 I've reviewed Iris' marvellous book at Blackbox Manifold - HERE
Here's a snippet - Nothing Intensifies questions transmission on a couple of key levels. First, how to score poetry on the page that is primarily intended for performance that goes beyond the voice, to the embodied. A variety of performances on Colomb’s website include her reading poetry in uncommon situations: whilst eating ice cubes, whilst being hoisted, tied in ropes, and durational pieces such as Deadlock where a cable-wheel is rolled back and forth in a ginnel. On a second level the poems in the collection ask how we can transmit ‘nothing’ (well at least at times they do). More of this later.
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A little blog piece for my upcoming Sonnet Course at The Poetry School. It begins:
Let’s start with Desert Island Sonnets. What 7 sonnets do you treasure the most? So let’s start by cheating and having the whole of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I enjoy the cycle and the epic that the sonnet can offer, and having all of them by the palm tree will if nothing else help with counting ‘the clock that tells the time’ (‘Sonnet 12’). Then we’ll need some animals in the pot, so I’ll be taking John Clare’s double sonnet, the sonic gem ‘The Marten’. I’ll want to continue by thinking about the sonnet as a visual form; existing anywhere and everywhere, so next is Mary Ellen Solt’s ‘Moonshot Sonnet’. Perhaps, after, something a little political with a capital P: I’m fifty-fifty between Wordsworth’s ‘On The Projected Kendal And Windermere Railway’ and Sassoon’s ‘Attack’. Umm? Last on the list are Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets (a collage sequence), the humour of Bernadette Mayer’s ‘You jerk you didn’t call me up’ and reduction and palimpsest in my own one-line Sonnet from Plants which goes: ‘Thirteen lines dumped. Fourteenth July Owe Six.’ Read more here - https://poetryschool.com/theblog/how-to-write-a-sonnet/  On 17th May I ran the first Manchester Experimental Poetry and Arts festival. It was a great day in Old Trafford, in the sunshine in, in the beautiful Centenary Gardens. The website gives a list of performers and photos. There was lots of amazing poetry as well as movement, sound and conceptual art. More here - https://manexpoetryfest.wordpress.com/
The finishing of the second box of 'Yellow Lines Drawn on Q4 Paper and Then Put in a Box This mega online festival, running 28th February-2nd March features myself along with poets including Briony Hughes, Camilla Nelson, Tim Atkins, Stephen Mooney and many others. See HERE for full details. And watch the video below for a lovely description of what the festival's all about from its creator Michal Piotrowski.  View HERE
 The great futch journal, publisher of hybrid prose, has published my story 'wellness retreat prose'. It's a deep dive into a yoga weekend in AR and mixed reality. Simon Taylor heads the writing with a fantastic image. You can read it here - https://www.futchpress.info/post/wellness-retreat-pro
 Will be reading at the ever brilliant series Xing the Line, June 9th, 6 pm at The Hoxton Cabin with James Coghill, Fran Lock and Nicol Parkinson.
Compleet details on the Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/events/266542529816471?ref=newsfeed More verbulence from the basement with hosts Iris Colomb & Jeff Hilson. Doors open at 6pm for a 7pm start. £5 waged, £3 unwaged. James Coghill Following the quiet release of his first pamphlet ‘Anteater’ in 2018, James Coghill has been published in a number of places including Blackbox Manifold, Datableed, Pamenar, Shearsman, Tentacular and The Hythe, as well as in a number of anthologies from Sidekick Books. His preoccupations include flora, fungi, and fauna, as well as medieval and renaissance literature. He is currently working on a pamphlet about the Brecklands area of East Anglia and another about various species of fungi. He is largely happy to be out of hibernation again. James Davies James Davies is the author of a number of poetry collections, most recently ‘stack’ and ‘it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall’. ‘stack’ is a set of 900+ single-line poems, which document alternative walking practice and can be combined together variously to make longer poems. ‘it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall’ is a selection of 201 poems that come in pairs of minimalist lines, many of which have been made into artists’ books or poetry sculptures, which explore beauty and horror. He is also the author of a few short stories and novels including the Oulipian psychedelic romantic comedy ‘When Two Are In Love’ or ‘As I Came To Behind Frank’s Transporter’, written in collaboration with Philip Terry. For a number of years he was one of the co-organisers of The Other Room reading series in Manchester and has edited his experimental poetry press ‘if p then q’ since 2008. Fran Lock Fran Lock is the author of thirteen poetry collections, most recently ‘Hyena!’ (Poetry Bus Press, 2023), inexplicably shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023, and 'a disgusting lie: further adventures through the neoliberal hell-mouth’ (Pamenar Press, 2023). Fran was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022-23). ‘Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects’, a collection of essays based on her work at Cambridge, was published by Out-Spoken Press last year. Fran is a Commissioning Editor at the radical arts and culture cooperative Culture Matters; she edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review. She lives between Cambridgeshire and Kent. She hates the Tories. Nicol Parkinson Nicol Parkinson is an artist and researcher working with sound in the fields of music, live art and performance seeking out the connections and confusions between these forms. They are slowly building a vocabulary of material approaches, both visible and obscured, embracing flexibility of form, in an effort to avoid settled definition.  Cute on the page, not quite palindrome, not quite mirror image, it’s one of many fantastic language games that run through the two collections.
Read more HERE |
