gorse No. 4

Issue 4 of gorse is now out and available to buy directly from the website, where you can also purchase a subscription, or from selected bookshops. I'm proud and excited to be publishing in it new poetry from Philip Terry, Robert Herbert McClean, Kimberly Campanello and Patrick Chapman.

Philip Terry contributes a long prose poem with title 'Bird Notes'; Robert Herbert McClean's 'Excerpt from Pangs!' is six extracts from his eponymous debut collection just out from Test Centre; Kimberly Campanello's three visual poems are taken from MOTHERBABYHOME forthcoming from zimZalla in 2016; and Patrick Chapman's 14-part sequence 'The Film of My Death' channels Alfred Hitchcock and Paris - his seventh book of poetry Slow Clocks of Decay is due out from Salmon next year.

gorse No. 4 also features fiction by Adrian Duncan, Paul Kavanagh, Thomas McNally, Hugh Fulham-McQuillan, Ian Parkinson, Pierre Senges (in translation by Jacob Siefring), and Jona Xhepa; essays by Alice Butler, Daniella Cascella, Dominique Cleary, Orla Fitzpatrick, Christopher Higgs, Barry Sheils, Suzanne Walsh and Adrian Nathan West; and two interviews: Luis Chitarroni by Andrew Gallix, and Lee Rourke by Liam Jones. Susan Tomaselli's editorial, 'Wonder is Really Nothing', takes Alice in Wonderland and dream-writing as its starting point and follows it down the rabbit hole to find Joyce, Duchamp, Burroughs & Gysin, Švankmajer, Hitchcock and much more. The cover design, as ever, is from Niall McCormack. The first 150 copies are individually numbered.

We will be celebrating the launch of gorse No. 4 at The Liquor Rooms, Wellington Quay, Dublin 2, at 7pm on Wednesday 21 October 2015, with readings from the issue by Dominque Cleary, Orla Fitzpatrick, Suzanne Walsh, Jona Xhepa & more, plus music by Gar Cox. Join us.

psí víno magazine

My long poem 'Prime Time' from The Architecture of Chance was published in issue 72 of Prague's psí víno magazine, in a Czech translation by David Koranda.

psí víno is a quarterly journal of poetry and criticism founded in 1997. Its current editors "strive to confront Czech literary scene with the current trends from abroad (especially from the English speaking countries, Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, and Scandinavia), and to give voice to the contemporary phenomena at the edges of literature (experimental literature, digital literature, uncreative writing, text art etc)."

'Prime Time' is the record of my live transcription of all advertising broadcast on Ireland's state TV channel RTÉ1 on Friday 28 February 2014 between 6pm and 11pm. David translated the resulting text into Czech, and performed it with me at the Prague Microfestival in May.

A taster of the issue - also featuring work by Petr Borkovec, Frank Smith, Juliana Spahr and Rike Scheffler, as well as Charles Reznikoff, among others - is available on ISSUU.

Ways of Writing: essay in Trumpet 4

My essay encompassing a discussion of the cross-stream: ways of writing project within a larger discussion of my curatorial activities and compositional interests appears in the latest issue of Trumpet, Poetry Ireland's quarterly pamphlet of poetry, reviews and essays. Future issues of Trumpet will include articles by poets who participated in cross-stream based on their presentations for the project.

My thanks to Poetry Ireland's Paul Lenehan for his interest. Issue 4 of Trumpet also features reviews of new books by Dylan Brennan, Angela Carr and Victoria Kennefick among others, as well as poems by Kim Moore, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh and more.

Trumpet costs €2.00 per issue and is available individually from bookshops or directly from Poetry Ireland through subscription.

Interview on The Literateur

In advance of my participation in Prague Microfestival 2015 later this month (details soon) I was interviewed by Martin Šinal for The Literateur.

The Literateur is "an online literary magazine featuring interviews with luminaries of the literary world, articles, reviews and exciting new creative works." Previous interview subjects include Eimear McBride & Lee Rourke, Rachel Kushner, Deborah Levy, Keston Sutherland and Zadie Smith among others.

