Sat, 30 Jan 2016 4.00 PM – 6.00 PM Tickets: £3/2 – Bluecoat, School Lane, Liverpool

Myths of the Modern Woman – an afternoon of readings and discussion curated by Sandeep Parmar, academic, poet and author of The Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman. The event features contributions from poets Zoe Skoulding, Sara Crangle, Joanne Ashcroft, Robert Sheppard and artist Melissa Gordon.

Parmar has programmed Myths of the Modern Women in response to Loy’s writing and to Melissa Gordon’s enduring fascination with Loy’s play ‘Collision’ (1916). Gordon’s exhibition Fallible Space, an installation determined by the script of ‘Collision’ provides the backdrop for the afternoon. The event will be introduced by Sandeep Parmar followed by poetry readings by Skoulding, Crangle, Ashcroft and Sheppard. The readings will be followed by a round table discussion and drinks in the Bluecoat bar.

Mina Loy (1882-1966) is recognised today as one of the most innovative modernist poets, numbering Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Djuna Barnes and T.S. Eliot amongst her admirers.

About the Poets:

Robert Sheppard’s History or Sleep: Selected Poems has just been published by Shearsman, and showpieces work from the last 30 years. Last year he also published his ‘autrebiographies’ Words Out of Time and this yearThe Drop will appear from Oystercatcher. He is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University, and is also a critic of contemporary poetry.

Sara Crangle is a Reader in English at the University of Sussex. She edited Mina Loy’s unpublished short prose works for a volume titled Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (Dalkey Archive Press 2010). She has published writing on Loy’s associates Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and members of Dada, and is currently working on a book with the working title, Mina Loy: Anatomy of a Sentient Satirist (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press). She started her first book of poetry, Wild Ascending Lisp (Critical Documents 2008), whilst on a research trip to explore the Loy archive at Yale.

Zoë Skoulding is primarily a poet, though her work encompasses sound-based vocal performance, collaboration, translation, literary criticism, editing, and teaching creative writing. She lectures in the School of English at Bangor University, and has been Editor of the international quarterly Poetry Wales since 2008. Her recent collections of poems are The Museum of Disappearing Sounds (Seren, 2013), Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008), long-listed for Wales Book of the Year 2009, and The Mirror Trade (Seren, 2004). Her collaborative publications include Dark Wires with Ian Davidson (West House Books, 2007) and From Here, with Simonetta Moro (Dusie, 2008). She is a member of the collective Parking Non-Stop, whose CD Species Corridor, combining experimental soundscape with poetry and song, was released on the German label Klangbad in 2008. You Will Live in Your Own Cathedral is a multimedia soundscape, video and poetry performance with Alan Holmes that has been presented across Europe in several languages.

Joanne Ashcroft has had poems published in journals, pamphlets, and in The Other Room anthology 2015. Her pamphlet Maps and Love Songs for Mina Loy won the Poetry Wales Purple Moose 2012 and is published by Seren. Most recently she has a collaborative work with Patricia Farrell, Conversational Nuisance available as a zimZalla object. Several of her ‘Charm’ poems can be read in the current edition of The Wolf and in Litter (online). Joanne is currently a research student at Edge Hill University, studying ‘sound and transformation’ in the work of three contemporary innovative poets.