Tony Lopez

WORKS ON PAPER

2012-01-05T14:56:00.001Z

At the apex of modernism in the early twentieth century, Bury in Lancashire was the world centre of industrial paper manufacture. Works on Paper is a serial poem looking through the history and language of that technical innovation and place of trade. The poem was written in 2008, first performed at the Text Festival in 2009, and letterpress printed on 130 gsm Hahnemuhle old antique laid by Richard Parker in October and November 2011, limited to 100 copies at £4.
Works on Paper is Crater 15 published by Crater Press, London and Brighton.

THE BURY POEMS

2012-01-04T14:44:00.001Z

The Bury Poems was published in 2011 by Apple Pie Editions.

Contents
Works on Paper, Tony Lopez
6 Poems, Robert Grenier
Extract: Northern Soul, Ron Silliman
0, Geof Huth
Viaduct, Carol Watts
1 am made of desire, Philip Davenport
Stripped, Philip Davenport
Foody, Holly Pester
HEAP, Holly Pester
Footnotes
For The Bury Poems, Tony Trehy

Philip Davenport's Apple Pie Editions published this hardback collection of work related to a number of Bury Art Museum commissions set up by the Text Festival curator Tony Trehy. The book includes a good reproduction of one short sequence '6 Poems' of Robert Grenier's four-colour hand-drawn poems that are best presented as colour plates. If you haven't seen Grenier's colour work this is a useful point of reference. Ron Silliman's 'Extract: Northern Soul' is actually a tiny extract that was made into a neon poem exhibited at the Text Festival in 2011. It figures in the book as a series of 15 photographs by Philip Davenport of the neon manufacturing process including a double spread with the text. The neon is now installed in Bury tram station. I would have liked to see some more of the Silliman poem. Carol Watts contributes a sequence 'Viaduct' that is based on a fatal road accident near Bury in 1840 involving a horse. The poem uses contemporary sources and material from the Bury archives to dramatise a collision of mechanical industrial and animal worlds. The book also includes photos by Julia Grime and Steve Walton, and drawings by Darren Marsh.
My poem sequence 'Works on Paper' is broken up arbitrarily and distributed through the book, out of the composed order, with one section used as a half-title and another as back cover copy.
Ron Silliman's recent chapbook Wharf Hypothesis (published by Lines, NY) is a sort of 'Stranger in a Strange Land' poem describing a train journey in England taken at the time of the Text Festival 2009 and including the 2-3 lines turned into a neon mentioned above. I like the no-nonsense descriptions, Bury Market appears as "off-brand tack / in vast quantity" which it mostly is. The fresh food wouldn't look remarkable to an American, though you wouldn't find that selection of Lancashire produce anywhere else. It's good to read a poem you could argue with, that has a point of view. I'm looking forward to the rest of 'Northern Soul'.

EXETER POETRY FESTIVAL

2011-10-17T15:43:00.000+01:00

I went to a couple of events at Exeter Poetry Festival last week. I would have liked to see more of it but I only found out about the festival because a friend who was reading told me just beforehand. I don't think there was any advertising. The readings I saw in Exeter Library were very good indeed and it was a pleasure to meet friends and have a drink there, a great way to use the library. On Saturday 8th October there was a book launch for a new anthology of prose poems This Line is Not for Turning edited by Jane Monson and published by Cinnamon Press. There were readings by Andy Brown, Anthony Caleshu, Luke Kennard and the editor Jane Monson. Andy Brown's work included some postcolonial narratives that reminded me a little of Tom Raworth's Logbook, but they were more continuous and atmospheric, less deliberately disjunctive. Anthony Caleshu read some work from his recent collection Of Whales, I really enjoyed the Writer's Room poem, and Luke Kennard's witty performance of a playful and vivid piece about scale was a delight. Jane Monson's poems were much better than her explanations about the anthology.

On Sunday 9th October there was a Shearsman event with readings by Mark Goodwin and Harriet Tarlo, who both have work in the anthology The Ground Aslant, edited by Tarlo. This was an extended reading of landscape based work, Goodwin's poems were about walking and climbing in Torridon and I loved them having climbed there myself a long time ago. Tarlo's reading from Clouds Descending was very interesting, the works like arrays of landscape features spread projective verse style across the page. These were sections from a work made in collaboration with photographer Jem Southam. It would have been great to see some of the photos projected at the same time. Photos of Harriet, Anthony, Luke and Mark were the only snaps worth posting.

SENTENCES EXHIBITION BURY

2011-09-01T11:30:00.000+01:00

I just found these photos by Jari Kuusenaho, posted on the Text Festival Facebook page. The top photo is of the main gallery at Bury with one section of the Sentences show curated by Tony Trehy. Derek Beaulieu is walking towards the camera and Marjut Villanueuva is looking at the exhibit and writing. The second photo is my piece More and More moving between sentences.

EDINBURGH PHOTOS

2011-08-06T11:05:00.000+01:00

In Edinburgh for a reading at the Voodoo Rooms for the University of New Orleans overseas summer writing programme, I went to see the local art museums and took photos of these outdoor works by Eduardo Paolozzi, Nathan Coley, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Martin Creed. The Finlay memorial for Robert Louis Stevenson is in Princes Gardens. A Finlay work at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is badly installed next to a car park. I also saw a wonderful retrospective of Elizabeth Blackadder at the Royal Scottish Academy but no photos allowed.

READING IN EDINBURGH 25 JULY

2011-07-20T14:49:00.000+01:00

I'm giving a reading for UNO at the Voodoo Rooms, 19A West Register Street, Edinburgh, EH2 2AA, at 8pm, 25 July 2011 with Hank Lazer, Susan Schultz, Biljana Obradavic and Dorothy Alexander.
I've been working through the summer with the editor Bill Lavender and designer Carrie Chappell of the University of New Orleans Press on the production of the North American edition of my book Only More So. UNO currently has a summer writing programme in Edinburgh.

