Tom Jenks

Robert Sheppard: Words Out of Time

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Words Out of Time deforms and reforms a story of Sheppard’s life as an othering, an ‘autrebiography’, in modes that include what he calls ‘unwriting’, working through and transforming diaries and journals. The Given tells it in four different ways, from a litany of what hasn’t been remembered, to an alphabetical disfigurement of its features. Arrival invents a demonic sibling, generated from the diaries, restlessly inhabiting lyrics, a short story, an essay and footnotes. In When Sheppard goes conceptual with ‘With’, while ‘Words’ weaves abandoned (found) texts to shake up this history; ‘Work’ distends temporality, reverses standard autobiography’s fascination with origins, slows down time to show how work works its way into a life. Out now on Knives Forks and Spoons.

(O) by Sophie Mayer

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Sophie Mayer’s fourth published poetry collection, (O), is a bittersweet lovesong to zombies, tattoos, lovers and sisters, Katniss and Pussy Riot, Artemis and suffragists. In three parts – I DO, I UNDO, I REDO – the poet undoes herself and all around her in a cycle that takes her back to the start as it comes to an end. Spirited, politicised, contemporary and Classical, these poems bring a poetic voice to the women that have lived in the cracks of history. In her own words: “Nothing – and everything – is sacred in this new cosmogony, beginning again with O.” Published by Arc.

Speaking Parts

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Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, London, E1 7LS. 16 to 24 May 2015. Open daily, 11am to 6pm.

Speaking Parts, a ten day exhibition framed by two weekends of performance, brings together artists who weave text and language – from poetic prose to the spoken word and scored voice – into the fabric of sculpture, film, painting and performance.

The works in the exhibition are for the most part ephemeral and portable, and depend on the input of the artist, collaborators and/or audience to be fully realised. Each piece has its own temporality, from one-off performance to intermittent activation.

During Speaking Parts, Raven Row will host Bob Cobbiiiiiiiiing Live, an evening celebrating the work of the great British concrete poet Bob Cobbing (1920-2002), with performances by Brian Catling, Paula Claire, Beth Collar, Hannah Silva and David Toop.

Artists in Speaking Parts are Brian Catling (b. 1948, UK), Michael Dean (b. 1977, UK), Natalie Häusler (b. 1983, Germany), Ewa Partum (b. 1945, Poland), Heather Phillipson (b. 1978, UK), Agnieszka Polska (b. 1985, Poland) and Giorgio Sadotti (b. 1955, UK). The exhibition is curated by Amy Budd, writer and Exhibitions Organiser, Raven Row.

The exhibition will open with a series of performances on Friday 15 May for which places must be reserved. Admission is free. Please book your places for this and the two other evenings of performance following the links below.

Please note Speaking Parts will be open daily from Saturday 16 to Sunday 24 May.

Performance Programme:

Friday 15 May, 6.30pm: Ewa Partum, Natalie Häusler, Giorgio Sadotti. Book here.

Wednesday 20 May, 6.30pm: Bob Cobbiiiiiiiiing Live with Brian Catling, Paula Claire, Beth Collar, Hannah Silva and David Toop. Book here.

Saturday 23 May, 6.30pm: Agnieszka Polska and David Bernstein, Brian Catling, Michael Dean, Giorgio Sadotti. Book here.

Gelynion: a Welsh Enemies project / Enemies Cymru

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Beginning on the 19th May through to 5th June 2015 2015
visiting Newport, Cardiff, Swansea, Aberystwyth, Bangor, Hay-on-Wye & London

Gelynion is an exploration of contemporary Welsh poetry through the potential of collaboration. Shining a light on the often overlooked contemporary Welsh avant-garde, and placing that work firmly beside more literary poetry and the Cynghanedd tradition, Gelynion aims to bring together communities of writers that might not otherwise collaborate, from all four corners of the country & beyond. Generously supported by the Arts Council of Wales & Poetry Wales, Gelynion will also produce these original collaborations in both of Wales’ languages.

Gelynion involves over 40 poets with a core group performing new collaborations each night throughout the tour, including Poetry Wales’s Nia Davies, Joe Dunthorne, Zoë Skoulding, Eurig Salisbury, SJ Fowler and Rhys Trimble. The core poets will tour these new pieces in rolling pairs throughout Wales and at each reading multiple poets from the local area and beyond are invited to create their own collaborations.

The tour begins in Newport on May 19th and visits Cardiff, Swansea, Aberystwyth, Bangor before a culminating premiere performance at the Hay-on-Wye festival on May 29th. Then the project will close for 2015 with a reading at the Rich Mix Arts Centre in London on June 5th.

