tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive/9 2008-08-08T23:46:02Z Movable Type 3.34 tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.827 2008-08-08T23:44:53Z 2008-08-08T23:46:02Z

'Barely a week since my last post, and here I am again. What's going on? Well, despite a summer cold (aren't they the worst?) I ventured out to the Other Room, a reading series in a pub behind Manchester University,...

The Editors 'Barely a week since my last post, and here I am again. What's going on? Well, despite a summer cold (aren't they the worst?) I ventured out to the Other Room, a reading series in a pub behind Manchester University, last night. And very glad I am I went, though it's a shame that one of the readers, Philip Davenport, wasn't able to make it. The two other readers, Maggie O'Sullivan and Stuart Calton, were there however. From what I've seen in anthologies, I haven't quite got Maggie O'Sullivan's work yet, but her performance last night went a long way towards me beginning to appreciate her work. It seems to straddle various strands of avant garde poetry. There's a large element of "radical pastoral" that one can see also in poets like Harriet Tarlo, Frances Presley and Geraldine Monk; but also a large element of pure sound in the work. It's interesting that the book of early work she brought with her was called "Body of Work", but it does have a very physical element to it; this is a poetry concerned as much with the physical articulation of sound as with "meaning." It seems to be to be very "instinctual"; as opposed to a more "calculated" approach. Which doesn't mean that there wasn't a very feirce intellect behind the words, because there certainly was. Although I don't want to make too obvious a connection, it's something I also find in poets such as Geraldine Monk and Micheal Haslam; although all of them have a strong intellectual basis for their work, there's something untamed about them, a kind of wandering spirit that seeks to go beneath the surface of the world and bring something elemental back. Stuart Calton, on the other hand, seemed to be a much more calculated poet. The two long pieces he read were sometimes funny, very involved, fragmented narratives and arguments with a strong political bent. The second poem was about the Co-Op, in fact, which he is ambivalent about. Although this was very definitely non-mainstream, this was on the surface much more controlled and probably represents the more politically-charged end of the non-mainstream as represented most publically by Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady and Barque Press. It was difficult to understand, but also fascinating, and I enjoyed his performance, especially the halting way he sometimes spoke half-phrases and sentences. I bought one of his pamphlets, so I can pore over it and seek a way through it. All in all, a fascinating evening. The Other Room is a good series to have in Manchester; we've had so much mainstream poetry for years, it's good to have something rather stranger at last.' tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.826 2008-08-08T23:43:25Z 2008-08-08T23:44:40Z

'Was top. Disappointingly I can't say too much about the poets - Maggie O'Sullivan and Stuart Calton, as, to be quite honest, I couldn't concentrate on what they were saying. Not because they were rubbish or anything; in fact, the...

The Editors 'Was top. Disappointingly I can't say too much about the poets - Maggie O'Sullivan and Stuart Calton, as, to be quite honest, I couldn't concentrate on what they were saying. Not because they were rubbish or anything; in fact, the very opposite I suspect - I think they're probably two very brilliant poets - the phrases and words which succeeded in penetrating my consciousness served only to suggest as much. No...I couldn't concentrate for two reasons; firstly, the to-be-expected one: my brain was a bit puddled by alcohol; secondly: I spent a great portion of the evening reflecting upon how fucking brilliant the concept and the reality of The Other Room is. Honestly, like when you get 99 Red Balloons trapped in your head on an endless loop, going round and round my head in The Old Abbey Inn last night was the refrain: this is brilliant, this is brilliant, this is brilliant... (I spent a fortune on books. I bought 3 by Calton, and the Collected O'Sullivan - Body Of Work. So I'll write more about the two poets once I've actually read their stuff). ...so why was last night so brilliant? People were asked what they'd been writing lately; how the reading had gone which they'd taken part in last week; debates begun in a month old piece of writing were continued. Yeah, I saw your sestina, check out this review of mine which has just appeared. That's Barry MacSweeney's first collection - I didn't even know they had a copy of that - oh, you picked it up from John Rylands...I had a great idea earlier for a poem - I see, I see, interesting. Poet x was remembered to poet y, with the words "you've obviously been on her mind". Acquaintances made months ago were renewed. Drew Milne was declared unpredictable and egotistical. Mark E Smith anecdotes were retold: him mishearing the word "duo" - thinking someone had challenged him to a duel. Comparisons and introductions were made - and invitations were issued. Oh yeah...I know that book; blank looks at certain names and titles. Alcohol. Before you leave we must exchange email addresses. Something is happening. It centres on The Old Abbey Inn every second month. I walked out of that pub last night feeling - how else to put it? - energised. And enthusiastic. I'm unaware of anything else quite like it: a roomful of people who all - I would guess, I obviously didn't have the opportunity to question them all! - share a broadly similar aesthetic; who are all into and trying to do roughly similar things. It's so unusual for me, that experience; I have never known where to find these people before! I couldn't help but imagine all the future work last nights attendees might go on to produce and the undoubtedly huge number of those attendees who'd look back and remember The Other Room nights as being key to their poetic development...I just saw that pub as being the key to a vast library... * I missed The Other Room 2 - I'm so gutted I haven't got the complete set! And...only every two months...? There needs to be some kind of son/daughter of Other Room in the intervening month just to tide us over!' tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.814 2008-07-31T12:41:19Z 2008-07-31T12:46:10Z

Scott Thurston Alex Davies Sascha Akhtar Sean Bonney Frances Kruk Photographs are courtesy of John Wilkinson, who also read at the night....

The Editors Scott Thurston Alex Davies Sascha Akhtar Sean Bonney Frances Kruk Photographs are courtesy of John Wilkinson, who also read at the night.]]> tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.806 2008-07-31T10:44:55Z 2008-07-31T12:48:31Z

It has begun It is really happening. or seems to. My first feed for over three years occurred last night in east london at the Foundery: Sascha Akhtar Sean Bonney Frances Kruk Scott Thurston John Wilkinson All great . ....

The Editors It has begun It is really happening. or seems to. My first feed for over three years occurred last night in east london at the Foundery: Sascha Akhtar Sean Bonney Frances Kruk Scott Thurston John Wilkinson All great . . .. especially the performance of Sean Bonney and Frances Kruk. If you have not heard of the poetry of Sean Bonney and Frances Kruk then you are missing out. John Wilkinson was also amazing. And Sascha Akhtar takes the word soundings of Mr. James Joyce to a whole new level. And Scott Thurston and a nice performance of a man in a t-shirt who helps run the series. There are lots of things happening in London with experimental/avant-garde poetics. I met a fine smattering of fine poets and the place was packed and the venue was perfect. Met a fine fellow poet named Rob Holloway. He told it is best for poets to live near old street/brick lane (east London) or South London. Across from the hip pub in east London there is a bookshop. And Rob Holloway told me they sell interesting experimental poetry. That could get me in trouble with my current salary of £700 a month. But AH > > > > >> > paradise has returned. Got word that there are at least another two great reading series in London. One run by Sascha Akhtar and another one somewhere near London bridge on the first Thursday of every month called Crossing the Line at The Leather Exchange. Hm . . . and so . . .. here we go . . . . exactly what I have been missing in South Korea and Poland all these years. I may live, full tilt, once again. And get my rawness back. My play . . . ah the play is the thing that makes me happy . .. . I got a tad serious in Poland especially. Melancholy ruled in Poland. Think I will also look at my two manuscript collection Resident Alien from my days in North Carolina with the Lucifer Poetics Group. Maybe rework it a bit and send one or both to Salt Publishing. I gotta get some shit out there . . . I gotta read some shit out there . . . . I was floating floating dancing dazzling high as kite on an electric wire last night openned readings . . .. thank you!!! ]]> tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.784 2008-07-12T17:12:12Z 2008-07-12T17:15:15Z

The Editors ]]> tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.776 2008-07-08T13:38:04Z 2008-07-08T13:39:17Z

Manchester Poetry Scene: A Survey Poetry in Manchester takes in Writing Groups, Readings and Magazines. The longest-established writing group is The Monday Night Group, which meets in The Friends Meeting House behind Central Library. The group isn't specificly poetry focussed...

