TEXT FESTIVALS NOW PUBLISHED

The Text Festivals: Language Art and Material Poetry, edited by Tony Lopez, is now published by University of Plymouth Press: ISBN 978-1-84102-359-5; 13 new essays, 164 pages including 16 colour plates, notes on contributors, and a catalogue of works shown.

CONTENTS
Preface
Tony Lopez, Introduction: Language Art and Material Poetry
Tony Trehy, Curating Text
derek beaulieu, The Value of Nothing
Christian Bok, The Xenotext
Carol Watts alphabetise // Different Alphabets and Damage Control
Philip Davenport, An Alphabet of Fishes: Curating Bob Cobbing
Colour Plates
James Davies, if p then q three and the Text Festival
Robert Grenier, Bury Memories (whilst yet living)
Alan Halsey, Memory Screen at Bury Met
Holly Pester, 'I did not know till afterwards': An Archive Artwork
Hester Reeve (HRH.the), But the Real Work Was to Place a Stone in my Mouth
Liz Collini, Versions
Carolyn Thompson, You're so Pretty when You are Unfaithful to Me
Contributors
Catalogue

Get the book from University of Plymouth Press here.

Cover art: Versions (detail) © 2009 by Liz Collini

THE TEXT FESTIVALS: LANGUAGE ART AND MATERIAL POETRY

The project that has kept me busy over the past few months is a book about the Text Festivals, curated by Tony Trehy at Bury Art Museum and other venues in the town in 2005, 2009 and 2011. The Text Festival has always been about presenting high quality Language Art from the very different traditions that it emerges. Artists' and poets' works have been displayed together in exemplary curated space with minimal explanation, allowing different approaches in language use to work on each other, making it possible for the viewer to experience an unusual cultural resonance and crossover. Works from Conceptual Art, Concrete Poetry, Artists' Books and Publishing, Fluxus, Outsider Art, Minimalism, Performance Art, Vispo, Language Poetry, Pataphysics, Poetry Video, Conceptual Writing, really anything made of text or performing text or associated sound works have been presented and shown.
     I read some commissioned work at the second festival in 2009 with Philip Davenport and Carol Watts. I met lots of people involved with the festival and related events in Manchester. Apart from working directly with Tony Trehy, I got to know Philip Davenport, Helmut Lemke, Kerry Morrison, Robert Grenier, Marianne Eigenheer, James Davies, Tom Jenks, Hester Reeve and others. I spent some time with Ron Silliman who was also on at the Met Arts Centre that evening and we were both put up at the same Manchester hotel. We had a good time at the festival and after the main events there was a workshop day for participants based I think on business development techniques. That was a strange experience like being new at school or going to a training 'awayday' when I used to be an academic -- but one thing that came out of it was the obvious need to mobilise our different skills to make space for our work in common. I was really struck by the urgent need to make progress on focused secondary work. I kept in touch with Manchester friends, especially Tony Trehy, and was involved in the third festival, this time showing some new work in the main exhibition. And later on Philip Davenport edited and published The Dark Would: Anthology of Language Art, a wonderful ground-breaking collection. I took part in the launch earlier this year with Philip, Caroline Bergvall and Simon Patterson at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. James Davies, Scott Thurston and Tom Jenks have been running The Other Room a series of free poetry performance events in Manchester for about five years. The associated website that they run is an important information hub for news of all kinds of cultural events in the Northwest and it helps to maintain online connections nationally and internationally.
     It seemed a worthwhile project to try and capture some of the huge range of activity involved in the Text Festivals in another form. I proposed editing a book that would gather contributions from artists involved in the festivals and also retrospectively catalogue exhibitions and events. I'm really delighted that the book was recognised right away by the editor and readers for University of Plymouth Press. It was a new area of research for me and an interesting challenge to write something about the quite separate fields of Language Art and Concrete Poetry as it happened in the UK since the 1960s. Tony Trehy and Philip Davenport have both written chapters about curating, and the other contributors have written about specific projects made for the Text Festivals. It's a valuable and unusual collection right away because of the range of contributors and what they each bring.
     This is the contents page but the order has since been changed to fit in the section of 16 colour plates in the middle of the book.

