Storm and Golden Sky

FRIDAY 25th April, Zoe Skoulding and Keston Sutherland

Up the stairs (at the back of the barroom) at the Caledonia pub, Catharine Street, in the Georgian Quarter, Liverpool, £4, 7 pm spot-on start!
Keston Sutherland is the author of The Odes to TL61P, Stupefaction, Stress Position, Hot White Andy and other books, and lots of essays, many of them about Marx and poetry. He lives in Brighton, where he runs the Sussex Poetry Festival, and where he founded Brighton Left Unity. He co-edits Barque press.
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. 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.

Born of a Liverpool taste for variety and drama, ‘Storm and Golden Sky’ offers literary high style from across the poetic landscape. Programmed by a collective of Liverpool-based poets, Michael Egan, Nathan Jones, Robert Sheppard and Eleanor Rees.

Poetry and Protest

24 Aprilm 19:30. Rich Mix, 35 – 47 Bethnal Green Road, London, E1 6LA.

Join English PEN for a night of poetry, music and discussion on how literature and activism can come together. Featuring poets James Byrne, Sophie Mayer, Laila Sumpton, Aoife Mannix and Sonority Turner. Hosted by Shane Solanki.

The evening will also highlight PEN’s campaign for the release of imprisoned Camerooian poet Enoh Meyomese and celebrate the publication ‘Jail Verse’ a collection of his poems translated into English.

7.30pm Open-mic performances from Student PEN
8.00pm Panel discussion on How to be a literary activist with Sophie Mayer, Laila Sumpton and James Byrne.
9.00pm Performances from Sonority Turner and Aoife Mannix

Hidden Door films

Films from SJ Fowler’s Enemies event at the Hidden Door festival in Edinburgh are now online, including this performance from Jow Lindsay and Samantha Walton. Full list below:

Graeme Smith & Anthony Autumn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x178S_I8mS8
Daisy Lafarge & Anne Laure Coxam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKJRX-hTeXQ
Greg Thomas & Lila Matsumoto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7J2491JF-0
Ryan Van Winkle & Sarah Kelly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNI5bAl5R-8
nick-e melville & Ross Sutherland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3shpmr-hCKA
The Walking tour

 

I Love Roses When They’re Past Their Best

Edited by Harry Burke with poems by Rachael Allen, Jayinee Basu, Gabby Bess, Crispin Best, Harry Burke, Sophie Collins, Carina Finn, Cassandra Gillig, Francesca Lisette, Luna Miguel, Marianne Morris, Sam Riviere, Bunny Rogers, Guillermo Ruiz de Loizaga, Timothy Thornton & Vicki Tingle.

I Love Roses When They’re Past Their Best is an experimental poetry anthology which brings together the work of 16 young poets whose work has been influenced by the digital age.

Intercapillary Places: Mystery & Medicine

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, 14 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW. Thursday 10 April, 7 pm.

Three speakers will examine medical history and poetry, place and allegory. Tessa Whitehouse will focus on a literary exploration of the medical geography of Moorfields in East London into the 18th century; Fabian MacPherson will read poetry drawn from medical and scientific text and Edmund Hardy will speak on the relationship between alchemy, power and language.

Speakers:
Tessa Whitehouse is a lecturer in English at Queen Mary University of London. Her first book, The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent, 1720-1800 is contracted to Oxford University Press.

Fabian MacPherson is a poet based in London. His pamphlet ‘A Waspshire Lad’ was published by Crater Press (2012).

Edmund Hardy is a writer and publisher. His critical work on the history of poetry and dialectic Complex Crosses is forthcoming from Contraband Books. He co-edits the small press Capsule Editions who are dedicated to the essay form.

The Other Room anthology 6 – out now

Anthology front

We are delighted to announce the publication of our sixth anthology, featuring all of the performers at The Other Room over the past year: Richard Barrett; derek beaulieu; Mike Chavez-Dawson; cris cheek; Patrick Coyle; Sarah Crewe; Lewis Freedman; Harry Gilonis; Elizabeth James; Tom Jenks; Laurence Lane; Jo Langton; Sandeep Parmar; Holly Pester; Frances Presley; Gavin Selerie; Robert Sheppard; Rachel Smith; Chris Stephenson; Carolyn Thompson; Rhys Trimble; Chrissy Williams; Nigel Wood. Click HERE to buy a copy from within the UK, and HERE to buy a copy from elsewhere.

