Issue 10 out now, featuring:
The new ebook from Argotist Ebooks is Commentaries on Bob Cobbing by Lawrence Upton. Available free here:
“Oulipians are into literary bondage. Their fetish is predicated on the notion that writing is always constrained by something, be it simply time or language itself. The solution, in their view, is not to try, quixotically, to abolish constraints, but to acknowledge their presence, and embrace them proactively.”
Andrew Gallix, writing in The Guardian.
Great writer, great press, out now.
Malgras|Naudet, Crusader Mill, 66-72 Chapeltown Street, Manchester, M1 2WH.
Opening / Sculpture with Performances
Friday 19th July 2013
6 – 9pm
Sculpture Post – Performances
20th – 21st July 2013
12 – 6pm
O X O X O X O X O X O X O X O
Malgras|Naudet is pleased to present, The First Oxo Conference, curated by gallery member, Daniel Fogarty, as part of our summer 2013 programme, feat. Patrick Coyle, Tom Jenks, Holly Pester and Mark Reid.
Using the word ‘Oxo’ as a tool to look at language (objectively?), and the context of conferences as a format of presentation, ‘The First Oxo Conference’ is an evening of performances, and a weekend of what remains of their sculptural backdrop, that in one way or another relate to the word ‘Oxo’ and its many attributes both formally and linguistically.
The conference is hinged on ‘Oxo’; its physical suggestion of a rudimentary face (two eyes and a nose), its reading as an algorithm, a game of noughts and crosses, a set of orifices where food goes in and shit comes out, an equation or a brand name for a beef or vegetable extract. Throughout the evening the word ‘Oxo’ will be used as a clothes-horse, a device on which to hang a range of new and existing performance works by Patrick Coyle, Tom Jenks, Holly Pester and Mark Reid. Taking the format of a conference (after all, is an exhibition not too static and a meeting not too informal?), the evening brings together a range of performers whose work approaches language from a formal and / or potentially skewed perspective. There is an ‘Oxo’ Tower that looms over all of us, and not just as a backdrop to the Thames.
The speakers have been invited by Daniel Fogarty to perform in front of his vision of an ‘Oxo’ backdrop (…not the Tower), a new sculptural work by Fogarty consisting of a large sheet of hand-dyed material covered in the letters ‘o’ and ‘x’ falling in and out of formation, spanning the width of the gallery. The sculpture sits awkwardly between a nomadic tent and a promotional stand functioning as a backdrop, a temporary piece of architecture, against which the conference’s performances take place. Constructed with the potential for it to be flat-packed and moved from venue to venue, conference to conference, the sculpture / backdrop aims to act as a part of the performance / conference as much as a wall would. It is a passive agent, something like a prompt, prop or post-match analysis backdrop (with great bouncebackability), brought in and out of audience and gallery perspective with a range of text and performance-based works.
The weekend aims to point a finger (pick your ‘Oxo’ expression to match now), if only for a second, in the right or wrong direction, towards the temporary nature of graphical, spoken and written language.
www.danielfogarty.co.uk
www.malgrasnaudet.tumblr.com
O X O X O X O X O X O X O X O
Notes to Editors.
Daniel Fogarty is a Manchester-based artist whose current project is Another Television Ident, presented by VINYL : SITE, Birmingham. Past shows include IDENTS, Cornerhouse, Manchester; Held, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool; The Manchester Contemporary, Manchester. Please contact Helen Collett at malgrasnaudet@gmail.com for further information.
Membership.
To find out more about Malgras|Naudet and become a member, please visitwww.malgrasnaudet.tumblr.com/membership.
Films from the launch of Gareth Twose’s debut collection Top Ten Tyres, published by The Red Ceilings Press, are now online, with readings by Gareth, Richard Barrett and Rachel Sills, all below:
Gareth Twose, pt. 1
Rachel Sills
Richard Barrett
Gareth Twose, pt. 2
2nd edition now available from Stranger Press.
Films from the first night of SJ Fowler’s Enemies exhibition and associated series of events at the Hardy Tree Gallery, London, are now online, including the above by David Kelly and Dylan Nyoukis. Full list below.
Other Room reader Nick Thurston has two new projects: Of the Subcontract, Or Principles of Poetic Right, “a collection of poems about computational capitalism, each of which was written by an underpaid worker subcontracted through Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk service”, and Pretty Brutal Library, “a temporary public reference library, produced as an artwork in the format of a solo gallery show”, opening in at & Model gallery in Leeds on 25th July.