Gelynion is co-curated by Nia Davies & SJ Fowler, and generously supported by Arts Council Wales, Poetry Wales & the Hay-on-Wye festival.

The Speaking Trumpet

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Edge Hill University writers at The Tate Liverpool. Saturday, May 16, 2015 from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM. A reading of surrealist and fantastical new writing, inspired by Leonora Carrington. Readers include Ailsa Cox, Claire Dean, James Byrne, Tom Jenks and Jenny Barrett. Free, but you can confirm a place here.

Make Perhaps This Out Sense of Can You

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A Free Symposium on Bob Cobbing. Chelsea College of Arts (Banqueting Suite). 10:00- 18:00, Thursday 21 May.

Make Perhaps This Out Sense of Can You contextualises Cobbing’s work as a concrete poet as well as looking at his legacy as an organiser. The day is built around concerns that continue to be relevant today, such as the value of artist-led publishing initiatives, archiving artist collections, and the intersections between art, poetry, literature and music. More details can be found at Robert Sheppard’s site.

The Other Room reviewed

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Thanks to all who came to our seventh birthday event on 30th April, which was, in the words, of Judy Gordon, a night of “meltdowns, anthropomorphic puzzles, and other surprises”. Thanks to Judy and Write Out Loud for this review, which you can read in full here.

A World Without Words

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A World Without Words is a project by writer and filmmaker Lotje Sodderland, in collaboration with poet and curator SJ Fowler and artist and material engineer Thomas Duggan.

Bringing together the most dynamic genre pioneers in neuroscience and sensory aesthetics, A World Without Words explores the nature of human language through a collaborative program of exhibitions, interactive events, and screenings in bespoke venues across London.

Language is considered perhaps the most characteristic ability of the human species, yet very little is known about it. When Lotje had an unprovoked brain hemorrhage, she woke to find a familiar stranger inhabiting her body, where her ‘self’ used to be. Unable to read, write, speak, or think coherently, she used this unique opportunity as a lens through which to explore the everyday assumptions of how we wield words to express ourselves, bringing a profoundly personal perspective to the contemporary Copernican revolution of neuroscience.

A World Without Words is the latest in Lotje’s body of work around visual perception and neurolinguistics, notable highlights being her Guardian feature All In My Mind and multiple award-winning documentary My Beautiful Broken Brain.

The first event is on May 6th 7.00pm – 10.00pm, Apiary Studios, 458 Hackney Road, London, E2 9EG. Entry is free. Space is limited so come early to get a spot.

Tim Allen – A New Geography of Romanticism

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“There is another England, a country not of Cameron, Farage and the house of Windsor, but of Lear and Carroll, Gasgoyne and Blake, a deeper, darker, stranger place. It is of this nation underground that Tim Allen is the cartographer. A New Geography of Romanticism stakes out this shadowy turf with prismatic, kaleidoscopic brilliance. Reading this book on another rainy afternoon in Albion is a beautifully startling experience, like finding a giant hailstone in the fireplace or a peacock perched on the sideboard. These poems are the potions of the maddest of scientists, a gift of sherbet lemons from the gods.” Tom Jenks.

Out now on The Red Ceilings Press.

Live Coding Alternatives Workshop call

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Call for position papers and performances as part of Critical Alternatives, 5th Decennial Aarhus Conference, 17 or 18 August 2015, Aarhus University, Denmark.

Organizers:
 Alan Blackwell, Reader in Interdisciplinary Design, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge (UK); Emma Cocker, Reader in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University (UK); Geoff Cox, Associate Professor, Participatory IT research centre, Aarhus University (DK)

Live Coding Alternatives is an interdisciplinary workshop (‘live laboratory’) for testing and exploring live coding as a creative, aesthetic and potentially political practice for constructing ‘critical alternatives’ within both computing and everyday life. The workshop explores this emergent field and aims to open up deeper critical questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. It is structured around live research practices of writing, presentation and performance, collaboratively interrogated through discussion, and the development of critical frameworks that reflect the live coding dynamic. Live Coding Alternatives emphasizes the relation of live coding to the cultivation of ‘alternative’, potentially subversive, ways of operating within contemporary culture. In addition the workshop explores the alternative possibilities offered by live coding practice as able in itself to generate epistemic claims through software development, improvised live performance and ‘artistic research’. The intention is not only to propose how live coding transforms code and coding practice but to investigate the transformational potential inherent within the process of live coding itself. We ask what possibilities for change and action does the practice of live coding suggest? What alternative ways of ‘being operative’ are evoked? We welcome analytical, theoretical and reflective papers from diverse disciplines but especially want to encourage expanded notions of live coding in the form of performances and alternative presentation modes.