The Editors Manchester Poetry Scene: A Survey Poetry in Manchester takes in Writing Groups, Readings and Magazines. The longest-established writing group is The Monday Night Group, which meets in The Friends Meeting House behind Central Library. The group isn't specificly poetry focussed - the attendees seem to produce a lot of short-stories - but poetry certainly is read out there. I've only ever read poetry out when I've been; and I've heard a few other people read poetry as well. The group's useful as you do get a lot of feedback on your work, but...and isn't there always a but...the collective mentality of the group seems a bit Movement- esque. That is to say: the majority of the people who go there (although that's the majority, it isn't all of them!) seem to think "poetry" means Philip Larkin and, well...just Philip Larkin really. For a while now my writing has been guided by the idea that poetry is less about conveying "message" and more about conveying a "mood"; and that the best means of conveying that "mood" is to allow rhythm and visuals to determine how you place the words on the page. Admittedly, with this approach there's a risk of drifting into a poetics which becomes so personal that your work becomes unreadable to anyone but yrself, but... done correctly I think that way of writing can have some interesting results: poems can be abstract, yet contain enough for an interested reader to latch onto to try and infer some meaning. And I've taken a couple of the products of this way of writing to TMNG and...the response I've got has been as though I'd spent the last 5 minutes swearing at them in german. In the nude. And, in all honesty, that kind of response to my writing is repeated at the other group I attend: Poetica. Steven Waling (one of Poetica's other attendees) is different though. He is as fully aware as I am of the poetic tradition which was the alternative of The Movement: The Ginsburg, Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Conductors of Chaos, Great Works, Openned, Scott Thurston kind of thing. Its informed his work, as it informs mine. So he, obviously, understands what I'm attempting to do; and he can assess my efforts in light of his historical knowledge. One guy at Poetica, a while ago now, after I'd read out a piece called possible titles said: I don't think it's a poem Richard...I think it's art. Which was a comment that made me smile. I only relate the incident to try and demonstrate that the conception of poetry a lot of the folk have who go to these groups is... sort of narrow...limited. Then there's the Poetry Society's Manc branch which I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago... Finally there's Manky Poets, based in Chorlton library. Never been, so I can't comment. Believe it's been around for a while and believe it's meant to be pretty good. Think the format there is: a featured poet, then discussion of the attendees work. Might get meself down to it one of these days... As for readings: there're open-mic nights, one-off poetry events, and two regular reading series'. The open-mic nights that I've done are just Freed-Up at The Green Room and Write-Out-Loud at the Tudor in Wigan. Generally they seem to be just an excuse for a piss-up and a laugh with yr mates. No bad thing; that's what I did both the times I did Freed-Up and the one time I did Wigan. No poetry of a serious nature ever seems to get read out at those nights though. Half the people who read seem to be more interested in smoothing-off the rough edges of their fucking stand-up comedy routine, rather than in developing their poetry. I've pretty much abandoned the open-mic thing now - at least as far as taking part goes; would have no particular objection to attending as an audience member. There is also a popular - I believe - night at The Trof in Fallowfield (Monday nights, I think); never been though. And there's a regular night on somewhere in Levenshulme. Also: most poetry events seem to feature an open-mic spot. The launch party for the last issue of PipeLine, at Cafe Muse, feature me reading: New Friends, Horses Die and...summat else...can't remember what now though. Poetry events pop-up regularly and randomly in Manchester. Poetica had a reading in February at Central library; they're holding another one - in conjunction with a landmine charity - Wednesday next (there's a post up about it on this blog somewhere). Most magazines celebrate new issues with a launch-party; the above mentioned Pipeline; The Ugly Tree at the Britons. Each Arts festival the Corporation stages seems to feature a poetry strand as well: just check out the current Not Part Of fest... In addition to all this ground-level activity there is also the reading series Poets and Players - seems to be based mainly in Didsbury, at the tai-chi village, whereever the hell that is! They feature, solely, established names. I haven't been to any of their events so far, but I plan to go to something they're putting on this week at St Anns Church, as Tom Jenks is reading. Speaking of whom brings us nicely round to The Other Room at The Old Abbey Inn. So far they've only held two nights. Only the first of which I managed to attend. It was brilliant though (the first post in this blog is a sort of review of the evening). The folk invloved with The Other Room like what I like (at least they seem to!), and at that first night they held there was a real sense of the beginnings of an avant-garde alternative to Manchesters poetic mainstream. Will just have to watch what happens to The Other Room with interest... Magazine wise...Lamport Court is now apparently dead (no great loss - they never published me the bastards!). The Ugly Tree still continues; and still to a high quality. Then there's Parameter and If P then Q. Out in wigan you have The Mental Virus. Of that last: I've never seen a copy but apparently they published a poem of mine once. At least I received an email from the editor telling me they'd accepted something... I'm sure I've missed loads of magazines out, but...the ones above are the main ones I can think of. Each of the Universities has respected Creative Writing courses: Amis jnr at Manchester; Carol Ann Duffy at M.M.U. (at least I think she still teaches there - if she no longer does she anyway once did); Scott Thurston at Salford - my destination this September! And those Creative Writing students, and the teachers of course, all feed into the scene. Jenks and James Davies of If P Then Q both studied at M.M.U. Thurston is involved with The Other Room. And the faces who you keep seeing at writing groups and events again and again: Steven Waling, Tom Jenks, Andy N, Simon InnVerse, Hannah-Kate, Matt Curry, Antonionio (or whatever the hell he's called!), Caroline England... The scene thrives. tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.721 2008-06-09T00:00:22Z 2008-06-09T00:01:35Z

http://tony-trehy.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-do-you-want.html Anyway, that's not very interesting for you. So just to get myself back into the swing, a couple of things to mention. Went to the Other Room, http://www.openned.com/manchester/ at the Old Abbey Inn last week to hear Alan Halsey,...

