Latest issue of this always interesting electronic publication with a newly deisnged site. Back issues and ebooks also available here.
Tom Jenks
Bad Press: subjectivity liberated from the imperatives of purposive activity!
Poems, 4 Poets: Marianne Morris, Luke Roberts, Sophie Robinson, Josh Stanley.
£2.50 + £1 p&p / / $7.
Four poems/poets in one cultural transmission. All poems feature identifiable subjects, thereby furnishing the reader with that distinctly cozy-by-the-fire hint of the middle-brow, whilst maintaining all the feigned legitimacy of dialogue with poetic history that one would expect from a Bad Press publication. What the hell more do you want. CALL THE DOCTOR!
Visit the Bad Press site for more information.
Xing The Line: James Davies & Carol Watts
Wednesday, May 11 · 7:30pm – 11:30pm
The Apple Tree, Mount Pleasant, WC1X 2AE
James Davies launches Plants and Carol Watts launches Occasionals, both published by Reality Street. More details about this event on Facebook.
Wonder Rooms
@ Bury Art Gallery
Preview: 30th April 2011 / 11.00am
30th April – 2nd July 2011
The history of the word as image, the visual poem, stretches back to ancient times, but in the last hundred years has been punctuated by seminal moments allied to breakthroughs across artforms, such as Constructivism, Dada, Fluxus. In the 21st Century the availability and ease of new technologies for design and production of visual poems has created a global practice. An almost infinite variety of forms and procedures from 3-dimensional constructions, classical shaped poems, hand-written, concrete, graphic, and digital, poets reinvent the alphabet and the language in the visual.
In surveying the best in contemporary practice from around the world the exhibition also poses two questions: does the global phenomenon of visual poetry represent a new artistic language? Or is this international practice a dialogue between differing national styles or ‘dialects’?
Artists confirmed: Alan Halsey, Stephen Nelson, Helen White, Amaranth Borsuk, John MAlan Halsey, Stephen Nelson, Helen White, Amaranth Borsuk, John Moore Williams, Karri Kokko, Matt Dalby, Andrew Topel, Christian Bök, Grzegorz Wróblewski, Marco Giovenale, Márton Koppány, Geof Huth, Nico Vassilakis, Derek Beaulieu, Satu Kaikkonen, Aysegül Tözeren, Steve Dalachinsky, Mike Cannell, Eric M. Zboya, Stephen Butler, Alexander Jorgensen, Zeynep Cansu Baseren, Sheila Murphy and many more…
The picture shows the installation of Andrew Topel’s zimZalla object Blueprints. Read more about Wonder Rooms and The Text Festival here.
the modernist magazine
From the manchester modernist society:
the modernist magazine is a quarterly magazine published for the North West of England by the manchester modernist society, a not for profit organisation dedicated to championing architecture of the twentieth century.
The writing of our launch issue is well under way and will be hitting the news stands in June. Get your copy delivered straight onto your door mat by subscribing on-line. With free postage and a chance to win some lovely books, why wouldn’t you? If you subscribe before the end of April, you have a chance of winning the fabulous Facismo Abbandonato or the gorgeous CCCP. Check out the modernist website and keep your eyes peeled for our launch event at CUBE Gallery as part of Architecture Festival NW.
Annual subscription £15 (inc postage)
Individual issue £3.75 (plus postage)
Derek Beaulieu at Penn Sound
Other Room reader and Text Festival contributor Derek Beaulieu now has a Penn Sound page, here.
Epiphanies: Kenneth Goldsmith
Kenneth Goldsmith talks music and file sharing for The Wire, here.
Marjorie Perloff – live video stream
Two programs featuring Marjorie Perloff at the Kelly Writers House will be available through live video stream:
1) Monday, April 25, 6:30 PM (eastern time) – a talk
2) Tuesday, April 26, 10:30 AM (eastern time) – an interview/discussion
Both events will begin precisely on time.
Go to KWH-TV here: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/multimedia/tv/
Christian Bök – The Xenotext
“Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realised, it all comes down to the durability of your materials. Bök has written a poem, “The Xenotext”, which he is inserting into the DNA of a particularly resilient form of bacteria, Deinococcus radiodurans. This extremophile bacterium can survive exposure to cold, dehydration, acid and vacuums, meaning it could live on in outer space should the Earth cease to exist.”
More about Bök’s Text Festival project in The Observer, here.
