writer – artist – teacher
For this year’s seasonal message, to cover Winter Solstice, Christmas, Yule, New Year and all other midwinter festivals, I made a composite image using old Irish Christmas stamps, a stepped paragraph to echo a postal address, and a ‘sticker’ referencing the Par Avion label. The initial letters of the greeting ‘as Gaeilge’ were used to generate the message text. This constraint was afterwards used to generate a further 8 poems, which were shared via Instagram.
Two new poems of mine have just been published by Rupert Loydell on the Stride Magazine site as part of his The Remix Project. The series, of which mine is no. 13, is a response to Rupert’s invitation “to submit a (preferably new and unpublished) short poem plus a remix of said poem” for publication. My contribution consists of two ‘square poems’, ‘A Quare Meal for a Square Dealer’, developed while working on material for the 9×9: a set of poems under constraint, and a remix of the two 81-word blocks into a set of lineated stanzas, ‘The Other Side of Money’.
From Wednesday 13th May at 12 noon Soundart Radio will broadcast a short weekly series of radio hours I have put together called ‘constrained radio show’. The shows feature poetry, text, voice, sound, music, and audio work in a variety of styles and genres loosely gathered under formal or thematic headings. The ideas that guided my choices for the first episode of ‘constrained radio’ were a sense of working within constraints or rules or limitations, or responding to those rules perhaps by resisting them. In the second show ideas of repetition and transposition run through the selection, with a mix of vocal, verbal, textual and sonic loopings, versions, layers, and reuse. Track listings will be posted here.