The Editors http://tony-trehy.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-do-you-want.html Anyway, that's not very interesting for you. So just to get myself back into the swing, a couple of things to mention. Went to the Other Room, http://www.openned.com/manchester/ at the Old Abbey Inn last week to hear Alan Halsey, Geraldine Monk and Tom Hanks read. A really good night and the venue is a remarkable find. It's Robert Sheppard and Alex Middleton plus others next on 4 June - which I strongly recommend (though I will miss it because I'll be at the Basel Art Fair). http://stevenwaling.blogspot.com/ THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2008 The Other Room I went to a reading at The Old Abbey pub (now owned by the Kro chain, it appears.) There was Geraldine Monk, Alan Halsey and Tom Jencks. Geraldine read from Escafeld Hangings and some know "ghost sonnets"; Alan read some of his logoclastic, intertextual poems, including a wonderful variation on some of John Ashbery's poetry from A Tennis Court Oath. Tom Jencks read from his first book, A Priori, just published by ifpthenq - which also run a magazine of loose-leaf sheets in an envelope. Maybe it's the presence of at least three creative writing courses in the area (Manchester, Manchester Met and Salford) - but there's an awful lot of poetic activity in Manchester at the moment, and quite a lot of it falls into that strange category, the non-mainstream. Tom Jencks himself writes a poetry that uses the language of science and the media, that plays with the conceptual nature of language in ways that make it almost unrecognisable as poetry to those for whom narrativity and shapely well-made shaggy dog stories are the essence of poetry. There's obviously something in the water. Years ago, we had the conventional mainstream of Manchester Poets, and that was it. Harold Massingham led a course at the Extra Mural Dept of Man U, which I went to and it was good in its way. You couldn't find non-mainstream books anywhere, really. It's really making a difference to what's going on in Manchester. I hope it keeps up and doesn't go away as quickly as it came, as the magazine Mad Cow did about a decade ago. I have a poem in the latest issue of parameter - which has had a radical makeover. The last issue was conventional A4 staple-stiched, but issue 5 came wrapped in silver foil, with four seperately stapled booklets, one for the editorial, one for poetry, one for fiction and one for reviews and articles. Gorgeous is the word, and with people like Rupert Loydell and Ron Padgett in it, well worth £2 of anyone's money. It was a great evening, organised partly by a London group called Oppened and by people like James Davies and Scot Thurston. The next one is in June, I think, and I'm already looking forward to it. http://artoffiction.blogspot.com/ WEDNESDAY, APRIL 09, 2008 The Accessibility of Inaccessibilty I've been to more poetry readings than a sane man should have ever been to. Yet I've rarely had a happier time than at the Old Abbey tonight, when Alan Halsey, Geradline Monk and Tom Jenks read, as the first of a regular reading of so-called avant garde poets. I'm not so sure. Halsey made fun, as an ex-bookseller might, of Ashbury's "Tennis Court Oath", and its value to collectors, "it always seemed to be the 4th edition, so we wondered if there ever was an earlier one; there was..."; Geraldine Monk confronted Mary Queen Of Scots head on, to great effect; whilst Tom Jenks managed to fit in both religious and secular saints (The Magic Band, thanks, Tom!). Reading from his very visual new collection, A Priori, you relished the words, whilst hankering for the visuals. My reluctant friend (there for a beer), enjoyed it thoroughly and bought the book. Go figure. tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.676 2008-05-18T12:19:43Z 2008-05-18T12:22:15Z

Openned was another good one. Decent turnout this evening, perhaps due to the extra-high-profile readers. Here’s a quick recap: Ensemble whose name I didn’t catch first. Illness meant improv insert, skillfully achieved by good conducting and keen ears. My friend...

The Editors Openned was another good one. Decent turnout this evening, perhaps due to the extra-high-profile readers. Here’s a quick recap: Ensemble whose name I didn’t catch first. Illness meant improv insert, skillfully achieved by good conducting and keen ears. My friend commented that in all the years he’s accompanied me to poetry events, this one fulfilled his need for woodwind, string, words and jazz hats. Bravo. But it wasn’t mere Jazz Club. It was, indeed, well-crafted sonically, and Steve did a good job, meeting crescendoes like Bruce Dickinson without the plane. He looks good in a hat. Maggie O’Sullivan, whose work I have heard read on several occasions, is perhaps my favourite poet to hear read outload with voice. She is such a good reader of her own work, and it reminds me how much I have to work on my own delivery. O’Sullivan read from All Origins Are Lonely, which bears familiar phonetic play to earlier works, apparently embracing misheard and colloquial phrasings, jarrings and tensions in language. O’Sullivan’s voice carries through musical wordings, and often pretty odd phrasings, in a way which jars beautifully. An example might be how she delicately pronounces the phrase “abattoir voltages”. Lovely, indeed. Part of the O’Sullivan reading, aided by Bernstein David Bowie recently said, “if I were Justin Katko, I wouldn’t leave the house,” and I see his point. I’d stay in and sing meself opera. 8-bit videogame, suicyclical opera. It was a whistlestop tour of the opera, at just under ten minutes, and so lots of the text was flixed thu at CRT rates. Justin recently posted the intro on the British Poets Listserv: The Death of Pringle, in which is related the Discursive Alignment of the Battlefield to Come. Our Story takes place in the Environs of Southern California’s Salton Sea, a World unto itself, where a Party of Alchemical Topologists and Real Bureaucrats have Launched an Imperial Scheme for World Domination. With the Power of a Mysterious 4-Dimensional Dust, an Infinite Research Grant, and a Fortified Lab Complex, these Imperial Mother Fuckers have acquired a Total Copy of Washington DC’s own Sonny Bono Memorial Park, binding it to the Interior of a Transparent Virtual Reality Sphere, and accessing, by means of this Chamber, a Fundament giving Real Physique to Architectures which until now have been merely Spectral. The Roll of the Great Plan continues. A Synthetic Atmosphere of Electro-Magnetized Dust is to be installed over and around the Sea, hermetically priming this Zone for Discrete Terraformalization. Upon the Accumulation of Power to the Critical Degree, it is their Vile Intention to Sublimate the Sphere’s Outputs into the Atmospheric Dust Particles, saturating the newly Truncated Sky with the Pure Stuff of the Virtual. Thus, the Entire Region takes on the unique Ontological Function of an Augmented Total Copy of the Sonny Bono Memorial Park, scaled Two Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty One Times its Actual Size. The Sea is converted into the Park’s Kentucky Bluegrass when the Mother Fuckers fill it up with Rotting Meat and let it grow its Own. This One Celestial Seed, bound in its Glowing Atmospherics, will Detach from the Earth to Propagate the Long Aether. The People, whom the Mother Fuckers have Tempted into Passive Alignment with Indefinite Free Lunch, must tend for Eternity the Park’s Banal Landscaping. And so goes the Evil Plan, but not unchallenged. A Pringle vested with the Power of Speech has Freed itself from the Lab Fortress, being one Pringle who has undergone Purchase and Storage, Stocked in the Laboratory as an Object of Experiment. Upon Escape, the Free Pringle brings News of the Imperial Machinations to the People. The Poets welcome this Talking Commodity and attend to its Speech; but the People, blinded by the Ease of their Freedom, fail to Listen to this Piece of their Food. It is thus that the Fate of the Commons and Autonomy itself is an Imperative Function of the Efficacy of the Poets’ Song. Will their Lyrics be well enough Advanced to Hijack the Technoitopian Scheming of the Imperial Mother Fuckers? Can a Pringle really DIE? Who the fuck knows, but this question now seems pertinent enough to pursue. You gots a good voice for singing, too. Proof (and reactshun documentashin): And the music was awesome too. Bring on Opera 2.0. Charles Bernstein, of course, a pro. Steve wisely skipped to the end of the intro and guaranteed I got the last train home. Bernstein read from a variety of work from over the last 15 or so years. Here’s how he could have introduced himself: The email and list poems I found myself perhaps least receptive to from Bernstein’s reading. In spite of my line of poetic/digital interest, I find it hard to be convinced by spam-mail poetry, or the use of spam language. Perhaps part of my skepticism for this lies in the fact that spam language is, in and of itself, already deliberately disjointed in its quest to slip through the spamfilternet, making it’s re-presentation unremarkable unless it’s deflected elsewhere. Though Bernstein’s take shot through noise and into pockets of meaning in a way which was interesting (also reminded me in parts of the performances I’ve heard of Steve McCaffery’s Carnival) I still find email language a difficult one to use, but Bernstein’s was hardly a predictable take. Though I enjoyed the semantic implications of the “like” poem, though I didn’t enjoy them nearly as much as the poems from which the above decontext springs, and the excerpts from “Girly Man” which was great finish to a great evening’s reading. tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.579 2008-03-29T18:20:08Z 2008-03-29T18:21:09Z

'Openned An excellent scene! Readings take place irregularly in the basement of The Foundry, an art and peformance venue where Shoreditch meets Hoxton in splendid industrial chic (with organic Pittsfield beer). At last: a valid innovative poetry event attracting an...