Maintenant #58: Nikola Madzirov
The birth of a major European poet is often heralded long after the fact by his or her emergence into the American poetic consciousness. The rapturous reception that has awaited Nikola Madzirov as he has travelled the US has only served to confirm what many already knew – Macedonia has produced a poet whose significance is undeniable, and whose gift is indelible. Nikola Madzirov is a poet who can look eye to eye with the great figures of the 20th century, he is one of our generations luminaries. His poetry is deft, sure and canny, he wields a wry and wise and often elusive aesthetic and while Peter Boyle has rightly traced his line back to Vasko Popa, Milosz, Herbert & Zagajewski, his voice is absolutely his own, absolutely of this generation. It is apt to leave the final words on Madzirov to Adam Zagajewski himself – “Madzirov’s poems are like Expressionist paintings: filled with thick, energetic streaks they seem to emerge from the imagination and to return to it right away, like night animals caught in the headlights of a car. “We are the remnants of another age” — Nikola Madzirov succeeds in convincing us.” For the 58th edition of Maintenant, we are very pleased to welcome our first Macedonian poet.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-58-nikola-madzirov/
Accompanying the interview are five of Nikola’s poems, translated translated by Peggy and Graham W. Reid, Magdalena Horvat and Adam Reed taken from the book
Remnants of Another Age published by BOA Editions
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/five-poems-nikola-madzirov/
Some more of Nikola’s poems have recently appeared in the latest issues of “American Poetry Review” and “The Wolf” poetry magazine, and the poem “After Us” was just announced as a poem of a day in US by the Academy of American Poets – poets.org:
The Michael Marks Awards for Poetry
Nominees for the best pamphlet prizes include Other Room reader Neil Addison’s Apocapulco and Other Room reader Sophie Robinson’s The Lotion. Alec Newman’s The Knives Forks and Spoons Press and Richard Parker’s Crater Press are noimnated for best publisher. Read more here.
Matt Dalby reviews The Language Moment
“The Language Moment started in a more sombre and insurrectionary mood than might have been expected. And it felt like different time-periods collided.
There was the bad news that day that after 28 years the greenroom will close at the end of May. Add this to Castlefield Gallery’s loss of Arts Council funding and artists might very well feel besieged.
It also seems perversely apt that a centre born during the previous Tory administration should end during another. Albeit in coalition with Lib Dems.”
More here.
Writers Forum North second meeting
Saturday, May 7 · 2:00pm – 5:00pm
Victoria Family & Commercial Hotel
28 Great George Street, Leeds
WFW(N) is an opportunity for innovative/experimental poets to present their work for feedback in a mutually supportive atmosphere. Ideally, please bring along copies of the work you intend to read for the other group members. Anyone who wants to come along but doesn’t want to read is also very welcome.
More here.
Station Stories lightboxes
The images accompanying the work of the six writer participating in Station Stories at Manchester Piccadilly station on 19th – 21st May are now on display in the lightboxes situatated on the Metrolink platform. Click the image above (accompanying Nicholas Royle’s The Lancashire Fusilier) to read more about the Station Stories project.
London Word Festival
This started on 7th April and runs until 5th May with some interesting events still to come, including:
Tue 19 Apr
Man/Machine
Paul Granjon + FOUND + Ross Sutherland + Nikesh Shukla + Tamarin Norwood + MC Nathan Penlington
featuring Ladies of the Press
Richmix | 7.30pm | £8 adv/£10 door
Tue 3 May
Christian Bök
+ Luke Kennard
+ Maria Fusco
+ Ben Gwalchmai
+ MC Ross Sutherland
Vibe Live | 7.30pm | £6.50 adv/£8 doors
More here.
