The Other Room Anthology 2012/13 is out now and features work from Linda Black; Paula Claire; Rebecca Cremin; Nikolai Duffy; Patricia Farrell; Clive Fencott; David Gaffney; Peter Jaeger; Tom Jenks, Chris McCabe and Sophie Herxheimer; Nathan Jones; Frank Kuppner; Helmut Lemke; Ira Lightman; Tony Lopez; Alec Newman; Ryan Ormonde; Nat Raha; Elena Rivera; seekers of lice; Robert Sheppard; Marcus Slease; Hazel Smith. Click here to buy a copy.
Contributor copies are on their way to all concerned.
Number 3 in the visual poetry broadsheet series edited by Antonio Claudio Carvahlo is curated by Chris McCabe and features the work of Geraldine Monk, Tom Jenks, Pascal O’Loughlin, Sam Winston, Simon Barraclough and Victoria Bean.
They can be bought at Paul Browns bookshop in Brighton (Studio Bookshop, 68 St. James’ Street, Brighton, BN2 1PJ, tel. 01273b691253, e-mail studiobookshop@btconnect.com) or directly from Antonio at poetry@unit4art.com.
15th April, 6.45-9pm, at Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB.
The latest publications from Like This Press are two new collaborations by SJ Fowler with Ben Morris and David Kelly, the Estates of Westeros and Gilles de Rais. Each box contains 34 loose-leafed A5 postcards, blending text and image.
The Estates of Westeros is where avant garde poetry meets avant garde illustration. Whether perception or reality, housing estates are environments of occlusion, claustrophobia and damage, and poetry about them has a responsibility to reflect this complexity and intensity in its tone and form. The Estates of Westeros is a meditation on this living space through the universe of George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones, and where Gilles de Rais explores the absurdity of mythmaking in that which once was real, the Estates … explores the grinding realism at the heart of the fantastical.
In Gilles de Rais – an interchangeable narrative reflection on the life and legend of Gilles de Rais – this fusion of avant garde poetry and modernist line drawing aims to satirise and subvert the manner in which the monstrous myth surrounding such de Rais is echoed in our own time by Jimmy Saville. This is the disjunctive folklore of idiot’s resounding through the ages, from 15th century France to 21st century Britain.
Both books can be purchased for £9 direct from Like This Press: http://www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/sjfowlerandbenmorris
http://www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/sjfowleranddavidkelly
Special offer: buy the Estates of Westeros with Gilles de Rais together for £15 from here: http://www.likethispress.co.uk/specialoffers
the Estates of Westeros and Gilles de Rais launched as part of the Enemies of the North project on 30 March, at the Cornerhouse, Manchester. Both books will feature also in the group exhibition,Synesthesia, organised by Leap into the Void & held at Darnley Gallery, in Hackney, London, 12-19 April. For more information, see: http://leapintothevoid.co.uk/2013/03/26/synesthesia-15th-19th-april-2013/
SJ Fowler is a poet living in London. He’s published four collections of poetry including Fights (Veer books) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA press), and has collections forthcoming from Penned in the Margins and Eggbox publishing. He has been commissioned by the Tate, the London Sinfonietta and Mercy and has read and exhibited across Europe. He curates the Enemies project, supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, and Maintenant, a series of reading and interviews focusing on contemporary European poetics and collaboration. He is currently undertaking a Phd at the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck College and is an employee of the British Museum. www.sjfowlerpoetry.com / www.blutkitt.blogspot.com / www.weareenemies.com /
David Kelly is an artist working in the modernist tradition, currently with a centre of interest in collage. He has collaborated with and ‘visually translated’ numerous writers and poets including David Berridge, Daniele Pantano and SJ Fowler. His collaborative works have been exhibited at The Saison Poetry Library, The Horse Hospital, My Pixxa and Rich Mix. He received a degree from the University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies in 2007 and is now an employee of the British Museum.
