Xing the Line

Wednesday 11th May, 7.30 - 10.30pm

• James Davies
• Carol Watts

The Apple Tree (upstairs), 45 Mount Pleasant, WC1X 0AE

Admission £5 (waged) / £3 (unwaged)

Writers Forum

Saturday 7th May, 4 - 6pm (arrive at 3.30pm)

Betsey Trotwood, Farringdon, London EC1

Admission is free.

The Xenotext: A Progress Report

Thursday 5th May, 6 - 6.50pm

Birkbeck Centre for Poetics welcomes Christian Bök.

The Xenotext is my nine-year long attempt to create an example of 'living poetry'. I have been striving to write a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon I use a 'chemical alphabet' to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium (in this case, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans - an extremophile, capable of surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile milieus, including the vacuum of outer space). When translated into a gene and then integrated into the cell, my poem is going to constitute a set of instructions, all of which cause the organism to manufacture a viable, benign protein in response - a protein that, according to my original, chemical alphabet, is itself yet another text. I am, in effect, engineering a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem - one that can persist on the planet until the sun itself explodes...

Birkbeck University, London (venue TBC)

Admission is free, all welcome.

Read an Observer article about the project.

POLYply 10: VOICINGS

A performance in the context of the exhibition 'Some Variations on a Theme of Bob'

Saturday 30th April, 1 - 4pm

• Jennifer Pike Cobbing (voice)
• Benedict Taylor (viola)
• Lawrence Upton (voice)

Some Variations on a Theme of Bob is curated Lawrence Upton, AHRC Research Fellow at Goldsmiths. Upton worked with Cobbing in a variety of capacities over many years.

SPACE, 129 - 131 Mare Street, London E8 3RH

Website

Giles Goodland & Ron Silliman Reading

Tuesday 3rd May, 7pm

• Giles Goodland
• Ron Silliman

32 Tavistock Square, London WC1

Xing the Line

Wednesday 20th April, 7.30 - 10.30pm

• Jennifer Cooke
• Richard Parker

The Apple Tree (upstairs), 45 Mount Pleasant, WC1X 0AE

The Blue Bus

Also reading:

• Paul Holman
• Matt Martin

Admission £5 / £3 (conc.)

POLYply 9 - ANIMAL ANIMAL

Writers Forum - new series

Saturday 9th April, 4 - 6pm (arrive at 3.30pm)

Please note, this is Writers Forum - new series, not Writers Forum run by Lawrence Upton.

William IV, 7 Shepherdess Walk, London N1 7QE

Admission is free