The Editors 'Openned An excellent scene! Readings take place irregularly in the basement of The Foundry, an art and peformance venue where Shoreditch meets Hoxton in splendid industrial chic (with organic Pittsfield beer). At last: a valid innovative poetry event attracting an audience with a median age under 30 – few sad old codgers in macs like myself there (but they didn't throw me out for uncoolness!). Openned Anthology is available as a download, including work from Sean Bonney, Tim Atkins, John Cayley, Dew Milne, Frances Kruk, Emily Critchley and many others (plus a collaborative and fluid Online Issue). The site (homepage in blog format) has a good set of listings for London events, and there is aManchester blog also. Well done, Steve Willey & Alex Davies!' tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.552 2008-03-15T00:17:43Z 2008-03-15T00:18:39Z

'Openned Website, #3 ‘Tis the season to be coding, and Openned are leading the way with their new website. Still unmistakbaly Openned to look at, it’s been polished up nicely, and a few extra usability functions (such as some nice...

The Editors 'Openned Website, #3 ‘Tis the season to be coding, and Openned are leading the way with their new website. Still unmistakbaly Openned to look at, it’s been polished up nicely, and a few extra usability functions (such as some nice space-saving jump menus) have been added. In my experience, it’s made the site, with its ever-increasing volume of archived material and news items, more easy to consume.' tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.429 2008-01-20T11:54:20Z 2008-01-20T16:55:09Z

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The Editors http://www.defaultpublishing.com/ http://www.swinground.co.uk/ http://www.mimesispoetry.com/ http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/ http://www.cinnamonpress.com/envoi/ http://www.cinnamonpress.com/ http://www.madhattersreview.com/menu.shtml http://www.happenstancepress.com/ http://www.myspace.com/libertinemagazine http://dtmcb.awardspace.com/online.html http://www.route-online.com/routev7/welcome.asp?idno=1&textonly=0 http://www.mslexia.co.uk/ http://www.ep.tc/realist/ http://www.machinebook.org/index.html http://fhole.blogspot.com/ http://www.zoharpublishing.com/index.htm http://www.chrisjoseph.org/wp/archives/date/2007/05/ http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/ http://home.freeuk.net/katermurr/ http://saltpublishing.com/saline/index.php http://www.pinko.org/1.html http://www.saltpublishing.com/index.htm?PHPSESSID=68a674695ac4340fe2d930f82027f10e http://buffaloreadings.com/index.php?topic=poems http://www.torriano.org/hearing_eye/readings.html http://www.applesandsnakes.org/events.php# http://london.e-poets.net/index.shtml http://www.soton.ac.uk/~bepc/ http://www.incwriters.com/ http://home.ptd.net/~clkpoet/cpintro.html http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr7/ebr7.htm http://www.cccp-online.org/ http://www.poetics.ca/ http://mainstreampoetry.blogspot.com/ http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html http://www.ubu.com/ http://howyahdoon.blogspot.com/ http://creamsiclestickshivs.blogspot.com/ http://www.logolalia.com/minimalistconcretepoetry/ http://takingthebrim.blogspot.com/ http://www.drunkenboat.com/ http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/ http://scorecard.typepad.com/crag_hills_poetry_score/ http://as-is.blogspot.com/ http://people2.clarityconnect.com/webpages6/ronhenry/aught.htm http://poemsmadefromspam.blogspot.com/ http://facesinthewater.blogspot.com/ http://blogg.gurka.se/prime_perl_haiku-eng.htm http://www.stuckism.com/ http://www.petermanson.com/ http://www.shadoof.net/in/ 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http://www.villageunderground.co.uk/ http://dev.null.org/gallery/London/Foundry1 http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/events/readings/?id=17 http://www.terriblework.co.uk/ http://members.aol.com/towntrick/yogh/index.html http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/cafe/caferate.htm http://www.opticnerve.co.uk/Rockdrill.htm http://www.openbracket.org.uk/ http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/events/readings/?id=31 http://darkmucus.blogspot.com/ http://www.pores.bbk.ac.uk/index.html http://whitechapel.org/ http://www.bbk.ac.uk/readings/ http://www.onedit.net/ http://www.zafusy.com/index.htm http://www.poetrylondon.co.uk/ http://sophierobinson.blogspot.com/ http://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/index.php http://butter.the.sides.googlepages.com/ http://beescope.blogspot.com/ http://www.anthonyjoseph.co.uk/main.html http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/ http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/photography/story/0,,2224011,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=40 http://www.headpress.com/ShowProduct.aspx?ID=37 http://egnep.blogspot.com/ http://openned.pbwiki.com/FrontPage http://www.openned.com/images/randoms/ http://www.openned.blogspot.com/ http://openned.googlepages.com/home http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/recent_news http://www.hlss.mmu.ac.uk/english/writingschool/news/ http://www.ica.org.uk/ http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/ http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/cafe/cafeind.htm http://whitechapel.org/content.php?page_id=3888 http://www.foundry.tv/ http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/literature-spoken-word http://www.hlss.mmu.ac.uk/english/writingschool/regional_events.php http://www.eri.mmu.ac.uk/news/ http://www.carcanet.co.uk/index.shtml http://www.literaturenorthwest.co.uk/events http://forums.cpanel.net/ http://jacketmagazine.com/00/noticeboard.shtml http://www.cornerhouse.org/art/events.aspx tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.411 2008-01-10T23:14:39Z 2008-01-11T04:16:32Z

From Insolent Boy: Openned at the Foundry, Old Street, London In a mildly smoky and dank cellar below Old Street`s, The Foundy, a cluster of uni-scenesters congregate on a night that is humid and expectant. At the front, well-lit and...

