Tom Jenks

The Other Room reviewed in Corridor 8

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“When a poetry evening attracts as varied an audience as this, aged from twenty-odd to fifty-something, and with latecomers crowding in at the back, you know something interesting is going on. The Other Room is free, and held in the marvellous wood-panelled, high-ceilinged performance space at the Castle Hotel on Oldham Street, Manchester, so its location is ideal. But the surprise lies in the number of poets who have so far taken part, and the health of the stylistic field it specialises in, which is defined as “experimental”.”

Read more of this review by Bob Dickinson of our November event featuring Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery and Claire Potter at the Corridor 8 site.

Kakania III

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The reverberations of the intellectual, artistic and creative tumult of the end of the Habsburg era are often evoked by contemporaries in the myriad of fields that the period profoundly changed, if not founded. The purpose of the Kakania project – over 4 events, over two dozen new commissions, over 4 locales, 4 publications, a vast array of artists – is not just to evoke that era, but to envelope it, to transpose it. To relive it in new colours. New artists making new work, paying their debt to that remarkable period of Austrian history in the writing, performance and artworks they are making, acknowledging that debt by being faithful to the methods and modes of the now.

The Horse Hospital, London,  Thursday 19th February.

Caroline Bergvall on Gustav Klimt
Martin Bakero on Arnold Schoenberg
Colin Herd on Oskar Kokoschka
Marcus Slease on Max Kurzweil
Damir Sodan on Gustav Mahler
Joerg Zemmler on Karl Kraus
Stephen Emmerson on Rainer Maria Rilke

Liverpool Camarade

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7.30pm, Wednesday 18th February
Upstairs at the Fly in the Loaf

13 Hardman Street, Liverpool, Merseyside L1 9AS

Free Entry
Pairings to include…

Tom Jenks & SJ Fowler (launching 1000 Proverbs)

Robert Sheppard & The European Union of Imaginary Authors

Scott Thurston & Steve Boyland

James Byrne & Sandeep Parmar

Patricia Farrell & Joanne Ashcroft

Steve Van Hagen & Michael Egan

Lindsey Holland & Andrew Oldham

Elio Lomas & Luke Thurogood

Hosts: SJ Fowler Fowler and James Byrne

Kakania at the Freud Museum

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The second in this series of performances where contemporary artists and poets presenting original commissions on the life and work of a figure of Habsburg Vienna is on Thursday, January 22nd, 7PM, at the Freud Museum, London. The lineup is as follows:

Emily Berry on Sigmund Freud
Esther Strauss on Anna Freud
Tom Jenks on Otto Gross
Jeff Hilson on Ludwig Wittgenstein
Phil Minton on Carl Jung

More at the Kakania site.

 

Robert Sheppard reviews Lee Harwood

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“A gatherer of fragments, Harwood’s writing is a mode of slow accretion, of building blocks of poetry (and prose), and presenting them in relationship with others, to allow them to resonate with one another. We think of collage as a technique of rip and tear, shuffle and paste, fix and finish, but for Harwood it is more like a slow game of chess.”

Robert Sheppard on Lee Harwood’s The Orchid Boat, online now at Stride.

Sandeep Parmar: Eidolon

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Other Room reader Sandeep Parmar launches her second collection, Eidolon, on Tuesday 20 January 2015, 7:30pm, Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH. The event is part of the Shearsman reading series and also features Timothy Adès (reading translations of Alberto Arvelo Torrealba) and Peter Robinson.

Blackbox Manifold 13

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Astrid Alben, Andre Bagoo, Kate Behrens, Adam Crothers, Claire Crowther, E.G. Cunningham, James Dufficy, Allen Fisher, Geoff Gilbert, Philip Hammial, Alec Hershmann, Vladimir Lucien, Colin Lee Marshall, Karthika Naïr, Oscar Oswald, Gareth Reeves, Steve Sawyer, Kerrin Sharpe, Dave Shortt, Hannah Silva, Alexandra Strnad and Helen Tookey, with reviews of Geffrey Hill by Karl O’Hanlon and of new translation work by Adam Piette. Available here.

The Wolf

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An exclusive interview with Jerome Rothenberg by Ariel Resnikoff. Reviews of Geoffrey Hill, Carol Watts, D.S. Marriott and SJ Fowler. Robert Sheppard on The Meaning of Form in the Work of Christopher Middleton. The Wolf Artist in Residence: Lenka Ðorojevic introduced by Simona Žvanut. Poems from Chris McCabe, Manoel de Barros, John James, Jana Bodnárová, Alvin Pang and much more in issue 31, here.

Tripwire 8

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Tripwire 8, a special issue on Cities & Cultural Poetics, is now available.

Featuring 240 pages of work from Anne Boyer, Cecily Nicholson, Marie Buck, DH, Amy Balkin, Kaia Sand & Daniela Molnar, Ryan Eckes, Kim Hyesoon, Zarina, Scott Sørli, Michael Woods, Lucky Pierre, Grupo de Arte Callejero (trans. MR translation collective), Jonas Staal & Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Emma Cocker, Nancy Popp, Gonzalo Millan (trans. Annegret Nill), Dambudzo Marechera, Lucy Parsons, and a special feature from Oakland, featuring Oki Sogumi, Jill Richards, Lara Durback, Wendy Trevino, Joshua Clover, Mayakov+sky Platform, Jasper Bernes, Emji Spero, Kate Robinson, and more.

Maintenant! (an International Poetry Course)

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Five sessions; five great, European avant-gardes. Explore contemporary innovations in European poetry with British vanguardist S J Fowler, and discover how their remarkable explorations in the written word often compliment, rather than antagonise, more formal writing practice. A course stressing the contemporary, Maintenant! will introduce 5 great poetic movements that will springboard you into new writing techniques, stressing the possibility amidst the history. Covering Oulipo, Austrian modernism, Concrete poetry, CoBra and the British poetry revival, this course – with the energy, dynamism and invention of the movements it explores – will enrich anyone’s poetry horizons. More at the Poetry School website.

Centrifugal – contemporary poetry from Dublin & Guadalajara

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7 poets from Dublin and 7 from Guadalajara exchange selections of their work in pairs and render the work of their partner poet in the opposite language. The emphasis is on re-interpretation rather than traditional translation: the poems become new in the hands of the partner poet while bearing the poetic core of the original.

Centrifugal investigates the multiple possibilities of meaning released through the transfer of texts between languages. The poets’ responses range from rewrites to deliberate mistranslations to dialogues with the originals to entirely new poems. Some make use of a near native-level knowledge of the opposite language, and some require literal translations of the source texts; others resort to dictionaries, web searches or Google Translate.

The writing presented in Centrifugal “strays from the centre, away from the main stream of how poetry and translation are expected to behave”. In addition to providing a record of the work of some of the outstanding poets currently writing in the two cities, this book stands as a significant contribution to the exploration of the relationships between language, geography, identity and poetry.

Featuring:

Alan Jude Moore & Xitlálitil Rodríguez
Anamaría Crowe Serrano & Mónica Nepote
Catherine Walsh & Laura Solórzano
Christodoulos Makris & Luis Eduardo García
John Kearns & José Eugenio Sánchez
Kimberly Campanello & Ángel Ortuño
Kit Fryatt & Ricardo Castillo

For more information, review copies etc please email Christodoulos Makris on akismakris71(at)yahoo(dot)com