Maintenant #57: Tomas S. Butkus
The impression left on the audience attending the Maintenant Lithuania events held over the weekend of April 8th only served to confirm Tomas S. Butkus’ reputation as one of the most complex and creative poets currently at work in the unusually healthy Lithuanian poetry scene. Sometimes seen as an irreverent and idiosyncratic poet, due perhaps his use of many mediums (text, video, sonic art, collage), his membership in an experimental art performance collective or his distinctive use of surrealist imagery – his work in fact continues the revolutionary underground spirit of creativity that underpinned some of the greatest poetry Europe produced while Lithuania was under Soviet occupation. Perhaps rather Butkus’ work stands out from a certain contemporary style (reformed, controlled and meditative) by virtue of its energy and individuality. And without doubt, as the people attending Europe House and the Rich Mix arts centre discovered, the man is equal to his work. Celebrating the Maintenant Lithuania project and our 57th edition, we welcome Tomas S. Butkus,
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-57-%e2%80%93-tomas-s-butkus/
Accompanying the interview are five of Tomas’ poems, translated by Kerry Shawn Keys, Edgaras Platelis, Becka Mara Mckay, Gerrie Fellows & Jake MB Levine
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/five-poems-tomas-s-butkus/
Huge thanks to everyone who attended and performed at Europe House in Westminster and the Rich mix arts centre in Brick Lane for the Maintenant Lithuania events last weekend. Both nights were fantastic, memorable for the quality of the work on display and the atmosphere generated by those who were kind enough to attend. Pictures and sound recordings of both events will be online soon, and the Rich mix event was filmed by the BBC for an upcoming cultural arts feature program. Special thanks to Gabriele Labanauskaite, Tomas Butkus, Donatas Petrosius and Daiva Parulskiene. Our next event looks to be in June, most likely Maintenant Slovakia.
The Ground Aslant
“Over the past 40 years or so, British poets have been remaking the pastoral. It has been a violent business. What Raymond Williams once severely called the old “enamelled world” of pastoral poetry has been worked over, its certainties cracked and shattered. Long gone are those shepherds and shepherdesses idly enacting class hierarchies. Toxins have seeped into Arcadia; “nature” is a mess of our own manufacture. Out of the static conservatisms of an ancient form has come a series of countervailing modes: the anti-pastoral, the counter-pastoral, the radical pastoral, the post-pastoral.”
The Ground Aslant, a new Shearsman anthology edited by Other Room reader Harriet Tarlo and featuring Other Room readers Zoë Skoulding and Carol Watts, reviewed in The Guardian, here.
The Language Moment – tonight
Last minute reminder for this excellent event tonight at The Green Room in Manchester:
Featuring Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Maggie O’Sullivan, Phil Minton and Ben Gwilliam & Phil Davenport, Sarah Sander, and Sarah Boothroyd
@ The Green Room, Manchester
Friday 15 April 2011
In a pre-festival partnership event with the Green Room, Manchester, the Text Festival presents an evening of virtuoso vocal performance and groundbreaking sound art.
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is an Icelandic poet and author of three novels. He works with performance and sound-poetry, and regularly appears at poetry and music festivals, as well as dabbling in the dark arts of the concrete. In the recent years he has explored the possibilities inherent in the European and North-American avant-garde traditions, and focused on disassembling language into its visual, social and linguistic units. Nothing can prepare you for the power and dexterity of his performance, the sonically richness of his sound poems, and his amazing control of his material. His huge contortions twist his mouth to stun the audience.
Phil Minton is a dramatic baritone with a free-form style of “extended techniques” that are extremely unsettling. His vocals often include the sounds of retching, burping, screaming, and gasping, as well as childlike muttering, whining, crying and deep-throated drones; he also has an ability to distort his vocal cords to produce two notes at once. Phil Minton’s voice occupies a category apart, as joyously accessible as it is radical.
For over thirty years, Maggie O’Sullivan has been one of the leading figures of British innovative poetry. An international performer and visual artist, she is committed to excavating language in all its multiple voices and tongues, known and unknown, in visceral gestures that collage and pulverization at the service of a rhythmic vortex.
Phil Davenport & Ben Gwilliam are artists engaged in collaborative practice across different artforms: Davenportthe poet and Gwilliam the sound artist merge experimental language through the infrathin processing of the silence between sounds.
The event will also feature specially commissioned sound art interventions in various Green Room Spaces.
More here.
AVENIR
The next zimZalla object will be AVENIR by Julius Kalamarz.
AVENIR is a series of synesthetic (grapheme → color) interpretations of color fields. The interpretations, and their corresponding colors, are presented on 24 cards housed within a box. The monochromes of Yves Klein inspired the concept, while the Event Scores of George Brecht inspired its presentation.
The anticipated release time for this object is May 2011. Click here to visit the zimZalla site and view a sample.
The world according to Newman
Alec Newman, editor and organiser of The Knives Forks and Spoons press, has a new blog. Check out what has been happening in Kiderminster and many other things, here.
otherroom.org 