When is a game a poem?
Via Ron Silliman.
Tom Jenks
Matt Dalby – Canal
Other Room favourite Matt Dalby’s project to produce a CD of sound poetry a month rolls on, with August’s instalment now available. It features four tracks, Tread, Decay, Shiver and Gnaw and is available from Matt’s own website.
Icon – Call for Contributions
“We are currently soliciting contributions for the next edition of the next issue of Stimulus Respond, called Icon.
Contributions might be literally or abstractly related to Icon, and we encourage, as always, creative and experimental approaches to the theme. In congruence with Stimulus Respond’s undisciplined approach, we welcome submissions from new and established contributors from within, between, and beyond such fields as cultural studies, anthropology, literary criticism, fashion, creative writing, politics, visual cultures, architecture, theatre, film and screen studies, sociology, media and communications and philosophy.
Fashion editorials and photography should be sent as low resolution jpegs including credits where necessary. The deadline for expressions of interest is 4 September, with the final deadline being 25 September.
This issue we are working with guest editors Phil Sawdon and Marsha Meskimmon. Potential contributors to the Literature section are to send an abstract of 200-300 words and an indication of the anticipated word length of the final article (within the parameters of 1000-4000 words) by 4 September. Authors of successful abstract submissions will be required to submit the final piece by 18 September and to be available to make any minor corrections by Friday 25 September.”
Charles Olson – The Kingfishers
A feast for the ears via Penn Sound and Ron Silliman.
Strretcake 7 open for submissions
From Nikki and Trini at Streetcake:
We are also still looking for contributions to our COMBO COMPOSITION! It’s going to be fun, as long as people get involved. Show us your inventiveness and we can celebrate it! (No one will know who you are!)
In the vein of strange combination words like ‘streetcake’, we have decided to open up to suggestions from our witty fans.
This is what you have to do:
1) Reply to this email OR
2) be a fan on either Facebook or follow us on Twitter
3) Add your strange combo ideas to either OR email them back
4) We will collate all of them and make a strange tribute page to our fans in the next issue!!
One to inspire you: stingsilence
We look forward to your input!
cris cheek’s part: short life housing
Published by The Gig, 2009, 259pp. The most substantial collection to date of cris cheek’s ‘poems performing thematic extraction’: mud (and fluff), fogs, squat, broom sleigh, plain speaking yet, canning town chronicles, short life housing: texts begun in the 1980s & ’90s and worked through into the 2000s.
£17 + £2.24 UK postage. Payment by cheque or PayPal.
Orders to a.halsey@westhousebooks.co.uk
or West House Books, 40 Crescent Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield S7 1HN
‘is your tongue a glom / weapon that stains?’ cris cheek is the Kepler of Chisenhale Dance Space. After a century of developments in poetic form best understood as a series of metaphors for transcribed speech, cheek’s poetry often is transcribed speech, throwing shapes on the page that pay homage to (and lay the ghosts of) all the dead metaphors. As in Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, the speech in cheek’s work functions as something like echolocation: its reflections (on him and in us) mapping out an ever more complex and multifocal shape for the public sphere, ‘where others fear to / t / read’. Peter Manson
‘For all its thickness, unanticipated moves, visual beauty, and playful language acrobatics, the poetry of part: short life housing consistently retains the edge of serious critique. There are few poets as attuned to the sounds and ambient fogs of everyday life as cris cheek, yet his record is tuned and sharply turned toward the reimagining of social knowledge. This volume is a generous move towards the full representation of cheek’s crucial project.’ Carla Harryman
‘Finally a good and rich span of writings from cris cheek. Here’s an artist and writer whose work has always taken up active tenancy of the languages and the streets of urban living, recording them and composing them back into the dense abstract neighbourhoods of his pieces. With this careful selection, cris cheek reminds us that he is a Londoner and as such is inhabited by Dickens’ dark maze of industrial streets as by mind-altering years of activist art lodgings, smoggy thoughtful wanderings or the eerie shock of the thatcherite city. That’s at least two hundred years of grime, greed and energy you’ll find distilled in the cellular lines and ink splashes of this great volume.’ Caroline Bergvall
POETRY SCENE: CURRENT DIFFICULTIES
“Poets have a poor public image, and make very little money. The problems are their self-centred attitudes, suspect reviewing, commercialization of the book trade, timidity in academia, the barbarism of literary theory, and their own ceaseless production of very indifferent work.” (www.textetc.com)
Discuss.
