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Throughout July I'll be teaching an interactive, online studio course at The Poetry School. Below is what the course description I've written: Archive, document and catalogue carefully selected moments of your life past, present and future At a time in which we are archived by others, often through digital means, it seems more and more important to attempt to define ourselves – on our own terms – as individuals and as members of a diverse range of groups. Written attentively, poetry that archives the self is subversive and can present radically different narratives to those purported by digital and mass media. By using methods such as diaries and collation of information one can conduct a close examination of the self as it stands, now and then, to see how it fits into the bigger picture. Alternatively, but just as interestingly, one can invent new identities, establish new routines and exist in new environments to generate original stimulus and structure for archival poetry. During this three-week Studio course you’ll write a number of poems which will archive, document and catalogue carefully selected moments of your life past, present and future. Some of time you’ll write about what you normally do on a regular basis. At other times you’ll look at yourself in relationship to local, national and global issues. And yet at other times you’ll be encouraged to try out new ways of seeing and behaving, in order to dictate how your ‘self’ can be a vehicle used to record infinite possibilities of being. The Poetry School describes the online studio format like this: Poetry Studios are short, intensive poetry writing courses that last 3-4 weeks. Unlike our standard 10 week courses, the emphasis on ‘Studios’ is more heavily skewed towards writing and getting words on the page, with a softer focus on group feedback and editing. If you're interested in finding out more click on the LINK to course
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 I've reviewed Tim Atkins' latest book and very splendid it is. Published in the likewise very splendid Adjacent Pineapple webzine.
phenomenological experience is foregrounded – a moment, for fathers and daughters, to understand the weight, texture and sound of an egg. Read more HERE A review of my book stack by Billy Mills at his blog Elliptical Movements, alongside two other interesting titles - Rosmarie Waldrop's White is a Color & Philip Rowland's Something Other Than Other.
Here's a snippet: The cumulative effect [of stack] is one of focusing attention on the everyday as a subject of great interest in and of itself, its significance deriving from a refusal to impose significance, a focus on the haecceitas of the thing observed and documented. More HERE At the end of the month I'll be reading from my new book stack alongside Judith Wilson and Sandeep Parmar, who are also launching recently published books. Details below.  I'll be launching my new book, stack, at The Other Room in Manchester with two other fine poets. More info below the poster.  Experimental poetry in Manchester, with readings from Pascal O'Loughlin, Stephen Mooney and James Davies, who will be launching his new book Stack. Details of all performers below. Free entry, as always. James Davies is the author of several works of poetry including Plants, A Dog, Snow and Acronyms. His most recent title is stack, a volume-length poem that documents a range of minimal interventions, normal and not normal. A novel, When Two Are in Love or As I Came to Behind Frank’s Transporter, co-written with Philip Terry, is forthcoming in 2018 from Crater Press. He edits the poetry press if p then q, co-organises The Other Room reading series in Manchester and between 2017-18 he is Poet in Residence at The University of Surrey. His ongoing experiences of drawing yellow lines on sheets of A4 paper and filing them into brown cardboard boxes can be viewed on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lncpdY7JweU&t=10s Stephen Mooney is a lecturer in Creative Writing and poetry co-ordinator at the University of Surrey, where he was also the Poet in Residence in 2012/13. He is an associate member of the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck, and co-runs the small poetry press, Veer Books. His poetry has appeared in various places and web-places, including as part of the performative poetry grouping ‘London Under Construction’. The poetry collections, DCLP and Shuddered, the latter co-authored with Aodan McCardle and Piers Hugill, were published by Veer Books in 2008 and 2010 respectively, while the trilogy The Cursory Epic (2014), 663 Reasons Why (2016) and Ratzinger Solo (2016) has recently been published by Contraband Books. Pascal O'Loughlin is Irish. Currently lives in London. Librarian at the National Poetry Library. A novel 'Now Legwarmers' is supposed to be published soonish. 1/3rd of Stinky Bear Press. Poetry published in various places. more at www.otherroom.org These two possibilities hang together, neither erasing the other - "wood", which has a kind of drifting solidity, both expected and unexpected; "a piece of metal", which again suggests distribution, individuation; "outside a bottle", which could refer to the metal being outside a bottle, or that there's only the outside of the bottle visible - its opaque? - or again this could be a more diffuse kind of image, a kind of reminder that is more about how we always experience things, describe things, and say things, "outside of" other things.
A generous review by Colin Herd. More at the LINK  The first of a few readings to launch my new book stack.
4pm at The Pop-Up venue. Free More details at the festival's website - HERE  stack is now out from Carcanet press. I have briefly outlined the project in the previous post. The book is available from bookshops, Amazon and at Carcanet via this LINK
stack is a volume-length poem that I've been writing for around seven years in one way or another and is the end product of my Creative Practice PhD in minimalist poetics. Phew. It comes out from Carcanet at the end of August. Below is a front cover. The poem is a list, a stack, of discrete lines that document the conducting of 'interventions' - many based in walking practice - in which I have either intensely familiarised or defamiliarised the environment. These lines also form a collage of of units that can be two lines or more.  A lovely print version of Changing Piece, with added subtitle 'An Epic Saga Against the Odds', is out now from Dock Road Press priced at £3. LINK  |