The Editors From Insolent Boy: Openned at the Foundry, Old Street, London In a mildly smoky and dank cellar below Old Street`s, The Foundy, a cluster of uni-scenesters congregate on a night that is humid and expectant. At the front, well-lit and theatrically draped in noir fabric, a poet announces (rough translation), "a Canadian cannot find his ass with both hands." A vibe of coolness and contented smiles are shared between cigarettes and sips of water. The poet (looking like a cross between the Brazilian footballer Leonardo and a ragged Peter Fonda) adds, "allowing to a shortage of cocaine I turned my back on public life." A tone is set, mildly serious but also mildly strange as if the poet is not a poet at all but a lawyer deconstructing a court case. During the break which follows, an earlier performance poet, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, who recited poetry while asking the audience to prompt her to "skip", "stop", and "review" her work, chats amiably with friends. Seeing this as a chance to hop to the loo, I arrive, instead at the the bar and ask for pints of beer to take downstairs. During the second act we are treated to another poet, Keston Sutherland (pictured, below), less controlled, perhaps angrier, with a fierce shock of hair, who read a series of poems and observations which had the audience listening with interest, bristling, even. "Am I too low for the flymo?" he announces, then to the amusement of all, he added, "You can`t put shit back in the donkey!" Two things noticed as I wait to interview the proprietors of the evening, Stephen Willey and Andrew Davies: 1. Still no piss AND 2. My father`s watch says 'Time for God." Time to interview the lads, no? Openned Up! at the Foundry, Old Street Tube. The two promoters, Stephen Willey and Alex Davies (pictured, below, right) started the idea at Royal Holloway at the University of London with the idea of opening a magazine combining politics and experimental poetry with an openness - hence the idea for the reading series: Openned. "Part of it," says Willey, "comes from an anger I have of how they teach poetry at school. I find it patronizing. Also we are living in political times. Poetry is powerful. We want to use language in a divisive way, encourage people to think for themselves. There are adverts that say: Image is everything. Or, as in the case of the re-named Mars Bar, now called Believe. Why is the bar called Believe? Who says? People don`t want to be told and they don`t want to be manipulated." Adds co-founder Alex Davies, "Poetry is in excess of everything that can be said in an essay. There is a vitality to it." As the series grows, and there appears to be more demand and spaces in London opening up, others like Penned in the Margins are gaining recognition. This is fine with Davies, who says with a shrug,"we haven`t set ourselves up in direct opposition to anybody." Looking around the room and judging by the quality of observation here and young faces it is easy to see that this night might be a success but for now the lads are putting the series on hold till September, as Davies states, "We`re off to China for the summer to make ipods." The series resumes in September. Previous Article Penned in the Margins reviewed Remember Readers?]]> tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.410 2008-01-10T23:10:52Z 2008-01-11T06:31:14Z

From I need some finer words and you need to be nicer Caroline Bergvall at Openned last night Openned is a group that among other things 'seeks to create flexible spaces for poetry and poetic practitioners by inviting less established...

The Editors From I need some finer words and you need to be nicer Caroline Bergvall at Openned last night Openned is a group that among other things 'seeks to create flexible spaces for poetry and poetic practitioners by inviting less established and more established writers to read together'. It does this by hosting evenings in the bowels of the Foundry in Old Street. Take a wrong turn and you might walk into the middle of somebody's sprawling sculptural plaster work, still in progress; retrace your steps and you will find yourself surrounded by mildly psychedelic canvases in a long, low-lit basement room, suitably scruffy and bohemian, but not so far away from the real world that we can't hear what sounds like a Lauryn Hill retrospective booming from the speakers in the upstairs bar. Jerome Rothenberg seemed quite at home there, stroking his beard and delighting in the sound of his American-Jewish vowels. Someone with a more diasporic relationship to her diphthongs was the French-Norwegian Anglophone, Caroline Bergvall (below). Brilliantly, she had found in the Canterbury tales the exact point in time where the sound of the English language most resembled her own accent. Her joyful reworking of Chaucer, in which she grouped together all his food references, sparkled off her tongue and allowed her to confidently move into a mix of Chaucerian and her own English for her second reading. It was when Bergvall was commissioned to write a piece in Norwegian for the online poetry journal Nypoesi that she really came up against her linguistic anxieties, and in doing so created a very moving piece, Cropper.]]> tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.409 2008-01-10T22:56:36Z 2008-01-11T04:04:11Z

Please note the below is the work of uber-talented John Sparrow and the shameless magpie-ing of his site should be reciprocated by visiting it, where you can find examples of his projects, as well as one of the best maintained...

