On Past Blackbox Simple Edit Manifold

Jow Lindsay has pieced together a new online magazine featuring poetry from a variety of asterixed people.

Click to read more ...

Bird bird Launch

Wednesday 18th March, 7.30pm Launch of Jeff Hilson's Bird bird, with launches of pamphlets by Chris McCabe and Simon Smith. Harold Pinter Drama Studio, Queen Mary, University of London, Arts Building, Mile End Road E1 4NS

Click to read more ...

R:FEST 09

Thursday 19th - Saturday 21st March The Runnymede International Literary Festival Too many highlights to mention. Click here to visit the website. Full programme of events available here.

Click to read more ...

AlterTateModern

Tony Trehy on the Tate Triennial exhibition, Altermodern:

Altermodern is also characterised as “trajectories have become forms: contemporary art gives the impression of being uplifted by an immense wave of displacements, voyages, translations, migrations of objects and beings, …displacement has become a method of depiction …artistic styles and formats must henceforth be regarded from the viewpoint of diaspora, migration and exodus.” While travel in the modern world is easier than anytime in history, surely historically modernism can lay claim to the effect of displacements and voyages with the more convincing imperative of wars. I think displacement as depiction is nonsensical and it is annoying when theorists who don’t actually make works use ‘must’ and limit the field of creative action. Why must artistic production be regarded from these viewpoints? This is as arbitrary as saying that the only legitimate subject for poetry is climate change.

Read the rest.

Click to read more ...

Shakespeare & Co

I visited this bookshop by accident in Paris about a year ago, completely ignorant of its significance until I visited the Pompidou a few days later and saw a picture of Joyce sitting where I had stood leafing through a volume of Jerome Rothenberg's poetry. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Jeanette Winterson has written an article in The Guardian about how the bookshop is planning to survive the ongoing financial shitstorm. Perhaps a wily London bookshop owner will open their doors to lodgers.

Click to read more ...

Bob Cobbing & PC Fencott

Video interview and performance. via Marcus Slease

Click to read more ...

Resisting the Kindle

Sven Birkerts with some understandable, but in my opinion completely groundless, concerns over how a potential move from print to electronic media can decontextualise documents. Firstly I am highly doubtful print will ever 'die out' - rather, electronic mediums will take the place of our 'disposable' print, such as newspapers, pulp fiction and airport novels. The printed work will become a fetish object - your 100 favourite books on the shelf. We make use of what we have and whatever is most useful is what we make use of. Secondly, context is not a given simply because something is in print, and the structures we use to catalogue and contain print could be just as easily be applied to the electronic form, if such structures were still deemed necessary. Having rapid access to fragmented information is simply an offshoot, both positive and negative, of the electronic form. The physicality of the printed medium is allocated too much cultural cache - print is vital, it has an importance all to itself, but is not a benchmark by which other emerging forms should be measured. via if:Book

Click to read more ...

TALKSTALKSTALKS

Wednesday 18th March, 7.30pm Mandy Bloomfield on ‘The word. The image’: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s filmic archaeologies in DICTEE Room 102, Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck College, Torrington Square, London Admission is free.

Click to read more ...

Bonney Reading at the Klinker

Tuesday 10th March, 8.30pm Sean Bonney reading at the Klinker's new venue. Tottenham Chances, 399 High Rd

Click to read more ...

Ron Silliman reading The Alphabet

A video of Ron Silliman's recent reading at Kelly Writers House is now available for viewing.

Click to read more ...