Thursday 13th March, 7.30 pm, Room 151, Malet Street Main Building, Birkbeck College, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7HX. Click here for a map link

The CPRC Birkbeck welcomes Robert Fitterman, Marc Atkins and Rod Mengham.

All welcome – free entry Featuring the launch of Robert Fitterman’s JUST ANOTHER SOFT MACHINE and Marc Atkins & Rod Mengham’s STILL moving (both new from Veer)
PLUSthe launch of Robert Fitterman’s No Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (new from Ugly Duckling Presse)
AND the launch of the U.S. edition of Robert Fitterman’s Holocaust Museum (new from Counterpath) (originally published by Veer in 2011)

JUST ANOTHER SOFT MACHINE
Veer Publication 059 [ISBN: 978-1-907088-66-7]A handbook of some ways contemporary poets use radical appropriation. The question is, how the meaning of anything readable changes when it’s moved into a new framing. Fitterman explores the terrain of quotation/conceptual writing.
A6 size. 34 pages. March 2014.STILL moving
Veer Publication 058 [ISBN: 978-1-907088-64-3]
’For Rod Mengham and Marc Atkins, cracking mirrors and counter-mirrors are not only a frontier between two worlds, they represent a systematic quest for desire, a haunted visual trope leaping towards an elsewhere as threatening as it is seducing, setting out to explore “the rear view of historical convergence”, carefully recording instances in which the conjunctions, collisions and chiaroscuro of memory and fantasy take us beyond the scope of the thinkable and the imaginable.’ (Michel Delville)
Design by Vaughan Oliver and Marc Atkins.A4 landscape size. 80 pages. Colour and B&W. March 2014.No Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself is book-length poem that loosely borrows the poetic form and sentiment of James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem. In my version, the articulations of sadness and loneliness are culled from online sources and carefully woven together through a single speaker. To some degree, I have realized the poem as an essay on contemporary poetics–an essay that aims to problematize and highlight the expanded fields of subjectivity, personal expression, the mediated self, and even verse form itself as it migrates from screen to page.
‘Holocaust Museum reframes the captions of holocaust photographs from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. These captions—without their photographic images—are arranged loosely in the order or narrative constructed by the museum. There are many purposes to this project but the genesis is in articulating a cultural shift from image to text. The subject, this particular holocaust, was chosen because the images are shared in our collective memory—by presenting only the text, the reader is, hopefully, consigned into a more complicit experience.’
Nick Thurston

Marc Atkins is an English artist, photographer, filmmaker and writer. Marc has lived and worked for many years in London, but has also spend extended periods of time in Rome, Detroit, New York, Warsaw and Paris. Previous publications include The Prism Walls (Contraband), Logic of the Stairwell (Shearsman), The Teratologists(panoptika), Thirteen (Do-Not Press), Warszawa [texts by T. Pióro & A. Sosnowski] (Wig-press), Faces of Mathematics (panoptika), and Liquid City [text by Iain Sinclair] (Reaktion). Atkins has presented his work and ideas on the image at venues such as the Royal Academy, Royal College of Art, UEL School of Architecture, Instytut Mikołowski, Poland, The Photographers Gallery, and the University of Liège.
Robert Fitterman is the author of 14 books of poetry including No Wait, Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (Ugly Duckling Press, 2014), Rob’s Word Shop (Ugly Duckling Press, forthcoming, 2015), Holocaust Museum (Counterpath, 2013, and Veer [London] 2012), now we are friends (Truck Books, 2010), Rob the Plagiarist (Roof Books, 2009), war, the musical (Subpress, 2006), and Notes On Conceptualisms, co-authored with Vanessa Place (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009). His long poemMetropolis, has been published in 4 separate volumes. He teaches writing and poetry at New York University and at the Bard College, Milton Avery School of Graduate Studies. His writing can be found at his website: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~rmf1/
Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature at Cambridge University and Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College, Cambridge. He has published monographs and edited collections of essays on nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, violence and avant-garde art, the 1940s, contemporary poetry; anthologiesAltered State: the New Polish Poetry [ed. Mengham, Pioro, Szymor] (2003), Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems [ed. Kinsella, Mengham](2005); poetry, includingUnsung: New and Selected Poems, (2001), Diving Tower (2006), Parleys and Skirmishes (2007), Bell Book (2012) and The Understory (2014). He has also curated numerous exhibitions, most recently ‘Sculpture in the Close 2013’ [Miroslaw Balka, Theaster Gates, Harland Miller, Damian Ortega, Doris Salcedo].