Martin's well-researched and probing questions allowed me to expand on many aspects of my practice, and elicited my thoughts on various subjects including conceptualism, intermedia and translocal writing, and the function of contemporary poetry.

launch party: The Architecture of Chance

Wurm Press

is delighted to mark the publication of

The Architecture of Chance

by

Christodoulos Makris

with a launch party

on Wednesday 8th April 2015

at

The Black Sheep

(downstairs function room)

61 Capel St, Dublin 1

from 6.30pm

launch speech by Maurice Scully

music from i am niamh

poetry happenings

discounted books

nibbles

ALL WELCOME

gorse No. 3

Issue 3 of gorse, edited by Susan Tomaselli [my editorial contribution begins from No. 4, due out in September] and with cover art once again by Niall McCormack, is now out. Copies can be ordered directly, while the journal is also available through selected bookshops.

The issue will be launched on Wednesday 15 April at The Workman's Club (The Vintage Room), 18 Wellington Quay, Dublin 2, with readings from Cal Doyle, Darragh McCausland, Paula McGrath and Michael Naghten Shanks.

Below is the full list of contents - with links to selected previews:


[Editorial]
Whale in the Moon When It’s Clear

[Interview]
‘At Home in the Unheimlich,’ Deborah Levy by Andrew Gallix

[Essays]
‘Initiations: On Grisey’s Music’ by Liam Cagney
‘A Writer’s Guide to the Dialectical Landscapes of Dublin’ by Therese Cox
‘Four Bridges/Four Exercises in Re-Construction’ by Adrian Duncan
‘A Fine House, The Irish Their Bungalows’ by Oliver Farry
‘Stasis’ by Ian Maleney
‘The Cardinal & the Corpse, A Flanntasy in Several Parts’ by Pádraig Ó Meálóid
‘Father of the Man, Terence Davies’ Trilogy‘ by Bobby Seal
‘The Eye & the Word’ by Joanna Walsh

[Fiction]
‘ten thousand tiny spots’ by Sheila Armstrong
‘April Truth’ by Ilya Zverev, translated by Anna Aslanyan
‘The Belly of the Whale, A Captain Ruggles Novelette’ by Adam Biles
‘Limbed’ by David Hayden
‘Medicine’ by Darragh McCausland
‘Selfie’ by Paula McGrath

[Poetry]
‘Two Poems’ by Thomas Bernhard, Friedrich Hölderlin, translated by Will Stone
‘Subcritical Tests’ by Ailbhe Darcy & S.J. Fowler
‘Three Poems’ by Cal Doyle
‘Five Poems’ by Michael Naghten Shanks
‘Five Poems’ by Georg Trakl, translated by Will Stone

The Architecture of Chance

My new book The Architecture of Chance is now out from Wurm Press:

Christodoulos Makris’ second full collection, blends painstaking poetic craft with the accidental hazards of found text and overheard sample. As challenging as it is accessible, these poems comment wittily yet unsparingly on the cultural, economic and political textures of twenty-first century life.

"A forerunner, in Irish poetry and Irish poetry publishing."

- Harry Clifton, The Irish Times

"We can distinguish two types of cityscape: those which are formed deliberately, and others which develop unintentionally. The former derive from the artistic will that is realised in squares, vistas, arrangements of buildings, and effects of perspective which Baedeker generally illuminates with a star. The latter on the other hand come into being without having been planned in advance. They are not compositions like Pariser Platz or La Concorde which owe their existence to a single architectural conception, rather they are creations of chance, which cannot be accounted for. Wherever a mass of stone and lines of streets, whose components result from completely different interests, come together, there you will find this kind of cityscape, which has never been the focus of any interest as such. It is no more designed than nature itself, and resembles a landscape in that it asserts itself unconsciously. Without a thought for how it appears, it slumbers through time."