The Editors Please note the below is the work of uber-talented John Sparrow and the shameless magpie-ing of his site should be reciprocated by visiting it, where you can find examples of his projects, as well as one of the best maintained blogs in the online poetry sphere. _______________________________ Archive for the ‘Openned’ Category Wrapping up the Anthology… Thursday, 23rd August, 2007 Well, it’s been a busy couple of weeks, with a couple of freelance bits and pieces it’s been difficult to get stuck into anything else. So, onward with the end of my first part of Openned Anthology roundup. I’d quite like to go back and write up my thoughts in relation to work by artists I don’t know at all or have never read before, but that will be a bit later, and I think I’ll devote a post per work! Where was I? Redell Olsen, from Punk Faun: A Baroque Pastel I could probably go on for most of this post covering this work in relation to the title alone, which implies some bizarre mix of pop culture (punk), mythology (faun), and classical art and music (baroque, pastel). The title does not appear to be arbitrary. Punk is a notoriously confrontational modern stance, creating dissonance and sticking two fingers up at authoritative notions of proof of craft, of artistic snobbery. Baroque as musical era often created combinations of both harmony and dissonance. Pastel paintings are, by nature of their tools, lent well to merging of colours, but also able to provide stark boundaries depending on pressure. Punk Faun begins by putting these into motion. Punk becomes verb, actively pulls apart the “oily truth” and producing violent reinterpretations of apparently classical modes. The everyday “nature in excess” undermines spoils of war: (SHE) Idyllic shepherd of modern Man fascinate me your arms Clasping the dead dailies to us And call innocence a blush (HE) Deskbound eager for evil tastes Castration rodeo TV What hurls itself into the mosh? We want the sting that words1 “[T]he sting that words” echoes an apparent inversion, “words that sting”, and yet, in context, also sound like a giddy fan of The Police calling for their hero. I suppose what I’m getting at is that the inversions, odd uses of adjectives (for example) in places where one would expect to find verbs, produce historical and semantic juxtapositions and agreements which fuse in relation to the reader’s own interpretation of his/her surrounding popular culture. Who doesn’t know someone who has failed “graceful on fat-free”?2 And yet, the mention of a C-130 Hercules - a mammoth aircraft - implies at once the size of the craft and its weight along with its apparent grace in flight, yet also provokes a vulgar metaphor for the person who failed on fat-free. The work is full of baroque echoes, literally even, as the homophonic “go bar rock” recontextualises the title’s classical references in terms of its Punk alter-anti-ego. The second half of this excerpt presents a list of seemingly disparate items, objects, abstract imagery and notion. Contrasts are brought into a level playing field through the consistency of the form. Yet, again, such apparent resolution is not completed, not just because the focal point and the TYPE of focal point in each line moves around so quickly, but because the descriptions themselves are “of”, already small parts of a greater whole without which no original context can be drawn. It’s a dada-esque paradox - a textual grid montage which calls attention to the absence of nonetheless implied origins. The things described are either introduced in terms of an absent object (such as a photograph), a medium through which realisation becomes possible - or they simply ‘are of’, constructed by that which they apparently describe, and therefore point toward a larger absence. I need safety pins for my eyes. Graeme Estry, CHAD, PUDS, RAT and SNOOPY I’d read some of Graeme’s original shaped texts (were these from the same project, Graeme?) and what struck me instantly was the striking form of the texts. Spewing, awkwardly stacked, forced into boxes, leaking - pretty much any violent, libidinal or excretal force you could imagine, used to present the text. It’s a good case for the form being integral to the content, since it seems essential to the barrage and excess of linguistic stuff (actual words, y’all) and the images and senses they evoke (imagery, sir, imagery. Would you like a doggy bag?). These texts seem on the surface to be obviously absurd (and this is something I think Graeme is using powerfully in the texts) given their combinations. That said, I think there is far more to the texts than surface humour, and this is achieved through the sheer abundance of text, with phrases and words forced together to create a kind of continuity of discontinuity, the jarring form of the lines resisting comfortable scanning: There are moments of thought collection in these texts, and although these produce diverse and grating meanings in their jarring metaphors, they nonetheless offer a momentum which is quickly staggered once more. Rhythm, neologisms and combinatory / separated phrasal units create a tension between the visual and the oral/aural reading, with homophonic continuations doubling up phrasal possibilities within syllabic singularities: (Click to enlarge. My highlighting.) Yes, even with all this text, it’s denser than haggis. And meaty haggis at that. Ok, that pretty much rounds up my Anthology posts for now. I plan to come back to Kai’s work, and revisit the Anthology in general, but all in good time. I’m also meeting up with an old friend from university tonight, for just under two weeks. We’re going to the Grand Canyon and to Vegas, amongst other things (including Mexican dinners). For this reason, my posting may become even more sporadic than usual. I already have a backlog of post content to write up, including details of an exciting evening at the roller derby. I guess I ought to sleep less. Toodle pip J Anthology, p. 109 [↩] Anthology, p. 110 [↩] Posted by Itch Away. No Comments » Openned Anthology, Part 4 (about most of “Part 3″) Wednesday, 15th August, 2007 Albert Pellicer, Selections from THE DOT ON A CAPITAL I “The fumigation of La Luna on July 17th 2004″ Albert’s work in the anthology hits me with two phrases from the text itself, which seem to get at what the text is doing. It appears to be “interrogating objects”1 and in doing so highlight a sense of the “axiomatic”2 relationship we have with language. The application of such an interrogation makes the poem’s content (it certainly uses the language of discussion around the fumigation in 2004), by way of blurred object relations, much more rich than simply being ‘about’ this event. The opening statements are a good example of this - the word “accountable” rings through the statements and is applied to objects which are victims, and circumstances which might be symptoms or distant possibilities. I have heard Albert read his work many times. What always seems to take me by surprise is just how much his reading voice, and the language it speaks, commands presence and attention. His words are, quite simply, beautiful to hear and beautiful to read. Especially, for me, at their most visual, clashing moments: limbs elbow an error arrows learnt by heart whose target is to aim the glitch will meet its ends the guerillas’s nest muffled dog barking in the distance door consistent valued chain report dreamerized the heart by way of the hands bridging bride and grooming moon freshly deboxed3 Allen Fisher, Proposals 4 Allen Fisher has produced approximately 65,034 chapbooks in his career to date. His work straddles a broad variety of media (including some fascinating microfiche work, which I’d love to see again). This is not irrelevant to Proposals, since it contains both text and paintings, but also textually crosses a kind of cartographical remapping transposed onto language. A little like Brixton Fractals, Fisher here uses definitive (as in the language of definition) description as a way into the text, which ruptures and deviates, producing a kind of re-scaling of the text as snippets of realtime intrude into an increasingly damaged text. This is the worst description I could have given, and I’m sticking to it, since for me reading Fisher’s work is like walking on a map rather than on the actual road depicted in the map - or perhaps it’s a combination of the two. Proposals jams together multiples so it can never sit in the same place. It lays down a rhetoric which it steadily pulls apart, allowing for an open-ended language which is always calling back to fact, to which the paintings seem pivotal. […] the degree to which polite ethical thought in societies of the West today rests on or involves self- deception or more active deceit depends on the private pretence, public affirmation, or purposeful suggestion of what is for those concerned the knowably false. [Painting] So what come around the corner in a blade suit whose system is this what trug of discarded root matter smoulders in a mental debris, […]4 Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, HER BODY: THE CITY It’s been a while since I read or heard or saw any of Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s work. It’s probably getting on for 2 years - the e-poetry festival - since I experienced it. To go off on a tangent for a sec, there was an unfavourable review of my curations at the e-poetry 2005 festival (one out of several gleaming ones, I might add, and one which I’m pretty sure did not reflect the views of the majority) which was not based on the quality of the work, but of the e-nature of the work. To me, this seemed a slightly absurd yardstick of generalisation, to think that only texts bound up in algorithm and code explicitly could be engaged with electronic poetics. It’s true to say that a healthy portion of my choices were cross-media, cross-genre works, MULTI-media. I mention this because Burnett’s work at the festival had me and many others excited in the fact that it was a text bound up in its media. Site-specific, slideshow, interactive, narrative - the work was a mixture of electronic media and human social interaction in which the