I POETI DI SALA CAPIZUCCHI

2011-07-12T15:54:00.000+01:00

The Poets of the Sala Capizucchi is a new anthology published in Rimini, Italy by Raffaelli Editore and in USA by the University of New Orleans Press, edited by Caterina Ricciardi, John Gery and Massimo Bacigalupo. Poems in Italian by Maria Clelia Cardona, Luca Cesari, Mario Lunetta, Daniel Maria Mancini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Daniele Pieroni, Mario Quattrucci, Edoardo Sanguineti, Carlo Vita printed with parallel English versions; Poems in Czech by Petr Mikes printed with parallel English translations; Poems in English by Massimo Bacigalupo; Mary de Rachewiltz, Patrizia de Rachewiltz, John Gery, Tony Lopez, Biljana D. Obradovic, Wayne Pounds, Stephen Romer, Ron Smith, C.K. Stead printed with parallel Italian translations. Introduction by John Gery.
This is my first Italian publication and includes Italian translations of 'A Path Marked with Breadcrumbs', 'Look at the Screen', 'On Tuesday', 'When You Wish ...', and an excerpt from Darwin all translated by Caterina Ricciardi.

POUND CONFERENCE LONDON 2011

2011-07-11T15:13:00.004+01:00

Just back from the Pound Conference in London. Four days of papers with three strands running at once at the Institute for English Studies in London University.
Among those that I saw were talks by:
Evelyn Haller of Doane College on the Pisan Cantos and the fashion houses of Charles Worth and Jeanne Paquin;
Gavin Selerie of London on London Ghosts and their Haunts;
Jo Brantley Berryman of Cal Arts on Pound and Hokusai;
Ira Nadel of UBC on Picasso and Pound;
Stephen Romer of Tours on Pound's views on London architecture;
David Ewick of Tokyo Woman's Christian U on Japanese No: Ito, Kume, Kori, Pound and Yeats;
Tateo Imamura also of TWCU on Hemingway, Pound and Japanese artist Tamijuro Kume;
Dorsey Kleitz also of TWCU on Ito, Pound, Yeats and At the Hawk's Well;
Karlein Van Den Beukel of London South Bank on Pound and Modern Dance;
Keith Tuma of Miami Ohio on Sons of Pound (Whigham, mostly);
Julian Stannard of Winchester on Bunting's Metropolitan Shudder;
Annabel Haynes of Durham on Bunting, ethics and politics;
Richard Parker of Sussex on Zukofsky's London;
Jeff Grieneisen of the State College of Florida on Pound and James Wright;
Alan Golding of Louisville on Rachel Blau DuPlessis' Drafts;
Gary Leising of Utica College on Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns as mini Cantos;
Gareth Farmer of Sussex on Veronica Forrest-Thomson's remarkable unpublished criticism on Pound;
Ryan Dobran of Cambridge on J H Prynne's Aristeas;
Helen Carr of London on Pound and Desmond Fitzgerald;
Catherine Paul of Clemson on HD's End of Torment about Pound's WW2 radio propaganda;
David Moody on the 'f - word';
there was a panel of presentations on the forthcoming new edition of the Pisan Cantos, with Ron Bush of Oxford and David Ten Eyck of Nancy, with respondents including Kenneth Haynes of Brown;
also a panel on Ezra Pound in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2010) with Ira Nadel, editor and Ron Bush, Rebecca Beasley, Demetres Tryphonopoulas, Catherine Paul, Massimo Bacigalupo, and others. There was a film of Canto 116 by Bernard Dew, a special reading by Keston Sutherland and Tim Atkins at the Poetry Library on the South Bank, and a conference reading by a dozen or so poets including Ron Smith, Biljana Obradovic, Wayne Pounds, Stephen Romer, Mary de Rachewiltz, John Gery, Jeff Grieneisen, Richard Parker, Gavin Selerie, Julian Stannard and me.
As usual I missed lots of interesting talks, not only because of parallel sessions but because there is just so much going on. It was good to see so many friends and hear some really good papers and very varied poetry readings.
I went on the Imagist Walk in Kensington and in Bloomsbury led by Robert Richardson of De Montford. The photo above is of Pound's lodging at 10 Kensington Church Walk, near Kensington High Street tube, where there is an English Heritage blue plaque for Pound.

ONLY MORE SO

2011-07-01T12:56:00.000+01:00

Only More So is published in North America by the University of New Orleans, UNO Press and is available now on Amazon. A poem in ten prose sections, 254 pages including a bibliography of sources and index. Cover photo: Fimmvörðuháls Iceland, 1997 © John S. Webb.

DAVID NASH at CCANW

2011-05-24T16:54:00.000+01:00

David Nash sculptures at the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW), Haldon Forest Park, near Exeter. The exhibition runs from 22 April to 25 September 2011. The sculptures shown here are 'Charred Cross Egg' (interior) and 'Three Humps' (outside), also details of 'Three Humps' showing new inhabitants.

PLANTS by JAMES DAVIES

2011-05-23T18:08:00.004+01:00

When I got this book I found it contained a piece of writing that I have read before and been back to many times to mull over and read again. I saw it first in the anthology Text 2 and I've seen a version of it exhibited, it must have been in the 2009 Text Festival. Called 'Untitled' it comprises 6 'Plates' which are brief apparently descriptive texts such as you would find on an art gallery label:

Plate 1 James Davies, Text 1 (2006).
Text on paper, variable dimensions,
Collection of the artist.