- Siegfried Kracauer, Seen from the Window (Aus den Fenster Gesehen), trans. Lyn Marven

Centrifugal at Trinity College Dublin

The Trinity Journal of Literary Translation, in association with The Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin and the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association, present the Dublin launch of Centrifugal: Contemporary Poetry from Dublin and Guadalajara - a bilingual anthology of reciprocal translations / re-interpretations / versions of the work of 7 pairs of poets from the two cities. The book is published by Mexico's EBL-Cielo Abierto publishing house in conjunction with CONACULTA, Mexico's National Council for Culture and the Arts, and is co-edited by Ángel Ortuño (Guadalajara) and Christodoulos Makris (Dublin).

Introduced by Christodoulos Makris, and also featuring contributions from Alan Jude Moore, Anamaría Crowe Serrano, Catherine Walsh, John Kearns and Kit Fryatt, the event will include readings from the anthology alongside discussions on the range of approaches employed in rendering the work of each partner poet into English.

Tuesday 10 February 2015, 6.30pm in The Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2.

*

Centrifugal was officially launched on 1 December 2014 at the Guadalajara International Book Fair in Mexico.

Launching Centrifugal at FIL Guadalajara with Ángel Ortuño and EBL-Cielo Abierto editorial director Rocío Cerón.

Belleville Park Pages No. 30

Belleville Park Pages is a publication printed on paper every two weeks, while also publishing various online pieces each month. Edited from London and Paris by James Bird and Will Cox, and currently stocked in 29 bookshops in 9 countries (including Books Upstairs and The Winding Stair in Dublin - as well as Foyles in London, Shakespeare & Co in Paris and City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco among others) each print issue is a hand-folded and hand-packaged creamy A3 broadsheet.

Page 30, published last week, includes my poem 'Consequences'. My thanks to Will for seeking it out for publication.

(There are actually four different editions of No. 30, each with a different festive recipe amongst the poetry and short stories from guest chefs from restaurants in Oslo, kitchens in London and home pantries in Ludlow.)

You can buy individual copies of Belleville Park Pages at £3.00, or take out a subscription.

Colony issue 3

Issue 3 of online journal Colony, published last month, focuses on the theme of Magic and includes my piece 'Heaney after Rauschenberg'. My thanks to poetry editor Kimberly Campanello for featuring it within what is a strong poetry section, also including excellent work by Paul Casey, Aodán McCardle, Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Ryan Van Winkle.

'Heaney after Rauschenberg' is a piece of erasure, which reduces Seamus Heaney's collection Death of a Naturalist to its four-letter words, in order of their appearance in the text.

Here's Robert Rauschenberg talking about his 1953 work 'Erased de Kooning Drawing':

Centrifugal: Contemporary Poetry from Dublin and Guadalajara

I'm thrilled to announce publication of Centrifugal: Contemporary Poetry from Dublin and Guadalajara, a bilingual anthology of reciprocal translations / re-interpretations / versions of the work of 7 pairs of poets from the two cities. Co-edited by Ángel Ortuño and myself, the book is published by Mexico's EBL-Cielo Abierto publishing house in conjunction with Conaculta, Mexico's National Council for Culture and the Arts.


7 poets from Dublin and 7 from Guadalajara exchange selections of their work in pairs and render the work of their partner poet in the opposite language. The emphasis is on re-interpretation rather than traditional translation: the poems become new in the hands of the partner poet while bearing the poetic core of the original.

Centrifugal investigates the multiple possibilities of meaning released through the transfer of texts between languages. The poets' responses range from rewrites to deliberate mistranslations to dialogues with the originals to entirely new poems. Some make use of a near native-level knowledge of the opposite language, and some require literal translations of the source texts; others resort to dictionaries, web searches or Google Translate.

The writing presented in Centrifugal "strays from the centre, away from the main stream of how poetry and translation are expected to behave". In addition to providing a record of the work of some of the outstanding poets currently writing in the two cities, this book stands as a significant contribution to the exploration of the relationships between language, geography, identity and poetry.

