THE DARK WOULD

THE DARK WOULD language art anthology

Cover image by Marton Koppany


Edited by Philip Davenport
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.
THE DARK WOULD gathers work by over 100 contributors including some of the most noted artists and poets alive today.
THE DARK WOULD comes in two volumes, one paper and one virtual, sold both together for £29.99, published by Apple Pie Editions. The book retails at £29.99 for both paper and electronic volumes together and is available from Amazon, Apple Pie Editions website (distributed by KFS) the Tate and LMAKprojects in New York.
Support the independent publisher, get it from direct from Knives Forks and Spoons Press.

Contributors include:

Jerry Rothenberg, Rosemarie Waldrop, Tom Phillips, Nja Mahdaoui, Tom Raworth, Paula Claire, Susan Hiller, Robert Grenier, Ed Baker, Lawrence Weiner, John M Bennett, Kay Rosen, Allen Fisher, Richard Long, Ron Siliman, Richard Wentworth, Kevin Austin, Maria Chevska, Alan Halsey, Ken Edwards, Mike Basinski, Tony Lopez, Charles Bernstein, Jenny Holzer, Hainer Wörmann, Fiona Templeton, Maggie O’Sullivan, Geraldine Monk, Márton Koppány, David Annwn, John Plowman, Jesse Glass, Jurgen Olbrich, Liz Collini, Robert Sheppard, Patricia Farrell, Fernando Aguiar, Shirin Neshat, Penelope Umbrico, Gregory Vincent St Thomasino, Steve Waling, Rob Fitterman, Michalis Pichler, David Austen, Keiichi Nakamura, Shaun Pickard, Geof Huth, Tony Trehy, Wayne Clements, Peter Jaeger, Elena Rivera, Kenny Goldsmith, Harald Stoffers, Erica Baum, Nick Blinko, Philip Terry, Caroline Bergvall, Carol Watts, George Widener, Philip Davenport, Nico Vassilakis, Monica Biagioli, Tacita Dean, Jeff Hilson, Alec Finlay, Christian Bok, Fiona Banner, Nigel Wood, Satu Kaikkonen, Simon Patterson, Dave Griffiths, Nayda Collazo Llorens, Vanessa Place, Peter Manson, Andrew Nightingale, Matt Dalby, Steve Miller, Christoph Illing, Sean Burn, Doug Fishbone, arthur+martha, Hung Keung, the gingerbread tree, Brian Reed, Laurence Lane, Tomomo Adachi , Tom Jenks, David Oprava, Scott Thurston, Julian Montague, Derek Beaulieu, Wang Jun, Mike Chavez-Dawson, Alec Newman, Rick Myers, Andrea Brady, Eric Maximillian Zboya, Linus Slug, Jeff Grant, Richard Barrett, Christopher Fox, Linus Raudsepp, Carolyn Thompson, Tsang Kin-Wah, Stephen Emmerson, Andrew Topel, Anatol Knotek, Ola Stahl, Roman Pyrih, Christine Wong Yap, Sarah Sanders, Ying Kwok, Catherine Street, Michael Leong, Sam Winston, Angela Rawlings, James Davies, Rachel Lois Clapham, Steve Giasson, Amelia Crouch, Aysegul Torzeren, Jeremy Balius, Emily Crichley, Amaranth Borsuk, Ben Gwilliam , Imri Sandstrom, Sam le Witt, Michael Nardone, Tamarin Norwood, Lucy Harvest Clark, Jessica Pujol Duran, Holly Pester, Rebecca Cremin, Ryan Ormonde, Nick Thurston, j/j hastain, Bruno Neiva, SJ Fowler, Alex Davies, Helen Hajnoczky, Samantha Y Huang, Anna frew, Nat Raha, Jo Langton, Ekaterina Samigulina, Emma King, Leanne Bridgewater, Quentin Lannes and more.

