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Showing posts from January, 2005

in Köln for the weekend

Arrived today in Köln for the weekend: Around the airport it is white with snow and driving through the woodlands surrounding the centre is reminiscent of a Brueghel painting. The City itself is warmer and not so wintery. Ulrich Rückriem is on better form than I can remember seeing him. He has resurfaced from the recent crises that hit him one after another over the last 5 years and the last surgery arising from the near-fatal car crash in Spain last year; suddenly he is positive and energised. The material for a new book gathered on one table in the studio, a large project for a Swiss pharmaceutical company in Sardinia spread along one whole wall, other projects and papers spread on other tables, pictures, drawings and diagrams, faxes and orders everywhere. What could be more invigorating than sitting in the studio of one of German’s leading sculptors writing while he works, accompanied by Mozart piano music and the distant bells of Köln Cathedral? Every now and then he brings out

How healthy is your Quality Health Check?

Unless you work in a library you probably don’t know that in 2000 under the Government’s targets regime something called the Stock Quality Health Check was created. Suitably dressed up with initial pilots and consultations, it is a spreadsheet into which libraries input their stock records and ostensibly are able to gauge the quality of their fiction and poetry collections through its scoring system. Interestingly it makes the claim that it is absolutely not a canon, with their definition of a library’s collection quality (ignoring physical condition of the books) as the degree to which it caters for all reading audiences. Fluffy inclusive stuff that’s good for us all then. The new up-dated 2004 Health Check features 9 new categories including poetry. So how well did the 4 good men and a woman of the Audit Commission, DCMS, Arts Council, Society of Chief Librarians and Museums, Libraries & Archives Agency do in creating a non-canonical poetry list which caters for all read

A Famous poet?

Lawrence Upton writes “The brief online text (on the Text Festival website – www.textfestival.com ) says that Cobbing is "famous for his use of the photocopier" This is often said and it isn't untrue, but... IN FACT he was first famous for his use of the ink duplicator If one were to date his career from SOUND POEMS / ABC IN SOUND, then the photocopier came into use in his hands slightly over half way through the career. If one were to date his career from his earliest arttistic use of the ink duplicator which he chose to preserve, then the photocopier came into use during the last 3rd of his career. This does not invalidate at all the work he did with the photocopier, which is often *at *least as good as the ink duplicator work; but to stress the photocopier is misleading. The blurb speaks of "his classic poems". One has to guess what that means, but I would have thought it is likely to refer to poems which, when they are graphically-oriented, rely

Back from Suffolk

One of the areas that I am playing with in the opening Text Festival exhibition is the privileging of the book and the canon. To do this I decided to create a canonical bookcase, an alternative canon; not complete or undisputable but something to raise questions, such as what is that? Why does this shelf look so different to every library or bookshop poetry shelf? Where could I get some of these books? Why isn’t such and such on there? In Suffolk over the last few days, visiting cris cheek (and Kirsten Lavers) (collectively Things Not Worth Keeping), he was stunned by his huge and remarkable book collection, fabulous things ranging from an original complete set of LANGUAGE and a massive collection of the innovative British poets of the last 30 years to rare editions to drop your jaw. I was particularly struck by the Tom Raworth and JR Prynne books. Through the recent Carcanet and Bloodaxe collected works of both I thought that I understood the quality of their work. Seeing what

A Portrait of the Artist in 2015.

Ask not what creative industries can do for you; ask what you can do for the creative industry! Quoted from a recent European cultural policy forum which attempted to predict the status of the arts in the year 2015: artists will either be marginalised(!) or part of the global creative industry. It seriously considered why the independent, individual, autonomous artist will be almost extinct in a few decades time. The big, global creative industries – which will rule the whole artistic and cultural world, including the political arena – will have absorbed the greater proportion of artists, providing them with security and success in exchange for their individuality and independence. To ensure this state of affairs, they will have replaced the art schools with their own educational institutes. Ultimately, the creative industries will define the public perception of art and creativity – not by just creating what the public wants, but manipulating the taste of the public in the direction

Text Festival postcard set

The Text Festival postcard set arrived today; I commissioned various artists and poets to provide a design(s) and the pack looks great. Thanks to Philip Davenport for the leg-work pulling it together. Email me if you want one. The artists are: Caroline Bergvall Carolyn Thompson Jennifer Cobbing Me Alan Halsey Philip Davenport Hester Reeve Jackie Wylie Shaun Pickard

The Red Pill or The Blue Pill

In 1916 Eric Satie performed his work 'musique d'ameublement', literally furniture music; music heard but not listened to. It was the first ever muzak; Satie foreseeing the time when our lives would be filled with unheeded music. While ignoring this contemporary sound track most of the time, we are conscious that it is there, neutered, affecting our moods, altering our behaviour – driving us to consume. This musical accompaniment is a new phenomenon – less than one hundred years old; in a same period of time, the textual has become furniture text, text seen but not read – logos, signs, advertisements, labels – affecting our moods, altering our behaviour, constructing our experience of reality. Morpheus: I imagine that right now you're feeling a bit like Alice. Tumbling down the rabbit hole? Neo: You could say that. Morpheus: I can see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he's expecting to wake up. Ironically, this is not

Death planning and resistance

What better way to start the New Year than planning your death? For about 30 years I have bought (literally) into a personal future plan believing the wisdom that saving for the future was a vital part of your life, your future security. Unbelievably now, at 18 I started an endowment Life Insurance Policy! And believing each time they trotted out the next scare about the future, I bought what was required of me. Anyway, back to my subject: much as they would like the respond-to-fear financial planning advice to sustain pension expenditure, no-one believes any more that any sort of pension will save you. Even the apparently secure final salary pensions of government workers are under the attack of the ‘hard choices’ of invading the next country on the list as against looking after the old. The next illusion offered was: invest in property. Pensions could be replaced by capital investment and anyone who could joined the rush to own. The financial industry of course only re