Next to 'Plate 1' is a printed square outline or box containing the same text, beginning 'James Davies'. So on the page we see two columns, one a list of three 'Plates' and the other column a display of three boxes containing the same texts, enlarged and reset. Over the page this layout and content is repeated in a similar display. The layout is similar but the content is not identical. The numbers change and 'Plate 6' is a 'Study for Text 4'. There is an emptying of the expectations we have for art and for poetry to signify. I'm used to that being managed in various ways but this is a particularly pure and conceptual form of written abstraction. It has a playful recursive emptiness that is appealing and witty. There is a very sure and confident touch in the switch from the genre of the descriptive label to that same material reset and exhibited or objectified as content in each typographical box. I mean it's confident to leave it at that and repeat the process six times without adding anything else, no quotes from Wittgenstein or other see-heres, just the thing itself. Beautiful.
The opening of the book is a sequence of 'Unmades', this is the first one:

Apples

Written, typed, altered, deleted

15.07.05

You'd think that this was a dead end but Davies manages 31 witty variations, his 'Unmades', title after Duchamp, remind me of Tom Raworth's sequence 'Stag Skull Mounted' in Moving 1971, especially the last poem in that sequence '7.40 PM. June 29th. 1970'. So much has been removed from the normal equipment of the poem that it comprises only (only) a highly literary intelligence at play. Because of this cut-down quality the titles become bizarre, ludicrous, fantastical, banal all at once. I love it.

James Davies, Plants, Reality Street, 80 pp, £8.50, 12 dollars US, 9 Euros.
The poems quoted here for review are copyright James Davies 2011. The book cover is by Simon Taylor.

THE RECIPE EXCHANGE AT SPACEX

2011-05-22T15:09:00.009+01:00

Yesterday, 21 May, I went to a workshop Exploring Digital Aesthetics led by Graham Dean at Spacex in Exeter. Described as 'a hands-on workshop exploring how to re-create data in physical form, using the Arduino prototyping system', this was a really good event. All the participants, who had no experience with electricals and almost no knowledge of programming, managed to use a programmable circuit board with components such as LEDs, switches and sensors, to make very simple functioning circuits and to write code to enable them to work.

THE RECIPE EXCHANGE is an off-site Spacex community art project led by artist Helen Pritchard, who uses digital technology as a creative tool to encourage community collaboration. The Recipe Exchange is a network based on Farringdon, a village just outside Exeter, and it seems to have been a great success in connecting people to share knowledge and skills and get involved in learning by making. Documentation of the project, including video of various workshops and local direct action events, is the current show at Spacex. There is more information at The Recipe Exchange, and more workshops are coming up at Spacex.

MODERN EMPIRE at LA SCATOLA GALLERY

2011-05-19T17:58:00.007+01:00

'Magic Touch' by Susie Green, 2005/09. C-Type Prints, published by Modern Empire and reproduced here by permission La Scatola Gallery.

24 May to 5 June 2011: La Scatola Gallery presents Modern Empire a group show with artists Vicki Bennett, Charlotte Bracegirdle, Alec Finlay, Sandy Grant, Susie Green, Russell Maurice and Inken Reinert.

Modern Empire commissions and produces print editions by emerging and established artists.

Modern Empire’s first public exhibition, at La Scatola, includes original drawings, paintings, collage, photography, and sculpture, illustrating the broad range of practice among the artists they work with. The show celebrates the launch of new print editions by Sandy Grant, Russell Maurice and Inken Reinert.

For some of the artists the process of creating a print is a complete departure from their regular artistic output, providing new techniques and tools to explore in order to express artistic ideas. For others, printmaking is already an existing aspect of their output and the opportunity is one in which the relationship to a print publisher creates a new context to develop an idea.

Modern Empire fosters a close relationship between the artist and an established print workshop or technician. The results are affordable, limited editions prints, which are available to purchase through Modern Empire online.

Further information about the artists and editions at Modern Empire.

LA SCATOLA GALLERY

1 Snowden Street, London, EC2A 2DQ

MORE AND MORE PHOTOS

2011-05-11T15:21:00.006+01:00

These are new photos of More and More by Julia Grimes: see my explanation of the work in the previous post. The reflections, used to great effect by Julia in these photos, are of Ron Silliman's neon work, an excerpt from Northern Soul, also exhibited in the Sentences exhibition on show in Bury Art Gallery until 9 July 2011.

Thanks to Julia Grimes, Phil Davenport and the curator Tony Trehy.

MORE AND MORE IN BURY

2011-05-03T11:26:00.013+01:00

More and More is a new work of mine exhibited in the exhibition Sentences at Bury Art Gallery, near Manchester. Three linked exhibitions were opened as part of the Text Festival, 30 April 2011. More and More, a kinetic poem, was a Bury Art Gallery commission made for the Sentences exhibition, purchased in 2011. The piece is an animation that simulates a Solari departure board as used in airports and train stations. There are sixty-six sentences programmed into the flash animation. At each new transition from sentence to sentence, each cell of the board travels through the alphabet, numbers and punctuation marks, until it gets to the character (or blank) required for the next sentence. The flash animation is by ranfirefly, and the display is a 42 inch TV screen with speakers for the clicking soundtrack and a DVD player. Technical development: programming and conversion to video by Tom Lopez. The work is on display in the Sentences exhibition 30 April to 9 July 2011 along with works by Pavel Buchler, Christian Bok, Ron Silliman, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Kate Pickering and others (I haven't been able to find a full listing in the Text Festival information but there is a link here.

