A personal post

For various reasons, it was my intention not to waste readers' time with personal details. Until recently, when it was pointed out to me that the odd thing that slipped in was becoming the raw material for someone writing a poem using my personal words. Marguerite Heywood has now sent me the poem, here it is:

The personal words of Tony Trehy

as a city boy I steered clear
of all this outdoor Romanticism
although personally I don’t subscribe to this equation
that makes a child death more meaningful
I
don’t often mention Galleries in Manchester though
I visit them frequently
as a city-dweller, I’m not sure that I would class fishing rods
as “everyday objects”, but maybe books are

ok why should I suffer alone
o fuck

paradise for me would be a cross
between Berlin, Venice, Manchester
people, noise, excitement, food, culture
it is going to sound like I am in grumpy mood
no wonder the majority of us have moved to cities

fired or maybe sometimes bored by the academic analysis and the power of the ‘actual’ work, I deserted for a time to write a poem in response to it

but ever since I was a teenage artist
it’s been a while since I visited the Park
I had a writing deadline of my own to hit
so I was out and about
writing and thinking in the Spring sunshine
someone who
I have never met and
I expect has never heard of me

I will never live in this town
what could be more invigorating
than sitting in the studio
of one of German’s leading sculptors
writing while he works
I first complained
to the Bury Librarian
and sent an alternative list

I think the definition of fame (in case there are any pedants out there) is
you are famous when someone knows you and you don’t know them
sadly I am too slow a reader to make a dent in this fabulous pile
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 at the end
I will be poor and ill
I am suddenly much richer to live my life now while
I can enjoy it a small resistance
be every little helps

Dinner with the Rothenbergs

A first meeting and a delightful evening with Jerry and Diane Rothenberg http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/rothenberg/, (plus Phil Davenport) visiting the UK to present a paper at the forthcoming Kurt Schwitters conference in the Lake District. Conversation about poetry - obviously - and art and travel - "it was nice to have people round who came to enjoy themselves" as Sue said. For anyone who has been to one of Sue's extraordinary dinner parties, it will be no surprise that the evening revolved around her fabulous cooking:

Starter: Spiced roasted butternut squash soup
Wine: Prosecco from Veneto

Fish Course: Grilled fillet of Salmon marinated with lemon grass on a bed of courgette ribbons stir-fried with ginger and chilli with a lemon tarragon and parsley dressing
Wine: Alsace Riesling

Main Course: Roasted boned leg of lamb stuffed with garlic, rosemary, lemon and parsley with a flagelot bean gratin and roasted vine tomatoes
Wine: 1998 Stag's Leap Fay vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley

Dessert: Tartes aux Pommes with home-made Madagascan vanilla and toffee ice-cream
Wine: Morande late harvest Sauvignon blanc, Casablanca Valley, Chile

Coffee and home-made chocolate truffles

The Safn Installation

Back from a great visit to Reykjavik - the launch of the eponymous bookwork and the spatial edit. Met many interesting artists and writers - of whom more in later bulletins. The Safn collection looked brilliant - in this latter photo you can make out Dan Flavin and Roni Horn.

Reykjavik

The exhibition of my eponymous text opens on 1 September at the Safn Museum in the Icelandic Capital. The accompanying limited edition, hand-bound, publication is a new text-poem available from me or from Safn for £30.

More from MPA Gallery

Above: Thickness by me; Monster by Hester Reeve; Atom by Mark Jalland; Shaun Pickard has a brilliant piece in also but I am missing a photo at the moment.

l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e+s=c=i=e=n=c=e

18th August - 13 October

Mid Pennine Gallery

Yorke St

Burnley

UK

www.midpenninearts.org.uk

I have curated a new text show featuring Phil Davenport, Mark Jalland, Shaun Pickard, Hester Reeve, Carolyn Thompson and a new piece - "Thickness" by me. Preview is 6pm on Friday. I'll be doing a talk on Thursday 13 September at 6.30pm. More about it after it opens plus photos when they are available.

More from Iceland

Iceland Preview

Iceland

Friday 27 July 7pm

I've curated this show at Bury Art Gallery, a exhibition of outstanding international art selected from the largest and most significant collection of contemporary art in Iceland. Pétur Arason and Ragna Róbertsdóttir have been collecting contemporary art for 30 years and have amassed a superb collection of leading artists from Minimalism, Fluxus, and Conceptualism, together with many important Icelandic artists, which they show at Safn in Reykjavik. This is the first time many of these works have been shown in the UK.

