June 19, 2004
SPELT! #3
The Horse Hospital and Caroline Bergvall present
SPELT!
Sunday July 11th, doors 7.30pm, tickets £5
The third in a series of events showcasing new contemporary writing, hosted by
MC for the evening
cris cheek
alongside
Things Not Worth Keeping:
London Under Construction:
Sean Bonney:
Hazel Smith:
Adeena Karasick:
John Cayley:
BrigidMcLeer:
Caroline Bergvall:
Todd Swift:
SPELT! showcases 9 writers from different styles and concerns reading for between 5 and 10 minutes max. The emphasis is mostly on writers that use a range of technologies to write and perform, combining a stunning array of international poets on very rare and special visits and established and up and coming UK poets and text-artists.
SPELT! takes place the day after
The Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing hosts a three day international conference on Contemporary Writing Environments from 8-10th July on their west London campus. In addition there will be various readings of innovative poets and writers, culminating in a paper by Charles Bernstein followed by a reading by Sarah Waters on the final day (10th July). See http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/eng/contemp.htmfor details.
and
On the same day as SPELT at 2pm Charles Bernstein will be giving a reading of new poetry in The Council Room, Birkbeck College (Malet Street), hosted jointly by the CPRC Birkbeck, Sub-Voicive poetry & Brunel University. Contact Stephen on 020 72444670 or at estaphin@hotmail.com for details.
Biographies
Todd Swift (www.toddswift.com) is one of the leading new poet-editors of the 21st century. The Chronicle of Higher Education have both recently compared him to the pioneering literary impresario Ezra Pound "in the 10s and 20s" of the last century. Moving from Montreal, to Budapest, to Paris, to London, he has created and abetted several new poetic movements since the late 90s, such as "fusion" and "hyper new" poetries, via four international electronic and print anthologies: i.e. zeitgeist classics Poetry Nation, Short Fuse, and 100 Poets Against The War. His own work, for screen, stage, CD, net and page, has been hailed by such diverse critic-poets as Paul Hoover and Derek Mahon. He has three collections out from DC Books (Budavox, Cafe Alibi and Rue du Regard), and a spoken word CD as one-half of Swifty Lazarus (www.swiftylazarus.com) which mixes Welles and Glenn Gould to create contrapuntal noir soundscapes. He is poetry editor of award-winning site www.nthposition.com . He is a former writer for Penthouse magazine; was story editor for the last season of manga classic Sailor Moon; and was visiting lecturer at Budapest university (ELTE) between 1998-2001. His work appears in places like Gargoyle, Jacket, New American Writing, Poetry London, and Retort. He currently lives in London with his wife.
Adeena Karasick is a poet, cultural theorist and performance artist; and the
award-winning author of six books of poetry and poetic theory, The House
That Hijack Built (2004), The Arugula Fugues (Zasterle Press, 2001),
Dyssemia Sleaze (Talonbooks, Spring 2000), Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1996),
Mêmewars (Talonbooks, 1994), and The Empress Has No Closure (Talonbooks,
1992). Marked with an urban, Jewish, feminist aesthetic that continually
challenges normative modes of meaning production, Karasick has performed
worldwide and regularly publishes articles, reviews and dialogues on
contemporary poetry, poetics and cultural/semiotic theory. Adeena is
Professor of Poetry and Literary theory at St. John's University in New
York.
LUC are a collective of poets living and working in London. They work within frames and environments that encourage spontaneous composition and textually generative performance; work that partly documents itself and is lineated within its own autonomy. Their work constitutes a play of surface with form, and of heterodox performative gestures determined by a process of continued negotiation of each poet's words/work by that of the others. It is therefore work that won't settle into any final or definitive form and could be said to investigate the uncertainties and ambiguities of collaborative spatial and temporal practice. Hopefully. Sometimes it implodes and we take what results and move on.
They have performed at the Diorama Arts Centre, the Klinker, the Taxi Gallery, Eton Mission, the CPT, Partly Writing 3, etc. They are the editors of the ongoing Underground Poems and Reception projects.
John Cayley is a London-based poet, translator, publisher and bookdealer. He runs Wellsweep, a small press which has specialised in literary translation from Chinese, and he is known internationally for his writing in networked and programmable media (www.shadoof.net/in). These are the media in which he has worked, as a poetic writer, more or less exclusively during recent years, his last printed book of poems, adaptations and translations being 'Ink Bamboo' (London: Agenda & Belew, 1996). Cayley has lectured and carried out research under the auspices of the writing programmes at Brown University and the University of California, San Diego. He is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of English, Royal Holloway College, University of London, and was made an Honorary Fellow of Dartington College of Arts due to his close association with its Performance Writing programme.
Hazel Smith works in the areas of poetry, short prose, performance, mixed-media work and hypermedia. Her web page is at www.australysis.com. She has published two volumes of poetry Abstractly Represented: Poems and Performance Texts 1982-90 and Keys Round Her Tongue: short prose, poems and performance texts. and made two CDs of her performance work, Poet Without Language and Nuraghic Echoes. She has written several commissioned works for radio, and is co-author of numerous mixed media, multi-media and hypermedia works. She is also a founding member of austraLYSIS, the international sound and intermedia arts group. Hazel is currently Senior Research Fellow in the School of Creative Communication, University of Canberra, and Deputy Director of the University of Canberra Centre for Writing. She is co-author, with Roger Dean, of Improvisation, Hypermedia And The Arts Since 1945, Harwood Academic, 1997, and author of Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: difference, homosexuality, topography, Liverpool University Press, 2000.
Sean Bonney is a poet and polemicist. He is the author of "Notes on Heresy" (Writers Forum, 2002) and "Poisons, their Antidotes" (West House, 2003), as well as several essays and gnostic critiques of everyday life. His current poetry attempts a fusion of documentary observation, critical polemic, marxist theory, porn and random insult. He lives in Lambeth, South London.
Brigid Mc Leer
Brigid Mc Leer is an Irish artist based in London. She trained in Fine Art at University of Ulster, Belfast (1988 – 91) and the Slade School of Art, London (91 – 93).
Her work is generally image/text based and is cross-disciplinary moving between the practices of visual art, writing, architecture, performance and critical theory. It is concerned with the ambiguity, complexity and incommensurability of place, identity and creative practice. She makes both solo and collaborative works and curates projects.
Recent work has been shown and published in Britain, USA and Ireland.
She is currently hosting a project in collaboration with Katie Lloyd Thomas titled In Place of the Page, the first gallery showing of which was part of ‘Watch This Space’ at the Phoenix Gallery, Brighton in May this year. It is also currently on show at the Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda, Ireland until July 7th and they will be presenting the project at Standpoint Gallery, London from July 23rd.
The project can also be accessed via the website www.inplaceofthepage.co.uk
Curatorial projects include ‘Para Sites’ a forthcoming show at Bridport Arts Centre, Dorset (this September) and ‘LLAW’ for the outside wall of ‘bookartbookshop’ London.
Brigid Mc Leer was a lecturer on Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts, Devon from 1995 – 2000 and currently is visiting lecturer on a number of arts courses in Britain, as well as teaching history and theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.
posted by James on June 19, 2004 03:24 PM