READING IN PLYMOUTH

2011-02-07T10:35:00.003Z

I'm reading with Steve Spence, 7pm, 8th February at the Roland Levinsky Building, University of Plymouth. This is one of the Peninsula Arts series running through February 2011.

A COLLOQUY OF POETS

2011-02-07T09:58:00.007Z

I'm still catching up with events listings from last year. On 13th and 14th November I took part in a Colloquy of Poets at the media centre, University of Hull. It was a busy weekend including public readings by invited poets: 1: Kelvin Corcoran, Zoe Skoulding, Matthew Welton, Philip Gross and Denise Riley; 2: Daljit Nagra, Carol Watts, Tony Lopez, Susan Wicks, and John Burnside. We stayed together at a hotel in Hull centre, near the station, and small groups walked around the city centre for a series of photo shoots with Carolyn Forbes. I had never been to Hull before. The Colloquy began with each of the poets giving a prepared talk on a poem that was important to them, and the idea, given the range of different poets invited, was set up useful encounters in poetry. I really enjoyed the readings on Saturday evening and Sunday Morning, including new commissioned poems. All of this was organised by Martin Goodman, Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Philip Larkin Centre at the University of Hull.

SOME TIMES BY HARRY GUEST

2011-01-27T16:36:00.005Z

10th November I went to the Exeter launch of Harry Guest's new book Some Times from Anvil Press. This is the first literary event I've been to in Exeter Central Library. It was a really fine reading, as expected, sensitive, beautiful poems and Harry's readings bringing them immediately into sharp focus. 'The Custard Mountains' is first one in the book about a young boy mishearing a word in a radio performance of a Lorca poem. It would be a funny story anyway but with Harry Guest's verbal invention of exotic landscapes in variations of yellow we are led into the daydreams of childhood imagination recovered through unreliable proliferating memory. And the poem's humour and imagination is a tribute to Lorca. It's a generous intelligent book by a restless and passionate writer. Of course Harry Guest draws a good crowd in Exeter and the event had that buzz with a big queue for signed books, a good night for Anvil and the library. The cover design of Some Times is by Tamasin Cole, based on a painting by Piran Bishop.

CONTEMPORARY POETRY CONFERENCE

2011-01-27T15:15:00.005Z

I failed to write anything about the British and Irish Contemporary Poetry Conference back in September because it was a difficult and very busy time. The second in a useful series organised by various collaborating universities British and Irish Poetry 1960-2010 was held at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University of Belfast, 15-17 September 2010. There were keynote papers by Sir Christopher Ricks, William Logan and Angela Leighton, and readings by Belfast poets Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Sinead Morrissey and Leontia Flynn, with a panel of poet-publishers: Michael Schmidt, Don Paterson and Peter Fallon. Another session of readings was given by Michael Schmidt, Don Paterson, Gerald Dawe, Christopher Reid, Peter McDonald and Peter Fallon.

I was in a panel with James Cummins of University College, Cork who spoke about Tom Raworth's use of self-reflection and repetition in Writing and Catacoustics, with Lacy Rumsden who read a paper 'Reading Prynne Aloud: Constraint, Orientation, Form. I gave a talk on what was then a work in progress 'Only More So'. The panel worked really well, we could have used more time for questions.

The next day I chaired a panel including Neil Pattison of St John's Cambridge on Denise Riley, Robin Purves of Central Lancashire on Tom Leonard and Keston Sutherland, and William Rowe of Birkbeck on Barry MacSweeney. This also was a terrific panel with quite different approaches to some of the most interesting recent poetry written in English. I went to some of the other papers but the thread I was really interested in did not survive into the later sessions. I saw Derek Attridge talking about Don Paterson, Christopher Ricks on Geoffrey Hill and Angela Leighton on various poets including Philip Gross.

RICHARD PARKER LAUNCH

2010-07-10T16:10:00.000+01:00

Richard Parker's book from The Mountain of California, Openned Press, is being launched on 18 August 2010, 7.30pm, at Carnivale, 2 White Church Lane, London, E1 7QR. Admission is free. It should be a good event, lots of readers, more information and another flyer with policemen on the Openned website.

SCOTT THURSTON READING

2010-07-10T15:46:00.000+01:00

Last Sunday 4 July I went to a terrific reading by Scott Thurston at Furzeacres on Dartmoor, hosted by poet Philip Kuhn and sculptor Rosie Musgrave. Scott read from his new book Internal Rhyme, four sequences of identical form that are designed to be read horizontally and vertically on the page. This sounds tricky but it works, with parts of a sequence heard in both directions and phrases being recombined as the performance moved on. The sense of a web or maybe an array of half-lines that make connections but avoid closure was very strong. Sometimes the work seemed to be theoretical and sometimes personal, I liked it very much indeed, and it worked really well as a reading. Here's a picture of Scott outside the studio building at Furzeacres. Internal Rhyme is published by Shearsman Books of Exeter.

THEO JANSEN ON EXMOUTH BEACH

2010-06-27T20:13:00.001+01:00

Our walk on the beach at low tide today included a look at Dutch artist Theo Jansen's Strandbeest which has been living and moving around on the sand for a couple of days. Theo Jansen (pictured above with his Strandbeest) explained that the creature was made out of ordinary conduit that is used everywhere in Holland for domestic and industrial buildings. The Strandbeest works on wind power, and uses moving sails to harness wind and store it as air under pressure in plastic bottles. We saw the sails working and saw the Strandbeest walk on the sand. This is the best addition to Exmouth beach that we've ever seen. Jansen drew a crowd of people for his talk about the creature and everyone was delighted to see the Strandbeest walking on the beach. There is also a smaller model that can be pulled along to demonstrate the mechanism in action and that was in use all the time. The Strandbeest is going to Exeter city centre for a few days during the Exeter Festival, and there is a Theo Jansen exhibition at Spacex currently.

