writer – artist – teacher
Ysella Sims has included a short audio piece of mine, ‘thaw biddy and melt’ in her latest Tell Me Something podcast for Poetic Licence. You can listen here: anchor.fm/tell-me-something/episodes/Tell-Me-Something 2
I made a short word and sound piece for Soundart Radio‘s annual First Spark Festival, happening this year from Sunday 31st January to Tuesday February 2nd. This piece, ‘thaw biddy and melt’ picks up on a text I wrote last year that drew on material in the Duchas.ie Schools Collection around the Irish traditions associated with St. Brigid’s Day (Feb 1st). I added some sound layers using treated and distorted water and ice recordings. You can hear it on Soundcloud, or listen out for the broadcast on Sunday 31st.
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.
The Constrained Radio Show series I have made for Soundart Radio is now archived for future / later / repeat listening on my Mixcloud page. The shows have been broadcast weekly on Wednesdays since mid-May. They began as a response to restrictions, limits and confinement during COVID lockdown. The Mixcloud page includes tracklistings and other information.
On May 29th my review of Christodoulos Makris’ this is no longer entertainment from Dostoyevsky Wannabe will be published on the Stride magazine site. Makris’ book gathers material from online comment threads on media and news websites across several years and edits these into a poem sequence of seventy-one sections.
The text is organised, shaped, to offer an obviously self-conscious curating of the material, opinions, ideas encountered there. ‘The word curate is not a synonym for “chosen” or “collected”. (119) This is a reading, that is open to other and others’ readings, it frames a view without determining what another will see there.
you could say you are parasitical on their labour (78)
it doesn’t include labels nor pity
it just floats quietly
and serves to begin conversations such as this (103)