Tom Jenks

LIFE OF RILEY, by Samuel Solomon

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“In this series of red shouts, misremembered lyrics and culture skimmings, Samuel Solomon offers a poetics of conviction: language bumped and rigorous, tampered by gavels but still boisterous in ‘the shadow of our right’. ‘These are not tactics raised to principles. / Every good poem is a transitional demand’. Taken as a set of analects ‘in the interest of positions sometimes happy’, Solomon’s Life of Riley offers both a serious engagement with the ludicrous what-is and a flicker of its opposite: resisting eviction from public space, the territorialism of capital, and the plunge out of affect into the trap of concepts, these are poems to lean on.” – Andrea Brady

Out now from Bad Press.

Chris McCabe and Tom Jenks – A Preview

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Preview of July 19th 2012 performers Tom Jenks and Chris McCabe who will perform at Leeds Gallery, Munro House, Leeds, 7pm. Entry is free and we’d love to see you there. Other performers are Ryan Ormonde and Hazel Smith. Ryan Ormonde to follow. See blog entries below for Hazel Smith.

Click the link for PRESS RELEASE_LEEDS 2012

Tom Jenks and Chris McCabe are working for the third time on a collaboration commissioned by The Maintenant reading series.

Above is their current literary postcards project. More HERE

The second project HERE

And the first HERE

Chris McCabe

was born in Liverpool in 1977. His published books are The Hutton Inquiry (Salt, 2005), Zeppelins (Salt, 2008) and a play Shad Thames, Broken Wharf (Penned in the Margins 2010). He has also recorded a CD with The Poetry Archive. His third full collection, THE RESTRUCTURE, was published in May 2012. He works as a Librarian at The Poetry Library, London.

Tom Jenks

has two collections, A Priori and *, published by if p then q (http://ifpthenq.co.uk). His work has appeared in a range of digital and print publications including Department magazine, onedit, Cleaves, Blackbox Manifold and the 18s anthology. He organises the avant objects imprint zimZalla (http://zimzalla.co.uk) and co-organises The Other Room reading series and website (http://otherroom.org). Gnomes, a collaboration with Chris McCabe, was published by The Red Ceilings Press in 2011.

Hazel Smith – A Preview

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Preview of July 19th 2012 performer Hazel Smith who will perform at Leeds Gallery, Munro House, Leeds, 7pm. Entry is free and we’d love to see you there. Other performers are Ryan Ormonde and a collaboration between Chris McCabe and Tom Jenks. Previews to follow.

Click the link for PRESS RELEASE_LEEDS 2012

Hazel Smith is active in the areas of poetry, performance and new media. Her work has appeared in numerous international literary magazines and in literary, musical and multimedia anthologies. She has published three volumes of poetry: Abstractly Represented: Poems and Performance Texts 1982-90, Butterfly Books, 1991; Keys Round her Tongue: short prose, poetry and performance texts Soma, 2000 and The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media works, Tinfish Press, 2008 (accompanied by a CD-Rom of works with Roger Dean).

Hazel has also, with Roger Dean, made three CDs of her performance work, Poet Without Language, Rufus Records 1994; Nuraghic Echoes, Rufus Records, 1996 and Returning the Angles, Soma Recording and Publishing 2001. She has collaborated with Roger Dean on many ABC radio commissions including Poet Without Language, 1991, Nuraghic Echoes, 1994, The Erotics of Gossip, 2001, Returning the Angles 1998, for The Listening Room, and The Afterlives of Betsy Scott, 2007, for Airplay. Her performance collaborations, such as the writer the performer the program the madwoman 2004, the space of history 2006, Mid-Air Conversations 2006 and Minimal 2007 are showcased on many poetics websites such as PennSound (US), and in internet journals such as How2 (US). One of her collaborations with Roger Dean, Poet without Language, was nominated by the ABC for the Prix Italia in 1992.

Hazel is co-author with Roger Dean of numerous new media works, such as Wordstuffs: the city and the body, 1998, Intertwingling 1999, the egg the cart the horse the chicken 2004, soundAFFECTs 2004 (with Anne Brewster) and Time the Magician 2007. She has also collaborated on several occasions with visual artist Sieglinde Karl, and their joint work has been exhibited in many art galleries in Australia and overseas. She has performed her own work extensively nationally and internationally in Europe and Australasia. She has been co-recipient of numerous grants from the Australia Council, The Australian Film Commission and Arts Tasmania.

Some links to work:

the writer, the performer, the program, the madwoman

the egg, the cart, the horse, the chicken

wordstuffs

Juxtavoices: 3 summer concerts

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  • Jul 14th: JUXTAVOICES at Tubermusic, St Margaret’s Church, Whalley Range, Manchester.
  • Jul 22nd: ORCHESTRA OF THE UPPER ATMOSPHERE plus JUXTAVOICES, Tramlines, Memorial Hall, Sheffield.
  • Aug 25th: JUXTAVOICES, Daytime TBC, Monsal Head Railway Tunnel, Derbyshire.

Juxtavoices is a large antichoir which includes many familiar faces from Sheffield’s leftfield music, poetry and visual arts scene. Although the group performs structured scores, no fixed pitches are ever notated, and the group uses improvisation to shape the detail of the scores as the music progresses. Both trained and untrained voices are included. As well as playing normal concerts, the group is to be found in various unexpected public places and at poetry / text events. A Discus CD is planned for 2012. Always on the look out for new members.

* not suitable for domestic sublimation – Jennifer Cooke

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not suitable for domestic sublimation is Jennifer Cooke’s first poetry collection and features poems written over the last six years that engage in various ways with radical politics; gender norms; personal and corporate self-actualisation (and Cooke’s hatred of such discourses); sexuality; town centres; and some of the ideas of the French Freud, Jacques Lacan.

The books includes “Steel Girdered Her Musical: in several parts”, originally made for performance with music by Adam Robinson. This twelve-part poem-sequence at the heart of the collection centres on the possible impossibility of a revolution beginning at South Mimms Service Station, a motorway convenience situated on the M25 and the A1 (M) near London. Passionately, irreverently, obliquely, it explores the relationships between theory and praxis, art and revolution, anonymous space and potential resistance, and the force of rhetoric operating within these fields, themes that are also echoed by other poems in the book.

Available now from Contraband Books.

Dash Booked a Builder by Ollie Evans

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Out now from Red Ceilings Press. Ollie Evans is a poet and performer from London. He has been making experimental ventriloquist theatre as a soloist and with his group, Dummy Company, since 2008. His first booklet, Stutter Studies (2011) was published by Department Press. He has had poetry printed in the International Egg & Poultry Review (2011), Depart (2012) and Anything Anymore Anywhere (2012). A book of poems after Dante, The Comedy, is due out through Holdfire Press in October 2012. He is also studying for a PhD on ‘Performance and Finnegans Wake’ at Birkbeck College.

Tom Phillips: A Humument (Fifth Edition)

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In 1966 artist Tom Phillips set himself a task: to find a second-hand book for threepence and alter every page by painting, collage and cut-up techniques to create an entirely new version. He found his threepenny novel in a junk shop on Peckham Rye, South London. This was an obscure 1892 Victorian novel, A Human Document, by W.H. Mallock. He titled his altered book A Humument. The first version of all 367 treated pages was published in 1973 since when there have been four revised editions and an App. It is now one of the best known and loved of all 20th century artist’s books and has become a cult classic.

This edition incorporates more than 80 new pages and, in its forty fifth year, the project continues to be a work in progress.