ORCOMBE.COM : A SMALL TREE

Working with friends and collaborators, I've just started a site for prints called Orcombe.com. The first publication is a print made in collaboration with my friend the photographer John S. Webb, who lives and works in Sweden. The print is a combination of four modes shown together: poem, image, commentary and memorial, and it makes connections between the works of the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, the economist Ernst Schumacher, and the peace campaigner Brian Haw, who lived on Parliament Square, London, for almost ten years to protest against UK and USA foreign policy. I have taken up the form of the one-word poem, invented by Finlay, and echoed several of his works in this new composition that incorporates commentary, rather like Finlay's Heroic Emblems (Calais, VT: Z Press, 1977) that incorporated commentaries by Professor Stephen Bann.
     The print is called A Small Tree. I had in mind Finlay's Small Is Quite Beautiful (stone, with Richard Grasby, 1976, collection Scottish Arts Council) because it picks up on Schumacher's most influential work and plays with that nice distinction between American and Scottish usage of the word 'quite'. My poem is in fact thirteen words including three colours and the important diminutive; the colours are conveyed only in language. It took many months before John Webb was able to get the right kind of flowering Hawthorn image, quite an unusual shot, on the coast at Ribbersborg, Malmo, near where he lives.
     The print is available only through the site Orcombe.com.

READING FOR VISUAL POETICS

I was in London March 20th for the private view of Visual Poetics at the Poetry Library in the South Bank, I met Paula Claire, whom I'd seen on film at The Other Room in Manchester when I read there last year. Also Liliane Lijn who is known especially for her revolving poetry machines: I featured a photo of one of them in my review of the ICA show Poor Old Tired Horse in a much older blog post. Liliane Lijn was set up with a table and chairs to play her poetry game with a set of word cards. A group of participants were dealt a hand of cards and then took turns to add a word card to a text developing on the table. This was something like fridge magnet poetry and the vocabulary was generic poetry words.
     There was a reading by exhibition participants, including: Victoria Bean, Wayne Clements, Paula Claire, Stephen Emerson, John Gibbens, Giles Goodland, John Hall, Alan Halsey, James Harvey (read by Matt Martin), Sophie Herxheimer, Gad Hollander, Julie Johnson, Sarah Kelly, Liliane Lijn, Tony Lopez, Matt Martin, and Gavin Selerie. I particularly enjoyed Paula Claire's audience participation performance of 'Gun Law'; Giles Goodland's witty prose poem made of phrases including 'hand' and words that sound like hand; John Hall's reading from Interscriptions, his very fine collaborative Word and Image book with Peter Hughes; Alan Halsey's fully theatrical persona reading from his White Writing through a magnifying glass, doubtfully repeating the words and word fragments, turning the page around to follow the indistinct and partly erased text; Matt Martin's hilarious poem made of just acronyms. It was a great set of readings. I'm hoping to hear the recordings made by The Poetry Library soon. THANKS to the curators Chris McCabe and David Miller and all the staff at the Poetry Library for making the event go so well.
     It was my first sight of Visual Poetics, apart from photos, really good to see it. Apart from the wall display and screens, there was a lot of work that had been gathered and shown in display cases and relevant material from the main collection was also put out. There is a review of the exhibition in One Stop Arts here. Thanks to Lucy Lopez for the photos.

MODERNISM AND THE ORIENT

I just got my copy of Modernism and the Orient, edited by Zhaoming Qian and published by University of New Orleans Press. This is a collection of essays derived from the eponymous conference held in Hangzhou, China in 2010. There are papers on Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, the flute in Modernist music and poetry, Marcel Proust, Robert Frost, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Lee Harwood and Harry Guest; the contributors are: Zhang Longxi, Sabine Sielke, Daniel Albright, Christine Froula, Qiping Yin, Ira B. Nadel, Fen Gao, Christian Kloeckner, Ronald Bush, Zhaoming Qian, Richard Parker and Tony Lopez. My paper 'The Orient in Later Modernist English Poetry' is a reading of Harry Guest's 'Two Poems for O-Bon' and Lee Harwood's 'Chên 震'. It's great to see this book come out, at one stage it looked as if UNO Press was going under, but it does seem to be getting the work out after all. Well done John Gery who runs the book series.
The cover design is by Lauren Capone, copyright © 2012 UNO Press

VISUAL POETICS AT THE POETRY LIBRARY

Visual Poetics is an exhibition currently on show at the Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre, curated by David Miller and Chris McCabe. It runs from 12th February to 14 April 2013. Poets and artists whose work is displayed include: John Furnival, Liliane Lijn, John Hall, Sarah Kelly, Hansjorg Mayer, Dom Sylvester Houedard, Thomas A. Clark, Laurie Clark, Paula Claire, Bob Cobbing, Karen Bleitz, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sophie Herxheimer, Tony Lopez, Victoria Bean, Gavin Selerie, Caroline Bergvall, Alan Halsey, David Miller, Julie Johnstone, James Harvey, Simon Cutts, Giles Goodland, Sam Winston, Gad Hollander, John Gibbens, Edwin Morgan, Stephen Emmerson, Matt Martin, Rick Myers, Antonio Claudio Carvalho and Wayne Clements.
    The Saison Poetry Library is located on the fifth floor of the Royal Festival Hall and is open Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 8pm: FREE ENTRY.
    My text animation work 'More and More' is included, on loan from Bury Art Museum.
   