Out now on Erbacce Press.
Some New Growth at the Temple or Lobe, by Rosa van Hensbergen, is now available from Critical Documents for £4/€6/$9.
http://plantarchy.us/somenewgrowth.html
*
A string made function unchanges
by damp. It hears the train, but staid,
all knockerless. Tendrils aim at something,
gather meld. The red light losing it rinses out
pimps with wet art, renovating in staged
ridicule, to throw an ‘if’ post
hoc. Another stumped cough and pass on.
In sixteen seven-line stanzas, Rosa van Hensbergen’s Some New Growth at the Temple or Lobe records the author’s introduction to life in Yokohama, Japan, where she travelled on a Harper-Wood Studentship to research and practice the art of Butoh. The poem inhabits those memories of the city’s professional sex life that were bombed out by a recent surge of gentrification, whitewashed like the skin of a Butoh dancer. “Wounds raw | but invisible.” Austere and voluptuous, Some New Growth is a poem drained of persona. Contradiction whips its tail as a typo amidst linguistic exactitude, as select prescriptions of starvation amidst a surplus of food. Social phantoms are painted into life and ordered to perform their way into unlit dead-ends through a coded language both private and historical.
The author writes: “Some New Growth was composed in November 2011, in a Koganecho room of a metre by a metre.[1] Its light was blinking red. At some point during composition, atmospheric pressure burst the bulb and turned the room into an installation. Red lights rinsed for Yokohama biennale. Dirts that got turned out that day breed themselves upon this sheet, in a Koganecho room squared twice over to sixteen stanzas.”
Some New Growth at the Temple or Lobe is Rosa van Hensbergen’s third book, following Inebriate Debris (Punch Press, 2011) and Buildings, a collaboration with John DeWitt (Tipped Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Snow, Hi Zero, Veer About, Half Circle, Anything, Anymore, Anywhere, and Friends.
Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre warmly welcomes Susana Gardner.
Susana will be reading in the gallery housing the exhibition Intellectual Tactility, curated by Holly Pester.
Tuesday 9 July, Peltz Room, (immediate left in the entrance to) 43 Gordon Square, London WC1, 7-9.
Free and all welcome!
Susana Gardner is the author of the full-length poetry collections HERSO (Black Radish Books, 2011) and [ LAPSED INSEL WEARY ] (The Tangent Press, 2008). Her third book, CADDISH, Black Radish Books, 2013 is just out. She has published several chapbooks, including Hyper-Phantasie Constructs (Dusie Kollektiv, 2010) and Herso (University of Theory and Memorabilia Press, 2009). Her poetry has appeared in many online and print publications including Jacket, How2, Puerto Del Sol, and Cambridge Literary Review among others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies, including 131.839 slög með bilum (131,839 keystrokes with spaces) (Ntamo, Finland, 2007) and NOT FOR MOTHERS ONLY: CONTEMPORARY POEMS ON CHILD-GETTING AND CHILD-REARING (Fence Books, United States, 2007). She lives in Zürich, Switzerland, where she also edits and curates the online poetics journal and experimental kollektiv press, Dusie. http://blackradishbooks.com/authors/susana-gardner/
Other room organiser and Other Room reader Nathan Thompson are involved in the following event:
Poetry Book Launch: Lucy Burnett, with Caroline Hawkridge, Nathan Thompson, Scott Thurston & Helen Tookey
To celebrate the launch of her first poetry collection, Leaf Graffiti (Northern House / Carcanet Press), Lucy Burnett will be joined by Caroline Hawkridge, Nathan Thompson, Scott Thurston & Helen Tookey for an eclectic night of poetry in the atmospheric surroundings of The Anthony Burgess Centre.
July 25th, 6.30pm, The International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Cambridge St, Manchester M1 5BY
FREE
Lucy Burnett’s first collection, Leaf Graffiti, was published by the Northern House imprint of Carcanet Press in April 2013. She has previously been published in magazines including Stand, Poetry Wales, Shadowtrain andnthposition. Lucy has just been appointed by the Arvon Foundation as Centre Director of The Hurst in Shropshire where she will take up position in the autumn; previously she taught Creative Writing at the Universities of Strathclyde and Salford, where she also completed her PhD.
