#worldhomelessday workshop

This morning @c_makris led a writing workshop with 5th year students from St Joseph's School, Rush, in Rush library #worldhomelessday
— Fingal Co. Libraries (@fingallibraries) October 10, 2013

As part of the workshop students composed messages to a fictional runaway from popular culture, from various perspectives #shesleavinghome
— Fingal Co. Libraries (@fingallibraries) October 10, 2013

Some of these messages coming up... #worldhomelessday
— Fingal Co. Libraries (@fingallibraries) October 10, 2013

"I don’t know where you are or what you have done to yourself but I really miss you. Pls text me back when you get dis" #worldhomelessday
— Fingal Co. Libraries (@fingallibraries) October 10, 2013

"You’re probably scared to come back now because of what people are going to say to you" #shesleavinghome #worldhomelessday
— Fingal Co. Libraries (@fingallibraries) October 10, 2013

"Remember I’m your best friend so when your sad Im sad, when your happy Im happy but right now I’m going crazy" #worldhomelessday
— Fingal Co. Libraries (@fingallibraries) October 10, 2013

"You're going with him too how can I trust him. I barely even know him" #shesleavinghome #worldhomelessday
— Fingal Co. Libraries (@fingallibraries) October 10, 2013

"We’ll start again. We’ll be a better family. I’m hoping you’re following your dreams wherever you are" #shesleavinghome #worldhomelessday
— Fingal Co. Libraries (@fingallibraries) October 10, 2013

"It’s weird without you around, everything is duller, things just aren’t the same" #shesleavinghome #worldhomelessday
— Fingal Co. Libraries (@fingallibraries) October 10, 2013

"Since your gone Im taking your laptop thanks :)" #shesleavinghome #worldhomelessday
— Fingal Co. Libraries (@fingallibraries) October 10, 2013

"We see you don’t want to talk to us, just hope you will be ok" #shesleavinghome #worldhomelessday
— Fingal Co. Libraries (@fingallibraries) October 10, 2013

The Burning Bush 2 interview

In the lead up to its sixth issue, Burning Bush 2 has been running a series of short interviews with some of its previous contributors. Writers including Afric McGlinchey, Kevin Higgins, Kimberly Campanello and Dave Lordan have responded to a list of questions from BB2 editor Alan Jude Moore, with these interviews appearing on the magazine's website at a rate of two to three per week.

With one writer still to come, my own responses to these questions were published today.

Thomas Brezing's 'Carpet Man'

Almost Fit To Be Hugged, a short essay in which I discuss Thomas Brezing's ongoing performance-based 'Carpet Man' project, is in the July/August 2013 issue of the Visual Artists' News Sheet (VAN) published by Visual Artists Ireland. Carpet Man himself makes an appearance on the front cover.

Devised primarily as an information source for artists in Ireland, VAN is distributed free of charge to members of Visual Artists Ireland, and is also available from galleries and arts centres.

* [Update 2/10/13] Almost Fit To Be Hugged has now been archived on the VAI website.

Safe as Houses

My 10-minute poetry film Safe as Houses is now available to view on YouTube and on the Speaking Volumes Live Literature Productions website. My thanks to Sharmilla, Sarah and Nick of Speaking Volumes for releasing/hosting it.

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I wrote the poem 'Safe as Houses' in 2010. It's composed of four separate parts: part one provided the poem's core - and was first published on the streets of Dublin in February 2011 as part of the UpStart campaign; part two was written in the style of a letter to The Irish Times, adhering to the peculiar conventions of that page and exhibiting a typical admonitory/self-congratulatory tone; part three is made of a series of bullet points describing a cyclical building process; part four is a transcription, with minor alterations, of one side of an email conversation spanning a period of 18 months.

Last summer I came across an abandoned, dilapidated house in north county Dublin the state of which encapsulated so much of what the poem came out of and what it attempted to convey that it seemed almost indecent not to try and put the two together. At first I couldn't work out how. I returned to the house in September with artist Thomas Brezing wielding a video camera and we shot several scenes of me reading from my poems, including the entire 'Safe as Houses', in that setting. Then in January I enlisted the help of film editor Oliver Fallen to make something out of the footage - who on viewing it had several eye-opening suggestions to make. A week later Brezing and I went back to the house, the operation towards the making of a film (as opposed to a record of the reading of the poem in a specific setting) pretty much fully-planned in my mind in advance, and we re-shot the whole thing.