SHANGHAI & HANGZHOU

2010-06-25T15:14:00.000+01:00

I was in Shanghai and Hanzhou from 1 - 10 June for the conference Modernism and the Orient, held at the Santai Villa Hotel, Hangzhou, on 5 - 7 June. I gave a paper on the English poets Harry Guest and Lee Harwood, choosing Guest's 'Two Poems for O-Bon' and Harwood's 'Chen' as poems that represent Japanese and Chinese cultures in their different ways. There were more than seventy papers at the conference, including contributions from Ron Bush, Ira Nadel, Daniel Albright, Sabine Sielke, Christine Froula, Zhaoming Qian, Fen Gao, Qiping Yin and Jiande Lu. I particularly liked the papers by Richard Parker, David Ewick, Dorsey Kleitz but as usual I was only too aware of the papers I was missing because of timetable clashes. A high point was the visit to the Lingyin Temple on a hillside near Hangzhou, my first visit to a Buddhist site, something I should have done about forty years ago. It was a wonderful experience to see the different temples and huge carved Buddhas, buddhist saints and warrior guardians. I was invited to give a lecture at very short notice at Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade and so time for exploring Hangzhou and Shanghai was limited, but I did get to spend some time at the Shanghai Museum, a day in all, some of it with my friend Wendy Flory of Purdue University in USA who is a good companion and knows a great deal about Chinese Art. I was looked after in Shanghai and Hangzhou by various University postgraduate students and staff, a really warm welcome and great hospitality. The photos above are 1 West Lake, Hangzhou; 2 Lingyin Temple; 3 Buddhist Stele, Shanghai Museum; 4 Lingyin Temple; 5 Memorial temple for Yu Qian. My trip to China was sponsored by the British Academy, I'm really grateful for their support.

PW10 PERFORMANCE WRITING at ARNOLFINI

2010-05-02T11:46:00.000+01:00

PW10 is a weekend festival of Performance Writing and Cross artform at Arnolfini, Bristol --

Friday 7 May evening, Saturday 8 May, Sunday 9 May

The programme includes

Opening Caroline Bergvall's and Ciaran Maher's sound installation 'Say Parsley'.

Talks by Redell Olsen, Ric Allsopp, Caroline Bergvall, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Lone Twin.

Performance by Aaron Williamson, Nancy Reilly-McVittie, Low Profile, Emma Bennet.

Readings by Tony Lopez, Drew Milne, Allen Fisher.

Multi-channel audio by David Prior.

Video installation by Nisha Dugall.

Digital and Visual text by John Hall, Jerome Fletcher, John Cayley, Ellen Bell, Melanie Thompson.

Arnolfini Gallery, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol, BS1 4QA

Day pass £8 / £7 concessions

Weekend pass £20 / £15 unwaged / £10 students

Road Sign Image (above) copyright (c) John Hall, 2009.

ARNOLFINI READING: MAY

2010-04-13T10:50:00.000+01:00

I'll be reading during PW10, the Performance Writing weekend at

Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol, BS1 4QA.

Saturday 8 May, 11am-9pm

Sunday 9 May, 11am-6pm

There is information about the weekend and ticket details on the Arnolofini website here.

Photo from the Text Festival, Bury, 2009.

EKLEKSOGRAPHIA NAKED TEAPARTY

2010-03-12T10:25:00.000Z

An excerpt from the manuscript books of False Memory has just been published in the new issue of Ekleksographia online magazine William Blake and the Naked Teaparty guest edited by Philip Davenport. The issue features textworks that emphasise touch - handwritten and haptic – particularly pieces that consider emotional engagements, and corporate or military erasure of the handmade, the human, the not-digital.

These qualities link into the alternative tradition of poetics - and to 'outsider' artists who are owed a debt by the experimenters (an IOU all the way back to Will Blake, he and the Mrs sitting on the lawn in London afternoons, naked, drinking tea).

Contributors: Alan Halsey, Anna MacGowan, The Atlas Group, Ben Gwilliam, Carol Watts, Carolyn Thompson, Darren Marsh, Dave Griffiths, David Tibet, Geof Huth, George Widener, Geraldine Monk, The Gingerbread Tree, Hainer Wormann, Harald Stoffers, Helmut Lemke, Holly Pester, James Davies, Jesse Glass, Jonathan Penton, Julia Grime, Kerry Morrison, Kirstie Gregory, Laurence Lane, Lee Patterson, Li E Chen, Liz Collini, Matt Dalby, Michael Wilson, Morry Carlin, Nick Blinko, Nico Vassilakis, Patricia Farrell, Rachael Elwell, Robert Grenier, Robert Sheppard, Sarah Sanders, Sean Bonney, Stephen Vincent, Steve Waling, Sue Arrowsmith, Todd Thorpe, Tony Lopez and Tony Trehy

The issue goes online 15^th March 2010 and will be launched with a 24 hour ‘live’ online writing event by Sarah Saunders

Ekleksographia Series Editor Jesse Glass, the latest issue designed by Jonathan Penton, the cover art (see above) by Ben Gwilliam and Philip Davenport.

W. S. GRAHAM EVENT

2010-02-10T17:23:00.000Z

Centre for South West Writing

and Special Collections

invite you to

A CELEBRATION OF W S GRAHAM

Wednesday 24 February 5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.

followed by drinks from 6.30 p.m.

____________________________________________________

Seminar Room A+B

Research Commons

Old Library

Prince of Wales Road

University of Exeter EX4 4SB

Andy Ching, Andy Brown, Tony Lopez, Ruth Rosen and Tim Kendall

Will read and discuss the work of one of Scotland's finest poets, who made his home in Madron, Cornwall.

