POLYply 18

David Herd’s poetry has appeared in various journals including Like Starlings, Mascara and Otoliths. His collections All Just (Carcanet) and Outwith (Bookthug) will be published later this year. His recent essays on poetics and politics have appeared in PN Review, Parallax and Almost Island. He teaches at the University of Kent, where he directs the Centre for Modern Poetry.

Michael Kindellan has written a few chapbooks of poems including Charles Baudelaire (Bad Press, 2005), Word is Born with Reitha Pattison (Arehouse, 2006), Not love (Barque, 2009), Crater 1 (Crater, 2010), and Financial Times (No Press, 2011). Currently he’s working on something called Being in Fleet to be published by Sancho Panza later in 2012. Michael completed his PhD at the University of Sussex in 2010; last year he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier III; at the moment he’s a Teaching Fellow at Sussex; and in the autumn he will take up a two-year Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship to study the drafts of Pound’s late Cantos.

Sandra Schäfer is an artist, filmmaker and curator of film programs who lives and works in Berlin. In her artistic work, Schäfer deals with themes of representation of gender, urbanity and (post-) colonialism. She is member of the Berlin based group artefakte which is part of Alexandertechnik, a network of social activists, artists and academics, and is also involved in cinenova, a feminist non-profit, charitable organization based in London and dedicated to preserving and distributing films and videos made by women film makers, artists and activist. She is co-curator of the film festival Kabul/Teheran 1979ff: Filmlandschaften, Städte unter Stress und Migration (Kabul/Tehran 1979ff: Film Landscapes, Cities under Stress and Migration) that took place 2003 at the Volksbühne Berlin, and is co-editor of a book with the same title, published in 2006 by b_books, Berlin. She also co-curated the 2007/08 film festival SPLICE IN and lecture program on gender and society in Afghanistan, and in 2009 her book stagings. Kabul, Film & Production of Representation was published in the series metroZones/media at b_books, Berlin. Films/videos/video installations/photographies (selection): on the set of 1978ff (2011), Urban settings and other kinds too (2002-09), stagings (2008), Passing the Rainbow (2007), Traversée de la Mangrove (2006), The Making of a Demonstration (2004), A country’s new dawn (2001), Die unsichtbare Dienstleistung (The invisible services, 2000), Kontaktfreudig, offen und gewandt im Umgang (The joy of communication, open with an elegant manner, 1999), England-Deutschland (1997), Shift (1996), Doch bin ich wirklich (Of course am I real, 1996).

John Sparrow is a poet from London, currently completing a phd on Performances of Technology and Writing. His current practice is concerned with the possibilities of performing with and against generative texts in a live context, from data mining and combinatory algorithms using large amounts of live data to the production of more finely structured templates.  In both cases, he is interested in the possibilities for meaning-making created by generative algorithms, and the challenges that performing such texts in a live setting can produce. John is especially interested in performing texts at the point where the arbitrary decisions of algorithmic processes create tensions with the artifice of formal and syntactic conventions, occupying spaces where the excesses of the coded application’s output are foregrounded on the one hand, and the presence of an apparently authorial voice, history or theme is implied on the other. The authoritative document is therefore a context for this artifice, contributing toward a false sense of stability as a platform for the performances of code. John is currently working on a series of sonnet machines that use Shakespeare’s sonnets as structural templates into which alternative vocabularies can be injected whilst maintaining the sonnet form. He is also working on engines that remix the language from live website data using bridge words in the code. Since this often triggers fusions between the markup and its rendered language, the results become performance challenges in which hypertext markup language and current affairs and headlines become creolised. John currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his wife and 2 cats.
http://itchaway.net

The Special Works School is a collective of artists, writers, designers and architects investigating the history of Kensington Gardens as a First World War camouflage training ground. Three representatives from the collective, David Henningham, Ping Henningham, and James Wilkes, will be performing work derived from the group’s research. www.camouflagepark.org

POLYply 17

Brian Catling is a sculptor, poet and performance artist, currently working in video and live work. He is professor of fine art at the The Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, University of Oxford.
http://www.briancatling.com

Ian Heames is a poet based in Cambridge.  Books include Bad Flowers (http://cucpress.tumblr.com), Out Of Villon (http://cucpress.tumblr.com) and Gloss To Carriers  (http://plantarchy.us/gloss.html).  His work also appears in short-run booklets and magazines including Axolotl, Cambridge Literary Review, Hi Zero, Holly White, Friends, etc.