I wanted to avoid making the result polished in any way; I wanted to retain an amateurishness and an aesthetic roughness, and to allow an element of negligence in its making - all integral to what I was trying to convey. We used no backing sound track or a separate recording of my voice, and the bare minimum of post-production tricks.

The editing process was fascinating to be involved in: watching how the experienced eye of an editor and his knowledge of his tools and their capabilities (and limitations) impacts on the finished film was a hugely valuable lesson in composition. Marrying the visual element, which is Fallen's expertise, to my interest in language and to the overall concept, was crucial. I hope we made a film that traverses the sum of its individual parts.

Penduline Issue #9

Issue 9 of Penduline, an online literary and art magazine based in Portland, Oregon, was published earlier this month. Penduline #9 (Éire) was curated by Dave Lordan and co-edited with regular Penduline editor Bonnie Ditlevsen.

As the title suggests it presents contemporary writing from Ireland - but with a twist: the aim, as stated in Lordan's invitation to contribute, was to create an issue that "showcases the range of work happening in the grassroots scene(s) and at the experimental end of literature from Ireland." The result places emphasis on the spoken word/performance poetry scene - unsurprisingly, since this is where a shift from a monolithic understanding of what poetry, and literature in general, can do and how it can be received has been most evident here - and includes an audio selection of some of the regular performers on the scene produced by Kalle Ryan of The Brownbread Mixtape, one of Dublin's most popular variety show nights. There's also fiction, interviews, visual art and poetry - with some outstanding stuff from Kit Fryatt, John Kearns, Anamaría Crowe Serrano and Sarah Clancy.

The issue is well worth a read/view/listen in its entirety. An interview with Lordan offers an insight into his drive to showcase the work he has chosen to showcase. This is a curatorial/editorial achievement from Dave: despite persisting evidence of a reluctance to experiment with process and form, the issue manages to argue that there exists a living breathing kicking contemporary literature emerging from Ireland that's forward- (if not always outward-) looking, various, multiform, collaborative and cross-pollinating - and one that, in the main, avoids falling into crippling co-dependence. Whether this is a record of a moment that will ossify and pass, or whether it forms the beginning of a wider, more radical and long-term shift in attitudes and approaches, remains to be seen.

The piece I contributed, 'Public Announcement', is a series of poems based on various treatments of public announcements of all kinds: transcriptions or manipulations of overheard conversations, news items or opinion pieces, cut-ups of public notices, short found texts delivered as public or private conversations - ie via SMS or Twitter - across national borders etc. It includes my side of a 6-month collaboration with James Wilkes, commissioned by Steven Fowler for his Camarade series and first performed at the Rich Mix arts centre (London) in February.

Solidarity Park Poetry

Solidarity Park is a space created by poets for poets from all over the world in a show of solidarity with the Turkish people as they struggle to own what is theirs. Edited by Sascha Akhtar, Nia Davies & Sophie Mayer, and with Gonca Özmen as consulting editor, the space has in just a few days attracted contributions from several notable poets including Katerina Iliopoulou, John Kinsella and Damir Šodan.

It was important to me, for several reasons, to register solidarity with the people of Turkey and their efforts to reclaim public spaces and freedom of expression, so I offered 'Voice of The Polytechnic' from my book Spitting Out the Mother Tongue to the project. It refers to the Athens Student Uprising of November 1973. The 5th line, translating as "Here is The Polytechnic, Here is The Polytechnic" or "This is The Polytechnic, This is The Polytechnic" links to a short sound clip with those very words as broadcast by the occupied student radio station in 1973.

A Telmetale Bloomnibus: 18 Tales from Modern Dublin

To celebrate this year's Bloomsday, the Irish Writers’ Centre invited 18 contemporary writers to 'rewrite' Ulysses. Joyce once took inspiration from the texts of Homer, and now each of the 18 episodes or chapters from Ulysses is being transported by a different writer to modern Dublin.

