Text Festival, books and stuff

As already featured in the anniversary post on 19 March, the field of action of first festival was contextualised with the ‘Text’ (ISBN 0 9538915 3 4). In addition to the ‘credo’, the festival published a postcard set, with designs by Caroline Bergvall, Geof Huth, Phil Davenport, and Carolyn Thompson and me. In parallel, there were collaborations with If P then Q, Knives Forks and Spoons, and Apple Pie Publications, a poster set and various chapbooks/books engaging with the Text Festival over its four-festival run. In this sense, I think the Festival can claim to have been fundament to developing and sustaining an experimental publishing sector in the north of England. For the 2009 Festival, we published ‘Text 2’ (ISBN 978 0 9538915 9 7) which was an anthology of works by artists involved in the Text Festival. In my focus on subsequent projects and moving country over the years, I seem not to have retained a copy, so again the contents is down to my poor memory. Maybe my forgetfulness is a broader metaphor for the festival itself, or any seminal moment that was influential in its time, but which is covered over by time, until some future generation rediscovers it. As Ron Silliman warned at the time, the biggest danger to the Text Festival was that its sheer scale and scope would burn me out – and it did, in the end.

The next publication, with which I am particularly proud, was ‘Maurizio Nannucci: Language and Horizons’ (ISBN 978-8888967523) with essays by me and Sergio Risaliti. This was a comprehensive survey of the work of Italian text artist Maurizio Nannucci, launched to accompany his Text Festival exhibition of the same name and the blue neon text in the Gallery rotunda which became one of the most used images of the Gallery’s ongoing identity. Also for the 2009 Festival there was the publication of ‘The Bury Poems’ curated by me, edited by Phil Davenport, design by Darren Marsh. The idea for this came about by accident. Robert Grenier was ‘headlining’ for the 2005 Festival and an interview had been set up with him, I think with Hester Reeve (HRH.the) – but again that might be misremembered. He was supposed to meet her in the Met Arts Centre café in Bury. However, she got delayed and since he didn’t have a mobile phone, she couldn’t get a message to him to postpone the meeting. So, he sat and waited, during which time he wrote six new poems, based on his experience of the countryside around his hotel in Ramsbottom. As at the time, his voluminous drawn poem output was based primarily on Bolinas, California, so this poetic-geography made the six poems unique. Of course, I acquired them for the Bury collection. But it placed the germ of an idea for what became ‘The Bury Poems’. In addition to Bob’s Six Poems, I commissioned Phil Davenport, Carol Watts, Tony Lopez, Holly Pester, and Geof Huth to write Bury-specific works and included images from Ron Silliman’s neon installation. Davenport did the edit, and I got some poems included too.

Although we didn’t commission/publish them, Ron Silliman found his time in Bury sufficiently inspiring that he wrote “Northern Soul” – dedicated to the festival mascot, Barney – published by Shearsman Books (ISBN 978-1-84861-319-5) and “Wharf Hypothesis” in 2011. The final book related to the Text Festival was “The Text Festivals: Language Art and Material Poetry” published by University of Plymouth Press, edited by Tony Lopez featuring essays by me, Derek Beaulieu, Christian Bök, Carol Watts, Phil Davenport, James Davies, Bob Grenier, Alan Halsey, Holly Pester, Hester Reeve (HRH.the), Liz Collini and Carolyn Thompson.

The Bury Poems

In 2008, when Robert Grenier was in Bury for his reading at the "Irony of Flatness" exhibition, an interview had been set up with him conducively located in a local cafe-bar. Unfortunately the interviewer was taken ill, which we didnt hear about for a few hours and with Bob not carrying a mobile phone it took a while to let him know. In those hours of waiting, he wrote 6 poems responding to the local rural landscape, north of Bury, where he had requested to be billeted because he can't sleep if there is any urban noise. They were called the "Ramsbottom Poems" from the village where he was staying.  This got me to thinking about the poetic responses that could be accumulated from artists' involvement in working Bury - and thus was born the idea of the Bury Poems.

Initially, I commissioned Phil Davenport, Carol Watts and Tony Lopez to create new Bury Poems - which all 3 performed at the 2009 Text Festival. Also during that festival, while Ron Silliman was here, he spent time on his wanderings between events working on a new poem called "Northern Soul" to be part of his Universe project. Initally I suggested that we publish it in time to launch at this festival, but Ron felt it may not be appropriate or ready within his plans. But I remembered a comment that Ron had made to me backstage at his festival reading along the lines that he could see in the performances of the artists on stage before him direct resonances to his own work. This made me consider: what has no-one asked Ron to do? A piece of public art. So we commissioned him to make a public text, a neon work which will be shown in the Art Gallery and then located permanently as an artwork in the Bury Tram Station. The making of this work in itself then became an additional sequence in the Bury Poems. With the final addition of works written by Geof Huth also in response to the Text and new works written by Holly Pester, one of the performers at this years event, the collection was almost done. Done in my mind anyway. Having editorialised it to this stage, I invited Phil Davenport to co-edit and continue the project to publication. All that was missing was my commissioner's contextualising essay, but Phil felt that my own poetry was also a response to the context that I had created and so pressed me to select new works from "The Tragedy of Althusserianism" which I have been writing for ifpthenq but had to delay because of the festival workload.

The book arrived from the printers on Thursday, a very handsome production just in time for the opening on Saturday. My thanks to all the poets involved and to Phil for bringing it to fruition.