The Red Ceilings
“We are now inviting submissions for inclusion on the Red Ceilings. All we ask is that we like your work and that it is inventive, intriguing and unusual. Send your work in either the body of an email or an attachment to theredceilings@googlemail.com”
Poetry Wales
The summer issue of Poetry Wales features:
Lee Harwood’s memories of Frank O’Hara
New poetry from Slovenia
Angela Carr in dialogue with Samantha Wynne Rhydderch
Matthew Jarvis on Wales in the 90s
Reviews of John Wilkinson, Tim Atkins, Pascale Petit, Sheenagh Pugh, John Goodby, Steve Griffiths, Sarah Corbett, Meirion Jordan and Myrddin ap Dafydd, plus Peter Barry on Complicities by Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin and Origins of the Underground by Andrew Duncan.
Contributing poets include Robert Sheppard, Vahni Capildeo, David Foster-Morgan, Ian Seed, Angela Carr, Richard Gwyn and many more.
Call for submissions:
A special issue in 2010 will focus on poetry and the visual. Submissions of poems drawing on this relationship, as well as texts that incorporate visual elements, are welcome with SAE by December 1st 2009.
Editorial address: Zoë Skoulding, Poetry Wales, School of English, Bangor University, Gwynedd LL57 2DG, Wales.
To subscribe (£20 for 4 issues UK) or buy a single copy (£5.50), visit http://www.seren-books.com/poetry-wales or send a cheque to: Poetry Wales Press Ltd., 57 Nolton St, Bridgend, CF31 3AE, Wales.
Openned
The Other Room 10 – more visual evidence
Thanks to David Andrew for these photos, which you can view via Flickr here.
The Other Room: we never close
It’s a mere 6o days until the next Other Room on October 7th, so you really should start preparing. Why not get acquainted with the work of Michael Haslam, who will be one of the readers? Links to Crag Dworkin, the other October reader, coming soon.
Michael Haslam’s homepage here.
The Other Room 10 – aftermath
Sean Bonney and Frances Kruk gave us a magnificent evening on 5th August. Tony Trehy‘s photograph of Sean and Frances above.
Richard Barrett has posted more photographs here.
Matt Dalby has reviewed the evening and you can read it here.
Alex Davies recorded the first half and you can listen to that here.
Thanks to all for these resources and thank you again to Sean, Frances and everyone who came along.
Poetext
“Devoted to Poetic form – Inspired by Modernity.” Check out this new txt based project.
Poetry and practice
“There’s no creativity, there’s just decisions.” — Kenneth Goldsmith
“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” — T.S. Eliot
“All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” — Wordsworth
“Nor till the poets among us … can present … ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them,’ / shall we have / it.” — Marianne Moore
“Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun.” — Gertrude Stein
You can vote for one of these, should you be so inclined, at readwritepoem.
Poetry as sound, poetry for the page.
“The sound of the words spoken aloud is itself the meaning, just as the sound of the notes played on the proper instruments is the meaning of any piece of music.” Basil Bunting.
Silliman has things to say.
The Commons set 3
Sean Bonney has started to post the next series of The Commons on his website. For those of you yet to check out this work, you can download set 2 free of charge off the Openned website.
Via Openned.
Sean will be reading at The Other Room this Wednesday at 7PM, with Frances Kruk.
Diverse Deeds
Peter Philpott’s renowned Sundays at the Oto reading series has been reborn as Diverse Deeds. This from Peter via the Brit-Irish poets list:
“I am pleased to announce that the poetry and music reading and performance series Sundays at the Oto will be reborn from autumn onwards as Diverse Deeds, held still at Cafe Oto (18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London E8 3DL), but on evenings, mainly it is hoped Thursday or Wednesday, approximately once a month. The first event will have as poets John James and Sean Bonney, on September 24th. Music is yet to be arranged, but will be an element.
The programme for the rest of the year is now being set up. The specific dates will need to be negotiated with Cafe Oto, and balanced against other events in London, but the event is not tied to a repeated day in the month. If anyone from outside London, indeed from outside UK, who might wish to read or perform, suggests dates when they will be In London, I can see what can be arranged. Similarly I would be interested in considering any suggestions by List Members as to performers (poetry read or performed, music, multimedia etc), especially where poets and musicians are working together.
A MySpace page is being set up, and a Facebook group. Details will be given on http://www.asifyourlife.blogspot.com. It is planned to increase the level of publicity from that of Sundays at the O, to attract not just the cognoscenti (who I hope will carry on flocking to sunny Dalston), but a wide range of interested people.”
The real business of poetry, meanwhile, goes on under the radar
“Just as one thinks that poetry is on the rise, one reads the list of Forward Prize nominations and starts to despair again.” Steven Waling.
New title on Knives, Forks and Spoons
The fourth title on Richard Barrett’s Knives, Forks and Spoons imprint will be UDUN DUNKED UHUH by Josh Stanley. More information on Richard’s blog.
otherroom.org 