From the title of an episode allocated by the centre, each writer/musician has produced an original piece of prose, dialogue, poetry or song to be performed in public next Friday 14 June. It was stipulated that the pieces could not be directly about Ulysses, The Odyssey or Joyce (though inspiration was allowed) and it had to be set in contemporary Dublin.

The lineup in order of appearance/episode is as follows: Pat Boran, Colm Keegan, Jane Clarke, Niamh Boyce, June Caldwell, Steven Clifford, Christodoulos Makris, Jude Shiels, Jack Harte, Maire T Robinson, Emer Martin, Niamh Parkinson, Deirdre Sullivan, Graham Tugwell, Alan Jude Moore, Oran Ryan, Doodle Kennelly and Nuala Ní Chonchuir.

As can be deduced from the above I was allocated the title of episode/chapter 7, Aeolus. In response I produced a prose-poem with title 'Metro Herald's Advertorial Wind Bags Let Loose, 28-31 May & 4-7 June 2013'.

Friday's performance starts at 7pm. Tickets are €8 (or €6 for IWC members) and can be booked from the event page on the centre's website. For those who cannot make it, publication of an e-book is also being planned.

Rain of Poems: the book

During the Poetry Parnassus festival at London's Southbank Centre a year ago, the Chilean art collective Casagrande dropped 100,000 poems printed on bookmarks out of a helicopter over Jubilee Gardens. The installation included several copies of my poem 'The Impressionists', printed both in English and in a Spanish translation by Marcelo Pellegrini.

Now Casagrande, in collaboration with a selection of Chilean cultural institutions and the Southbank Centre, have produced a book of the Rain of Poems which features the poems dropped over London.

Casagrande's slogan is "we don't sell, we don't buy," and their aim is to make of every one of their projects a gift to the community. The book, then, is a non-profit project, and will not be available for sale. It's to be given for free to the poets, publishers, organisations and cultural institutions involved; apart from commemorating the Rain of Poems in London, it will be used to explain Casagrande's poetry bombing/rain of poems concept for future collaborations.

There will, however, be a launch of the book as part of the London Literature Festival, next Wednesday 5 June 2013 at the foyer of the Southbank Centre (6.30pm start) with readings by some of the poets involved in the project.

About the project:

Bombing of Poems (renamed Rain of Poems for London) is a performance which consists of dropping one hundred thousand poems printed on bookmarks from an aircraft – a helicopter or plane – over cities bombed during military confrontations in the past. The bookmarks are released at twilight and printed in two languages, written by both Chilean writers and poets native to the location of the city. It has been held in London, UK (2012); Berlin, Germany (2010); Warsaw, Poland (2009); Guernica, Spain (2004); Dubrovnik, Croatia (2002); and Santiago, Chile (2001).

Each time the cargo of poems was released, every single bookmark was picked up by the crowd.

This performance creates an alternative image of the past and is a gesture of remembrance as well as being a metaphor for the survival of cities and people. 

contests, branding and the experimental ...

... are some of the subjects raised in my review of Keith Gaustad's chapbook High Art & Love Poems (Broken Bird Press, 2012) which appears in issue 4 of The Burning Bush 2.

The issue also includes new original work from Dave Lordan, John Sexton, Barbara Smith and many more.

Muses Walk gets recommendation

To celebrate being nominated by The Alliance for Independent Authors for their 'Top Website for Self-Publishers' award, Sabotage Reviews has selected for recommendation eight self-published works from the website's not inconsiderable archives. Alongside among others an artisan book from Kate Tempest and a chapbook with responses to the work of Ginsberg, I was very happy to see that Muses Walk was one of the publications recommended.

Thanks to editor Claire Trévien for her attention to the book. And congratulations to Sabotage Reviews - a vibrant, innovative and wholly necessary reviews journal.

Over half of all copies of Muses Walk have now gone. Some are still available for 8 Euro. As the number of remaining copies diminishes, the price will go up...

can can #4 (the 'from' issue)

Issue 4 of Wurm im Apfel's poezine can can is entirely composed of poems, sequences and - naturally - extracts with titles beginning with the word "from." A strong issue, it includes work by, among others, Sabne Raznik, Christine Murray, Theodoros Chiotis, derek beaulieu, Dave Lordan and Séamas Cain.

