A note on: Lexicon, performing at Marsden Woo - March 16th 2016

Such a beautiful experience, to curate a night of new poetry and performance responding to Alida Sayer's magnificent exhibition at Marsden Woo Gallery. We did it all on quite a tight timeframe, really through my friendship with Marsden Woo curator Siobhan Feeney and an immediate passion I felt for Alida's work. She is interrogating, in sculpture, what I am interested in digging into in poetry - language, its instability, its material qualities, its graphic glypic abstraction. So I asked Giovanna Coppola, Fabian Peake, Iris Colomb and Christian Patracchini to come and see the work and we all presented this on a really enthusiastic evening, on March 16th (2016), in the gallery. You can see all the performances www.theenemiesproject.com/lexicon

Held on March 16th 2016 at Marsden Woo Gallery (23 Charlotte Road, London) five poets and artists responded to the remarkable 'Lexicon' exhibition by Alida Sayer, presenting new poetry and performance for the night.

For my own performance, I have become increasingly interested in improvisation, in speech rhythms and crowd responses, and in breaking the 4th wall with readings and performances. In this case I spent quite a bit of time working out certain parameters, concepts, that I would adhere to, but deliberately, strictly, ignoring the 'content' I might produce. In this case, I pretended that I was performing only for to-be-edited youtube vignettes, like some televisual curator, highlighting Alida's exhibition. I hoped for it to be humorous but not flippant, and people seemed engaged anyway, so I was pleased I took the risk.

I would highly recommend visiting www.marsdenwoo.com and checking out www.alidasayer.com

Visual Verse: August issue: Sink

Great to be part of Visual Verse, a really innovative writing project in online journal form where authors are asked to respond, in the course of one hour, to an original artwork, an image, across a range of mediums, be it poetry or art etc. You have a size limit, between 50 and 500 words, and that one hour. 

My poem, Sink, is in Volume one of Chapter 10, and I join an amazing list of writers who have taken part in the Visual Verse experience. Check out the poem (it's unusually concise, for me) 

http://visualverse.org/submissions/sink/