Other Room performer Rachel Lois Clapham be presenting OF FINGER – a talk from recent scores, readings and live performances that presses on embodied acts of (w)reading and writing, finger(ing) texts and pointing to pointing at things at Spike Island on April 10th. More details at Open Dialogues.
To many what was once the most expansively influential European tradition of poetry has now become one of the most hermetic. Yet within France there remains singularm emergent figures whose invention, and whose brilliance, marks them out as some of the most innovative in the world. Eric Suchère is one of them, art critic and art historian, he has created a remarkable oeuvre of conceptual, prose and written poetry over the last few decades and holds a rightful place as a leading light in the current French scene. For the 89th interview in our series, Eric Suchère.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-89-eric-suchere/
Accompanying the interview is an extract from Eric’s longer work Set, Winterwreck, translated by Lisa Robertson.
Visual poetry by Philip Davenport, at Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, Wigan, UK. April 2-14. This exhibition questions the idea of a BIG society by focusing on the voices of the little and the lost.
Davenport’s poems APPEAL IN AIR and POLLINATORS OF EDEN erupt from the page into dizzy sequences of word/space disjuncts spilling across the large gallery.
APPEAL IN AIR is a celebration of quiet voices, the people at the fringe –- and the songs of birds. Texts bend into the shape of birds and weave through a city skyline. Children mimic birdcalls as a soundtrack for the space. Language morphs into code: Davenport’s “Liquid morse.” APPEAL celebrates the many voices and languages that make up a world – including those that get lost in noise.
POLLINATORS OF EDEN replays the form of a child’s educational book, complete with an instructional animation of a drowning shark. The piece documents encounters with people in North Manchester, an area of stark economic hardship, and is cartoonishly illustrated by local school pupils, in bright counterpoint to the dark tone of the poem.
Much of the material in the show derives from Davenport’s recent book APPEAL IN AIR, published by Knives Forks & Spoons Press.
Davenport’s debut was published by seminal avant-garde press Writers Forum in 1999; his heartporn/poems written on apples were shown at the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. His work has been variously billposted and exhibited throughout Europe and in China. Davenport curated the largest survey exhibition of Bob Cobbing’s work for Bury Text Festival in 2005 and the first posthumous gallery exhibition of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s work in 2006. He often collaborates with other artists and writer, including Ben Gwilliam, Lee Patterson, Tom Jenks. His current sequence of spreadsheet poems have been exhibited in the Henry Moore. APPEAL IN AIR is published by Knives Forks and Spoons press, UK whose list includes many British avant-garde poets.
For further information contact TURNPIKE GALLERY (+44)1942 404420
EXHIBITION FACEBOOK PAGE http://www.facebook.com/#!/media/set/?set=a.257496341008638.59781.208328225925450&type=1
APPEAL IN AIR isbn 978-1-907812-77-4 available from http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk
Steve McCaffery PANOPTICON. BookThug rev. edn. 2011. £15
Taking its inspiration from Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon Papers’, McCaffery’s Panopticon shatters all omnivision in a tour de force of formal innovation, theoretical comment and narrative critique. In Panopticon narrative stutters, repeats itself, sequence is deranged and complicated by a multimedia presence on the page of grids, film bands and acoustic channels. On its first appearance Charles Bernstein hailed the book as ‘perhaps the exemplary “antiabsorptive work” and William McPheron claimed it as “an extraordinary act of revolution and charity”. Out of print for more than twenty years, this new edition has been revised extensively and is accompanied by an afterword written by McCaffery himself.
OPEN LETTER 14.7, Fall 2011: Breakthrough Nostalgia: Reading Steve McCaffery Then and Now. Ed. Stephen Cain. 172pp. £10.50
W/ contributions by Geoffrey Hlibchuk, Stephen Voyce, Gregory Betts, Tim Conley, Jason Starnes, Alessandra Capperdoni, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Matt Carrington, Lori Emerson, Andy Weaver, Christian Bök, Derek Beaulieu, Alan Halsey, Peter Jaeger + new poetry & prose by SMcC.
Allen Fisher PROPOSALS, 1-35. Poem-image-commentary. 76pp incl. 35 images in colour. Spanner 2010. £9.50
Allen Fisher STROLL & STRUT STEP. 16pp + 3 images in colour. Spanner 2004. £7.50
Post-free in UK. Payment by cheque or Paypal.