There will also be a chance to listen to recordings of the man himself, followed by informal drinks from 6.30 p.m.-7.30 p.m.

The evening is free and to reserve a place please email:

c.j.faunch@exeter.ac.uk

or Tel. 01392 263879 by 19 February

PLYMOUTH TALK

2010-01-13T15:16:00.000Z

Monday 18 January, 11 am, I'm giving a talk on my project 'Only More So' for the MA Creative Writing seminar at The University of Plymouth, Portland Square Building.

PUBLICATION of WORK IN PROGRESS

2010-01-13T09:56:00.001Z

My previous post on the publication of Work-in-Progress from 'Only More So' was incomplete, so here it is updated:

'Only More So' in Practice: New Writing + Art, 2 (2007) 145-148.

'Giant Steps' in the Dispatx issue Eminent Domain (2007).

'from Only More So' Argotist Online (2007).

'from Only More So' in Kornelia Freitag and Katharina Vester (eds), Another Language: Poetic Experiments in Britain and North America, Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2008, 17-20.

'The Hawthorne Effect' in Wobbling Roof issue 1 (2009).

'from Giant Steps' in Salt Magazine issue 2 (2009).

'from Giant Steps' in Tears in the Fence, 50 (2009) 35-37.

'from Only More So' in Tony Trehy (ed), Text 2, Bury Metropolitan Borough Council, 2009, 34-41.

The most substantial publication so far is Darwin, one section (10%) of 'Only More So', a 44-page book published in a limited edition by Acts of Language, 2009.

Reception

Darwin has been reviewed by Ron Silliman in Silliman's Blog and by Steve Spence in Stride Magazine.

Richard Kerridge, 'Climate Change and Contemporary Modernist Poetry' in Poetry and Public Language, Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2007, includes critical work on 'Only More So'.

ONLY MORE SO / ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND

2010-01-01T11:49:00.000Z

Since 2005, I've been working on a prose book called 'Only More So', building it up in sections, fitting in when I could around teaching in Plymouth. It is a large-scale structure composed in a strict form using a collage process, similar in a way to False Memory (1996, 2003), but the unit of composition in this book is the sentence, rather than a verse line. In order to make more rapid progress with this work I decided to give up my chair in poetry and take voluntary redundancy so that I could write full time. I went back to self-employment on 1 August 2009, and since then I have been working on this project and putting in various grant applications. I just heard in late December that 'Only More So' was approved for Arts Council 'Grants for the arts' funding beginning January 2010, so I can concentrate on writing right through 2010 and also free myself up for any freelance work.

Some Work-in-Progress from 'Only More So' has been published:

'Only More So' in Practice: New Writing + Art, 2 (2007) 145-148.

'The Hawthorne Effect' in Wobbling Roof issue 1 (2009).

'Giant Steps' in the Dispatx issue Eminent Domain (2007).

'from Giant Steps' in Tears in the Fence, 50 (2009) 35-37.

'from Only More So' in Text 2, edited by Tony Trehy (Bury Metropolitan Borough Council, 2009) 34-41.

The most substantial publication so far is Darwin, one section (10%) of 'Only More So', a 44-page book published in a limited edition by Acts of Language, 2009. Darwin was reviewed by Ron Silliman in Silliman's Blog.

BOOKS RECEIVED

2009-12-08T14:43:00.000Z

Helen Lopez, Shift Perception, Exeter: Shearsman, 2009, isbn 978-1-84861-073-6 -- my sister Helen's first poetry book.

Andrew Nightingale, The Big Wheel, Kingsbridge, Devon: Oversteps, isbn 978-1-906856-05-2 -- Andrew studied for the MA in Creative Writing at Plymouth.

Christopher Cook, Notes to the Graphites (exhibition catalogue), University of Plymouth: Peninsula Arts Gallery, 2009 -- I have a small collection of Christopher Cook artworks.

Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, Ted Pearson, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Steve Benson, Barrett Watten, Bob Perelman and Kit Robinson, The Grand Piano (Part 9): An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco 1975-1980, Detroit, MI: Mode A, 2009, isbn 978-0-9790198-8-3 -- The Grand Piano design and typography by Barrett Watten, cover motif after Varvara Stepanova.

QUARANTINE AT EXETER PHOENIX

2009-12-05T13:59:00.000Z

I went to see Make Believe by Quarantine at Exeter Phoenix on 1 December. It's a piece of devised theatre performance, a patchwork of stories that must be the stories of the performers themselves, each taken over by other performers and thus turned into fictions presented both as fictions and lived experience. This teasing mix was the main pleasure as the show developed and I liked the changes in pace and mood as it went on.

Having opened with one performer telling a personal story that couldn't have been her own, then another, then each of the other performers taking over, it moved on to music and dance, showtime, dressing up, working with a toddler onstage and not onstage, more music and dancing and a big slice of audience involvement. Some of the best theatre events I've seen (and this was one of them) have that quality of theatre cut down to essentials. I've seen it recently in work by Chris Goode and by Lone Twin. In Make Believe the stripped-down set really works for the production, the curtains used with the panache of Morecombe and Wise, tech crew on view at the side of the stage, wonderful use of music, every aspect dovetailed into the current story. I really loved this show and will look out for their future work.

Talk at Dartington

2009-10-23T19:24:00.000+01:00

I was at Dartington (lower image) on Tuesday 20 October for a talk on Darwin for students and staff there. The event was organised by Larry Lynch who directs the field of writing at Dartington. There was a good crowd for a writer's talk and discussion about working methods, the questions went on longer than the original talk. John Hall, Jerome Fletcher and Marianne Morris were there. I stayed over at Sharpham House (top image, thanks Jerome, for your generous hospitality) and was able to look around the wonderful palladian house and estate in the morning, we even saw the vineyard, dairy and walled garden: amazing views from above the river Dart down two bends in the river and north to Totnes.