Featuring:

Alan Jude Moore & Xitlálitil Rodríguez
Anamaría Crowe Serrano & Mónica Nepote
Catherine Walsh & Laura Solórzano
Christodoulos Makris & Luis Eduardo García
John Kearns & José Eugenio Sánchez
Kimberly Campanello & Ángel Ortuño
Kit Fryatt & Ricardo Castillo

*

Centrifugal is being launched by Ángel Ortuño, EBL-Cielo Abierto editorial director Rocío Cerón, and myself at the Guadalajara Book Fair next Monday, 1 December, at 7.30pm. The Guadalajara Book Fair is the premier annual meeting event of the Spanish-language publishing world, with over 750,000 visitors.

gorse no. 2

The second issue of gorse, a wonderful print journal of literature edited in Dublin by Susan Tomaselli, was published last week and includes a new long poem of mine.

gorse publishes high quality work in the form of essays, fiction, interviews, poetry, variations of these and much else. It's distinguished by top production values with beautiful cover art, extended knowledge of and interest in a diversity of writing traditions and movements, an experimentalist thrust, cosmopolitanism and wit combined with seriousness of attention, and an interrogative outlook - a confluence of dimensions generally lacking from other Ireland-based journals.

Issue 2 also includes work by Claire-Louise Bennett, Matthew Jakubowski, Rob Doyle, Colm O'Shea, SJ Fowler, Dylan Brennan and Lies Van Gasse among others.

My poem has title 'Civilisation's Golden Dawn: A Slide Show' and is composed out of specifically-written captions to old family photos of trips to Greece, with fragments from official publications about the country and various references to recent political events, accounts of which are typically delivered through online/social media, interspersed among them. Two of the 'entries' are translations of the transcript of a public, multiphobic rant by an MP from the far-right party Golden Dawn as provided by separate online translation engines.

Apart from purchasing individual copies or taking out a standard subscription, there are several additional ways of supporting gorse: please do so if you can.

essay on Jacket2

An essay I've been making notes towards for the best part of two years has now seen the light of day courtesy of Jacket2, the online journal of contemporary poetry and poetics associated with PennSound and the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Titled 'Monoculture beer no more: other poetries from Ireland', it aims to offer an interrogation of the territorial concerns of the vast majority of the poetry coming out of Ireland, and a discussion of emerging avant-garde tendencies brought about by political discontent and driven by poets and editors/curators straddling linguistic & national divisions.

I like to think that the effect of the article having been written over a period of time is akin to that of long-exposure photography: in addition to capturing individual items it also records time. In it I discuss, link to and/or quote from the work of (among others) Catherine Walsh, Anamaría Crowe Serrano, Dylan Harris, Kit Fryatt and Susan Connolly.

I'm excited & proud to be joining the list of contributors to Jacket2. Thanks in particular to Julia Bloch for her editorial attention and support.

Chances Are on 3:AM Magazine

My mass collaboration poem 'Chances Are' is now live on 3:AM Magazine.

very proud to publish @c_makris brilliant "Chances Are" on @3ammagazine a truly inventive conceptual widgettweet poem http://t.co/9DwR1gsqLO
— Steven J Fowler (@stevenjfowler) August 9, 2014

"... it involves embedding the HTML code for a Twitter widget bringing up a feed with all tweets that include the word "chance". I have the code - the idea is to present it as it is as a 'conventional' poem in the new book, along with instructions to go to a specific web page for an online application of it. There's currently around 100 tweets per minute feeding through, so the poem gets constantly updated, and fast, by everybody/anybody (knowingly or not) and is in effect never the same twice."

Dublin-Guadalajara poetry exchange

I'm really excited to be involved as the Dublin curator/editor of this project - part of a series of city-to-city collaborative poetry projects headed by Mexico's EBL-Cielo Abierto publishing house - as well as participating poet: at the end of last year 7 poets from Dublin were partnered with 7 from Guadalajara to exchange selections of their work and render the work of their collaborator into their language, be it English or Spanish. A resulting anthology, Centrifugal: Contemporary Poetry from Dublin and Guadalajara, is due out in September from EBL-Cielo Abierto as a dual-language volume, with support from Mexico's National Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA). There are unconfirmed plans for public presentations of the book in both cities.