The artists included in ICELAND are Lawrence Weiner, On Kawara, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Ragna Róbertsdóttir, Richard Long, Carl Andre, Birgir Snæbjörn Birgisson, Þór Vigfússon, Hörður Ágústsson, Karin Sander, Birgir Andrésson, Roni Horn, Ólafur Eliasson, Hreinn Friõfinnsson, Stanley Brouwn, me, Helmut Lemke and Tacita Dean.

The show runs 28 July – 3 November 2007
For more about the Safn collection, go to www.safn.is

Secession

secession quickly satiated open-source as
surface disregulation i are more discrete

secession laughter over central dogma
breathers experience concrete or abstract

secession in application not in principle
desquamate is nothing iff memento mori

secession zugzwang and vertigo
torsion

secession spring, and all thickness waits
the implicate order of other stations i are

Constellation of Luminous Detail

Phil Davenport's new poems can be heard at http://www.artradio.fm/

Luminous Detail Launched

Friday night at Islington Mill: Helmut Lemke and Ben Gwilliam, two of the sound artists performing at the launch of Phil Davenport's new poetry cd "Constellation of Luminous Detail".

Adieux to Silence

To quote On Kawara: I am still alive. Most irritatingly my net connection has been broken, but more positively I have been busy completing Reykjavik, the text-poem and book for my installation at Safn in Iceland in September and briefly writing this piece called Shut UUUUUp for a show at the Chapman Gallery in Salford curated by Ben Gwilliam and Helmut Lemke. It has been noted that I rarely mention personal things here and in the same vein some of the reviews of 50 Heads have magnified my distain for mainstream poetry (and its reliance on the personal voice of the poet). This is actually not quite accurate since many of the Heads are quite personal. I also have a reputation for not explaining the poems – this is also not true. So… As Sound Artists, Ben and Helmut’s show set out to address the question of Silence…

I have always been touched by the opening page of Simone deBeauvoir’s Adieux to Sartre in which she recounts that during some philosophical or political debate whichever one of them won the argument would cap it off with “That’s you in your little box”. She notes that Adieux to Sartre is the only one of her books that he would not be able to comment on because he was dead and literally in his box. Sue and I have an inverted version of this argument closer. The one who is losing usually resorts to the phrase “Shut UUUP” (the extended ‘up’ is conclusive). In thinking about Silence for the show, the final silence of its last utterance, similar to Adieux’s box, would give the phrase a particular poignancy – with the one in their box literally shut up.

Ben and Helmut noted that artists and writers in the show fell into either those embracing silence and those rejecting it. My text is the latter. As everyone knows I celebrate the City and that is where the text begins. Well not quite. In 50 Heads each poem begins with zero and ends with one; this is because in mathematics the probability of something happening is said to be a number between nought and one. So if the poem isn’t read – ie a reader doesn’t read passed the zero – the poem hasn’t happened; and if the reader gets to the one at the end then it has happened. With Shut UUUUP the poem begins with one and ends with zero because it progresses from noise (ie life) to silence (ie death).
One other thing, the quotation is from Pierre Boulez about Karlheinz Stockhausen (both of whom I like). It was a little joke for the German co-curator. This is followed by writing as thinking about consciousness, the difference between noise and sound, and finality.

Shut UUUUp



1. Silence is a bad thing a bad way Shut up
SAY falling descant every city still joyous
humming traffic and pneumatic humming and
uplifting sirens and retail palaver praise be
rest tested rejected

reductio ad
absurdum

“the endless chord, how typically German”
walking – at least partially in high
prevalence in functional importance
in periodic crystal-like lattice
structures with long range order in
ability to be transiently isolated from
interaction/observation functionally
coupled to events in emptiness so the foot
hitting the ground projects into amplified future
knowing cancelling out accompanied frequencies
silence is not the answer to itself
neither is an even distribution of all frequencies
without definite pitch
besieged one always dies
too soon or too yet is complete
at that moment with a line
drawn and when
examining the function
values between
the stationary points equals:
0

Northern Mirror

Radcliffe was worth a visit just to see the twelve stones by Ulrich Ruckriem, now with the addition of Alan Johnston's northern mirror sculpture to the same site, the Outwood Country Park is a special experience. Without exaggeration, Alan's sculpture is brilliant. I don't need to say much about it here, as the accompanying website is comprehensive, including Alan's voluminous research, image files and critical essays.

http://www.northernmirror.com/

Post-Heads

I'm happy to see that Ron Silliman appreciated 50 Heads:

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Tony%20Trehy

More on which I will write next week when I return from the European Museums Forum in Spain: http://www.europeanmuseumforum.org/

50 Heads read

Around 50 people turned up for the launch party for 50 Heads. As Orwell observed - Poetry readings can be grizzily affairs - so instead of me reading, I invited other artists to interpret a poem each. Alan Johnston, Phil Davenport, Hester Reeve, Helmut Lemke and Mark Jalland did the honours/did me the honour. Phil opened with “Reciprocity”. Alan read “Yddrasill”. Then sound artist Helmut Lemke did a brilliant interpretation of “Entscheidungsproblem” - this involved a tape of him reading it underpinning reading a strip of the poem spooling along a fishing rod, periodically punctuated with a yarrow stick inserted into holes in the rod. This was followed with “Faces” from Mark Jalland who, with intense clarity, took up the challenge with about 15 minutes notice. Hester ended the readings with “Place”. Then we ate Chinese and drink happily.

Poetry Collection Launch

50 Heads
my new poetry collection published by Apple Pie Editions
written during 2006 in Venice, Cologne, Reykjavik, Tokyo, Edinburgh and Manchester.

Friday 27 April from 7pm
food and drink and guest readings
Venue: LotusBar & Dim Sum
35a King St
Manchester
M2 6AA

It's ticket only. email me for details.

Cologne

I'm off to http://www.koelnmesse.de/wEnglisch/artcologne/index.htm this week. All being well I will spend some time going round with American Poet Marjorie Welish http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/welish/

I'll be staying with Ulrich Ruckriem and getting him up to speed on the proposals for a new gallery in Radcliffe. http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=426&storycode=3084049&c=2&encCode=00000000012c4954

Plymouth and the Trojan Frog

Tony Lopez is to be congratulated on a very successful (if over-academic) conference at Plymouth University – “Poetry & Public Language”. One of the high points for me was Will Rowe’s opening paper - which I am pleased to say he has said I can reproduce here soon. Other highlights for me where the papers presented by Piers Hugill and Allen Fisher. As with all this sort of event some of the most interesting dialogue takes place in the coffee breaks and over dinner.

‘Ecocriticism’

Oddly though, the paper that most fired me to response was the worst. Richard Kerridge’s preamble to it can be read on Carrie Etter’s blog at http://carrieetter.blogspot.com/2007/04/underlying-propositions.html. She raves about it but maybe that is because she works with him. Anyway, the most damnable phrase of the paper comes at the end: “poetry could not have any subject matter more important than this [climate change]”. I don’t think I have actually come across this thing called ecocriticism – though maybe I have since nowadays sticking ‘eco’ on the front of anything makes it the thing of the moment. The paper was illustrated with a poem by Kathleen Jamie (Frogs), a range of excerpts form J R Prynne and from a forthcoming work by Tony Lopez. It is instructive that the only ‘transparent’, mainstream poem mentioned in the whole conference came here. It was flagged up as an early Green poem. Prynne was analysed primarily as an ‘eco-difficulty – “insistently rejecting apocalyptic discourses” and I couldn’t tell how the Lopez fit into the original thesis. I have had a number of conversations in the past about how the mainstream conservativism of British poetry renews itself – since the 1970’s it has been through the appropriation of dialects and regionalism and communities of identity (Black poetry, Gay & Lesbian poetry, etc), and here we have its next potentiality: environmental poetry. If they aren't doing it already, I expect eco-poems from Armitage, Duffy and Motion are coming to Waterstone's soon. Subject matter – the very idea is fundamental to pre-modernism – which no-one can disagree with, a poetry fit for the curriculum, a poetry a government department could probably even draft access performance targets for. At one point, Kerridge declared that all the natural sanctuaries have been violated. Though this is one of those apocalyptic declarations that are supposed to sadden us and rally us to save the planet (without any ideology that could actually achieve change): I find sanctuary in the City so the notion that natural ‘sanctuary’ has been violated, its viscous threat punctured, is a source of some relief.

Mobile again

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.21423

Last week I was at the National Maritime Museum for the Lawrence Weiner Opening - please to catch up with Lawrence and finally meet Alan Charlton, an artist whose work I have appreciated for some years and looked forward to meeting. At the weekend, I'm down to Plymouth for the Poetry and Public Language conference. http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/pages/view.asp?page=17709
Things have been a bit hectic up to now, but I hope to do a more detailed report on the conference when I get back.