Tony Lopez

South West Poetry Tour – films

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The South West Poetry Tour was a groundbreaking collaborative poetry initiative bringing together over 70 poets connected to the region moving through Cornwall (St Ives & Falmouth), Devon (Dartington) and Somerset (Bruton & Bath) in August 2016. As well as core touring poets JR Carpenter, John Hall, Matti Spence, Annabel Banks, Camilla Nelson and SJ Fowler, the project featured many dozens of well-known poets of south westerly counties and an open call for participation. Films are now online here, including the above featuring Other Room readers Tony Lopez and Elizabeth-Jane Burnett.

Tony Lopez on his work for the Bury Text Festival

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 ‘Works on Paper’ was commissioned in 2008. I stayed in Manchester and spent a few days visiting Bury just finding out about the place, people and history, including the library and archive. Of course Bury is a prime site in the Industrial Revolution both in terms of technical innovation and its rapid economic development as a manufacturing centre. I was particularly interested in Bury’s later position in the early twentieth century as a world-leading producer of paper. This makes sense when you realise that industrial paper production came about as a kind of diversification of the cotton industry after much earlier breakthroughs in mechanical weaving, John Kay’s flying shuttle, programmed looms and so on. They had cotton waste and rags, water and then steam power; factories with highly trained mechanics and inventive engineers, and were very well placed to respond to the explosion of print culture.

Discover more HERE at the Text Archive Blog and site which also includes news and articles by derek beaulieu, Helen White, Richard Pinkney & Holly Pester

Wor(l)ds in Collision

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words_collision

CLICK on the poster to enlarge

This exhibition concentrates on Wittgenstein’s insistence in his later writings on the usefulness of the concept of ‘games’ for thinking about language. There is no one quality that unites all the things we think of as games, and to play a game requires not only rules, but the possibility of testing, breaking, revising those rules. Rejecting the idea that language has one essential purpose, or that meaning is something fixed and transparent, the artworks here are engaged in various forms of play, translation or reconfiguration. Language is physical as well as symbolic. Our experiences lay claim to the traditions and practices that give them meaning, but can be turned back thereon to question and confuse what we might otherwise take for granted. We come to points where ordinary language seems inadequate, but this is not because we lack an adequately nuanced set of concepts, or because we need a better ‘theory’ of language, but because we have not paid enough attention to the particular and the familiar. What frameworks support our observations and convictions? The artwork here in some ways mimics the incompleteness of Wittgenstein’s writing, the unendingness of his philosophical project. Variously they show art as a process of discarding and reassembling, of repetition with variation, of careful attention to presentation and nested meanings, to the balance between authorial control and emergence, between understanding and opacity.

We are delighted to welcome you to this playful collaboration between poets, artists and philosophers, where the boundaries between words and images, meanings and material are plucked, strummed, exalted and trammelled.

Tony Lopez: Nevermore

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Nevermore

 

zimZalla object 023 is Nevermore, by Tony Lopez: silkscreen printed folding card, letterpress sleeve with rubber stamp. 44.6 x 9 cms (unfolded). Hand-printed sans serif letterforms are arranged in threes, located on each plane of the folding card. The text is a variation on Robert Creeley’s statement that ‘form is never more than an extension of content.’ This is a limited edition of 40. More details at the zimZalla site.

Tony Lopez – Two Prints

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Go to Orcombe.com to view both these prints

Venus appears to shine most brightly in the sky just after sunset. Evening Star, set out as a circle poem and printed in deep blue on satin white, combines topographical and celestial scales in a brief form of words.
This silkscreen print is published in an edition of 10, signed and numbered, available only on Orcombe.com.
A3 plus: image 297 x 485 mm, paper 386 x 570 mm.

If it were possible, an art of pure ideas must nonetheless rely on language: a matter subject to slippage, manipulation and play, to colour and emotion, to expectations and their subversion, diversion or delay. Ideas Aside is a language game of wooden and metal sans-serif type composed in the press and printed in permanent red ink.
This letterpress print is published in an edition of 20, signed and numbered, available only on Orcombe.com.
A3 plus: image 260 x 381 mm, paper 350 x 513 mm.

