Tag: writing

new text in MA Bibliotheque publication

My contribution ‘What did he do with his pipe?’ is included in The Graveside Orations of Karl Einstein, a new publication from Ma Bibliotheque, edited by Dale Holmes and Sharon Kivland.

At the memorial for Rosa Luxemburg on 13 June 1919, the political radical, art historian, critic, and writer Carl Einstein gave an oration. There is no record of what Einstein said, how he said it, or what it addressed. This collection assembles a broad range of texts from artists, film-makers, writers, poets, critics, philosophers, and art historians. Each contribution is a speculation on what Einstein might have delivered, each as likely and as unlikely to be Einstein’s as any other.

In my piece I present a fictional or imagined synthesis of accounts made by government or right wing spies who attempt, but fail, to record Einstein’s speech. Their observations and annotations generate a faulty record of the gestures of the speaker.

The publication is available from the Ma Bibliotheque website.

‘She Mick …’ in Purge 6

The latest issue of the occasional magazine Purge, edited by Robert Hampson has just arrived. Purge 6: hostile environment includes work by Allen Fisher, Drew Milne, Karen Sandhu, David Herd and Amy Evans Bauer among others. My piece ‘She Mick on JB’s Island’ is published as a supplement to this issue.

‘hostile environment’ refers to the expressed policy in 2012 of Theresa May, then Home Secretary. It was her intention to make the UK a hostile environment for migrants and those seeking asylum. In practice, the implementation of this policy distributed the function of border officials into the everyday work of administrators in hospitals, universities, letting agencies etc.

‘She Mick on JB’s Island’ draws on my mother’s experience of migration to the UK in the 1950s, and folds this with a sense of the limiting of expression, silencing of voices, caused by this hostile environment, and the disproportionate impact of the policy on lives of women.

contribution to According to John James

In September, Shearsman Books published According to John James edited by Kelvin Corcoran. The project was organised in memory of John James who died in May 2018. I was one of a number of poets who answered a call for responses to 2 quatrains in James’s ‘Theory of Poetry’. Among others who contributed are Lyndon Davies, Andrew Duncan, John Hall, Alan Halsey, Peter Hughes, Romana Huk, Linda Kemp, Tony Lopez, Simon Perril, J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley, Peter Riley, Gavin Selerie, Karlien van den Beukel, Robert Vas Dias, Geoff Ward, and John Wilkinson. A painting by Bruce McLean is reproduced on the cover. Published September 2018. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £6.50 / $9.95ISBN 9781848616301


article in Performance Research 23.2: On Writing and Performance

I have an essay ‘Disrupting the Market in Echoes: Voice, body and technology in poetry and performance by Hannah Weiner and Holly Pester’ in a recent issue of Performance Research published by Taylor & Francis. The issue, On Writing and Performance, is edited by Ric Allsopp and Julieanna Preston.

This essay considers questions of writing in its relation to voice, technology and performance through a reading of voiced and printed work by Hannah Weiner and Holly Pester. The focus is on two works, Holly Pester’s ‘Buddy Holly on my Answer Machine’ published in Hoofs (2011), from if p then q books, and ‘RJ Romeo & Juliet’ from Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems: From the INTERNATIONAL CODE OF SIGNALS for the use of all nations, published in 1982. 

Link to the Journal online: doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1464761