Dominic Lash is a double bassist and composer active in improvised and experimental music. Resident in Oxford for a decade, he spent much of 2011 in New York and has recently relocated to Bristol.
http://www.dominiclash.co.uk

+ For documentation of Dominic Lash’s performance, please see:  http://compostandheight.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/dominic-lash-erogen.html

POLYply 16

Sean Bonney‘s recent books are The Commons, Happiness and Four Letters. Most of his work attempts to think through the fault-lines that run between political activism, revolutionary subjectivity and radical poetics. His work has been translated into several languages, and in late 2011 he taught a seminar series on Poetry and Revolution at the University of Cambridge. He was out on the streets during the August riots, and lives in utter poverty in East London.

Jennifer Cooke is a London-based poet whose work can be found online and in print, courtesy of the following publications, among others: Onedit, Great Works, Quid, Punch, Intercapillary Space, Breach, Succour and Archive of the Now. She edited an East Midlands issue of Cleaves journal while living in Leicester two years ago. Her poem-sequence set to music composed by Adam Robinson, Steel Girdered Her Musical: In Several Parts, is the topic of a chapter in the forthcoming book, Britannia’s New Tongues, by David and Christine Kennedy. A book collection of her poetry is coming out this year with Contraband Press, University of Surrey, entitled *not suitable for domestic sublimation. A Lecturer in English at Loughborough University, she has publications on modernism, contemporary poetry, psychoanalysis, and Hélène Cixous. She is author of Legacies in Plague in Literature, Theory and Film (Palgrave, 2009), the editor of the forthcoming essay collection, Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing, and Theorising Contemporary Literature, and is currently writing a monograph entitled Experimentalism, Intimacy, Affect which examines the usage of intimacy as an experimental tactic in texts from modernism to the present. For ‘Expenditure’ she’ll be reading poems from a sequence-in-progress about water, its privatisation, and the ethical questions it raises about its ownership, usage and consumption, and what will happen in the water-scarce globally warmed future.  Water is both a huge natural resource and an intimate part of us: every ‘average sized man’ contains 40 litres of it. The final series of poems will be set to the music Adam Robinson is creating through a variety of water-related processes, including boiling and freezing.

Emily Critchley is an Early Career Researcher who has already earned an international reputation as both a writer and critic, specialising in experimental literature. Her research has been rated at the international level with over fifteen published articles and poetry collections. She has been performing her work across the UK and in the USA since 2000. She has also organised two three-day, international conferences for other experimental writers, at the universities of Cambridge and Greenwich respectively.

Angharad Davies is a violinist based in London. She is an active performer in contemporary, improvisation and experimental music both as a soloist and within ensembles. Since making London her base in 2002 she has developed a specific approach to the violin, extending the sound possibilities of the instrument by attaching and applying objects to the strings or by sounding unexpected parts of the instrument’s body. She is dedicated to exploring and expanding sound production on the violin.

Andrew Spragg is a poet, performer and critic. His first book, The Fleetingest, was published by Red Ceiling Press in May 2011, and a second, Notes for Fatty Cakes, was published October 2011 by Anything Anymore Anywhere. Andrew will be performing with some, though not all, of the Effort:  http://the-effort.co.uk/music.html
He has a blog at www.brokenloop.blogspot.com
He also edits Inf. Ed. www.infiniteeditions.blogspot.com

Jonty Tiplady grew up in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, moving to London, Paris, then Brighton, where he received a PhD on Jacques Derrida. He has published 8 chapbooks of poetry, including Zam Bonk Dip (Barque Press 2007) and At the School of Metaphysics (Fly By Night 2008). He won the 2009 Crashaw Prize and currently lives in London.

POLYply 15

Samuel Dowd trained at Chelsea College of Art and subsequently at Wimbledon College of Art in Fine Art Sculpture. In 2007 he graduated with an MA in Time-based Arts from Dartington College of Arts. He is currently based in London. Dowd’s films to-date are predominantly non-narrative portraits of both existent and imagined dwellings – exhaustively nuanced spaces – often populated by sculptural objects and, occasionally, somnambulist figures. This work is underscored by the will to inhabit moments of unmitigated experience: moments of making, being and becoming. Enigmatic encounters with forms, subjects and structures set against idealised settings and landscapes, not only in film but also manifest as sculpture, collage, text and photography. Dowd’s obsession is with the quest for ideal environments – the earthly paradise – as inscribed in the objects, furnishings, patterns and architectures of real and imagined tribes.  For POLYply 14 he will be screening his recent work, Bare Breath, shot on-location in Finland last summer.
www.samueldowd.info/

