DUBLIN POUND CONFERENCE

I was in Dublin for the Pound conference 9th to 14th July. Lots of papers of course and with three strands running most of the time you get only a sample of what is happening. Ira Nadel's paper on Pound and the Artichoke (Pound meeting Beckett) had a spoiler from Seamus Heaney who also had something to say about this Paris encounter and Pound's dismissive remark to Beckett. Emily Mitchell Wallace was again focused on Byzantine Torcello and carved dolphins with lots of beautiful photos. I think that the Torcello mosaic is one of the most beautiful things I've seen and very different from everything else in Venice, so I was glad to have it displayed up on the big screen. I saw and heard a range of papers some of them really interesting by David Ewick, Catherine Paul, David Ayers, Jo Berryman, Richard Parker, Yoshiko Kita, Andrew Houwen, Ron Bush, Michael Kindellan (read out by Richard Parker) Giuliana Ferreccio, Annabel Haynes, Alan Golding, Daniel Swift, Philip Coleman, Robert von Hallberg, John Gery, David Moody and others. I took part in a reading with David Cappella, Desmond Egan, Kevin Kiely, Patrizia de Rachewiltz, Mary de Rachewiltz, John Gery, Biljana Obradovic, Jessica Pujol I Duran, Ron Smith, Stephen Romer, Daniel Maria Mancini, Jeff Grienensen, probably others, which demonstrated the enormous range of poets who apparently have an interest in modernism (though quite a few of them write as if it never happened). It was fun to meet up with friends and go out in Dublin for drinks and dinner. The district I was staying in, Temple Bar, is a kind of theme park of Irish nightlife, lots of live singers, pavements thronged with revellers many of them very tired and emotional. I had a day free after the conference, stashed my luggage and walked round the James Joyce sights including the James Joyce Centre and a trip on the DART train to see the Martello tower that opens Ulysses. I wished I'd taken some swimming trunks along as the forty foot bathing place looked like the best place to be. The photos above are the Martello tower at Sandycove, the interior of the tower as it is now, the sign for the Forty Foot Bathing Place, and the James Joyce statue with suitcases and litter bin by O'Connell Street.

TEXT ART ARCHIVE

These are photos from the Text Art Archive Colloquium at Bury Art Museum on 20 May 2013. Me with Nick Thurston (left) in the first photo, then Holly Pester and Kerry Morrison (left), then Tony Trehy in front of the dead deer painting, then Scott Thurston (left) and James Davies. It was a good day put together by Holly Pester who has been working at Bury as artist curator, with talks about archiving and arts practice from Holly Pester, derek beaulieu, Carol Watts, Tony Trehy and Kerry Morrison. Thanks to Phil Davenport for the photos taken on my camera.

IN PLACE OF LOVE & COUNTRY

A new anthology edited by John Gery and Richard Parker, In Place of Love and Country is published by Crater Press, 2013 - ISSN 2041-0948. The contributors are Mary de Rachewiltz, Ron Smith, Wayne Pounds, Biljana D. Obradovic, Julian Stannard, Amy Evans, David Cappella, Desmond Egan, Jeff Grieniesen, Tim Atkins, Daniel M. Mancini, Kevin Kiely, Richard Parker, John Gery, Michael Kindellan, Dirceu Villa, Tony Lopez, Jessica Pujol I Duran, Gavin Selerie, Stephen Romer, foreword by Walter Baumann. This is an anthology based on a reading in London at the Ezra Pound International Conference, held at the Institute for English Studies, University of London, July 2011.

MOVING ART TO MANCHESTER

Just packing up my neon to go to the Bury Art Museum for an exhibition later this year. It looks like Marcel Broodthaers has been here and left something behind. Now that is someone I wish I'd met and had a chance to talk to, and get a personal tour of the Museum of Modern Art Department of Eagles. I hope to get there eventually and donate some Eagle sculptures. I'm driving to Manchester tomorrow to attend the Archive Colloquium at Bury: Derek Beaulieu, Carol Watts, Kerry Morrison, Holly Pester and Tony Trehy are giving talks; I'm looking forward to seeing good friends and catching up, hopefully meeting Tom Jenks of zimZalla avant objects to discuss our upcoming collaboration.

Here is a photo by Phil Davenport of the neon being tested at Taylor Electronics (Manchester) Ltd.

TIME, THE DEER, IS IN THE WOOD OF HALLAIG

Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig, is an exhibition on forest memory curated by Amy Cutler.
The Belfry art gallery, St John on Bethnal Green, 200 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9PA.
6th till 11th June/ weeknights 7-9pm, weekends 12-6pm
Nearest tube Bethnal Green

This free exhibition investigates the properties of forest memory through text, archive, and ‘xylarium’, or wood collection. Between the French horticultural term “forest trauma” and Robert Pogue Harrison’s “forests of nostalgia”, a whole discipline around history, witnessing, and the memorial qualities of woodland opens up. Art works examining the cultural expression of time and history in the forest are placed here alongside archival photographs, small press texts, artefacts, and museum objects, in an old, low-lit belfry designed by Sir John Soane.