Orders to info@westhousebooks.co.uk
Becky Cremin will read at the next Other Room on Thursday 17th April. For a flavour of her work, see this film of her reading with Ryan Ormonde at Openned, her page at Veer, her blog, Perform-A-Text and her other blog Revelation Nation. Check out also the press free press project.
The other readers will be Tony Lopez and Elena Rivera. You can find a preview of Tony’s work here, with a preview of Elena to follow next week. Please note the change of location for this event owing to the closure of our usual venue. The reading on 19th April will be in the Basement Bar of the Deaf Institute, just off Oxford Road, Manchester.
Thursday 29 March 2012
Room B20, Birkbeck main building on Torrington Square, London WC1
6.00-7.30pm
“I lost my mother tongue more than thirty years ago and am still searching for it.”
Hungarian visual poet MÁRTON KOPPÁNY talks about his work, and projects images. Introduced by Holly Pester.
“Who is looking at, listening to and leaning on whom? And what is left of looking, listening and leaning in what is ironically referred to as the post ultimate glade? Thompson, with understated assertiveness, doesn’t answer these questions, but the poems in The Visitor’s Guest changed the way I had to walk around the block this morning. Thompson’s writing opens up a space with which I’m half familiar—perhaps it’s the sense of honesty which underlies his slanted lyrical stance— but which continues to surprise. Many of these poems engage with ‘love’, as a perception, as a verb, but to say so underestimates them. Visceral, tangential, with a genuine sense of belief / refusal to believe. You might think that you’ve arrived but, most of all, how interesting it is trying to get there.” —Lucy Burnett
More information at Shearsman.
As the monumental literary figures of the velvet revolution have passed their profundity and vibrancy onto a new generation of poets and writers, the Czech Republic has faced a shift in its poetic register, as the country has in its fundamental politik. So a return to the author has taken place, and straddling the two great contrasting generations and experiences of the Czech Republic as perhaps few others could, Sylva Fischerová, poet, author, teacher, has become the representative of the very best of her times – a poet whose wit, whose wisdom, whose incisiveness has brought her devotees across the world and across languages. In the 88th edition of Maintenant we welcome the lauded Sylva Fischerová.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-88-sylva-fischerova/
Accompanying the interview is six poems, translated by Sylva and Stuart Friebert
Lots of new work appearing all the time at Richard Barrett and Simon Howard’s Depart, an offshoot from their Department publishing project. Writers with work online included Ollie Evans (see in’n’on above) , Andrew Spragg and Jaime Birch.
Tony Lopez will be reading at the next Other Room on Thursday 19th April. For a flavour of his work, check his own site, his blog and his page at Shearsman Books, where you can find information about and samples from his two most recent books, Only More So and False Memory. The photograph above is of More and More, part of the Bury Art Museum collection and was taken by Julia Grime.
Tony will be reading with Becky Cremin and Elena Rivera. Previews of both to follow in the coming weeks.
Thurs March 22nd, £5/£4 conc, 7.00pm
Parasol Unit, 14 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RW
For more info: https://sites.google.com/site/intercapillary/
University College Falmouth invites submissions for ENVIRONMENTAL UTTERANCE – A Performative Conference – Sat 1 to Sun 2 September 2012. Submission Deadline: Saturday 31 March 2012. Across disciplines academics and artists are researching and creating practices that are highly contextual (determined by the environment in which they are located), exploring ways of articulating specific environments, spaces or places. This conference examines a specific problematic that attends the dissemination of this work: how to engage with ‘being there’ when ‘there’ is not here? For more information, see the programme.
New magazine Innovation in Fiction is looking for the following for its debut issue:
Email adrian.slatcher@gmail.com
The programme for the Writing and the Small Press Conference at Salford University on Saturday 31st March is now available. This conference aims to bring together publishers, writers and academics to discuss the influence of the small presses on creative practice and to consider their broader role in cultural production. In addition, there will be practical sessions on how to publish with a small press and opportunities for publishers to showcase their books.
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.
Upcoming events include:
The Blue Bus is pleased to present a poetry event featuring Ken Edwards and John Gibbens, with music by Ken White and David Miller, on Tuesday 20th March, from 7.30 at The Lamb (in the upstairs room), 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1. This is the sixty-first event in THE BLUE BUS series. Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions).