Ben Morris is a London based experimental musician and artist. He has been active in the UK underground music scene since 2005 and is best known as 1 half of Chora, which he formed with Robert Lye in Sheffield. He has gigged and toured extensively throughout Europe receiving critical praise in The Wire magazine, on webzines such as The Quietus, Dusted and Foxy Digitalis and on radio stations like WFMU (America), VPRO (Holland) and BBC radio 3. Chora have a large multi-format back catalogue on labels like ChocolateMonk, Singing Knives Records and Winebox Press. He has played gigs with Sonic Youth, Wolf Eyes and Psychic TV as well as shows at Colour Out Of Space Festival, the ICA and at the Liverpool Biennial. He has received commissions from Mercy for collaborative sound performances with Steven Fowler. Other musical projects include: Le Drapeau Noir, Akke Phallus Duo and he records/performs solo as Lost Wax…
Did queuing have to be invented?
Or is queuing innate to us all?
Are there people who dont queue?
Who are they?
Why dont they queue?
A new sequence from Richard Barrrett, unfolding online.
Chrissy Williams will read at the next Other Room on Monday, 8th April at The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester. Her site has details of all of her published work, including the above pow broadside Murder She Wrote, plus links to her work online.
The other readers will be Patrick Coyle, Sarah Crewe and Rhys Trimble.
Out now, with work by Leanne Bridgewater, Iain Britton, Sarah Edwards, Stephen Hitchins and Andrew Nightingale.
In June 2013, Amy Cutler will be putting on a free public exhibition called Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig, a line by Scottish poet Sorley Maclean. It will be on the topic of forests, history, and memory, and will range between natural history (specimens and found artefacts), social history (archival texts, photographs, and samples from museum collections), and art (book works, wood works, and installations). The exhibition will take place at a Grade 1 listed belfry in London (E2 9PA), which is also a community art gallery.
The project needs funds to ensure the safety and appropriate display and transport of the objects, which will allow the museums and artists to loan them. You can support the project via Kickstarter.
Birkbeck College, 18th May 2013, 10am-8pm.
General Invitation
This is a follow-up event to the Poetry and Revolution conference. The aim is to take discussion further and link it specifically to militant political action.
The format will be different: A one-day event with an on-going plenary session and a total of around 30 people attending. It will be organised as 2 round tables, each with six speakers presenting initial 5-10 minute stances, followed by discussion, with a view to reaching conclusions and decisions that relate to action, not simply to debate. We will aim to produce a document.
Questions/themes to be addressed
1. What is the situation in the UK now?
2. Poetry, violence, the law. How can our work meet the violence of capital? What is the specific violence of the situation? Can poetry have its own specific violence?
3. How does our relation to our work and the work of others become changed in militant action?
4. At what points in the class struggle can poetry intervene at this moment?
5. In what militant actions and situations can we intervene? In what ways? What is poetic thought in relation to struggle?
6. What types of agitprop should we be engaging in? See Benjamin’s ‘One Way Street’. Leafleting, propaganda? Directed to whom?
7. Would it be useful to organise ourselves? In what way? e.g. form a faction; produce agitprop material; create a website; produce collective statements for website, perhaps weekly.
Speakers
Justin Katko, Jennifer Cooke, Keston Sutherland, Sean Bonney, Stephen Watts, Harry Gilonis, Danny Hayward, Sam Walton, Zoe Sutherland, Will Rowe, Jow Lindsay, David Grundy
Thursday, April 4, 7:30pm. The Apple Tree Clerkenwell, 45 Mount Pleasant, London, WC1X 0AE. Three sound poets:
Rhys Trimble will perform at the next Other Room on Monday 8th April at The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester. For a flavour of this work, try this clip of Rhys at work with his bardic staff. You can also read a selection from his collection Kapita at the Knives, Forks and Spoons site. Rhys’ other publications include Skine, also Knives, Forks and Spoons, Trace Agents, published by Department Press, and mynydd, reviewed by Michael Peverett at “Intercapillary Space”.
The other readers will be Patrick Coyle, Sarah Crewe and Chrissy Williams.
Inaugural address as First Poet Laureate of the MoMA in New York, presented on 20th March 2013.
Since the beginning of his poetic career in the 1990s, derek beaulieu has created works that have challenged readers to understand in new ways the possibilities of poetry. With nine books currently to his credit, and many works appearing in chapbooks, broadsides, and magazines, beaulieu continues to push experimental poetry, both in Canada and internationally, in new directions. Please, No More Poetry is the first selected works of derek beaulieu.