Also included is my poem or sequence or (if you like) piece of conceptual nonsense 'From Something to Nothing'. Taking as reference Francis Alÿs' instructions behind one of his actions/performances (Procure yourself a 100 US dollar note, go the the nearest Exchange, change it into Mexican pesos, change it again into US dollars, change it again into Mexican pesos, change it again into US dollars, and so forth, until you are left with nothing) the poem is a record of each of the 29 stages in the process of running the 'about' text from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) website through Google Translate in a sequence of seven European languages, back and forth four times, beginning and ending with English.

can can #4 is now sold out.

Neon Highway, issue 22

Neon Highway is a biannual magazine of poetry and art based in Liverpool that aims to publish "more alternative work by artists and poets, particularly the visionary, experimental pulp and sci-fi." According to the records of the Poetry Library in London, issue 22 of Neon Highway was published earlier this year and probably includes my Oulipian poem 'Scales'.

I say probably because, initially, I was notified that this poem "may" be included. Then I was told that indeed it would be, and was asked for an address for my contributor's copy - which regrettably hasn't arrived. In any case, my name appears on the list of contributors to this issue as received by the Poetry Library in May.

Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot

Edited by Mark Burnhope, Sarah Crewe and Sophie Mayer, and with an introduction by George Szirtes, Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot is an anthology published in e-book and PDF versions by English PEN today, 1 October 2012 - thus marking the hearing of the three Pussy Riot members' appeal against their prison sentence. I am one of 110 poets contributing to this resonant collection, a full Russian translation of which is being sent to Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.

Though publication is free, the anthology is distributed on the Pay-What-You-Think-It's-Worth model. Please consider donating what you can afford. Proceeds go to the Pussy Riot legal fund and the English PEN Writers at Risk programme.

On being asked to contribute, initially, to a portfolio of poems to be sent to the three women in prison, I decided to offer 'Sleepwalker on Stage' from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue. I like to think that the poem lends itself to multiple readings, and though it was written out of a different set of concerns it immediately suggested itself to me as a valid contribution. The meaning and implications of the Punk Prayer have been constantly on my mind since the women's detainment, and this poem strives towards capturing the confusion that greets potentially transformative acts such as the Punk Prayer, followed by the awakening of a spirit that drives change, and a re-alignment of attitudes. I declined a temptation to adapt it to reflect issues of gender, even though gender is clearly embedded into the protest and the collective Pussy Riot in general.

Read Sophie Mayer's note in The Guardian of last Saturday, and listen to Sarah Hesketh's account of the project on BBC Radio Ulster.

And please download the anthology, share news of its publication, and add your own voice in any way possible to help FREE PUSSY RIOT!

'The Impressionists' into Spanish and on video

Having been dropped along with tens of thousands of others from a helicopter onto London's Jubilee Gardens about two months ago, one of the bookmarks with my poem 'The Impressionists' flew through my letterbox last week. It was great to get it - and to read its translation into Spanish done specifically for the Rain of Poems installation by Marcelo Pellegrini. Here's a rough image of it:

And here's a video of me reading the original poem, made at the Poetry Library one rough morning during Poetry Parnassus:

The World Record anthology

Published by Bloodaxe, The World Record is an anthology featuring one poem by each of the poets who were selected to participate in Poetry Parnassus. Entries are arranged alphabetically by country; the biographical notes following the main body of the book are also arranged by country, while an index allows the reader to search by poet (sur)name. There's also an introductory note by Simon Armitage, and a preface by anthology co-editor and festival organiser Anna Selby. Apart from its obvious function as a reference publication, the book also serves as a valuable memento for those who have attended what has been a unique and vibrant gathering of poets.

My contribution to The World Record is 'The Impressionists'. It's taken from the-now-totally-sold-out Round the Clock, and was first published in Succour's issue 6 (The Future).

An interactive map through which you can 'visit' each country and read its representative's featured poem is available on The Guardian website.

Poetry Parnassus: Rain of Poems

Rain of Poems
Jubilee Gardens, Tuesday 26 June 2012, 9:00pm

(Rain of Poems is planned to take place on either Tuesday 26, Wednesday 27 or Thursday 28 June depending on weather conditions - please check the website and Southbank Centre/Casagrande social media at the time.)

Watch 100,000 poems by over 300 contemporary poets from 204 countries fall from a helicopter over Jubilee Garden during Poetry Parnassus as the sun sets.