Ken Edwards’ books include the poetry collections Good Science (Roof Books, 1992), eight + six (Reality Street, 2003), No Public Language: Selected Poems 1975-95 (Shearsman Books, 2006), Bird Migration in the 21st Century (Spectacular Diseases, 2006), Songbook (Shearsman Books, 2009), the novel Futures (Reality Street, 1998) and the prose works Nostalgia for Unknown Cities (Reality Street, 2007) and Bardo (Knives Forks & Spoons Press, 2011). A book of short narratives, Down With Beauty, awaits publication. He has been editor/publisher of the small press Reality Street since 1993. He lives in Hastings, where he plays bass guitar and sings with The Moors, a band he co-founded with Elaine Edwards.
David Miller was born in Melbourne (Australia) in 1950, and has lived in London since 1972. His more recent publications include The Waters of Marah (Shearsman Books, 2005), The Dorothy and Benno Stories (Reality Street Editions, 2005), and In the Shop of Nothing: New and Selected Poems (Harbor Mountain Press, 2007). Spiritual Letters (Series 1-5) appeared from Chax Press in Tucson in 2011, and a double CD recording of David Miller reading this same work should be out from LARYNX (London) in time for this event. Black, Grey and White: A Book of Visual Sonnets came out from Veer Books in late 2011. He is a clarinettist who has performed solo, in duets with Ken White and others, and in The Mind Shop, and he is a member of the Frog Peak Music collective.
Ken White is a jazz guitarist from Melbourne, Australia, who has performed widely in his native country, as well as in London with David Miller, and has recorded with the vocalists Suzie Dickinson and Patsy O’Neill. He has composed and recorded music for independent films. He is also a painter, who has had many exhibitions in Australia. Kater Murr’s Press published his Drawings for Music in 2005.
John Gibbens was born in the Wirral and grew up in West Germany and West Cumbria. He’s lived in London since 1978, and currently earns his bread on ‘Fleet Street’. He won the Eric Gregory Award at the age of 21. Collected Poems appeared from Touched Press in 2000. In 2005, the title poem of the Touched Press pamphlet Sand of the Thames won the Southwark Poet of the Year competition. A narrative poem, Orpheus Ascending, set in an alternative Britain of social inequity, repression and violent disorder, appeared from Smokestack Books in March 2012 (available from Amazon.co.uk). The Nightingale’s Code, his acclaimed “poetic study of Bob Dylan” was published by Touched in October 2001. Covenant, a set of one-act plays which he also acted in, was produced at the Finborough Theatre in London in 1989 (with Francesca Howell, movement directed by Rosemary Lee, stage deisgn by Emma Withers). He formed The Children with Armorel Weston in the early Nineties and their first CD, Play, was released in 1999. There have been six further albums, the latest being In Memory of Grace (2011). He also plays with and the poet and clarinettist David Miller (and Armorel Weston) in The Mind Shop.
We also hope to launch two CD recordings from LARYNX at this event: Poems by Christopher Gutkind and Spiritual Letters (Series 1-5) by David Miller. There will be a brief reading by David Miller.
Forthcoming events will include Eléna Rivera, Scott Thurston and Melissa Buckheit (17th April), Marcus Slease, Lesley McKenna and Fran Lock (15th May) and D S Marriott and Robert Sheppard (19th June).
This conference aims to bring together publishers, writers and academics to discuss the influence of the small presses on creative practice and to consider their broader role in cultural production. In addition, there will be practical sessions on how to publish with a small press and opportunities for publishers to showcase their books.
Confirmed speakers include the novelist Elizabeth Baines, poet Robert Sheppard and Alec Newman of The Knives Forks and Spoons Press. Manchester publisher The Red Telephone will also be in attendance.
More at the Salford University site.
An irrepressible poet and thinker, the work of Eugene Ostashevsky has been a dynamic presence in the New York poetry scene for some years. Born in Leningrad and emigrating while still a child, like so many who have left their homeland, alongside the ebullience and humour of his own poetry, Ostashevsky has been a tireless translator and advocate of Russian poetry, most specifically the OBERIU group, whose radical experimentation was led by the near mythological Daniil Kharms. Teaching at New York University, the energy and vibrancy, and intellectually buoyancy, of Ostashevsky places him as an invaluable link to both the Russian past, and future, in poetics. He reads in London for the first time on March 8th 2012 at Pushkin house, and celebrating that event we are pleased to welcome him as the 87th respondent of the Maintenant series.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-87-eugene-ostashevsky/
Accompanying the interview is an excerpt from the The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, a work-in-progress about the relationship between a pirate and a parrot.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-pirate-who-does-not-know-the-value-of-pi/
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