TRIP TO SWEDEN

2009-10-14T09:35:00.000+01:00

I was in Sweden last week for a meeting with the photographer John S Webb to discuss a new collaborative project. John's photo Finnvorduhals, Iceland, 1997 is the cover and frontispiece for my latest book Darwin (Acts of Language, 2009). We spent two days touring Skane by train, ferry, car and on foot, travelling round Oresund and visiting the Louisiana art museum as well as different kinds of landscape around the coast from Malmo where John lives.

We saw an international contemporary art show The World is Yours and a one person photography show Jacob Holdts Amerika both at Louisiana, a first rate art museum in Denmark. The Holdts show is a major documentary view of American society in the 1960s and early 70s, rough and ready photo quality with some contemporary more professional looking photos, the whole show focusing especially on race.

NEW POETRY JOURNAL LAUNCH

2009-10-08T10:05:00.000+01:00

The new Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry is launched this autumn with events at Birkbeck College, University of London, 7.30pm, 21 October, featuring Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Brady, and at University of Salford, 4pm, 9 December, featuring Christine Kennedy, Allen Fisher and Ian Davidson. The JBIIP is an academic journal devoted to a range of late modernist writing on poetry and poetics, and seeks the very best critical writing and reviews for publication.

GAVIN SELERIE AT FURZEACRES

2009-09-07T14:21:00.000+01:00

It was great to see Gavin Selerie reading at Furzeacres on Dartmoor yesterday, hosted by Philip Kuhn and Rosie Musgrave. Gavin read from the second section of his book Le Fanu's Ghost, published by Five Seasons Press in 2006. The poems work over the connections between certain locations in Dublin (Phoenix Park, Chapelizod), their recreation in gothic fiction, the Sheridan / Le Fanu family, Wilde, Swift, Beckett, and especially Joyce's Work in Progress which became Finnegans Wake. These Irish literati, their houses and families, their interconnections, are a rich and luminous field for Selerie's obsessive writings and wonderfully inventive poems. The format at Furzeacres allows a writer to take the time to read from a longer work, and Gavin Selerie really benefitted from the opportunity to give us a sense of the expanded literary context of the poems, mapping in Le Fanu's The House by the Church-yard, The Cock and the Anchor, Joyce's letters and early venture as a Cinema manager, Work in Progress, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Francis Bacon's London studio reconstructed in Dublin, the rivers of Dublin and much more. Le Fanu's Ghost is a compendium of literary allusion, an expanding map of Irish culture and its workings in English but also a masterpiece of writerly poetry made of literary sources. I've heard Gavin read from it three times now, quite different performances, and this last one the best and most assured.

Just for the record, Five Seasons Press makes the finest books you could find, beautifully designed and printed, clear type, sympathetic setting, sewn bindings, unfussy but real quality manufacture on recycled paper. Their list includes poets such as Alan Halsey, Yannis Ritsos, Gary Snyder, and Gavin Selerie, enough said.

BOOKS AND JOURNALS RECEIVED

2009-08-04T14:50:00.000+01:00

Rupert M Loydell, Lost in the Slipstream, Maryport, Cumbria: Original Plus, 2009, isbn 978-0-9562433-2-4

Caterina Ricciardi, Ezra Pound and Roma, Rome: Edizione Fuori Commercio, 2009

Carol Watts, When Blue Light Falls, Hunstanton, Norfolk: Oystercatcher Press, 2008, isbn 978-1-905885-11-4

Tony Trehy (ed), Text 2, Bury, Lancashire: Bury Metropolitan Borough Council, 2009, isbn 0-9538915-3-4 -- This is an anthology associated with the Text Festival, Bury, 2009, includes new work by Tony Trehy, Phil Davenport, Hester Reeve, Alan Halsey, P. Inman, Allen Fisher, Caroline Bergvall, Carolyn Thompson, Judy Kendall, Tony Lopez, Scott Thurston, Stephen Miller, Jesse Glass, Joe Devlin, James Davies, Carol Watts, Carl Middleton

Andrew Hiscock et al (eds), English: The Journal of the English Association, OUP, 58, 2009, issn 0013-8215 -- two poems of mine in this journal, a corrupt text of 'A Path Marked with Breadcrumbs' and the first publication of 'On Tuesday'.

NEW DANCE AT DARTINGTON

2009-07-12T17:38:00.000+01:00

On Saturday 20 June 09, I saw Stephen Koplowtz's Task Force, a site specific dance performance in the Tiltyard at Dartington Hall. This was the first event in a series of site specific works that ran right through the week in various Devon locations. Local collaborators had been found, including student dancers and their teachers, production, costumes, a music director, the whole organisation is very impressive. The performance I saw began with a herald figure running through the garden calling to the dancers, then, one by one, they were seen slowly rolling down a large stone staircase to one side of the Tiltyard. After a while there were lots of dancers, maybe two dozen, and every so often one of them would get up to do some standing dance for a few moments. Then it was surprising to see them roll up the stairs.

The next routine was using the stepped sides of the Tiltyard. When the dancers were lying down we couldn't see them from below. When they sat up we could see their heads and shoulders popping up over the grass banks. They used three rows of the grass steps and played a game of appearing and disappearing, some dancers jumping up together, all of it organised to make different groups of uniformed dancers appear in patterns.