Preface

Tony Lopez, Introduction: Language Art and Material Poetry

Tony Trehy, Curating Text

derek beaulieu, The Value of Nothing

Christian Bok, The Xenotext

Liz Collini, Versions

Philip Davenport, An Alphabet of Fishes: Curating Bob Cobbing

James Davies, if p then q three and the Text Festival

Robert Grenier, Bury Memories (whilst yet living)

Alan Halsey, Memory Screen at Bury Met

Holly Pester, 'I did not know till afterwards': An Archive Artwork

Hester Reeve (HRH.the), But the Real Work Was to Place a Stone in My Mouth

Carolyn Thompson, You're so Pretty when You are Unfaithful to Me

Carol Watts, alphabetise // Different Alphabets and Damage Control

I was at the printers in Exeter recently to see proofs and the book looks really good. The design by Daniel Jones is excellent. The front cover (above) shows a detail of Liz Collini's wall drawing Versions. I'll post again when the book is available from the publishers University of Plymouth Press and all good booksellers.

Cover art: Versions (detail) © 2009 by Liz Collini

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.

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.

AFTER INSTALLED IN RADCLIFFE

This summer and autumn I've been working on a commission for the Irwell Sculpture Trail that runs from Salford Quays to Bacup, through Bury and Rossendale, 33 miles long and over 70 works of sculpture. My work After is installed in Radcliffe, near the Metrolink Tram Station, on a footpath that leads to the Manchester, Bury and Bolton Canal, and on a bridge support along the canal towpath. There are three stone plaques each with an inscribed verse set into stone walls. The preparation of the stone and the lettering was carried out by Rossendale stonemason Ken Howe.
     This is a work that has been at the planning stage for a long time. After, also now known as The Scattered Poem is a 28 verse holocaust poem that was first published in 2000. It is a particularly abstract poem, composed using a text generation programme that was run many times to produce a vast text and the results edited down to a tiny fraction of the output. I wanted to set up a staged composition procedure that would include actions beyond my control. Of course I still needed to be responsible for the finished work and to make it my own by means of editing and refining the result. Mulling over the possibilities of the process, it gradually became clear to me that my ambition for this work just could not be fully realised on paper. It was a turning point for sure. What I now aim to do is to get verses and clusters of verses installed as far as possible from each other, so that the viewer sees only a fragment of the work. If you wanted to see more you'd have to travel, which would always put the work you'd already seen at a distance. In order to get this work established and located in different places I needed to have an example to show. To get it made I need to rely on describing the project and on photographs.
     So I've been working with Tony Trehy, director of the Irwell Sculpture Trail, and the stonemason Ken Howe, to find suitable sites and get three of the inscribed verses installed in Radcliffe. It's an interesting aspect of this kind of project that you need to collaborate to get it made and to make it visible. We still have quite a way to go. I'm hoping that we will have QR codes before too long, to add additional information. The stones are located on the Sculpture trail very near Brass Art's Falls the Shadow and Lawrence Weiner's Water Made It Wet.
     The title After comes from Theodor Adorno: 'Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch' (To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric) from Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (1963). After was published in my book Devolution, Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 2000, and in Poetry Review, 93, 3 (2003): 32-35. There is a related piece called 'Not Reading After' in Covers, Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2007, which is transcribed from a performance at Camden People's Theatre, curated by Chris Goode and also published in the journal Shearsman.

THE BURY POEMS

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'.

SENTENCES EXHIBITION BURY

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.

MORE AND MORE PHOTOS

These are new photos of More and More by Julia Grime: 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 Grime, Phil Davenport and the curator Tony Trehy.