The performance, carried out by the Chilean arts collective, Casagrande in collaboration with Southbank Centre, is set to be one of the most visually stunning displays of aeronautical poetry ever seen.

Rain of Poems over London is the sixth performance of its kind which sees poetry raining down on cities that have suffered air raids in the past.

It has been held in Berlin, Germany, Warsaw, Poland, Guernica, Spain, Dubrovnik, Croatia, and Santiago, Chile.

The bookmarks are released at twilight and printed in two languages, written by both Chilean writers and writers involved in Poetry Parnassus. This performance has a symbolic value that serves to create an alternative image of the past and is a gesture of remembrance but also a metaphor for the survival of cities and people.

The Stinging Fly issue 22/vol 2 (Summer 2012)

Guest editors can charge magazines with an energy and relevance they had hitherto only potentially or theoretically possessed - and this could not be better illustrated than with this latest issue of The Stinging Fly, edited by Dave Lordan. The Stinging Fly has established a reputation as the "go-to" place for those in Ireland looking for new and exciting writing, but when it comes to poetry it has fallen a little short of doing something truly remarkable or breaking the mould. With this issue, Lordan, a singular presence in Ireland's contemporary poetry scene, has sought to rectify this - while his notes on its editing articulate refreshing views on writing, editing and criticism.

I'm happy he has chosen to include my poem 'The Executioner's Confession' in his issue. Also included is work by several poets who for me have stood out over the last few years, among them Kimberly Campanello, Kit Fryatt, Dylan Harris, Ronan Murphy and Anamaría Crowe Serrano. There are also some names unknown to me, whose work I look forward to getting to know.

You can buy a copy of issue 22 (vol 2), which also includes critical prose and fiction, as well as back issues or a subscription, directly from the magazine's website.

The challenge for Declan Meade, publisher and managing editor of The Stinging Fly, is to sustain the level of vitality imbued into his magazine by Lordan's guest editorship.

Interview for Poetry Parnassus

In advance of Poetry Parnassus I am being interviewed for the festival website by S J Fowler.

Our conversation builds on a previous interview Steven conducted with me for 3:AM Magazine's 'Maintenant' series on contemporary European poets, originally published on 2 January 2011 - and coincidentally republished just this week on the Poetry International blog as part of that organisation's effort to bring the whole series and the poets featured in it to a wider audience.

Features in Φιλελεύθερος and Cyprus Mail newspapers

A double-spread feature on my work by arts writer Elena Parpa appeared in the culture supplement of Sunday's (20 May) edition of Φιλελεύθερος - in terms of circulation Cyprus' largest broadsheet newspaper. With a title loosely translated as 'The Audacity of Poetry' and gleaned in the main out of a long conversation Elena and I had last week, it's a considered and well-researched piece, taking in my writing origins and concerns, my activities and inclinations, and much else, without falling back on cliché or easy conclusions. Our conversation took place in English, but she rendered what we talked about expertly in Greek. It can be viewed online in two separate parts (pages 24 and 25).

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Also, last Tuesday 15 May - on the morning of my reading at the Home for Cooperation in Nicosia - the Cyprus Mail, the island's main English-language daily paper, published a piece on my work and upcoming participation in Poetry Parnassus. Though welcome, this is (in contrast) a heavily edited transcription of responses I gave to a series of questions they submitted - omitting most of the juicier stuff and inevitably distorting emphasis and meaning.

The Burning Bush 2, Issue 2

The Burning Bush 2 is an online 'revival' of the original Burning Bush magazine, which was published in print from Galway between 1999 and 2004. I remember coming across a couple of issues just before it ceased publication and being impressed by what I saw as an outward-looking, experimentalist ethos and underlying radical dimension - a refreshing approach in a conservative Irish poetry scene.

TBB2, edited from Dublin by Alan Jude Moore, aims like its predecessor to publish work from a mix of new and established writers while operating under new publishing and social conditions. It therefore represents both a revival of and a break from the original magazine.

Issue 2, published last week and available both as a download and on the magazine's website, includes two new poems of mine. There's also excellent work from, among others, Kimberly Campanello and co-founder and editor of the original magazine, Michael S Begnal.