Robert Hampson has been actively involved in poetry – as poet, editor, critic, and facilitator – since the early 1970s. During the 70s, he co-edited Alembic (with Ken Edwards and Peter Barry), co-organised various poetry reading series in London, and ran ‘Saturday Courses’ with Eric Vonna-Michel and Ken Edwards at Lower Green Farm.   More recently, he has edited an occasional poetry magazine, purge. His early publications included ‘degrees of addiction’ (Share, 1975), ‘how nell scored’ (poet & peasant, 1976), ‘a feast of friends’ (pig press, 1982), ‘a human measure’ (hard-pressed poetry, 1989). His early poetry appeared, among other places, in both Cid Corman’s Origin and Alan Davies’s 100 Posters. In 2001, Stride published ‘Assembled Fugitives: Selected Poems, 1973-1998′. More recently, his long poem ‘Seaport’ has been re-issued by Shearsman and Veer has published the sequence ‘an explanation of colours’.

Mark Leahy is a writer, artist and curator operating among textual practices and performance. He works with the body as sensing and as affected, using language, models of perception, and objects of everyday use. Including spoken word, task-based actions, and song his performances address the male body as desired and as desiring, and the body as a site of inscription by others and by oneself. Recent live work includes ‘Voice Recognition’ at Chapter and Verse Festival (Bluecoat, Liverpool, Oct 2011), and participation in DIY8: Queer Eye Enquiry with Chris Goode (Sept-Oct 2011). ‘After Durer after Mantegna’, an emblem combining text and image, was installed in the Window Work series at DXDX Studios, Plymouth (Aug 2011). He has written texts to accompany work by other artists, including Teresa Grimaldi’s The Vacated Works (Isle of Wight, 2009), Katy Connor’s Pure Flow (Exeter, 2009), and ‘Aftermath’ for Deirdre Power’s project Brokenland (Limerick, 2011). Critical publications include essays in Performance Research and The Journal of Writing in Creative Practice; a chapter in The Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2007); and an essay in The Salt Companion to John James (2010). Curated projects include ‘Public Pages’ for the conference Poetry and Public Language (University of Plymouth, 2007). ‘Swatches’, a poetry sequence was published by Acts of Language (December 2009), and texts have appeared in UK and US journals and online. Forthcoming publications include a performance text in Open Letter, a chapter on the poetry of Thomas MacGreevy, and a text on the work of artist Martha Winter. He was Director of Writing at Dartington College of Arts (2005-2007), and was MA Programme Leader at Dartington Campus, University College Falmouth (2007-2010). He lives in Devon, teaches part-time and supervises PhD students at University College Falmouth, and works freelance as an arts project manager.
www.markleahy.net

Nisha Ramayya will be screening a film about the Hindu goddess Tara, and making some annotations live. The film is part of ongoing  research into translation – of language, culture, and form. In this project photo and film documentation of West Bengal  is mixed with Tantra-based poetic rituals and organised around a variety of genres. It is part of an exploration into contemporary versions of ‘performing the goddess’ in feminist art/writing practice. I am at the beginning of my 2nd year of a PhD in Poetic Practice, supervised by Dr. Redell Olsen.

Dawn Scarfe presents subtle site-specific interventions and resonating glass sculptures that ask us to re-think and re-negotiate our impressions of our surroundings. Individual parts of her installations are encouraged to respond to each other or to enter into a dialogue with their environment. Dawn has recently exhibited at Q-O2 werkplaats Belgium, TONSPUR_passage MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, La Casa Encendida Madrid, Bios Athens, Café Oto, 176 Zabludowicz Collection and the Southbank Centre, London. She was awarded a PhD in Sonic Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London in December 2011.
www.dawnscarfe.co.uk

 

 

POLYply 14

*NEWS FLASH:  Timothy will be unable to attend due to illness.*

Jeff Hilson‘s recent books include stretchers (Reality Street, 2006), Bird bird (Landfill, 2008) and In The Assarts (Veer, 2010). He also edited The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008). Additional thoughts about the sonnet form can be found in The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (CUP, 2011,) in a ‘trialogue’ with Paul Muldoon and Meg Butler.  He teaches Creative Writing at Roehampton University and runs the Xing the Line reading series in London.