The Text Festivals: Language Art and Material Poetry

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Text_collini

The Text Festivals: Language Art and Material Poetry edited by Tony Lopez

It is a remarkable phenomenon that the foremost among recent sites of this interrogation of boundaries has been a series of festivals located in Bury, on the outskirts of Greater Manchester. World leading artists and poets have been brought together in a range of exhibitions and performances that demonstrate a new and productive collision of different cultural enterprises and expectations. Among those shown at the Text Festivals are Fiona Banner, derek beaulieu, Caroline Bergvall, Joseph Beuys, Christian Bok, Brass Art, Marcel Broodthaers, Pavel Buchler, Augusto de Campos, Zeynep Cansu, Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing, Liz Collini, Philip Davenport, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hamish Fulton, Eugen Gomringer, Robert Grenier, Alan Halsey, Alexander Jorgenson, Satu Kaikonen, Martin Kippenburger, Karri Kokko, Marton Koppany, On Kawara, Helmut Lemke, Richard Long, Tony Lopez, Jackson Mac Low, Hansjorg Mayer, Steve Miller, Kerry Morrison, Maurizio Nannucci, Patrick Fabian Panetta, Holly Pester, Tom Philips, Shaun Pickard, Kate Pickering, Hester Reeve (HRH.the), Spencer Roberts, Ed Ruscha, Ron Silliman, Mary Ellen Solt, Magda Stawarska-Beavan, Harald Stoffers, Carolyn Thompson, Nick Thurston, Aysegul Tozeren, TNWK, Tony Trehy, Nico Vasilakis, Carol Watts, Lawrence Weiner, George Widener, Ming Wong, and Eric Zboya. Artists, poets and curators working in these overlapping fields have written this book. It includes new essays by Tony Trehy (director of the Text Festivals), derek beaulieu, Christian Bok, Liz Collini, James Davies, Philip Davenport, Robert Grenier, Alan Halsey, Tony Lopez, Holly Pester, Hester Reeve (HRH.the), Carolyn Thompson, and Carol Watts.

OUT NOW from Plymouth University Press or via Amazon

THE DARK WOULD language art anthology

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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.

Experimental Sonnet Writing – Online Course

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James Davies will be teaching an online course for The Poetry School

Experimental Sonnet Writing

Tutor: James Davies

Day / Time: Thursdays, fortnightly, 7pm UK Time

Duration: 5 sessions

First Live Chat: 4 October

Price: £76, £67, £60

Level: open to all

The Sonnet has proved to be the most popular form of poetry over the last 500 years or so. The twentieth and twenty-first century has seen the form reinvented time and time again in staggering ways which suggests there are no end to the possibilities it has to offer. On this course we will explore the form’s malleability and range. By reading a small amount of the key sonnets of modern and contemporary times, whilst considering the sonnet’s heritage, you will write your own 14 liners. Tasks will be based around sonnets written in the last hundred years or so (with a particular focus on the last fifty years).By the end of the course you will be inventing your own methods and processes and adding to this rich tradition. Students should have 5-10 of their own poems ready to work on which they are prepared to treat and manipulate; these need not be sonnets nor in any way complete.

We will be thinking about poets including: e.e. cummings, John Berryman, Man Ray, Matthew Welton, Ted Berrigan, Derek Henderson, Philip Terry, Jen Bervin, Tim Atkins, Tony Lopez, Juliana Spahr, Sarah Riggs

See www.poetryschool.com for more

Tony Lopez: Sounds New Poetry Festival

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Recent Other Room reader Tony Lopez is reading with Steve Collis at this year’s Sounds New Poetry Festival in Canterbury. Details below:

Wednesday 9th May 6pm, Peter Brown Room, Darwin College, University of Kent.
Reading: Found Text

Working with the idea of the found text, Steve Collis and Tony Lopez present poems that explore borrowing and appropriation in art. Like John Tavener in The Veil of the Temple, Collis and Lopez work with and through mixed sources to open the possibilities of collective expression.

Tony Lopez: a preview

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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.