Initial areas of interest might include:
* Live coding and performance writing, interplay of text and code, experimental notation practices
* Live coding, its transformative potential and politics
* Live coding, temporality and just-in-time production
* Live coding, alternative epistemologies and artistic research
* Live coding, subjectivity and ‘life’ coding
* Live coding and attribution in reputation economies
* Live coding as the persistent traces of interaction

Position papers will be circulated in advance. Working throughout the day, there will be a critical interlocutor and facilitator, helping excavate and elaborate key ideas connecting live coding to the cultivation of various ‘critical alternatives’. Results of the workshop will be published on the Live Coding Network website<http://www.livecodenetwork.org/&gt;.

Important dates:
Call goes live: 02 April
Proposals due: 20 May (email 300 word proposals to gcox@dac.au.dk)
Results made known: 31 May
Workshop: 17 or 18 August 2015, Aarhus

About Critical Alternatives: 1975-1985-1995-2005 — the decennial Aarhus conferences have traditionally been instrumental for setting new agendas for critically engaged thinking about information technology. The conference series is fundamentally interdisciplinary and emphasizes thinking that is firmly anchored in action, intervention, and scholarly critical practice. In 2015, we see critical alternatives in alignment with utopian principles—that is, the hope that things might not only be different but also radically better. At the same time, radically better alternatives don’t emerge out of nowhere: they emerged from contested analyses of the mundane present and demand both commitment and labor to work towards them. More information here .Critical Alternatives, 5th Decennial Aarhus Conference.

CAESURA #30: Third birthday

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17th April, 19:30.
The Artisan Bar, Edinburgh, EH7 5BQ.
Celebrating three years of exploring the recesses language and sound through poetry, music and art with a return to our auld haunt – upstairs at The Artisan on London Road.

The event will feature an avant radge poet, a Glasgow-based experimental writer, a performance from an actor-provocateur and some words and noise from a lanky jive merchant that is normally (perhaps mercifully) constrained to short bursts.

That is Calum Rodger, Katy Hastie, Jamie Scott Gordon and GS Smith.

w/ more to be announced!
CALUM RODGER

Calum Rodger is a Glasgow-based poet working online, on the page and in performance. His first pamphlet

‘Know Yr Stuff: Poems on Hedonism’ was published in 2014 by Tapsalteerie with limited edition booklet

Glasgow Flourishes (of a poem first performed at TEDxGlasgow) following later that year.

He runs live poetry night VERSE HEARSE with Stewart Sanderson, is currently finishing a PhD on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay at the University of Glasgow, and is a contributor to I ♥ E-Poetry and Glasgow Review of Books. Previous collaborators include artists, musicians, software developers, theatre directors, charities and a chef.

He likes limit-experiences, metaphysics and retro video games, and he blogs at All Real Culture Is Free.
-www.allrealcultureisfree.wordpress.com
KATY HASTIE

Katy Hastie is a new writer learning her stuff at Glasgow Uni.

She’ll do anything to get a laugh, cough, tear or a moment of your time: cut-ups, poems, short stories, flash fiction, radio drama and essays.

Places she’s tried not to waste that attention include: Rally and Broad, Fail Better, SubCity radio and Glasgow to Saturn.
JAMIE SCOTT GORDON

Jamie is a Scottish actor, working in film and theatre.

He enjoyed a busy 2014 making films in the UK and America. He looks forward to the release of five films in 2015.

He is currently co-writing his first feature for Hex Media and is in pre-production with his own short film.
GS SMITH

Edinburgh-native GS Smith is a writer and curator.

He has created word-filled egg filled installations in abandoned vaults, farcical pseudo-lectures on abnormal psychology and various collaborative pieces with poets, actors, artists and musicians. In May some of his poems will be turned into interactive computer games in a performance for European Literature Night.

He has curated two exhibitions of visual poetry – show&tell (2013) and Palimpcyst (2014) – and since 2012 he has run the reading series CAESURA.

Cemetery Romance

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Czech artist, writer and dramatist Miloslav Vojtíšek was joined by a series of contemporary British poets for a unique literary tour of the magnificent Kensal Green Cemetery. S.d.Ch. who has worked for many years as a grave digger will explain the art of exhumation, while other artists including Emily Berry, Alex MacDonald, James Davies & Tom Jenks presented their work each next to the grave of a famous figure (William Thackeray, Isambard Brunel, Harold Pinter, JG Ballard), throughout the beautiful Gothic surroundings of one of London’s magnificent seven cemeteries. More at the Enemies site.