The poet pairings are as follows:

Alan Jude Moore & Xitlálitil Rodríguez
Anamaría Crowe Serrano & Mónica Nepote
Catherine Walsh & Laura Solórzano
Christodoulos Makris & Luis Eduardo García
John Kearns & José Eugenio Sánchez
Kimberly Campanello & Ángel Ortuño
Kit Fryatt & Ricardo Castillo

In initiating the project (whose Guadalajara curator is Ángel Ortuño) last summer, our interest lay in collaboration and experimentation, and in challenging what is understood by the term 'translation'. The emphasis is on re-interpretation rather than traditional translation: the poems were to become new in the hands of the partner poet while continuing to bear the poetic core of the original.

My versions of five poems by Luis Eduardo García are a fusion of translation and re-interpretation, riddled with misunderstandings and errors. What excited me most about this project, in addition to the cross-national and -language collaborative element, was the chance to encourage and present the differing approaches to this process that each participant chooses or is forced to adopt. Having seen the original pieces - which include 'untranslatable' material as well as some already in the opposite language - and some of the reinterpretations/versions/responses, I'm happy to report that the project's experimentally-minded premise is yielding some amazing results.

Keep watching this space for more on publication details & launch dates.

Poezija Magazine

A little over a year ago I received a request for permission to have some poems from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue translated into Croatian, which I happily granted. These poems are to be included in an anthology of contemporary European poetry to be published in Zagreb (Croatian Writers Society) in celebration of Croatia's recent entry to the EU.

I'm grateful to the redoubtable Damir Šodan for selecting my work for the anthology, and for having a go at translating my poems - I remember him suggesting to me after a reading that he could hear them very clearly in Croatian. And it's great to be joining the likes of Raymond Carver, Allen Ginsberg and Leonard Cohen in having work rendered into Croatian by Damir!

Part of a taster for this ambitious anthology - which features some really exciting young/younger poets hailing from Europe (Elisa Biagini, Valzhyna Mort, Ilya Kaminsky) alongside one or two luminaries (Tranströmer, Zagajewski, Armitage) and is due to appear in the coming months - Damir's translation of my poem 'Mötley Crüe' appears in the June 2013 issue of Poezija magazine.

Colony Issue 1

Colony is one of a flurry of recently-established Ireland-based journals interested in a break from a traditional-institutional understanding of literature (or at least, as Colony's first editorial statement puts it, in an area of "healthy tension" between the traditional and the avant garde). A group of exciting writers and artists make up its editorial team. It's to appear online three times a year, with a fourth, print issue including the best of the online material plus new work set to be published annually.

Colony's inaugural issue presents work that "exemplifies [a] spirit of playfulness, glee, and anarchic invention" by "some of the best writers and most gifted artists and thinkers in Ireland (and beyond)." I'm delighted to be contributing two poems to it: 'xxxxx' and '16 X 16' are concerned with ideas of appropriation, re-framing, constraint and process, while extending a sideways glance at the issue's theme of Counterfeits/Fakes/Hoaxes. My thanks to poetry editor Kimberly Campanello for taking a chance on them. And also for embedding into the issue the sound file of my speaking of '16 X 16'.

Across its various sections, Colony's inaugural issue also features Billy Ramsell, Giles Goodland, Dimitra Xidous, Mia Gallagher, Raymond Deane, Dave Lordan, Kit Fryatt, Robert Sheppard, Alan Titley and Bernard Clarke among several others. Well worth a read, watch & listen in its tumultuous entirety, and a very welcome addition to Ireland's artistic/literary scene.

The Ash Wednesday series: How to Speak Poetry

The Ash Wednesday Poetry Series is part of the Ash Sessions initiative, a poetry and music showcase (named after a Leonard Cohen quote) curated by Dimitra Xidous and taking place at Nick's Coffee Company in Dublin's Ranelagh village. This year the series examines "the line, real or perceived, between the page and the stage, the written and the spoken, and how and where these two worlds collide (and whether or not they are best conceived as two worlds at all)." Taking its cue from Cohen’s ‘How to Speak Poetry' (from his book Death of a Lady's Man) the series will feature the work of 8 poets and their thoughts on Cohen’s positions on speaking poetry.