A candle-lit collection on forests, memory, and social and natural history ● Cabinets of book works, wood works, paintings, drawings, prints, film projection, and music ● Wood specimens and photographs from Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany, English Heritage, the Epping Forest archive, the London Metropolitan Archives, and local collectors ● Tree ring slices and materials from dendrochronology labs ● Installations and one-off editions from forty artists, including Colin Sackett, Chris Drury, Bryan Nash Gill, Richard Skelton, herman de vries, Katsutoshi Yuasa, and Stefka Mueller

ARTISTS / CONTRIBUTORS: Alec Finlay, Peter Larkin, herman de vries, Jeff Hilson, Colin Sackett, Gerry Loose, Justin Hopper, Carol Watts, Camilla Nelson, Anthony Barnett, Edmund Hardy, Una Hamilton Helle, Katsutoshi Yuasa, Richard Skelton, Autumn Richardson, Julian Konczak, Bryan Nash Gill, Amy Cutler, Tom Noonan, Chris Drury, Paul van Dijk, Frances Hatherley, David Chatton Barker, James Aldridge, Chris Paul Daniels, Frances Presley, Stefka Mueller, Gail Ritchie, Christina White, Paul Gough, Morven Gregor, Perdita Phillips, Amy Todman, Peter Jaeger, Zoe Hope, Zoë Skoulding, Peter Foolen, Phil Smith / Mythogeography, Cees de Boer, Carlea Holl-Jensen, Tony Lopez, John S. Webb, Will Montgomery, Michael Hampton, Kate Morrell, Ben Borek, Natalia Janota, Sung Hee Jin, Martin Bridge, Nicholas Branch, Mike Baillie, Mark Nesbitt

WITH THANKS TO SUPPORTERS: Landscape Surgery at Royal Holloway, John Wylie, Giles Goodland, Justin Hopper, Kris Rockwell, Jamie Wilkes, Sally Davies, Sally Armisen, Peggy Seymour, Sean Powley, Amy Francis-Smith, Richard, Neville Midwood, Nicholas, Liberty Rowley, Lee Wagstaff, Susan Holl, Carlea Holl-Jensen, Esther Rowley, Mark James, Susan Wright, Matthew Riley, Felix Driver, Harriet Hall, Cara Jessop, Thomas Jellis, Andrew Ray, Matthew Sperling, Candice Boyd, Katie Murphy, Louise Joly, Camilla Nelson, Alice Clark, Innes Keighren, Peter Larkin, Sue Edney, Tilla Brading, Jo Norcup, Sandra Wright, Hilary Orange, Simon Howard, Edmund Hardy, Jenny O’Sullivan, Alexandra Parsons, Charlotte Jones, Sefryn Penrose, Paul Warde, Leo Cutler, Clare Williams, Sarah Browncross, Kate Maxwell, Tim Cresswell, Caroline Cornish, Martin Bridge, Xas Arnaud, Diana Hale, and Gavin MacGregor

THE OTHER ROOM ANTHOLOGY

Got my copy of The Other Room Anthology 5, 100 pages of writing, edited by Tom Jenks with a foreword by Scott Thurston. Linda Black, Paula Claire, Becky Cremin, Nikolai Duffy, Patricia Farrell, Clive Fencott, David Gaffney, Peter Jaeger, Tom Jenks, Chris McCabe, Sophie Herxheimer, Nathan Jones, Frank Kuppner, Helmut Lemke, Ira Lightman, Me, Alec Newman, Ryan Ormonde, Nat Raha, Elena Rivera, seekers of lice, Robert Sheppard, Marcus Slease, Hazel Smith and Biographical Notes.
Lovely cover. Get it direct from the publisher The Other Room, Manchester.

QUIET WALK ON DARTMOOR

Friday evening, 26th April, Sara and I went on the Aune Head Arts Quiet Walk number 1, led by Sound Artist and Naturalist Tony Whitehead, 7.30pm to 10.30pm at Bellever Forest, just a mile south of Postbridge in the middle of Dartmoor. In the evening light we walked and ambled up woodland tracks near the Youth Hostel, taking plenty of time to stop and listen to the sounds of Dartmoor. It was a treat almost right away to hear our first cuckoo of the year in the distance at first, then it flew close by and continued to call. We saw a roe deer very close and heard chaffinches, wrens, blackbirds, greenfinches, sparrows, woodpigeons, songthrushes, goldcrests and other quite ordinary birds - but we really took time to listen and to hear all the calls. Higher up in a clearing we waited and listened for fifteen or twenty minutes for the last of the evening songbirds, and when the air changed as the light faded a songthrush's extraordinary repeated variations were echoed across the valley way into the distance.
     Then we walked higher up towards Bellever Tor on the forest track in among a group of about twenty Dartmoor ponies, snorting and munching, tearing at the grass. As it grew really dark we saw the first planets, Saturn and Mars, coming into view, and then the mass of stars. It was very cold when we stopped on a high ridge and saw a red glow in the distance that turned into a red full moon rising over the moor, the colour draining out as it lifted higher in the sky. Then we walked down a steep rocky path by torchlight back to the Bellever Forest car park and drove back through Moretonhampstead and Dunsford to Exmouth. What an amazing experience and great company, thanks to Tony Whitehead and Aune Head Arts.