Blue Touch Paper event on may 16th

Blue Touch Paper Preview Event
Wednesday 16 May, 7.30pm, Village Underground, London

The London Sinfonietta and Jerwood Charitable Foundation are delighted to present an event showcasing three works currently in development on the Blue Touch Paper programme.

Steve Potter and Kélina Gotman's music-theatre piece stages the urgency and ambivalence of dreaming other possible worlds. Philip Venables and Steven J Fowler explore boxing, a form of violence sanctioned by society, through the use of music and poetry. Meanwhile, Elspeth Brooke, Seonaid Goody and Anna G Jones use the arts of puppetry, live music and electronics to re-imagine the Greek myth of Persephone and Demeter.

This exclusive preview event is not open to the public, however a limited number of tickets will be available to the London Sinfonietta Pioneers. Join today for your opportunity to attend. See making new music happen below for more details.

Maintenant #87 - Eugene Ostashevsky


An irrepressible poet and thinker, the work of Eugene Ostashevsky has been a dynamic presence in the New York poetry scene for some years. Born in Leningrad and emigrating while still a child, like so many who have left their homeland, alongside the ebullience and humour of his own poetry, Ostashevsky has been a tireless translator and advocate of Russian poetry, most specifically the OBERIU group, whose radical experimentation was led by the near mythological Daniil Kharms. Teaching at New York University, the energy and vibrancy, and intellectually buoyancy, of Ostashevsky places him as an invaluable link to both the Russian past, and future, in poetics. He reads in London for the first time on March 8th 2012 at Pushkin house, and celebrating that event we are pleased to welcome him as the 87th respondent of the Maintenant series.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-87-eugene-ostashevsky/

Accompanying the interview is an excerpt from the The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, a work-in-progress about the relationship between a pirate and a parrot.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-pirate-who-does-not-know-the-value-of-pi/

As mentioned Eugene is reading for in London this upcoming Thursday, at Pushkin house. He will be speaking specifically about the OBERIU group and it should be a unique event, not to be missed. (Thanks to Alistair Noon)

http://www.pushkinhouse.org/en/events/the-oberiu

Chatting with Sam Riviere

Listen back to Austerities

Carmel Doohan, writing in Exeunt, gave our packed event Austerities a magnificent five stars:

“Sam Riviere is trying to find a way of being authentic about this inauthenticity. At Toynbee Studios, he recites a poem that reads like a shipping forecast of literary criticism. Comprised of a tutor’s one line comment on each poem – good, okay, we’ve heard this idea before, nice rhythm - it reveals the work lurking behind the myth of inspiration. Poetry is shown as calculated word-smithery; like everything else, poems are made to create a certain response.”

★★★★★ Exeunt Magazine

Listen back to Sam Riviere reading from 81 Austerities and in discussion with SJ Fowler.

Maintenant Camarade II: The Videos

I’m very pleased to say Saturday’s Camarade: Edition II event was another remarkable evening of poetry and a fine continuation of the series. A three figure audience witnessed some wonderful performances and equally significant poetry, and it was an evening which showed the depth of talent, inventiveness and wit in the contemporary British scene.

McCabe & Jenks

Bonney & Sutherland

Terry & Hilson

the Righteous Harmony Society Movement


After about a year, the Voiceworks song from last year, created in collaboration with the singers Lucy Roberts and Hadleigh Adams and the composer Wenjing Wang has been placed online.


The poem is about Chinese revolutionary spiritual movements, specifically the boxer rebellion, and stupid stereotypes of China from the West. Here's the blog with the text of my poem http://blogs.voiceworks.org.uk/1011/groupthree/

Enjoy enjoy www.voiceworks.org

North Chicago Review

Update: the North Chicago Review is nearly here!

16012012

Finally.
After a variety of setbacks that range from shitty printing presses (I said it, we’re on our third one – though this one’s great, really) to broken bones and the occasional flash flood, we are in the final stages of the process. We expect final-edit copies in the very near future, at which point we can do a quick sweep for glaring errors, and then get these suckers printed! Among the nearly overwhelming number of submissions (a fantastic problem to have), we have selected an eclectic group of artists – proud to have them involved.