Simon Jarvis is the Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of Cambridge. He has also taught at Newcastle, Cornell and Johns Hopkins. He works on the poetics of verse, and is currently completing a monograph on the poetics of rhyme for Cambridge University Press. His books include Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; reprinted, 2008); Adorno: a critical introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998; reprinted, 2003); and Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean textual criticism and representations of scholarly labour, 1725-1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

Zoë Skoulding’s most recent collections of poems are Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008) and The Mirror Trade (Seren, 2004). Her collaborative publications include Dark Wires with Ian Davidson (West House Books, 2007), a pamphlet/CD You Will Live in Your Own Cathedral with Alan Holmes (Seren 2009), and From Here, with Simonetta Moro (Dusie, 2008). She is a member of the collective Parking Non-Stop, whose CD Species Corridor, combining experimental soundscape with poetry and song, was released on the German label Klangbad in 2008. She lectures in the School of English at Bangor University, where she also holds a part-time AHRC Fellowship in Creative and Performing Arts 2007-2012, and she has been editor of the international quarterly Poetry Wales since 2008.

Fiona Templeton  is a poet and performance artist, and director of the New York-based group The Relationship, specialising in experimentation in language, relationship with the audience, and use of site.  She and her work have won awards and fellowships including New York Foundation for the Arts, the US National Endowment for the Arts, and the Judith Wilson Senior Fellowship at Cambridge. Her works include The Medead, a 6-part epic, L’Ile, a staging of the dreams of the people of Lille in the places dreamed of, You-The City, an intimate Manhattanwide play for an audience of one, Cells of Release, an installation in collaboration with Amnesty International. Current activities and interests include writing with the voice, the idea of co-creation between audience and art, ventriloquism in spatialisation of the speaking subject, a collaborative project The Eavesdroppers’ Choir, and new works with composers Samita Sinha (vocal) and Pamelia Kurstin (theremin). Books include You-The City (Roof), Cells of Release (Roof), Delirium of Interpretations (Green Integer), London (Sun & Moon), and Elements of Performance Art (with Anthony Howell).
www.fionatempleton.org
www.therelationship.org

POLYproject 1

Cut & Splice free launch event
http://www.soundandmusic.org/projects/cut-splice-gr%C3%BAndelweiser/events-0

Poetry as Score
Jürg Frey – Landschaft mit Wörtern (selection) (2003)
Manfred Werder – 2009/4
Michael Pisaro – A single charm is doubtful [harmony series no.14] (2004-6)
Antoine Beuger – Confidential Letter #7 (2011)

Performers: Antoine Beuger, Angharad Davies, Sarah Hughes, Tim Parkinson, Michael Pisaro, David Stent, Carol Watts and Manfred Werder.

Antoine Beugerstudied composition with Ton de Leeuw at Sweelinck Coservatorium in Amsterdam 1973-78. In 1990 he began composing after an interruption of about 10 years. Two years later he founded Edition Wandelweiser together with composer/performer Burkhard Schlothauer. Since 1994 he’s been active with the conception and organisation of KLANGRAUM, a concert series at Kunstraum Düsseldorf. During the years 1995-2001 he was working together with visual artist Mauser as artistic director of “Werkraum”, Place for Interdisciplinary Artistic Events, Cologne. Since 1996 he’s been artistic director of edition wandelweiser records and since 2004 managing director of Edition Wandelweiser gmbh.

Jürg Frey developed his own language as a composer and sound artist with the creation of wide, quiet sound spaces. He has worked with compositional series, as well as with language and text. Some of these activities appear in small editions or as artist’s books as individual items and small editions. (Edition Howeg, Zurich; weiss kunstbewegung, Berlin; complice, Berlin). His music and recordings are published by Edition Wandelweiser. Jürg Frey is a member of the Wandelweiser Komponisten Ensemble which has presented concerts for more than 15 years in Europe, North America and Japan.

Michael Pisaro is a composer and guitarist, a member of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble and founder and director of the Experimental Music Workshop. His work is frequently performed in the U.S. and in Europe, in music festivals and in many smaller venues. He has had extended composer residencies in Germany (Künstlerhof Schreyahn, Dortmund University), Switzerland (Forumclaque/Baden), Israel (Miskenot Sha’ananmim), Greece (EarTalk) and in the U.S. (Birch Creek Music Festival, Wisconsin). Concert length portraits of his music have been given in Munich, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Vienna, Merano (Italy), Brussels, New York, Curitiba (Brazil), Amsterdam, London, Tokyo, Austin, Berlin, Chicago, Düsseldorf, Zürich, Cologne, Aarau (Switzerland), and Several CDs of his work have been released by such labels as Edition Wandelweiser Records, Compost and Height, confront, Another Timbre, Cathnor, Nine Winds and others, including most recently “transparent city, volumes 1–4″, “an unrhymed chord”, “hearing metal 1”, “A Wave and Waves” and “harmony series (11–16)”. His translation of poetry by Oswald Egger (“Room of Rumor”) was published in 2004 by Green Integer. He is Co-Chair of Music Composition at the California Institute of the Arts near Los Angeles.

