from Muses Walk (video)

A 5-minute home video made last October for the project & exhibition 'Transcapes / The Halted Traveler' in which I read from Muses Walk under fading light.

Transcapes / The Halted Traveler

Part of the exhibition Other Indications at the Municipal Arts Centre in Nicosia (NiMAC), 'Transcapes / The Halted Traveler' is a project co-curated by artist Maria Loizidou and researcher/curator/journalist Elena Parpa - within Parpa's larger proposal 'Exercises on Orientation' - which takes the form of a workshop of "memory recall". It makes use of work by a group of artists, architects and poets (Meletis Apostolides, Leto Kattou with Leontios Toumpouris, Marianna Christofides, Kyrillos Sarris with Giorgos Hatzimichalis, Yves Sabourin, and myself) to "approach the concept of landscape as a mnemonic and psychographic space, which is composed through personal narratives, memory overlapping, but also through travels – real and imaginary – which at times activate the desire for repositioning in space and time [... and] attempts to create the conditions for such a reorientation."

To realise 'Transcapes / The Halted Traveler', Loizidou worked with the contributors towards creating a 'carnet' (notebook) with work from each. The notebooks, though identical on the outside, contain individual and specific treatments of the question of urban landscape and memory. In my case this takes the form of having a copy of my book Muses Walk embedded into the notebook, encompassed by fragments from older posts on this blog concerning themselves with the process of the book's conception, composition and production. This material is intended to provide take-off points for discussions & workshops on the themes under consideration. The project also includes some complementary material, such as an additional notebook with a bibliography suggested by the participating artists, and a number of films, including a 5-minute 'home video' in which I read from Muses Walk, shown on a loop.

This ambitious exhibition - "with an aim of renegotiating and re-examining the procedures of curating art exhibitions" and "an experimental approach to curatorial practices" - in which I'm delighted to have been invited to take part, also marks the 20th anniversary of the centre. It opens this coming Saturday 30 November 2013 and runs until 30 March 2014.

publication of Muses Walk

gone walkabout

I'm very happy to announce that Muses Walk, my new chapbook / artist's book, is now available in an individually-numbered edition of 100 copies. The first three of these have been donated to 'An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street', for which project the book was originally conceived (I have been writing a series of posts on my involvement with this project, the idea behind the book, its relevance to the project and also to the rest of my work, and its development). The remainder will be available to buy at readings and events, and can also be purchased directly from me on request. The price is 5 Euro.

Writing, producing visual material, designing, laying out the text and images, printing, binding, cutting and generally publishing Muses Walk is proving a hugely valuable experience, if only as a sobering lesson in small-scale book-making and publishing. The finished book measures 148 x 105 mm (A6) and is in the quarto format - which means that it has been produced by twice folding over the full blanksheets, in this case of standard A4 size, of material on both sides. It's printed on 160gsm coloured (ivory) card paper, and runs to 32 pages - translating to 4 double-sided twice-folded sheets, each quarter of which contains one page of the book. Working out how the pages relate to each other when printed back-to-back and then folded, which piece of text and/or visual material should go on each quarter/page, and how exactly this material should fit within each quarter, was the easy part.

One reason for making the production of this book relatively complex is that I wanted its publication to be virtually unrepeatable. Its specific printing requirements (so that text and images line up correctly) and the material I used to make it, as well as the folding, binding and cutting of each individual copy by hand, make this the case. Plus I have no plans to reprint it in this form. In this sense, the making of Muses Walk was akin to a performance. I enjoyed the difficulty of putting it together - the consequence of which is that I feel huge satisfaction for having brought it to completion as I envisaged it, without having to compromise in its making.

Special mention must go to the people at the extremely busy Reads print centre on Dublin's Nassau Street, and in particular Nohema, for their patience with my nit-picking, endless re-drafting of the pdf file before re-printing and re-folding sample sheets, and my very specific printing requirements...

Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts in Dublin

On 5 March 2007 a bomb was exploded on Baghdad's Al-Mutanabbi Street, located in a mixed Shia-Sunni area. More than 30 people were killed and 100 wounded. Al-Mutanabbi Street, the historic centre of bookselling in Baghdad, holds bookstores and outdoor bookstalls, cafes, stationery shops, tea and tobacco stores. It has been the core of Baghdad's literary and intellectual community for many centuries.

The Al-Mutanabbi Street coalition was formed in response to the bombing by poet and bookseller Beau Beausoleil in San Francisco. It initiated and completed a broadside project with contributions of 130 broadsides from 130 letterpress printers, some of which were exhibited at the Market House in Monaghan and the Central Library in Dublin last March. It's now in the process of compiling 'An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street', a project for which over 250 writers and artists worldwide have committed to producing three books each in a symbolic attempt to "re-assemble" the "inventory" of what was lost in the bombing.

Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts in Dublin is the Dublin edition of a series of events taking place around the globe on 5 March 2012 to mark the 5th anniversary of the bombing, and will feature readings, performances and exhibitions by the Ireland-based participants in 'An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street' and other friends of these projects. More specifically, and among other contributions, the event will include a short play, a poetry reading with musical accompaniment, a performance of poetry in translation, a short talk on the significance of the project, and exhibitions of images from books produced for the project.