Artist’s Spotlight: SJ Fowler, who will be introducing a band of relevant British Poets – giving us a glimpse into England’s modern poetry scene. www.sjfowlerpoetry.com

It’s going to be great. Stay tuned. http://northchicagoreview.com/2012/01/16/update-the-north-chicago-review-is-nearly-here/

Maintenant #85 - Gonca Özmen


Contemporary Turkish poetry looks confidently back upon the iconoclastic individuals who have constituted its genuinely remarkable tradition, and the current cohort of poets emerging from the 21st century possess the unique sensibility in language that marks them from their predecessors and stamps their entire generation with the influence of their work. As the light of poets like Ilhan Berk and Nazim Hikmet begins to fade from view, it is poets like Gonca Özmen who have come into their own. After just two collections and a variety of prizes, Gonca has become one of the most direct, concise and eloquent voices in Turkish poetry and one who has begun to grow a reputation far beyond the borders of her home nation, thanks to last year’s publication of the Sea Within, a collection of translated poems from Shearsman press. In our 85th edition, we are pleased to welcome, our second Turkish respondent, Gonca Özmen.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-85-gonca-ozmen/
Accompanying the interview are five of Gonca’s poems, translated by George Messo, Ruth Christie, Mel Kenne, Saliha Paker respectively.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/five-poems-gonca-ozmen/

a spy vanderung inem wilderness - Mercy UK

SJ Fowler and Ben Morris at Liverpool Music Week
  • SJ Fowler and Ben Morris at Liverpool Music Week
  • SJ Fowler and Ben Morris at Liverpool Music Week

SJ Fowler and Ben Morris at Liverpool Music Week

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17/01/12 Live
by Nathan Jones

An experimental, highly affecting experimental poetry and music performance for unsuspecting audience at Liverpool Music Week, commissioned by Mercy.

We asked SJ Fowler to produce a new performance, to accompany Jon Davis's new setting of Dustin Wong's seminal Infinite Love album, for guitar orchestra. In this collaborative show with Samizdat, we decided to produce two complementary works which explored 'trance', 'hypnosis' and the loop in relation to performance.

Steven asked his friend Ben Morris to collaborate with him on this project.

With language-based work, there is always a difficult hurdle to climb when we consider what is happening with something which tries to be 'abstract' and let the mind wander, while we use a concrete 'signifying' language. Steven changed the nature of this relationship by using an invented 'cod-yiddish' to perform his work. It's a really powerful peice, set of by Ben's finely balanced drone music.

SJ Fowler and Ben Morris - A Spy Vanderung Inem Vildness from Mercy on Vimeo.

Some information and discussion around this work here.

Monika Rinck 'to refrain from embracing'

http://www.burningdeck.com/catalog/rinck.htm

With linguistic sophistication and a great deal of self-irony and humor, Rinck sets in tension the most disparate ideas “along with their margins.” Her tonal register shifts from harsh to vulnerable, from formal to casual and playful, from mockery to dreaminess. Her subject matter combines reflection on language and philosophy with everyday problems, animals, pop culture. And she is equally at home with Kant and Bob Dylan, Hölderlin and bar talk. The book is indeed a “tour de trance.”

Monika Rinck lives in Berlin. After studies in comparative literature and religion, she attracted attention with her Begriffsstudio, a website (www.begriffsstudio.de) and book (2001) of striking concepts and weird neologisms. Her first book of poems,Verzückte Distanzen, appeared in 2004, followed by the present volume, zum fernbleiben der umarmung (2007), HELLE VERWIRRUNG / Rincks Ding- und Tierleben(2009), and a book of essays, Ah, das Love-Ding (2006). Her many awards include the Ernst Meister Prize (2008), Arno Reinfrank Prize (2009) and Georg K.Glaser Prize (2010).

“As adaptable, multifaceted, and aggressively engaged as any voice in contemporary German poetry, Monika Rinck is a poet of intellect, experimentation and humour. Her work over the last decade has been marked by a singular turn of expression, the profound imbedded in a poetic discourse that disarms the reader… It is a careful and precise methodology.... Her work implies poetry has something akin to a responsibility, that it acts as a trace, a marker that can enlighten.” —S. J. Fowler, 3:AM Magazine/Maintenant #4

Maintenant on Poetry International

I am pleased to say Poetry International, a world class, internationally focused literary magazine and organisation based on the campus of San Diego State University has taken on a program to reprint the Maintenant series, beginning from issue #1, on their site. This will give the series a wider readership in both the American and academic communities and provide a sort of second life to the publications. The first posts can be seen below and can be followed from the PI website here http://poetryinternational.sdsu.edu/ Thanks to Ilya Kaminsky, Jenny Shippey & Victoria Valencia.