‘resident’ in the space.
The artist talk is free but booking is required: please follow the link below for tickets: http://whisper-residency-artists-talk.eventbrite.com/
The tours are free and running as part of the open studio as follows:
9 Dec – 7pm 10 Dec – 1.15pm and 3.30pm 11 Dec – 1.15pm
Special thanks to Tom Jenks and Leftfield, School of Art & Design, University of Salford www.salfordleftfield.co.uk for their support.
Philip Davenport reviews * by Tom Jenks
“There’s no sense of an overarching schema, no symphony, no grand homophonic ending. This is channel-hopping faster than eye or ear, driven by panic and punctuated with nervous jokes. In the tone of it, I’m reminded of nobody so much as neurotic old Brit comedians, Kenneth Williams or Hancock, the weirdness of their emotional hygiene, the horror at the approach of their ogres. Held in the throat of the poem is Ken Williams’s skreeking laugh, Hancock’s tussle with the melancholy of each bloodied day.”
Read it at Intercapillary Space, here.
* is published by if p then q.
this work im doin i dont kno what it is
this work im doin i dont kno what it is: poems for the eye, exhibited and hidden in the Henry Moore Institute Library by Philip Davenport
Philip Davenport’s poems insist on the importance of reading, but not as stiffness, or adherence to tradition – the opposite – the emphasis is on a kind of wayward thoughtfulness and imaginative investment. Davenport is conscious of his work neither being sacrosanct nor easily-absorbed signage. He carefully adds words up – omissions, divisions, extensions and provoking grammatical errors are as calculated as metric verse – and themes are both flashed cryptically between the text and conducted so as to cast a shadow over the whole, as if one needs to be at once at a distance and right inside the poems.
Spreadsheets of Light, Davenport’s most recent project, is debuted in this exhibition. These are poems as spreadsheets, with words substituting numbers. They present moral dilemmas as accountancy – war crimes, celebrity death, or the act of shopping – the impossible necessity of adding up atrocities and banality to come up with an adequate answer. Each spreadsheet is accompanied by what Davenport describes as a “word-abacus” – sculptural works whose dual role as poem and counting instrument reinforces the importance of form in these works. So, dozens of broken eggshells become symbols for smashed skulls; a poem is inscribed within these fragments. Davenport wants his poems to interfere with our expectations of the library space, yet their dual visual/literal nature also harmonises with the sculptural research setting.
Heart Shape Pornography is ‘found text’ written onto apples; extracted from pornographic material by cutting out a heart-shaped cross-section, and reproduced on an object itself heavily symbolic, with the sometimes prosaic, sometimes prurient, words literally on the flesh of the fruit. This fracturing of original text is continued in the Imaginary Missing People – made by collaging missing person’s notices with text from Davenport’s diary. The missing people are bookmarks hidden between pages at HMI library. Unexplained breaks suffered in personal narratives are a dark contrast to the minutely-researched histories of sculptors.
On 5 May Philip Davenport will be a ‘reader in residence’ in the library – looking at work from the Institute’s Special Collections and pleased to answer any enquiries regarding his work.
Exhbition runs 27th April-7 June 2010
Henry Moore Institute
74 The Headrow
Leeds
LS1 3AH
UK
Philip Davenport
More from the April 2009 reading with this film of Philip Davenport.
Thanks to Ed Moore for filming and transferring this video.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Click here to open the film in a bigger screen.
if p then q Issue 4 now available
if p then q issue 4 has finally arrived. To purchase go to THIS LINK
This is the last issue of the magazine and is packed full of all your favourites:
- Caroline Bergvall – Cash for Questions and poem
- Allen Fisher – 60 Second Interview and poems
- Lucy Harvest Clarke – What’s in my Fridge and poems
- Richard Makin – The Writer’s Room and poems
- Joy as Tiresome Vandalism – Summer Sizzlers
- Scott Thurston on Stuart Calton and Ira Lightman
Also poems by:
- Charles Bernstein
- Philip Davenport
- Ray DiPalma
- Andrew Shelley
Allen Fisher – Proposals (pdf Sample) – HIT THIS LINK
Allen Fisher video version of 60 Second interview below
otherroom.org 