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 Last International Poetry Dog Day

This would have been the 15th birthday of Barney, the famous Poetry Dog - he missed it by one month. We have been touched by the outpouring of condolence for him. So I thought a last acknowledgement of his status in the Poetry World was a suitable memorial. 

Ron Silliman, Tony Lopez, Tony Trehy, Christian Bök (Text Festival)

The Text Festivals - the Book

On occasion, I think, people interested in the ideas we have been working with in Bury have been stymied by my preference for the next project rather than the past project. But the Text Festival has been breaking new ground since 2005 so maybe inevitably it has developed a history that needs to be acknowledged. The Text Archive developed by Holly Pester through the AHRC funded partnership with Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre responded to  that imperative. And now hot off the Plymouth University Press, "The Text Festivals: Language Art and Material Poetry". You can acquire this must-have publication from here or via Bury Art Museum shop (slightly cheaper). Tony Lopez has done a great job - not least getting me to do my bit for it. As he wrote in his blog the field of enquiry that the festival has opened up urgently needed focused secondary work which can inform and develop the ongoing dialogue. Phil Davenport's seminal anthology The Dark Would clearly operates in this capacity.

The new book includes new essays by me, Derek Beaulieu, Christian Bök, James Davies, Philip Davenport, Robert Grenier, Alan Halsey, Tony Lopez, Holly Pester, Hester Reeve (HRH.the), Carolyn Thompson, Carol Watts and Liz Collini - whose work is also on the cover. (Indulge me, I can't resist quoting the Plymouth site): 

"It is a remarkable phenomenon that the foremost among recent sites of this interrogation of boundaries has been a series of festivals located in Bury, on the outskirts of Greater Manchester. World leading artists and poets have been brought together in a range of exhibitions and performances that demonstrate a new and productive collision of different cultural enterprises and expectations."

Anyway, now the Light Night is done and the Sculpture Centre announced, my next job is completing the curating of the future Festival opening in May 2014 (which got delayed by the other two); being part of this 'remarkable phenomenon' should be in your diary already.  

After

Installed this month on the Irwell Sculpture Trail, Tony Lopez's new text work After. This is one of three inscribed plaques installed in Radcliffe, Lancashire, along a footpath and a canal towpath near Radcliffe Metrolink Tram Station, part of the work After, also known as The Scattered Poem, a holocaust memorial piece that Tony has been planning for the last few years. The title After comes from Theodor Adorno: 'Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch' (To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric) from Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (1963). The original poem is 28 verses, a particularly abstract piece that was composed using a text generator program that randomised vocabulary combinations from an original draft that he wrote on a visit to Providence, Rhode Island, in the late 90s. The program was run many times to produce a vast text and the results were then edited down to a tiny fraction of the output. This text was then finished work by means of editing and refining. 

Tony aim's to get verses and clusters of verses installed as far as possible from each other, so that the viewer sees only a fragment of the work. If you wanted to see more you'd have to travel, which would always put the work you'd already seen at a distance. The project is intended grow with new installations, extending the network and using local materials.
 

Rossendale stonemason Ken Howe quarried the stone, carved the lettering and installed the plaques in a retaining wall on a footpath and also on a bridge support on the Manchester, Bury and Bolton Canal towpath. The stones are located on the Sculpture Trail very near Brass Art's Falls the Shadow and Lawrence Weiner's Water Made It Wet.


Back from Exeter

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 walls in near darkness and is one of the most beautiful exhibitions I have seen in a long time. I'm sorry I didnt get to see it earlier in the run as I would like to return to it.