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Showing posts from March, 2010

The Other Room

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The Other Room celebrates its second birthday! Readers: Ian Davidson, Zoë Skoulding, Matthew Welton Wednesday 7th April, 7.00 pm The Old Abbey Inn, 61 Pencroft Way, Manchester, M15 6AY. Admission is free. Ian Davidson's poetry is gathered in two collections from Shearsman, as well as chapbooks from Spectacular Diseases, West House Books and Oystercatcher. His critical volume Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry was published by Palgrave in 2007. Zoë Skoulding is a poet, writer, musician, performer, and also a lecturer in creative writing. Since 1994 she has edited the poetry magazine Skald, more recently alongside co-editor Ian Davidson with whom she also writes collaboratively. Zoë is editor of Poetry Wales and currently holds an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship (2007-2012) in Bangor's School of English, where she is researching poetry, gender and city space. Matthew Welton received the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for The Book of Matthew (Carcanet

Back from Exeter

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Back from the reading in Exeter. It was interesting to see how the theming of the poems worked as a form, though I think I probably read a little too fast this time. Thankfully, the only recording was the one I did for my own reference, so any experiments remain focused for my purposes rather than being out in the wide world. My thanks to Tony Frazer for having me down for the Uncut Poets series. It was a pleasure to see Tony Lopez again. He gave me useful feedback on the reading and we talked about our various projects - including developing an idea which we hope will be an element of the Text Festival. This morning we walked on the Exmouth beach, before my train back north. I was very pleased that I decided to drop into International 3 when I returned to Manchester. It was the last day of Brass Art 's exhibition, The Non-existence of the Unnamed . http://www.international3.com/exhibition.php?E=57 The show features exquisitely simple monocrome watercolours hung on dark gray wal

Haiti. Artists. Art. Auction.

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‘pure indexes’ - my contribution to the arts auction in aid of UNICEF's Haiti Earthquake Children's Appeal. With artworks donated from over 40 contemporary artists from Manchester, Salford and beyond. The event is Tuesday 30th March at CUBE, viewing and silent bidding are from 12-5pm, with the evening event and live auction from 6-9pm. 100% of the proceeds raised will go to UNICEF’s work with children in Haiti. For more details: www.haaa.salford.ac.uk pure indexes do not contribute divergent boundaries tmesis of last edge imperfect transforming boundaries divergent convergent unbound objects denizens of scale-variants

Reading in Exeter

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On Thursday I will be reading at the Pheonix Arts Centre in Exeter. The first part of the reading will be a ‘conversation’ with Robert Grenier, with a working title I HATE SPEECH. On and off through a number of my publications I have been having a poetic dialogue with Bob so plan to structure the reading sequence to work through this. Obviously the first poem will be ‘First’ from 50 Heads , followed by ‘ Alice & Bob’, ‘Flatness’ and ‘ Arriving at the Same Place At the Same Time’ from ‘ Space The Soldier Who Died For Perspective ’; closing this section with a return to 50 Heads – Dialect, Translation, and Poem. In the second half, I am interest in the contemporary implications of ICELAND. In 2006 I exhibited and published ‘ Reykjavik’ in the then thriving capital. Four years on, I have not been back to Reykjavik and feeling pessimistic effects of the economic situation on Icelanders themselves, (this week’s volcanic eruption seems symbolic too) caused me to reconsider the origin

David Osbaldeston

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Introduced by Barney on the stairs, I discover that my neighbour is artist David Osbaldeston . Turns out that we have a number of mutual friends but have somehow never met . Now, by chance, we live next door to each other and are talking about what he will do in the Text Festival. http://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/osbaldeston/exhibition-1.php

Tuesday evening in Salford

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A full evening out in Salford on Tuesday: at The Crescent, 20 The Crescent, Salford, Manchester, M5 4PF. 7pm. BOOK LAUNCH new books from: NEIL CAMPBELL, ALEX DAVIES, DERMOT GLENNON, JOHN G. HALL, and STEVEN WALING *SCS 10 :: Ryu Hankil, T.H.F. Drenching, Ben Gwilliam .* Tuesday 16th March 8.00pm Islington Mill, James Street, Salford, M3 5HW Entry: £5 on the door A closer glance at the image on the flyer will reveal it to be the dirty & dark Church St Record Shack, a place ( along with the secondhand book stall on that stretch ) frequented and passed by on a daily basis for several decades and a photo taken with a strange subconscious foresight only weeks before the whole thing was torn down to make way for something nice, tidy and more in keeping with Manchester's new tunnel vision. A fitting image for what will be the last event of this nature by SCS, similarly the loose change that is tossed from time to time into our polystyrene cup has fallen victim to a familiar but no le

William Blake and the Naked Teaparty

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The new issue of the Ekleksographia online magazine gone live. Guest editor Philip Davenport has put together ‘ William Blake and the Naked Teaparty’ . http://ekleksographia.ahadadabooks.com/davenport/ The issue of Ekleksographia he's edited is a broader human issue – that of lost touch. This version of the magazine is a digital flag for handwriting and human touch. It features textworks that emphasise the touch - hand and haptic – particularly pieces that consider emotional engagements, human space - the trace and corporate/military erasure of the handmade, the not-digital. These qualities link into the alternative tradition of poetics - and to 'outsider' artists who are owed a debt by the experimenters (an IOU all the way back to William Blake, archbishopric of the outsider, he and his wife sitting on the lawn in London afternoons, naked, drinking tea). Some great stuff from Contributors : Alan Halsey, Anna MacGowan, The Atlas Group, Ben Gwilliam, Carol Watts, Carolyn T

Art and Text

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Having read Simon Morley’s “ Writing on the Wall ” last year and just finishing “ Art and Text ” from Black Dog Publishing, I started to write these thoughts with the intention of comparing the two and considering questions that are cumulatively thrown up by both books about the current position and possibilities of text art. Obviously there have been other such surveys previously but as the foreword of ‘Art and Text’ observes: “this timely survey, … attempts to address the use of text in modern and contemporary fine art… it aims to present the appearance of text as representing a fundamental conceptual shift in art practices, wherein the production, motives and intent of works may be seen to be in part, or wholly founded upon a linguistic basis”. It is the premise too of the Text Festival and Language Moment that something fundamental is happening, so what do these books contribute to the discourse? Well, on reflection “Writing on the Wall” is so much better than “Art and Text”, I hav