Beard of Bees 100th chapbook

To Cure Nature with Science is the 100th chapbook published by Eric Elshtain’s online imprint Beard of Bees. Written using poetry generating software Gnoetry, this chapbook is a treatment of the previous 99 Beard of Bees chapbooks:

“In an effort to honor the dual function of Beard of Bees Press, as publisher of machine, human-machine, and human poetries, editor Elshtain uploaded the each of the first 99 chapbooks in his Gnoetry engine and asked the machine to render the works, through its magic of statistical analysis and system of penalty/reward, into 100 fifteen-line stanzas, each line consisting of anywhere between five and ten syllables. Then, Elshtain and Beard of Bees factotums Rachel Burman and Shannon Frech pored over the material, looking for clues, hints, and threads. Breaking the material into rough thirds, each took a pile of stanzas home and made light to medium edits, finding arguments for changes on the punctuation, word, syntactical and grammatical level— sometimes, even on the poetical and historical levels.”

New from Oystercatcher

Scott Thurston: Figure Detached, Figure Impermanent

A series of trials set up like islands in a river – noticing where a current is viable even in concealment. A perfect will turns like a needle as a thread of disgust stitched through every day starts to come undone. You slip into the stream.

*

Michael Farrell: the thorn with the boy in its side

reading [ …] with the light on

after the escalators –

metaphors became metaph-

ors. ‘[ … ]’ [my translation.] & ‘ive always been a

rebel’. i survey

the experimental fencing. the word

‘poets’ in black, on pineapp-

le; the fuchsia in the freezer.

‘chasing’ a sound

down george st: a drag

queen with the name ‘fay doubt’.
THE LONELY SCOUT
‘moving away’ seems too obvious. youre in

the gardens, suddenly conf-

ronted by an expanse of sonnets.

they take your weight.

Sein und Werden: the Oulipo issue

Online now, featuring Norman Conquest, Matt Leyshon, Esther Greenleaf Murer, Hugo Vernier, Dominy Clements, Teri Lee Kline, Patrick Cosgrove, David McGroarty, W.C. Bamberger, Aja Bamberger, Martin Rose, Susan Oke, Allen Ashley, David Turnbull, Benjamin Robinson, Wayne Clements, Philip Terry, James Davies, Mark Lewis, Tom Jenks, Paolo Brito, Charlie Loudowl, Daniel Galef, John Shire, Dan Morey, Rachel Rodman, Dave Drayton.

Fjender films

Held on March 15th 2014, at the Rich mix arts centre in Shoreditch, London, Fjender (part of the SJ Fowler’s Enemies project) celebrated cutting edge avant garde poetry from Europe, centred around contemporary Danish poets. A selection of British poets were asked to write original works as commissions in response to the themes of Morten Sondergaard’s Wordpharmacy,  including Stephen Emmerson, above.

Whale Hunt

Poet and vangardist, SJ Fowler, strives to encounter and confront all disciplines in the poetic tradition. His latest work starts from a root of Norse mythology and carves a path through contemporary poetics and language construction.

Whale Hunt is a curated section of Fowler’s Vikings work and is published as an illustrated pamphlet by Annexe.

 

Wrogowie films

Wrogowie, organised by SJ Fowler, celebrated contemporary Polish poetry in collaboration with British poetry on February 8th 2014 at the Rich mix arts centre in London. Six pairs of poets premiered original collaborative works specifically for this event, including Marcus Slease and Grzegorz Wroblewski, above. Links to the other performances below.
Amy Cutler & Ula Chowaniec http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6LdC442EKk
Angus Sinclair & Laura Elliott http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrH3G34BQ_M
Francesca Listette & Joanna Rzadowska http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZukpdL6Cxk0
Philip Terry & Adam Zdrodowski http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHzymaGAgPQ

Hidden Door Festival

28 March – 5 April 2014
Market Street Vaults Edinburgh

Hidden Door – a not-for-profit independent festival for Edinburgh.

A one-off opportunity to occupy the forgotten vaults of Market Street.

80 visual artists, 50 live music acts, 40 film makers, 30 poets, 30 performers, 20 animators, 9 unique parties, 2 live music vaults, 2 bars, 1 theatre, 1 cinema, 1 secret music venue, 1 site, 1 chance.

24 Rediscovered vaults on Market Street Edinburgh unlocked for 9 days only, to showcase some of Scotland’s best breakthrough talent.