Manfred Werder is a composer, performer, pianist, curator. His work actualizes time and space by letting the world’s natural abundance appear. Performs throughout the world. Lives in situ. CD releases include 20092 (Heresy, A Coruña upcoming 2011); 20051 (8 CD-set, winds measure recordings, US, upcoming 2011); stück 1998 seiten 624-626  (skiti 06, Japan 2010); 20095 (Cathnor Vignettes series, UK 2010);20071 (futow, Kôbe 2010); 20083 (Im Sefinental, Edition Wandelweiser Records, Germany 2009); ein(e) ausführende(r) seiten 218-226 (Edition Wandelweiser Records, Germany 2006); and 20061 (skiti 01, Japan 2006).

Hear audio recording of pre-event talk here:
http://soundcloud.com/soundandmusic/poetry-as-score-with-antoine

Read review of the ‘Poetry and Score’ POLYproject  here:
http://www.thewatchfulear.com/?p=6160

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

POLYply 13

Ryan Dobran is the author of Your Guilt Is A Miracle (Bad Press, 2008), Ding Ding (Critical Documents, 2009), and Confection (©_© Press, 2011). Shouts From OK Glamour is forthcoming from Mountain Press. He lives in Cambridge, UK.

Patrick Farmer is a sound artist who works with improvisation, scores and composition. Commonly referred to as a percussionist, Farmer will often enlist the help of a drum as a resonator for natural materials or for filtering field recordings. He has performed throughout Europe and America. He has forthcoming  residencies at Q02 in Brussels and MOKS in Estonia. In 2008 Farmer co-founded the record label Compost and Height, which focuses on free downloads of improvisation and field recording. His recordings have been released on Cathnor, Another Timbre, and Organised Music from Thessaloniki, amongst others. He is a member of Loris, and frequently performs with Dominic Lash.

Peter Larkin is the author of Terrain Seed Scarcity, (2001), and Leaves of Field (2006).  A new collection Lessways Least Scarce Among is due from Shearsman in 2012.  Recent work has appeared in Stride, Blackbox Manifold, Poetry Wales, Quarterly West and New Walk.  He has also contributed to The Ground Aslant: an Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (2011) An interview with Edmund Hardy is available at Intercapillary Space and another has appeared (with Matthew Hall) on Cordite.

Salomé Voegelin is an artist and writer. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, Continuum, NY, 2010. The book engages with the emerging practice of sound art and the concurrent development of a discourse and theory of sound. It seeks to immerse the reader in concepts of listening to sound artwork and the everyday acoustic environment, to establish an aesthetics and philosophy of sound and promoting the notion of a sonic sensibility. Other recent writings include an article on Morton Feldman in the Wire 324, February 2011 issue, and an essay on durational radio for Kunstradio ORF Austria. Her blog soundwords.tumblr.com writes the experience of listening to the everyday.

Gillian Wylde works with video, text and performance. Her projects respond to peculiarities of a site or a place, encounter and dialogue(s) and explore simple interconnections of agency. This leaky thing next to that leaking thing. Central within these processes of response are properties of the pathetic or cheapo, instances of featurelessness, nowotony and/or petty conjectures of the queer. Critical investigations of multivalent performance activities or forms of energy (such as mechanical, electrical, or chemical energy), the body (human or animal) in relation to the video camera are constants through most of the  work like maybe a savage smell or hairy logic. Her interests include: failure, mistakeology, happiness, normal nature, antediluvian dirt, pathetica aesthetics, pet assemblage, rude electricity, Fibonacci Feminisms, the WWW, on-goingness,  blurriness, performative assemblage, entanglement, colourings, textiness, cultural phenomena, negation, domestica, queer arrangements,  fleetingness, resemblances, animal reaction shots, burrowing, ur-language, film, noise, viral poetics, mediocrity, antagonism, the political and keeping fit with Jane Fonda and Donna Haraway. Click here for image.  See her website: 15minuteswithyou.org.uk/