two perpetuated each other. e, it certainly was. And so to HER BODY: THE CITY, which Burnett explained to me is (in the anthology) an earlier version of an evolving work. Not that this in some way implies a lesser quality work, but that it seems to be a text which is in flux, and which invites various performance states in its realisation. Case in point is Burnett’s performance of the piece with Sean Bonney on guitar. To bring the text into such an overtly performative realm seems quite deliberate, as there is clearly a formal nod to Ginsberg in the poem, though we’re not talking half-baked parody. Indeed, where Ginsberg’s (actually slightly questionable) ’spontaneous’ poem bring real-life acts into immediacy, Burnett’s more fragmented language make settling on one act itself an act to be “disappeared into the surface of writing”5 Ironically, this is perhaps so effective for me through the Ginsberg filter from which it turns, presenting a kind of semi-transparent reportage. As Burnett herself seems to imply, these are not just structures but systems, ways of thinking about actions differently, subjectively, “who” suggesting an object-action as in Ginsberg but often actually delivering abstract action and/or displaced object through which to develop a reading strategy: who embedded all night in multiple light oxfam re-routed and littering through stale beer Mixer listing to the crack-doom of social lip-box who unutterable seventy hours park to pod to flower to Westminster Bridge lost words of platonic roses6 Looking forward to the next incarnation. Alex Davies Alex presents 3 works in the Anthology, each one pretty short and each one vastly different. “Oh! For the Glorious Days of Slavery” As previously discussed, I am all for détourning authoritative documents, or anything with apparent historical, social, formal traditions which themselves imply a promise, either legal, factual or linguistic. Alex here uses a historical map to ‘map’ out his texts, which weave between the ‘factual’ landmarks an undermine the proposed authority of the document. Indeed, one might interpret the title in terms of what is missing from this picture as well as what is contained within it. Historical omissions are what leave behind the stuff of history, and Alex’s weaving language occupies spaces and non-spaces, claiming and undermining their historical worth all in one jellied eel. “Big Ben” takes a different approach to the role of authoritative statement. A little like Fisher’s text, “Big Ben” produces layers of clarity through which the meaning of educative or narrative statements becomes obscured, and their reliability (and that of the referent) called into question: No bell moves more than one place in the row at a time, although one pair may change in the same row. Each sound is a massive point full of weird objects in a strange room of many people, and each person is a through to some thought.7 Which brings us slap bang into “12 Lens”, a(n intentional?) pun (surely) on lens, appropriately implying a skewed, distorted but implicitly true collections of thoughts, speeches, narratives from ‘Len’’s life spanning 60-odd years. I guess what fascinates me beyond the snippets of info we receive are the huge gaps between them, and the highly specific nature of their collation (almost scientifically categorized and labeled) and date of production. Transient snapshots of a man’s life, far too brief to be useful, nonetheless create a 60-year narrative in which we piece in some of the gaps and arguably start to feel we’ve gained a fairly robust (or depressingly satisfactory) overview of a life’s work. Sorry this post took so long to complete. I’m busy, really. Really. Busy. I’ll be beginning the next post with Redell Olsen’s piece and moving into Part 4… J Anthology, p. 78 [↩] Anthology, p.79 [↩] Anthology, p. 80 [↩] Anthology pp. 81-3 [↩] Anthology, p. 99 [↩] Anthology, p. 98 [↩] Anthology, p. 104 [↩] Posted by Itch Away. No Comments » Openned Anthology, Pt3 Thursday, 9th August, 2007 Nooz Flash! Openned have fixed the Anthology! Amendments are available for download, and they’ve offered a full-fat version for those of you with good eyes and equally good internet connections: Lynx: Amendments Larger version Onward with my pick from the Anthology… Stephen Willey, from Translations out of Walter Benjamin Steve has been working on this project for some time, spending most of the preliminary stages researching Benjamin and laying out what appears to be an exceptionally thorough theoretical basis for his practice. Out of this comes Translations out of Walter Benjamin, a series of variations writing through Benjamin’s ghost (this is paraphrasing what Steve has told me about his work, and my apologies to him if this is inaccurate). Anyway, the result is a highly-planned and well-thought-out mish-mash of form. I don’t mean this negatively - Willey is experimenting here with various forms, some palimpsest in their approach (in one, a carefully deconstructed Battersea Power Station - a landmark notably unscathed in the Blitz, dictates the layout for an overlapping text; in another, an old Elizabeth Arden advert is détourned to subvert the existing language and set a context for the new language) some adopting the format of codes and structures to imply (in my view) a system of reading analogous with that code. Both of these examples strike me as interesting. I am always hot for détourned media, diagrammatical systems, code structures. But Steve’s use of code structures reinforces that we should be reading his texts differently to the usual. Code (or at least the type of code he seems to emulate in this extract) is object oriented, much like regular language use. Yet it possesses its own terms of use and parsing of object, and how an object is created. Bastardised HTML code implies broken anchors, unfinished (or already finished) links to nowhere. Curly brackets contain the parameters of a function, thus redefining the possibilities of meaning in “loop + echo” in terms of quantifying qualitative values or implying that loop and echo must have numerical equivalents and are therefore extraneously referential. Lists within functions imply arrays which themselves imply a one-out-of-many decision making process - a glance at a text of which only one array per realisation would exist.1 All of this is just personal interpretation, of course, but the way Steve has jumped from form to form means that one is only just getting used to one way of reading before being jerked into the next frame. With all this focus on form, I’m not ignoring the text itself. Yet Steve’s texts are so intertwined with the form that binds them that neither seems secondary to the other. The projection slides, for example, demand readings through their shadings which exceed a left-to-right, top-to-bottom scan. Various reading strategies based on the textual aesthetics are naturally provoked, producing several sub-texts within an overall text. Ceri Buck, What is action? Ceri Buck, where have you been? Or where have I been? And how do I go about talking about your work when we sat together all those times and fretted about dissertation woes through beer soaked eyes? Of course, I know how good Ceri’s work is - I saw it. I knew. Still, it’s been a while since I saw newer work (probably the last time I saw anything was in HOW2, and her performance at the e-poetry festival 2005). What is action? is phonetic and visual pun / play / trap-setting at its finest. Like an autistic mother, Ceri’s neologisms slip you up and make you think of combinations. Combinactions. Then we’re in another crammed paragraph of open meanings with not enough seconds for the words. In the rush towards definition, we fall over the ‘wrong words’ and are brought abruptly to the surface once more: somewhere in London a woman hijacks the supermarket tannoy to sing sweetly to the shoppers ‘combat the capitalist inside of you’ / Where was I and what did I do when Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed? A keep pressed battery hen blind of free rage This is combined with a kind of Steinian repetition-variation-repetition trap, spanning a few mere words or travelling across paragraphs. I get pulled to and fro and I like it. My favourite: 5. Desirable bacteria or is not ravaged by the imprint scorch of a kiss & waking up mast Ur bating? repossess a connection in a possessive it rubs it rubs up against us Up against against Up freedom from possession(s) up against love one how it rubs up against up free pursue against possess up love another are you sure you want to be here? Can we check in? I’ve got that feeling in my belly gut feeling belly warmth context is everything a warm feeling in my belly a deep low belly feeling an awareness of the belly belly deep down warm the blood spilling This coming must do something! Demo and Die, Flickerng Bdy, John Sparrow Such utter genius defies words. Only kidding. Big pile of shit, ignore at all costs.2 Drew Milne Read this poem (poems) and notice how your mind runs out of breath. Milne’s punctuationless onslaught is perhaps so entertaining because it doesn’t form any kind of tirade against anything, rather it seems to collect and disperse genres or themes (in a vocabulary sense rather than a narrative sense) such as music, tools, ancient civilization, mythology, archeology, architecture and more. However, it’s where these vocabularies cross over which strikes me as interesting. “spinal tap”, “Zildjian”, “big hair”, for example, are very visual words3, through which “set to slay in metal” “axe” (”golden axe” too - which calls to memory the early 90s computer game) “rock god” take on new meanings. It is this dense battle of contexts drives on the text, and, thankfully (for me at any rate) heavy metal wins. Word grids make many reads, then back into juxtapolevaulting as phrases cram together emoshred: neo-industrialists in prog lime glad rags leopard slipper shaker all heaviest raw denim columns to riff glow the republic preaching the perverted ivy corinthians cometh the shredder cometh the beard metalocalypse beyond parody sky blue willy-tinsel and emo schlong giving pink spandex in thrashtastic grunt retro-stonk