UNCUT AT EXETER PHOENIX

On Thursday 31 January I was the guest poet at Uncut, the local reading series at Exeter Phoenix, an arts venue located off Gandy Street in Exeter, near the Museum. The building looks like an old school and used to be the base for the University of Exeter when it was an external college of London University. Inside the Phoenix houses an art gallery, a restaurant and bar, and a range of different halls and rooms that are used for music, theatre, film, comedy and other arts events. We were in a space called the Black Box, a theatre workshop space on the ground floor. The night that I read was the opening of Maia Conran, The Crowd Laughs With You Always (1 February to 16 March). These are installations of digital works, mostly representing rows of empty cinema seats seen from different angles in grey. There was one booth we couldn't get into and I heard that it was showing a montage of old black and white film clips.
     Uncut is run by Alasdair Paterson and Gemma Green and works on the open mike format. Poets who want to read to an audience turn up and give their name to the organisers who set up a running order for the night. Each reader gets a few minutes to present normally two or three poems and then the guest poet does a set. The first 'open mike' session was an hour long. At Uncut they repeat this format. If you went to see the guest poet you could find this arrangement really obstructive and tedious, but of course many of the audience are 'open mikers' and are there to perform. The guest poet ought to bring something special to the occasion.
     I remember that when I first moved to Exeter I went to a Festival run on this basis by a series of different poetry groups. My friend the poet Ken Edwards was one of the guests, so I went along and got very impatient with the local performers because I was expecting to attend a reading by the advertised poet. What the format shows, of course, is that the main audience for poetry readings is poets themselves. Giving anyone who wants it a platform to perform is bound to produce uneven results but it does show a particular poetry community to itself, and hopefully creates the conditions to make it self-aware. Of course you can't really assume that there will be progress, because there is no more than 'show and tell'. There is no apparatus of feedback except applause. I've read at the Language Club in Plymouth also, and that runs with the same format.
    On 31st January the organisers Alasdair Paterson and Gemma Green opened each half with a reading. The other readers were Norman Jope, Simon Williams, Susan Taylor, Mary Coghill, Liz Adams, Mark Totterdell, James Turner, Jaime Robles, Graham Burchell, Ian Chamberlain and Jennie Osborne. That's thirteen poets apart from the guest poet; I hope I haven't missed anyone out. Exeter Phoenix clearly doesn't take poetry events seriously because they don't show Uncut on the programme posted on their website: so you can't tell who the guest poet is unless you are in touch with the organisers. I have seen some terrific guest poets at Uncut readings, among them Kelvin Corcoran and Harry Guest. I wouldn't miss the next guest poet Gavin Selerie on 28th February 2013.

   

PLANTED BY JOHN S. WEBB

Planted is John S. Webb's latest book of photographs. There are 30 images of trees and plants in containers in various public locations: airports, big hotels, courtyards, out in the street, but mainly spacious interiors. Technically the photos are brilliant but the thing that hits you in the midriff is the way that these trees are captured and cultivated in enclosed, totally unnatural environments. We see a whole range of bright transit routes and lounges in airports, the air-conditioned spaces filled with glass and polish, some of them shiny and new, some of them looking neglected and sad. The trees are isolated from their kind and from the atmosphere, they simply grow and express their species identity. It's a very moving collection of images and the effect of the whole book is really impressive. The eco-theory and environmental movements should catch up with John S. Webb's amazing work in landscape photography. 
Cover photo from PLANTED copyright © 2012 by John S. Webb
Photographs from UK, USA, Sweden, Denmark, NZ, etc.
32 pages. 30 images. Edition 550 copies +50 boxed special edition with print.
Hard cover clothbound. Size 28cmx17cm.
Printed by Bulls Graphics/Standartu-Spaustyve, Lithuania.
ISBN 978-91 976852 9 0/ ISBN 978-91 976852 9 9 boxed edition.
Published by Nya Vyer Stockholm. www.nyavyer.se