The Literateur Interviews Sean Bonney

An interview with Sean Bonney by The Literateur:

But it’s true there is a very real resistance to complex poetry, and it’s strange because people don’t have the same problems with music, or the visual arts, or film or whatever... Poetry, or at least the areas of it that I’m interested in, is always going to [be] difficult because it’s consciously focussing on language as the medium people exist within and understand the world through – a medium that’s usually only used for information, instructions, commands and so on. It’s probably the most alienating of the artforms. Great. I’m happy with that.

Writers at Warwick

A treasure trove of recordings at the Writers at Warwick Audio Archive.

via Luke Roberts

Albion Beatnik Reading

Thursday 24th February, 8 - 11pm

• Amy De'Ath
• Sean Bonney
• Dominic Lash
• David Stent

Albion Beatnik Bookshop, 34 Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6AA

Admission £5

Writers Forum

Saturday 26th February, 4 - 6pm (arrive at 3.30pm)

Betsey Trotwood, Farringdon, London EC1

Admission is free

Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing

Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing

£38.48 / $42.75, Northwestern University Press, 2011 (608 pages)

ISBN 978-0810127111

In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways. In Against Expression, editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments. Charles Bernstein has described conceptual poetry as "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Dworkin and Goldsmith, two of the leading spokespersons and practitioners of conceptual writing, chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors including Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp to the most prominent of today's writers. Nearly all of the major avant-garde groups of the past century are represented here, including Dada, OuLiPo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Flarf to name just a few, but all the writers are united in their imaginative appropriation of found and generated texts and their exploration of nonexpressive language. Against Expression is a timely collection and an invaluable resource for readers and writers alike.

Update on Wednesday 16 February, 2011 by Openned

Introductory essays are available to view online free of charge.

Infinite Difference Reading: University of East Anglia

Tuesday 22nd February, 7pm

A reading by contributors to Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, featuring:

• Anne Blonstein
• Carrie Etter
• Rachel Lehrman
• Wendy Mulford
• Frances Presley
• Anna Reckin
• Lucy Sheerman

Drama Studio, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ

Admission is free.

Dancehall #2

Dancehall #2

£2 (print) / free (online)

Featuring:

• Previously unpublished extracts from Peter Manson's Sourdough Mutation
• Mark West on the threat of the disruptive voice
• Some responses to the Evacuation of the Great Learning workshops at Instal 2010
• New work by Malcy Duff, Robert Lye, Ash Reid and Greg Thomas

via Sam Walton

Salt Plus

Tuesday 15th February, 7.30 - 9.30pm

• Miranda Cichy
• Nia Davies
• Amy De'Ath
• Giles Goodland
• Emily Hasler
• Sophie Mayer

The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BL

New From Shearsman

Two new books by Robert Sheppard from Shearsman.

Berlin Bursts

£8.95 / $15, Shearsman, 2011 (Paperback, 96 pages)

ISBN 9781848611351

These new poems feature territories as dispersed as Sheppard’s local Capital of Culture and the global city of division and political murder of the title poem. Yet a series of metapoems brings agency and wonder to the idea of the poem, always seeing the world as well as itself, in perceptual double-takes that tease away at the meaning of the poetic act. At the centre of the collection is 'Six Poems Against Death' whose lyric imperative hovers before the portals of the unknown to embrace human unfinish as the condition of our survival.

When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry

£13.95 / $22, Shearsman, 2011 (Paperback, 218 pages)

ISBN 9781848611368

This study presents an episodic history of an epic period in British poetry, when bad times forced political subversion and textual impaction upon its central figures and provisional institutions. Episodes cover the Poetry Wars of the 1970s; the centrality of Bob Cobbing as poetry activist and the SubVoicive poetry scene in 1980s London; he also writes individual chapters on the poetry and poetics of Allen Fisher, Tom Raworth, Iain Sinclair, John Hall, Ken Edwards, and Maggie O'Sullivan.