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Showing posts from January, 2010

Back to Budapest

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Just off to Budapest to write. Having just finished a short poem for the forthcoming second issue of the Other Room Anthology, I am hoping to make some progress with the new book Tesseract . I always like to develop major sections of a text in non-English speaking cities. In 'exile', the foreign language space intensifies the phenomenological reliance on your own creative resources and strangely the transparence of language. No doubt this experience is different for people who speak more than one language, but I find it very conducive. Hopefully I'll also see some shows and I have meetings with various people about the next Text Festival and the 5 Places project that I am setting up with Irene Barberis in Melbourne. One of the people I am looking forward to seeing is visual poet Márton Koppány (one of his works pictured).

The Other Room

Wednesday, February 3rd 2010, 7.00 The Other Room with Rob Holloway, Holly Pester and Steve Waling The Old Abbey Inn, Manchester, Rob Holloway writes in Vauxhall and teaches in Dagenham. His first book PERMIT was published by the US -based poetry collective Subpress in 2009, and a new chapbook MORTMAIN is forthcoming from Stem. From Nov 2002 to March 2004 he hosted the poetry radio show "Up for Air" on Resonance FM (http://resonancefm.com/). In 2004 he launched the poetry CD label Stem (www.stemrecordings.com). Holly Pester is an experimental sound poet and writer undergoing practice-led research at Birkbeck College in 'Speech and the Archive in Intermedia Poetry'. Her performances texts are experiments in the sound and shape of speech, blending pre-verbal noises with semantic surrealism in an affecting investigation into language transmission. Holly’s work is published on Onedit and in City Scapes, a new anthology of London poets (Penned in the Margins) and Zimzal

A Manifesto for Monsters in Museums

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I have previously expressed exasperation about the pronouncements of the bloody woman who runs the organisation “Kids in Museums” http://www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk/about/ She is at it again – this time an article in Arts Industry magazine www.artsindustry.co.uk – talking about the Kids in Museums Manifesto http://www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/kim_manifesto_a4_low_res.pdf Her main agenda obviously is to promote the manifesto, but in the article she does this by attacking the ‘arts sector’ over how bad it is at writing manifestos. Her article and her manifesto manifest to me someone who actually fundamentally dislikes the arts; there is always the subtext of her residual anger that she and her noisy brood were ‘thrown out’ of the Royal Academy. Her article basically argues: Galleries, museums and arts campaigns are bad at writing manifestos – they create documents that are either too long or, conversely, if short, too loose – “It’s no good having a manifesto with aim

Glow with the Flow

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Friday 22nd January FREE GLOW WITH THE FLOW RUTH TYSON JONES Bispham High School , Bispham Road, Blackpool, FY2 ONH FREE EVENT FROM 7.30PM Seven pods glowing in the dark each telling their own story of Blackpool through dance and light. Each, a unique contained magical world. Choreographed by Ruth Tyson Jones (with thanks to Kat Irving for additional choreography).Music by Joshua Kopecek. For more details please visit: www.blackpool.gov.uk/arts

on a day unknown

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It may not be immediately obvious how Jason E. Bowman ’s new show “Untitled (on a day unknown)” at the Whitworth Art Gallery resonates with Damien Hirst’s “Nothing Matters” at the White Cube for me. On first viewing of the simple installation of court artist drawings, pinhole camera photos and quotation panels from the 1936 trial of 29 gay men in Chester, I found it lacked something. At the artist’s conversation yesterday, the discussion centred on the temporal re/dis/location of oppressive attitudes and violence against gay, lesbian and transgender identity. Jason had worked with a group of older LGBT people to reconstruct the trial – the choice of which was to span 3 generations of gay experience from pre-war oppression through 50s-60s legalisers to his present. It was in this discussion that I put my finger on what was missing – everything. I realised that the exhibition is fundamentally a structured absence. The archival process is a presence that represents a series of absences: -

London - Nothing Matters

Just back from London: Very enjoyable lunches with Holly Pester (agreed her input into the next Text Festival) and Museum consultant Benedetta Tiana. Sadly Carol Watts had to cancel. With Lois and CJ at the Live Arts Development Agency, I agreed a Language Moment DIY project in September this year and a Live Art Platform event in the 2011 Text Festival. I only managed to see a couple of exhibitions – one of which was Nothing Matters – Damien Hirst’s painting show at the White Cube. http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/nothing-matters/hs-ii/ The only interesting thing about the Hirst show is the question whether it reads as Nothing (actually does) matter or nothing at all matters – and that is not that interesting. What Hirst does generally tends to pass me by and I have a feeling that he didn’t actually paint the works, that assistants did them, much as his teams of technicians build the Pharmacy cabinets, etc. Whoever painted them was being taken much too seriously. The ground floor

Ekphrastic Poem-Book of The Year

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As I did a review of the year a couple of blogs ago, it turns out that I have made into someone else’s review. Namely, Steven Fama (in California, I think) http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2009/12/poetry-published-in-2009.html It’s a long blog review but some great observations in there. Gratifyingly, Space the Soldier Who Died for Perspective received Steve’s accolade for “Ekphrastic Poem-Book of The Year”. As Steve comments on my expansive and often obscure vocabulary, it amused me that I had to look up ‘ekphrastic’. It means, as you will all know, “a rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate to another medium by defining and describing its essence and form, and in doing so, relate more directly to the audience, through its illuminative liveliness”. Readers of my work will of course recognise that commitment to illuminative liveliness(!) despite Steve’s observation that it is “almost utterly incomprehensible, in terms of positivist, or straight-line logical, meanin

jean-luc guionnet

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Friday 8th January 2010 7:30 pm St. Philips Church, Encombe Place, Salford, M3 6FJ Entry: £5 on the door A first for the North West, this well known French Improvisor and electro-acoustician graces our shores by performing his careful pipe preparations on the historic Church organ of St Philips. Expect a post-christmas audio treat of maximalist sounds and mictrotonal tendencies .