As the publisher of first housepress and, more recently, No Press, beaulieu has continually highlighted the possibilities for experimental work in a variety of writing communities. His own work can be classified as visual poetry, as concrete poetry, as conceptual work, and beyond. His work is not to be read in any traditional sense, as it challenges the very idea of reading; rather, it may be understood as a practice that forces readers to reconsider what they think they know. As beaulieu continues to push himself in new directions, readers will appreciate the work that he has created to date, much of which has become unavailable in Canada.
With an introduction by Kit Dobson and an interview with derek beaulieu by Lori Emerson as an afterword, Please, No More Poetry offers readers an opportunity to gain access to a complex experimental poetic practice through thirty-five selected representative works.
7pm, Thursday, 28th March, Royal Holloway University of London, room F3, 2 Gower Street, London WC1B 3RA.
Out now on Like This press, Where Were You When the Stars Went Out? consists of a group of 10 poems in memory of the singer Jhonn Balance (of the group Coil), composed by applying a chance selection procedure derived from Jackson Mac Low to Rilke’s “Duino Elegies”, then treating the results of that process as a first draft to be edited, shaped, added to, deleted from, etc. Phil Davenport has commented how: ‘Nigel Wood allows himself to be a vessel of others’ voices, other modes of hearing. In this daring but subtle book he uses another human’s life as material for an experiment in both commemoration and forgetting. Where were you... is a scattered memorial for the musician Jhonn Balance, quite unlike the ‘lead graves’ and last words that are usually stacked up to make the obituary of a life. In fact, they frequently mock the ponderousness of death-speak and the gothic. But more intriguingly, as I read some of these pieces I have the sense that the lines have been somehow erased even as they’ve touched the surface of the page, they’re the gaps in narratives, the pieces of half-dusted thinking, the moments of lucidity that toppled. It’s a book that’s been lived rather than written, or, more fancifully, I suppose it’s a book that’s been ‘died’. Wood’s melodic transliterations of this other-space sing from from the page, they’re scores of what comes between – breathings-in and whiteout. This little book of un-ideas imprints on me deeply – and has done so from the first time I encountered it. The details are so sharp and so heavy: childhood’s illnesses evaporate across the inevitable scales to nowhere Poised to a nicety, Wood writes us into some impossible conjuring trick – a knife blade balancing atop a pebble. The delicacy of these moments is often vertiginous, unsettled. Jhonn Balance lived forcefully, embracing both the shitstorm and the big light. Where were you… somehow manages to employ the forces that impinge on living as components of composition. It’s as if horror and happiness, disappointment, ennui, forgetfulness, transcendence have become tools for shaping. And out of it all, something emerges that is brisk and full of marvelling.’
The next meeting of the Writers Forum is Saturday, March 30th, 2-4 pm at Madlab in Edge Street in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. Bring a poem by someone you like, then one of your own. Bring photocopies if possible.
Sarah Crewe will perform at The Other Room on April 8th at The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester. For a flavour of her work, watch this clip of Sarah performing at Manchester Poets for Pussy Riot on 2012. For more of her work, try her poems in Bone Orchard Poetry and Peony Moon, or samples from her recently published collection flick invicta at the Oystercatcher Press site.
The other readers will be Patrick Coyle, Rhys Trimble and Chrissy Williams.
THE DARK WOULD language art anthology
Launch at Whitechapel Gallery 11April, 7.30-9 pm
£4/3 (concs)
Join us in the Whitechapel Gallery, London, for the launch of a pioneering anthology of text artists and poets, with talks/readings by artist Simon Patterson and poets Caroline Bergvall and Tony Lopez.
THE DARK WOULD gathers work by over 100 contributors including some of the most noted artists and poets alive today: Richard Long, Jenny Holzer, Fiona Banner, Maggie O’ Sullivan, Tacita Dean, Tom Phillips, Tom Raworth, Nja Mahdaoui, Lawrence Weiner, Susan Hiller, Tsang Kin-Wah, Charles Bernstein and many, many more.
This is a moment in time when poets and many artists share the same primary material: language. Conceptual art, vispo, text art, outsider art, conceptual poetry, flarf, concrete poetry, live art, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, sound scores… THE DARK WOULD is a compelling document of now, alchemising text into art into text.
To order tickets go here.
THE DARK WOULD comes in two volumes, one paper and one virtual, sold both together for £29.99, published by Apple Pie Editions.
otherroom.org 