The series began on Wednesday 8 January. Each week it showcases the work of one featured poet on the chalkboard at Nick’s Coffee Company. In addition, the 'How to Speak Poetry' series blog includes a small interview with each poet, as well as a soundcloud link of a performance of the poem showcased in the series.

My contribution to the discussion went live yesterday, 29 January, featuring the poem '16 X 16', spoken below:



The (excellent) line up in full is as follows:

8 January – Doireann Ní Ghríofa
15 January – Stephen Murray
22 January – Elaine Feeney
29 January – Christodoulos Makris
5 February – Sarah Clancy
12 February – Billy Ramsell
19 February – Máighréad Medbh
26 February – Dave Lordan

A reading on Wednesday 5 March 2014 - Ash Wednesday, I'm reliably informed - at the Ranelagh Arts Centre will celebrate and conclude the series. Details closer to the time.

New Planet Cabaret

Edited by Dave Lordan and published by New Island in association with RTÉ, New Planet Cabaret is an anthology of new writing prompted by an on-air creative writing course co-ordinated by Lordan that ran on RTÉ Radio's arts programme 'Arena' between December 2012 and June 2013. The anthology includes the best of the entries out of its series of competitions along with work from a number of specially-commissioned writers, intermixed and broken down into thematic sections. New Planet Cabaret attempts, in Dave's words, to "bring to print and to radio an anthology in the explicitly cross-genre or even Trans-spirit of the generation of collaborators, hybridisers, experimenters, and mutual inspirers I’m so happy and proud to be a part of".

The list of writers featured in the anthology includes Colm Keegan, Kevin Higgins, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, Billy Ramsell, Sarah Clancy, Dimitra Xidous, Jennifer Matthews, Jinx Lennon, Sarah Griffin, Raven, Paul Casey, Abby Oliveira, Kit Fryatt, Máighréad Medbh, Elaine Feeney, Temper-Mental MissElayneous and Karl Parkinson among many others.

My poem 'Daddy, Why did you Call me Bastard?', composed out of fragments overheard over a single day in 2010 around Dublin city, appears in the section with title 'Sluminosity'.

New Planet Cabaret will be launched on Friday 22 November at the Gutter Bookshop, Cow's Lane in Dublin's Temple Bar. The launch will be broadcast on RTÉ radio as a full 'Arena' programme from 7pm to 8pm.

All proceeds from the sale of New Planet Cabaret go to the Writers In Schools project which supports young writers.

VLAK 4

VLAK is an enormous journal that acts as an international curatorial project with a broad focus on contemporary poetics, art, film, philosophy, music, science, design, politics, performance, ecology, and new media. Its global-local environment is defined by intersections, hybrids, transversals: realities that are contested, interactual and always in the process of taking new forms. It stands for the drive to experiment, to synthesise, to extend - holding to the principle that a vital culture is always experimental and thus always "at a crossroads."

Issue 4 of VLAK, a 440-page volume edited by Louis Armand, David Vichnar, Edmund Berrigan, Ali Alizadeh, Steven J. Fowler, Jane Lewty, Stephen Mooney, Olga Pekova, Jeroen Nieuwland and Ewelina Chiu, was published last month. It features some fantastic work from a vast array of international artists and writers including Vanessa Place, Alice Notley, John Kinsella, Sean Bonney, Steve Dalachinsky, Philip Terry, Emily Critchley, Harry Gilonis, Ondřej Buddeus, Jennifer K Dick and many more.

It also features my poem 'Dream with Jeff Koons and La Cicciolina'.

VLAK 4 is well worth a space in your library. It's available for €8.00 plus postage from Litteraria Pragensia (Prague, London, New York, Melbourne, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam).