Tom Jenks

D A D A D O L L Z

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

POETRY READING – BOOK LAUNCH – PERFORMANCE – MUSIC

Astounding, Ground-Breaking, Subversive: a Celebration of the DADA dolls & art of Emmy Hennings, Hannah Höch, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
CHRISTINE KENNEDY
Hobby Horse: A PUPPET PLAY FOR CABARET VOLTAIRE

&

DAVID ANNWN, MICK BECK & JOHN COWEY
RunDADAnella: A ROUND DANCE POEM WITH MUSIC TUESDAY 24th May

£5.00 (Waged) & £3.00 (Unwaged) – Wine provided
8.00pm for 8.30 start

Over the Top, 78 Kingfield Road, Nether Edge, SHEFFIELD S11 9AU Access by 22 or 10 buses, near the Union pub. Easy parking.

ABOUT DADADOLLZ
The Over The Top music series hosts this evening of poetry with performance and music as the Sheffield launch of the publication of Dadadollz. Dadadollz celebrates the women Dada artists of the Cabaret Voltaire at the great moment of flowering of modern and radical art during the years of the First World War. Dada artists, Emmy Hennings, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hannah Hoch made and exhibited dolls for plays, revue catalogues, posters and photographs. ‘The Stag King’ was a Puppet play for Dada Zurich. Hoch’s photo-collages also featured myriad dolls.Dadadollz is a collaboration where Christine Kennedy and David Annwn have created new doll works and images: a Puppet play and a RunDADanella, or round-song and live music, to celebrate these women’s achievements. The Hadron Collider and Elle are just two of the artifacts drawn into the vortex.

Dadadollz is published in 2010 by ISPress ISBN 0-9533897-5-8
Copies are available at the Sheffield event on 24th April, and by post from ISPress, 3 Westfield Park College Grove, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England WF1 3RP

Christine Kennedy is a writer and artist based in Sheffield, and David Annwn is a poet based in Wakefield. David’s live project also involves haunting and playful neo-Dadaist collaboration with saxophonist Mick Beck and guitarist John Cowey.

These innovative musicians gleefully take the RunDADAnella apart from the inside, Mick’s magisterial, unpredictable free-form and John’s skilful feel for cabaret folk opening new musical perspectives, sparring and combining in irrepressible high spirits. This is a real first for poetry and music, in Sheffield & everywhere.

LVRS

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

JL / LVRSLVRSLVRSLVRS / 24 A4 pp. w/pink cardstock photocopied covers / contents: FUCKING HELL, TRANSIT, LIFE, OVERLOVE, NINE LINES FOR STREET VIEW / ed. 2.0 / £4.50 postage paid / hizeroreadings@gmail.com

Maintenant #61: Marcus Slease

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

Though the Maintenant series tries not to overstate the importance of the poet’s origin, practicality alone demands an attempt to show the range of European poetries with a representative range of nations. However in actually seeking out those poets creating exciting, original, genuinely evolutionary work, we find many cannot be tied to one single nation – they are migratory, multi-lingual – pan-European if not pan-global. Marcus Slease fits this archetype more than most. By birth he stands as the first Northern Irish poet to feature in our series. However by experience he is a poet of England, America, Poland, Italy, Turkey. Unsurprisingly he is an adroit and worldly writer, defined by his ability to remain elastic and fluid, and utterly unpretentious in his idiom, and yet fulfilling and resonant in his tone. His poetics are extremely contemporary, and yet they seem to maintain the confidence and solidity of time past. A major feature of the current London scene, we are pleased to introduce Marcus Slease as the 61st edition of Maintenant.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-61-marcus-slease/

Accompanying the interview are six of Marcus’ poems.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/six-poems-marcus-slease/

Commitment by Marianne Morris

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

Published May 2011, in collaboration with Bad Press

Limited edition has two-tone stencil cover and sparkly endpapers

Jonty Tiplady on Commitment:
Un dolce amaro, un si e no mi muovi: it is not enough to not commend. Reading this book, you are witness to what Pater calls ‘the struggle of a desolating passion, which yearns to be resigned and sweet and pensive’, and which then unaccountably is. Speed is not good enough, neither is poetry, the era of climate change is an error. I think of Prince confused by his experiments with ecstasy, he made Lovesexy. Morris knows that the psychic thing-cruelty of the art-thing is only almost unavoidable, and so the image-tail wags. Too too tout autre muse. Out of the strong came forth more sweetness. Not only should you read it, you should read it again slowly, and think on.

More here.

department #4

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

A magazine in print for innovative poetry & poetics, for cultural theory & social performance / cultural performance & social theory. A magazine dead set against the dead hand & deadly hands of instrumentalist reason & the banalisation / terrorisation / commodification of everyday life. A situation.

More here.

The Text Festival: Rainer Ganahl

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

Via Tony Trehy:

Guest curators Helen Kaplinsky & Maurice Carlin of Reading for Reading’s Sake bring New York based Rainer Ganahl to the Transport Museum. Ganahl, who represented Austria in the 1999 Venice Biennale, arrives on Wednesday though installation of his exhibition at the Bury Transport Museum starts on Monday. Ganahl has ambitious plans to create various works this week including two films. The show is called Engels…Engels…Engels and is an investigation through videos, assemblage, photos and prints of “The Condition of the Working Class in England” (1844).

As part of the project Ganahl will facilitate Engels seminars on the 18th (6:30-8:30pm), 19th (2-4pm) and 20th (6:30-8:30pm) May at Bury Transport Museum. No prior reading required but to book email kaplinskyhelen@yahoo.co.uk. The artist will also present a talk on Thurs 19th May 6pm at Islington Mill.

More here.

Stupefaction – Keston Sutherland

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

Stupefaction
A Radical Anatomy of Phantoms

Sutherland examines how speculative and satirical descriptions of stupidity function in art and in argument. His examples include Alexander Pope’s dunce, Adorno’s philistine, Wordsworth’s mechanical adopter of poetic diction, and phenomenologist Michel Henry’s drunkard who rides an escalator to nothingness. Sutherland also provides an important new account of the figure of the bourgeois in Marx and a powerfully original interpretation of commodity fetishism as a satire against bourgeois objectivity. This unusual analysis of the trope of the idiot will appeal to scholars of literature and philosophy alike.

Out now on The University of Chicago Press.

Alec Finlay: 4 new events

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment


skying : art, landscape and renewable energy
Alec Finlay in Conversation with Malcolm Fraser and Owain Jones

Alec’s Leverhulme residency at Northumbria University is now underway. The focus of the residency is the contested identity of the windmill turbine in the contemporary landscape. To mark the occasion, he will be joined by award winning Scottish architect Malcolm Fraser and cultural geographer Owain Jones, to discuss the various identities – political, social, aesthetic, ecological, architectural – of the turbine in contemporary society and culture.

Venue: Gallery North, Squires Building, Sandyford Road, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8ST.

Time: Friday 20th May 2011 3.00 – 5.00 pm

To print-off an invitation, which includes a map:
<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1599958/Skying%20conversation%20invite%5B1%5D.pdf>


The Road North : A matsuri Festival
This Sunday at The Hidden Gardens, Glasgow

This Sunday, join Alec and fellow poet Ken Cockburn for a matsuri festival at the Hidden Gardens, Glasgow. For the past year Alec and Ken have been travelling through Scotland, guided by the Japanese poet Basho, whose Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North) is one of the masterpieces of travel literature. On 15 May their year-long journey will come to an end, and to celebrate they have invited some of those they met along the way to join them for an informal afternoon in the gardens. At 3pm, alongside performances by Gaelic singer Margaret Bennett, poets including Gerry Loose, Larry Butler and Colin Will, will read 100 haiku: heard together, the poems form a word-map of contemporary Scotland.


Venue: The Hidden Gardens, 25 Albert Drive, Glasgow G41 2PE.
<http://www.thehiddengardens.org.uk/flash_content/flash_content.html>

Time: 12pm – 6pm; Reading and songs at 3pm

Print-off an Invitation:
<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1599958/Matsuri%20Public%20Invite.pdf>

The Road North:
<http://theroadnorth.co.uk/>

Modern Empire : La Scatola Gallery, London
Featuring a new paper-work by Alec

This is Modern Empire’s first public exhibition, at La Scatola; it includes original drawings, paintings, collage, photography, and sculpture, and will feature Alec’s new paper-work word-mntn (1000 Munro, Corbett and Marilyn), alongside Specimen Colony, his 2008 collaboration with Jo Salter. Other featured artists include Vicki Bennett, Charlotte Bracegirdle and Sandy Grant. The Exhibition Runs 24.05.2011 – 04.06.2011. Private View Tuesday 24.05.2011 – from 6 to 9PM

To print-off an invitation:
<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1599958/Modern%20Empire%20Press%20Release.pdf>

Modern Empire:
<http://www.modernempire.co.uk>

re:place Symposium : ‘Curating the Rural’
Reading from White Peak | Dark Peak by Alec Finlay and David Troupes

In 2009, re:place commissioned white peak | dark peak, for which Alec and a team of fellow poets such as Linda France, Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey mapped the Peak District National Park, using a combination of walking, letterboxing, renga ‘word-maps’ and field-recordings.

The re:place symposium will explore how contemporary art practice can interrogate, illuminate and reshape the ideas of Derbyshire and of the rural; Alec will read from white peak | dark peak, the book cataloguing his project and containing additional commentary and poems. You can find white peak | dark peak on our Amazon store: <http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/shops/storefront/index.html?ie=UTF8&marketplaceID=A1F83G8C2ARO7P&sellerID=A2K5GHRHWY9FJE>

Venue: Gothic warehouse, cromford, Derbyshire

Time: Fri 27 May, 11am – 4pm

To reserve a place email <info@re-place.co.uk>

white peak | dark peak website:
<http://www.whitepeak-darkpeak.co.uk/>

A Map of You

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment
Homeless people in Manchester are writing themselves into the public eye, creating ‘customised’ tourist postcards of Manchester, in collaboration with arts organisation arthur+martha. The postcards are currently exhibited in Bury Transport Museum as part of Bury Text Festival and can also be viewed at BBC Online website. Poems from the project will be shown on the BBC Big Screen in Manchester city centre and tweeted by advertising company LOVE.

a map of you postcards carry tiny stories, little snatches of homeless people’s lives. In the white space between the buildings, the stories appear, some stencilled, some handwritten, some self-explanatory, funny, dour, elusive. The cards are designed to bring attention to a group in society who are often overlooked, but have much to offer.

L, a homeless person in Bury, said: ‘People who suffer have knowledge.’ The skin of these writers is thin; through it they feel the world intensely and report with great vividness.  

The arthur+martha experimental arts organization works with people who are often pushed to the margins of society – older people in hospital, excluded school pupils, children with special needs and many others. The Bury Text Festival pioneers unusual and radical use of language – in this case, helping homeless people find opportunities for self-expression. International poets Geof Huth (USA) Steve Gaisson and Derek Beaulieu (both from Canada) are involved in the project, leading sessions as guest artists and helping to edit work. 

a map of you has been supported by Arts Council England, Bury MBC and The Lowry – and is working in partnership with The Big Issue in the North, The Red Door Housing Concern Centre, Brighter Futures at Bury Adult Learning Service, The Booth Centre and LOVE Creative.

 

Notes for Editors

A slideshow featuring a map of you is at BBC online:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-13281902

A BBC Radio Manchester feature can be listened to at http://www.arthur-and-martha.co.uk/pages/a%20map%20of%20you.htm The a map of you postcards are exhibited as part of the Bury Text Festival at Bury Transport Museum until 26 May 2011.

To read more about the project please visit http://arthur-and-martha.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20map%20of%20you

For more information and to obtain free copies of limited edition concertina postcard packs of a map of you- contact project organiser Philip Davenport on 07951 233953 / philipjohndavenport@hotmail.com

Maintenant #60: Luljeta Lleshanaku

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

It is hard to make a case against Luljeta Lleshanaku being the greatest Albanian poet of the modern era. Such is the measure of her work, and her repute across Europe and America. Her poetry reflects her marked humility and reverence for the written word, utterly unique and yet universal in a way that belies the overuse of that concept. Though a child of political exile and marginalization, let alone physical danger, her work remains dignified and singular, and nor does she allow her poetry to be dominated by the issues of her nation, of it’s politics and history. She is a voice that would be recognized as truly poetic in any language, in any setting and this perhaps her most remarkable achievement. A winner of the International Kristal Vilenica prize (following the likes of Peter Handke, Zbigniew Herbert & Milan Kundera) it is wonderful to announce her first work published in the UK will be released this September with Bloodaxe Books, already a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, and she will be attending this year’s Aldeburgh poetry festival in November . It is honour to introduce the 60th edition of Maintenant, a pioneer of Balkan poetry and a rightfully major figure in the current European poetry landscape.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-60-luljeta-lleshanaku/

Accompanying the interview are eight of Luljeta’s poems, translated by Ani Gjika.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/eight-poems-luljeta-lleshanaku/

Maintenant #59: Gabriele Labanauskaite

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

It appears self-evident that poetry is remarkably pliant, elastic and apt for innovation. As a sonic artform, poetry, in it‘s truest sense, grows as each individual practitioner allows themselves to explore their own culture, and so from certain artists there arrives unique and memorable experiments within the medium. For the Lithuanian poetry scene, it is Gabriele Labanauskaite who leads the way. Assured, intelligent and engaging, her sonic art is poetry, song & performance. Though a versatile poet, playwright & singer, she is renowned for her fusion of spoken poetry, music and sound, often as part of the collective AVaspo. Her work is explosive as well as satirical, wise as well as energetic and she embraces technological innovation while absorbing a myriad of aesthetics. She is the final poet representing the Maintenant Lithuania events held in London during April 2011 and we are delighted to welcome her as our 59th interviewee and poet.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-59-gabriele-labanauskaite/<

Accompanying the interview are ten of Gabriele’s poems, translated Translated by Ada Valaitis and Kenneth Smallwood.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/ten-poems-gabriele-labanauskaite/


{Maintenant Slovakia in association with Literature across Frontiers & Arc Publications}June Saturday 18th 2011 – 7pm – Entrance Free – The Rich Mix arts centre. LondonSlovak poets Ivan ��trpka and Mila Haugova will be joined by a half dozen London-based poets to celebrate the sixth event in the Maintenant series held at the Rich Mix arts centre in London’s Brick Lane. As ever, the Maintenant series will advocate a diverse selection of poetic methodologies, ages & nationalities – collecting together some of the most interesting poets Europe has to offer. Further details to follow…

James Davies’ Plants reviewed

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

Much of Davies’ work occupies a place between poetry and conceptual art. His poetry is shot through with references to the work of artists as wide ranging as Franz Kline, Vija Celmins and Thomas Fehlmann. Lines such as “next we masticated to Jeff Koons’ record collection”. Formally, his work responds in different ways to that of these artists. His chilly, wet and monotonous poem ‘The Weather’, made up of four identical tercets describing the weather, each tercet ending in the line “I wonder what it will do tomorrow” seems to be a response to the centreless, representational graphite Sea and sky drawings by Celmins.

Colin Herd reviews James Davies at 3am Magazine.

Robert Sheppard and Daniele Pantano

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

Via Scott Thurston:

Two Edge Hill University lecturers have published four books and two pamphlets of poetry between them in the last few months.

‘To celebrate this we will be launching them with two short readings, a Q and A and a chance to buy the books!’

Daniele Pantano and Robert Sheppard

Reading on Thursday 5th May 2011

at 5.30 in B005 (ground floor Business Centre, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk campus)

Senior Lecturer Daniele Pantano, who is Programme Leader for the BA Creative Writing, has published The Oldest Hands in the World, a new book of poems about exile, translingualism and writing one’s way home, as well as The Possible Is Monstrous, a collection of poems in English translation by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who is seen not only as the most prominent Swiss novelist, playwright and essayist of the twentieth century but as one of the most influential authors of modern literature.

Both books are published by Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books, New York.

Professor Robert Sheppard, who is Programme Leader of the MA Creative Writing, has published a new book of poems, Berlin Bursts. Themes covered include the troubled history of Berlin, Riga and other places ravaged by history. There are poems about poems and a sequence about the doomed attempt to create a hologram poet. His critical book When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry is a history of alternative British poetry and deals with major figures like Iain Sinclair, Tom Raworth and Maggie O’Sullivan. Both books are published by Shearsman Books.

They both have pamphlets out from the enterprising local Knives Forks and Spoons Press–one of our Creative Writing students is currently serving as an intern there. Robert’s book, The Given, is an anti-autobiography, telling his life via events in his diary he cannot remember and others that he’d rather forget. Daniele’s book, Mass Graves (XIX-XXII), is an excerpt from a new collection of poems he’s currently writing that examines the lives, events and connections between an unknown Swiss poet and the savage murder of one of Egon Schiele’s young girls.

Daniele and Robert work together to teach Creative Writing within the English and History Department at Edge Hill.

Book details and links:

1.    Robert Sheppard

Berlin Bursts (poems)

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/sheppardBB.html

When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry (criticism)

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/sheppardWBT.html

The Given (anti-autobiography)

www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk

2.    Daniele Pantano

The Oldest Hands in the World  (Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books)

The Possible Is Monstrous: Selected Poems by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books) both at:

www.blacklawrence.com/pantano.html

Mass Graves (XIX-XXII) (The Knives, Forks and Spoons Press)

www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk

Hi Zero

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

Via Joe Luna:

Hi Zero 3 now on sale in super-limited stock (i.e. about 20 copies left). Slim but sleek and fine, with poems from Harry Gilonis (after Mayakovsky), John Wilkinson, Ed Luker, Jennifer Cooke, Sarah Kelly, Laura Kilbride, Edmund Hardy & Joe Luna. =A33.30 inland UK all told, probs a lil more outside. E-mail hizeroreadings@gmail.com to order yours.

Next Hi Zero on Tuesday 24th May, radically fulsome details coming soon, but it WILL feature: Edmund Hardy, Helen Macdonald AND Sophie Robinson.

Thanks for watching!

Ursonate in Bury reviewed

~ theotherroom ~ Leave a comment

And what a remarkable piece it is: full of rolling ‘r’s’, labial ‘l’s’, ‘k’s’ and in amongst this the structure of a sonata, including a rondo, a scherzo, a beautiful largo and a cadenza. The readers included Christian Bok, himself a remarkable experimental poet whose pieces in the Text Festival include a poem programmed into the DNA of a bacillus, and Jaap Blonk, himself a sound poet and musician of considerable achievement.

More from Steven Waling on Brando’s Hat.