The writers, performers and artists contributing to the event are Alansary, Cah-44, Evelyn Conlon, Sue Cosgrave, Djeribi, Kit Fryatt, Judy Kravis and Sarah Lewtas. The event is co-ordinated and will be introduced by Christodoulos Makris. The venue is The Winding Stair Bookshop, 40 Lower Ormond Quay, Dublin 1, and start time is 7pm. Admission is free.

A new update on the Al-Mutanabbi Street project

Allowing for minor editorial interventions, the composition stage for my chapbook / artist's book Muses Walk has been completed. Sixteen new poems are, for better or for worse, written; I've also taken many photographs, some of which will contribute its visual element. I've now moved on to working out the design, before tackling production/printing issues.

In addition to being a response to the bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street (it was conceived as such, with the concept behind it discussed elsewhere) I view Muses Walk, which will be home-made and self-produced, as a sort of coda to Spitting Out the Mother Tongue - and the completion, at least for the time being, of my treatment of the conditions I grew up with and their implications. And though I'm only required to contribute three copies to the project (to be delivered by the end of March 2012) I intend to make 50 numbered copies of the book, with the rest made available for purchase at readings etc.

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I'm currently in the process of putting together a reading/event in Dublin to mark the 5th anniversary of the bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street, on 5 March. Time and venue are confirmed, as are most of the participants. I'll be posting more on this next month.

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Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, an anthology of texts responding to the bombing, will be published by PM Press in June. It's edited by Beau Beausoleil and Deema Shehabi, and is now available to pre-order from the publisher's website.

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Below is a video recording of a panel discussion on Al-Mutanabbi Street at Santa Cruz public library. It's introduced by Beau Beausoleil, who outlines quite comprehensively his reasons for initiating and curating these projects.

End of call for An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street

The Al-Mutanabbi Street coalition's call to book artists closed on 1 September. The project attracted an incredible 254 participants from around the world, far exceeding the curators' target of 130.

An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street is set to have its first full exhibition in early 2013 at Manchester's John Rylands (University) Library - an old haunt of mine.

Al-Mutanabbi Street project: an update

On joining An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street I had a clear idea of the concept for my contribution - though the details, especially in relation to the book's production, were (and are) still hazy. I made the initial assumption that a poetry chapbook would qualify as an artist's book without the need for visuals or special production techniques.

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The poem 'Muses Walk', included in my upcoming collection, is the product of an attempt to write a specific street in the centre of Nicosia as it stood at a (less) specific period of time. It's made of 16 lines, some as short as three words, others running to a second or third physical line on the page. The poem is an attempt to freeze space and time, and present Οδός Μουσών in a condition now long gone.

Οδός Μουσών is - or was - a street containing elements that I imagine, through pictures and verbal descriptions, Al-Mutanabbi Street to also contain. I was also struck by the idea that Al-Mutanabbi Street could be an ordinary street anywhere and at any time, but with a unique and extraordinary story. And of course Nicosia continues to be scarred by its own history of conflict.

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So for the project I proposed to make each line in 'Muses Walk' the title/starting point for a new poem, therefore producing a book of 16 poems, the "contents page" of which will simply be the original poem.

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Four months on I have begun expanding ten of those original 16 lines. I am keeping an open mind on the format each new poem might take: discursive or in note form, written in prose, made of found texts, employing words from languages other than English... And I haven't ruled out the possibility of adding photographs - perhaps in a manner not unlike the books of W. G. Sebald.

Writing "to order" like this is turning out to be bloody hard! Especially since I thought I had written all I had to write in the original poem. But it's also exhilarating and, now that the book is starting to find some shape, immensely satisfying. It's been put to me that what I am in essence doing is 'exploding' the original poem, with shrapnel of memory and language flying about in all directions, often crossing and lodging into each other at odd angles.

Baghdad, 5 March 2007 (Al-Mutanabbi Street) at the Imperial War Museum North, Manchester

Exhibition continues until 31 January 2012.

An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street

On 5 March 2007 a car bomb exploded on Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. More than 30 people were killed and 100 wounded.

Al-Mutanabbi Street is in a mixed Shia-Sunni area. It's the historic centre of Baghdad bookselling, with bookstores and outdoor stalls, cafés, stationery shops, tea and tobacco shops... It's been the heart of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community since the 13th century.

The Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition was formed as a response to the bombing, to honour the street by creating work that holds both "memory and future" - what was lost that day. To this end it devised and curated the Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadside Project, and completed its call to letterpress printers after reaching a goal of 130 broadsides from 130 individual printers. Thanks to the efforts of writer Evelyn Conlon, thirty of the resulting broadsides were recently exhibited in The Market House in Monaghan and the Central Library, ILAC Centre, Dublin.

Now the coalition is calling on book artists to work on An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street in order to "re-assemble" some of the "inventory" of the reading material that was lost in the bombing. The curators of the project are Beau Beausoleil of San Francisco's Overland Books and Sarah Bodman of the Centre for Fine Print Research, UWE Bristol.

I have joined An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street by making a commitment to produce and contribute an edition of three of a new chapbook of poems within one year (by end March 2012). One complete set of the 130 responses to the call will be donated to the Iraq National Library in Baghdad; the other two sets will be used in conjunction with shows of the broadsides as well as in shows of their own.

Participants in the project are not precluded from producing additional copies of their books to sell / exhibit / use however they wish. I haven't yet decided whether to do so, or to what extent. But I have settled on a concept for the book and began work on it. I'll be posting on its progress over the coming months.