Caroline Hawkridge wrote women’s health books before completing a MA in Creative Writing at MMU, where she was nominated for Faber New Poets. Currently, she is poet-in-residence at the National Aspergillosis Centre, University Hospital of South Manchester.
Nathan Thompson was born in Cornwall and studied music at the University of Exeter, where he subsequently lectured part time in musicology. He is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Salford, and lives in Hebden Bridge. His collections of poetry include the arboretum towards the beginning and The Visitor’s Guest from Shearsman, and pamphlets from Oystercatcher Press, Knives Forks & Spoons and Gratton Street Irregulars.
Scott Thurston’s books include Reverses Heart’s Reassembly (Veer, 2011), Of Being Circular (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2010) and three collections with Shearsman: Internal Rhyme (2010), Momentum (2008) and Hold (2006). He co-organises The Other Room poetry reading series in Manchester and co-edits the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. Scott has written widely on contemporary poetry and lectures at the University of Salford.
Helen Tookey is a poet, writer and editor currently living in Liverpool. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Poetry Wales,Poetry Review, PN Review, New Walk, New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011) and The Best British Poetry 2013 (Salt, forthcoming autumn 2013). Her first full-length collection Missel-Child is due from Carcanet in January 2014.
Veer 050 – Allen Fisher – Defaliliarising _______________ * (2nd edition)
Veer 051 – Martin Bakero – abjects
Burner Veer 012 – Doug Jones – Posts
Veer 052 – Catherine Hales – Feasible Strategems
Burner Veer 013 – David Ashford – XARAGMATA
Veer 053 – Karen Mac Cormack – AGAINST WHITE
Veer 054 – Carol Watts – Sun Dog
More at the Veer Books site.
New poems by Trevor Joyce, Sophie Robinson, Michael Kindellan, and Stephen Emmerson at James Cummins’ new site.
Dym. Occasional events selecting mediums and cramming them into one another.
Poets:
Music and Performance collaborations from and involving:
Rebeckah Davies, Ollie Evans, Dolly Dollycore, Ewa Justja, The Zero Map, Lora Pierre etc…
DJs…
Dolly Dollycore, Alan Hay.
Bees Mouth, Brighton/Hove. 12th July. 19:30
£5 waged.
£4 unwaged.
Sarah Crewe’s poems are deliberately resistant. flick/invicta raises the question: does a poetry which comes from outside, or which challenges, dominant ideology also need to come outside of normal syntax, to exceed normal registers? Does poetry need to challenge our modes of interpretation before it challenges anything else? Some of the poems in the pamphlet become so obfuscated as to resemble catalogues of private obsessions, and seem like the “secret code” mentioned in ‘bridge’. Others are, in context, remarkably conventional. But the best are hair-raising and subversive, breaking language up to “bring the vowels back” and “prise consonants/apart”.
Other Room reader Sarah Crewe’s flick/invicta reviewed by Charles Whalley at Sabotage.
Writing the queue. The queue as constraint upon poetic practice. The inhabiting of a public space for a predetermined length of time and writing in that public space. Considering: queuing as class occupation. Queuing as primary means by which the city is experienced. The redundancy of psychogeography? The development and rules of the queue. The queue as useful autobiographical metaphor?
As the next stage of his ongoing HOW QUEUES WORK project on Saturday 20th July Richard Barrett will occupy a place in the bus queue at the stop outside the Palace Hotel, opposite Cornerhouse, Manchester for exactly one hour between the times 14.30 and 15.30. During that time he will produce a text responding to the experience of queuing taking in the sights and sounds of the city available to him from his place in the queue and considering each of the points listed in the above paragraph. At 15.30 Richard will board the number 42 bus and leave.
Guiding text of this event will be Michel de Certeau’s the Practice of Everyday Life.
To take part – turn up.
The Deletionist is a concise system for automatically producing an erasure poem from any Web page. It systematically removes text to uncover poems, discovering a network of poems called “the Worl” within the World Wide Web. More here.
The next installment of the Enemies Project will be a two week exhibition of visual art & avant-garde poetry in collaboration at the Hardy Tree gallery (119 Pancras Road, London, NW1 1UN http://hardytreegallery.com) July 6th to 20th 2013, with the space open for viewing 12-6pm July 7th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and featuring seven events over the fortnight.
www.weareenemies.com supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Arts Council England.
otherroom.org 