loose stoic populists hardnosed to brine scuzzy perhaps Extra marks to Milne for inclusion of the word “stonk”, which the Urban Dictionary defines as “World War II British slang for a massed artillery bombardment on an enemy position” but which also might stir in some memories of a Comic Relief campaign centred on the “stonk”, along with suitably bad music release. Milne ist Thrashtastisch. There is an interesting short essay by Loss Pequeño Glazier which discusses language in terms of array structures at http://www.dichtung-digital.com/2005/1/Glazier [↩] Read them. Tell your friends. Then send me lots of money. [↩] I’m including cymbal manufacturer Zildjian since they have such an immediately recognisable logo [↩] Posted by Itch Away. No Comments » Openned Anthology pt. 2 Monday, 6th August, 2007 John Cayley, imposition John Cayley, to whom I attribute a great deal of inspiration with regard to digital poetics, features in the Anthology in the first section of PART 2. imposition was performed at an Openned night which I regrettably had to miss. This is a shame, as it’s a piece of work which I find conceptually very interesting, and was keen to see how the concept was realised in a live setting. The Anthology coverage forms a link to the main Openned site (in the real internets) which opens up a Quicktime panorama of the Foundry setting, with the audio of the performance over the top. The inclusion of the panorama certainly is not an arbitrary aesthetic decision; part of the brief for the audience was to arrive with any laptops handy, and with the software installed and ready to go. The result is that the audience form much of the performance - an achievement strikingly visual as around 1/3 of the audience sit with their laptops all working in tandem. The notes on imposition state that the project is “the networked performance of an evolving collaborative work engaged with ambient, time-based poetics and harmonically organized, language-driven sound.”1 As loaded as this statement may seem, it makes more sense given its origins in overboard (footnoted in imposition’s notes), a ‘textual painting’ in which, as far as I can tell, noise and a stable text interact, one emerging through the other. Such a setup seems relevant for the performative setting of imposition, since it foregrounds a reciprocal creative process between human beings and their language, all in terms of a wider reflexive participation with the media of flesh and machine. Random generation within algorithmic constraints produce textual variations, and it would appear that the same algorithmic system has been remapped onto the compositional strategies of Giles Perring. I hope I can participate in one of these performances soon. Fiona Templeton, imagining being at the republican convention Before picking up Mum in Airdrie (available here) I was really only familiar with Templeton’s work YOU–The City. Like Mum, this excerpt utilises mainly extremely short lines of text which, as I noted in Robert Hampson’s work, seem to blur the starting and finishing points of phrases. This is helped by the occasional neologism (or perhaps partial erasure), as in the following: bang off the realm of eager range sun pists down hold you on hold like fire spreading a scale of dampnation and this is where I really oozes itself disturb lack of kid knownly2 This extract scans fairly easily but turns away from comfotable closure at every turn. “pist” here could be a partially erased “piste” turned into a verb. It also phonetically demands a reading as “kissed” as in sun kissed (or even Sunkist) or (the way I like to read it) “pissed” turned into a kind of past-participle present hybrid verb. I like this reading better, as it complements the neologism “dampnation” later in the extract, a word which seems to imply wet damnation as well as simply an adjective and noun fused. “kid knownly” might go unnoticed as “knowingly” at first glance, only to refuse that reading alone. Interestingly for me, the persistent grammatical disagreements produce a plateau through which such tensions come through with exciting energy. Such has been the joy of reading Templeton’s page-based work for me. This post has taken longer than I’d expected! I’ll carry on in my next Anthology roundup with Steve Willey’s excerpts from his extended project (to be presented as part of his MA disertation) writing through Walter Benjamin. His relationship with this project, I assume, will eventually drive him mad. As an aside, it would be interesting if anyone has anything to add / disagree regarding my comments on these works so far. No pressure, but feel free. Cayley, notes on imposition, http://homepage.mac.com/shadoof/impose/impnotes.html. Accessed 5th August 2007. See also the PDF download of the same notes. [↩] Anthology p. 52 [↩] Posted by Itch Away. 2 Comments » Openned Anthology Wednesday, 1st August, 2007 Had I been able to earlier1, I would have mentioned that Openned’s long-anticipated Anthology is up and available for download, on time and on budget (free). The “home” PDF (from which the available downloadable PDFs are linked) can be downloaded here. The FULL Anthology PDF can be found here. To get the selfish plug done and dusted, I’ll briefly mention that I feature in the anthology. Demo and Die has a few screenshots, and they’re showcasing a few pages from my ongoing “Flickrng Bdy” work too. Thanks, guys. Aside from that, the anthology does what an anthology should; it collates a healthy cross-section of poets and their work and MAKES YOU WANT TO READ MORE of everyone’s work. Happily, the anthology uses its medium well and extends out to further reading, footnoted references, etc. It’s a printed book and a hypertext, and as such even the anthology’s form itself raises a few considerations which work well with the content. The other thing achieved by the anthology is a decent back catalogue of Openned’s reading nights, with most work featured in the PDF being work read, in some form or other, at one night or other at the Foundry. So, here is the double-whammy of being able to revisit works enjoyed and visit for the first time works missed. The scope of the work is broad, the contributors (not me) skilled. What is truly great and truly important about this is the fact that poets who might be considered “established” or more experienced are featured, in no particular order, alongside those whose work has not yet had much of a chance to be heard and which rightly deserves more ears and eyes. The anthology is rarely democratic in this sense and it manages to be so at no expense of quality. Although I have not had much of a chance to read it thoroughly yet, I have of course skimmed and darted straight for the people I know well, or whose work I was keen to refresh myself with having heard it or seen it before. Here are a few personal highlights from section 1 (in anthology order)2: Rosheen Brannan, from Panels Beautifully presented photography of (yuck) insect body parts and - to my eye - what seems like deliberately fragmented / blocked texts which encourage multi-directional readings. Mesmerizing use of image and text, both of which demand the other. Lydia White, from Song in Cycle I’ve heard great things about Lydia’s performance work, and it’s worth noting that she was (is?) a very talented vocal performer who had (has?) a scholarship with Royal Holloway’s choir. Yes, they paid HER to sing. Lydia’s documentation accompanies an mp3 of the performance, a kind of vocal / physical performance of endurance, which ranges from regular speech, through screeching sound poetry, to having her singing attacked by various other oral impositions such as gargling. There seems to be a kind of Aaaron Williamson / Brian Catling outlandishness to these performances, which is hot. Robert Hampson, from the war against tourism Winner of Itch Away’s “best title ever for a collection of poetry” award. I feel a little awkward talking about my Head of Department’s work (and that of all my peers above), but what the f*ck. What I like about Robert’s work is that its subtly fragmented prosaic poetry throws me into traps of ambiguity every time. It’s a complex work which takes me a long time to read, as - for me at any rate - the reward is in rereading, and reassessing meanings. Although there appears to be thematic continuity, it seems to be structured so that sentences begin or end in multiple places, and lead on or end depending on how you read: deprived of oxygen do not inflate the rhetoric the safety card is switched off during the duration3 Sophie Robinson, L.O.V.E.[sic] Sophie often reads with the speed and vigour of the Tasmanian Devil, and her words demand it. Think Bruce Andrews shoved into a “crampy world matrix”4. Every sentence is maximal, and forces contextual senses to be drawn out and dashed by the next. I want to quote the lot, but must really stop writing for today. In conclusion (for now), kudos to Alex and Steve at Openned for a cracking Editorial job, for featuring a rich mix of poets whose work is extremely varied but which fit together seamlessly. NOTE: Steve and Alex have had a few teething problems with the Anthology PDFs (a couple of minor corruption / compatibility issues, it seems). If the PDFs are down, it’s temporary. Keep trying. Thanks to Apple’s Airport Extreme update, my internet connection has been sporadic at best throughout the day, and I’ve only just got to the point where I can use any of the internets with cautious confidence. If you have an Intel Mac and are thinking about updating your software, think twice before Apple release a patch [↩] In order to keep this post from being 34134 pages long, and to spend more time with the anthology, I think I’ll make separate posts for each section every day or so [↩] Anthology, p. 22 [↩] Anthology, p. 35 [↩] Posted by Itch Away. No Comments » Itch Away blog powered by WordPress ]]> tag:www.openned.com,2008:/archive//9.392 2008-01-08T11:26:22Z 2008-01-08T16:26:51Z

Manchester Blog Post Archive (2007-Present) (also linked to at the bottom of Manchester blog page)...

The Editors Manchester Blog Post Archive (2007-Present) (also linked to at the bottom of Manchester blog page)]]>