For the third section of the performance the audience was shepherded onto the same slope of the Tiltyard so that we could look across at the twelve apostles, a group of trimmed yew trees on the top of the Tiltyard slope. The dancers began by running in and out of the row of trees, something like a May festival dance, then they got into positions behind the trees and different groups came forward or stayed hidden, there were virtuoso dances from some individuals and there was more group work working through and around the trees. It was a really fine spectacle making the most of Dartington's beautiful gardens, dancers at different stages of their training, some school and some college students. There was a big audience and this event coincided with Dartington degree shows.

CONCRETE POETRY AT THE ICA

2009-06-24T20:25:00.000+01:00

On 17th June I went to the exhibition POOR. OLD. TIRED. HORSE. at the ICA in London. Named after the 1960s magazine run by Ian Hamilton Finlay, POOR. OLD. TIRED. HORSE. is 'an exhibition of art that verges on poetry', including 1960s Concrete Poetry and Text Art by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houedard, Henri Chopin, Ferdinand Kriwet, Liliane Lijn, Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Christopher Knowles, and artists from that period who used text in some way such as Robert Smithson, Philippe Guston, Alasdair Gray, David Hockney, and some more recent artists who make text based art: Anna Barham, Janice Kerbel, Sue Tompkins, Karl Holmqvist, Matthew Brannon and Frances Stark.

I was really delighted to see the 1960s concrete work, especially an installation of Ian Hamilton Finlay's Sea Poppy I as a large wall painting. It was also wonderful to see dsh typewriter art as framed originals rather than as reproductions in books. I have the Finlay in my copy of Keith Tuma's Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (New York: OUP, 2001), but it really is much more impressive as a large wall painting. Liliane Lijn's rotating text cones set on record-player turntables (photo above, from the V & A collection) are great, Ferdinand Kriwet's stamped circular aluminium signs playing on power and sex language, Carl Andre's excerpts from Shooting a Script, Christopher Knowles' 'typings' from the 1970s, patterns made with the typewriter matrix, that look like carpet designs incorporating text. All this work is really worth seeing and the material that extends the show is compelling at first, especially the Philippe Guston / Clark Coolidge collaboration 'I am the First' (1972). After that, there is a quite a bit of material that is interesting but doesn't really manage to take the Text Art concept anywhere. I don't think that contemporary Text Art is represented well in this show.

HEAVEN AND EARTH

2009-06-20T14:24:00.001+01:00

I was in London for the Royal Literary Fund Summer Party (thanks to Steve Cook of the RLF for a great spread and good company) so I went to see the exhibition Richard Long: Heaven and Earth at Tate Britain. I've seen lots of Long's work at different galleries but I haven't seen a really big show before. The large scale mud wall paintings and the installed stone sculptures really have a strong physical impact when gathered together on this scale and Tate Britain can show this kind of work very effectively. The other work is documentation of events, especially walking and making land art out in the landscape. So what you see is a record of something already over and the work is conceptual, communicated through wall-painted lists and photographs which have their own generic aesthetic: the lists assembled in large scale Gill Sans capitals, typically in red and black. The photos usually empty of humans except the evidence of Richard Long's own low impact interventions: walking to make a line in grass or moving some local stones about.

There is something unsatisfactory about work that is communicated only through documentation. It's like having a theatre programme to a show you couldn't attend. So for me the wall paintings and sculpture installations have an important function in the exhibition, even though they undermine the conceptual purity and the aesthetic of minimal environmental intervention in Long's work. The impact of hand made work that is there in itself is a crucial experience. The work wants not to be Romantic about the landscape, but the life story of a singular walker in the UK and in remote wilderness locations all over the world, cannot help but establish an heroic artist explorer like a posh Victorian mountaineer at the centre of the enterprise. Even so, it is very moving to have this record of a life work of great clarity, intelligence, and environmental concern.

JAZZ AT THE NORTHCOTT

2009-06-20T14:06:00.000+01:00

The first Exeter festival event for me this year was Courtney Pine at the Northcott Theatre. This was a great jazz concert, Courtney Pine's band are all great musicians and they got plenty of scope to demonstrate their individual talents. This performance was part of the Transition in Tradition show promoting his latest album, which is conceived as a tribute to Sidney Bechet. I was frankly amazed at the range of this band, extended treatments of New Orleans, French and traditional Jewish music and great improvised solo and sustained ensemble jazz, the audience was wild with enthusiasm for the band. All the future dates and albums are listed on his own site here.

CRIS CHEEK AT DARTINGTON

2009-06-14T11:58:00.000+01:00

Last night I went to see cris cheek perform at Studio 3 in Dartington. The new performance work in progress was called Monday Morning, on and offing God's Commons. Some torn strips of text fragment and other material on paper was collaged into a palimpsest of printed and handwritten language and also neatly woven to make partly readable text surfaces that had been photographed and were projected as a changing backdrop. In front of this, lit up by the projector and casting shadows on the back projection, cris was reading from hand held text and from the text on the wall.

Some earlier versions of this performance, incorporating documentation of projection and previous live action were also part of the projected sequence, which included interiors and architectural forms. There was an intermittent scratchy violin sound track, previously treated voice recordings and the whole event was driven by cris's extraordinary capacity as a voice performer. There were at least two cameras documenting this event, so I'm hoping someone will be able to provide me with an image or two for posting here. Thanks to Larry Lynch of Dartington College of Arts for putting on this wonderful event.

It was great to see cris perform at the superb Dartington studio 3. I haven't seen him for a few years, last time I think we had lunch with a big crowd at Ravi Shankar's in Euston, when Bob Perelman was working for a year at Kings College in London. Cris is now on the faculty at Miami University of Ohio, in Oxford, Ohio.

Books received: cris cheek, part: short life housing. Toronto: The Gig, 2009.