A note on: A performance for Jerome Rothenberg

What an immense pleasure this was. To have the chance to celebrate Jerome Rothenberg, his influence on me, and on so many people, it was a beautiful night all told. 

The event was held at Birkbeck College, London, hosted by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc) on October 17th 2016. Organised by the centre's director, Dr. Steve Willey.

For my performance I carefully selected poems taken from Rothenberg's 1974 collection Poland/1931 and 1978 collection Seneca Journal and after much deliberation, I interspersed them with my own poems that responded / related to these works as influences. In the live performance, the poems were glued to paper to form two long poems, and then illustrated. Then for the last few minutes, wonderfully, Jerome joined me in the painting.

I had the pleasure to then spend a day with Jerome and his wife Diane in London and really feel inspired and humbled by their extraordinary lifetime of travelling, writing and following a path any of us would be lucky to follow. 

A note on: Reading with Jerome Rothenberg in London at Birkbeck College

The Technicians of the Sacred to Barbaric Vast & Wild: celebrating the work of Jerome Rothenberg
Monday 17th October, Birkbeck College : Room B34, Malet St Campus, London WC1E 7HX
Free Entrance : 7:30pm

A great privilege to be reading alongside one of the greats of world poetry, Jerome Rothenberg. An enormous influence on countless poets, his impact on how we conceive of poetry since WWII is unbridled. During this reading Rothenberg will present a series of poems termed 'variations' and 'auto-variations' demonstrating the connections between his work as an anthologist and a poet, while I will read from his works and those of my own which his have influenced.

The event is hosted by Steve Willey of the Contemporary Research Poetics Centre, Birkbeck College, and for further details email s.willey@bbk.ac.uk or visit the event facebook page.

Prior to the reading, from 6pm - 7.20pm there will be a seminar presentation and discussion in the same location. Jerome Rothenberg will present a review of his work as an anthologist from Technicians of the Sacred (1968) to his most recent anthology Barbaric Vast & Wild: Poems for the Millennium Volume Five (2015). This will be followed by an open discussion centred around ethnopoetics and what Rothenberg calls 'omnipoetics' with a particular focus on questions of translation. A rare opportunity in London, also free to attend.

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally celebrated poet, translator, anthologist, and performer with over ninety books of poetry and twelve assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin (traditional American Indian poetry), Exiled in the Word (a.k.a. A Big Jewish Book), and, with Pierre Joris and Jeffrey Robinson, Poems for the Millennium, volumes 1-3. He was a founding figure of ethnopoetics as a combination of poetic practice and theory, and he has been a longtime practitioner and theorist of poetry performance. His most recent big books are Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader (2013) and Barbaric Vast & Wild: Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Preset (volume 5 of Poems for the Millennium, 2015). A new book of poems, A Field on Mars: Poems 2000-2015, has just appeared in separate English and French editions. http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.co.uk/

Kiwi avant gardist Iain Britton in the UK

Im really happy to say that the wonderful, groundbreaking Kiwi poet Iain Britton, whom Ive had the honour of publishing at 3am, and whose works have graced many of the avant garde presses that have also featured my own, is giving a long overdue reading in London next month. It takes place at Birkbeck college, details here http://www.nzstudies.com/event/poetry-reading-iain-britton-friday-14-march-2014/ He will also read 5 days before at the Albion beatnik in Oxford, with the excellent Nikolai Duffy. Really worth taking the time to see someone doing the important work on the other side of the world, a brother to our endeavours. 
  • The Albion Beatnik Bookstore, 34 Walton St, Oxford, OX2 6AA. Sunday 9 March, 5 PM. With Nikolai Duffy.
  • Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, room MAL 151. Main building, entrance from Torrington Square. 14th March, 6 PM. Poster here.

Will Alexander reading at Birkbeck, London - Dec 2nd

Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre is delighted to welcome Will Alexander. A rare chance to hear him read in London. Monday 2 December, Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, WC1, 7pm. All welcome.
 
Los Angeles poet Will Alexander works in multiple genres: the novel, essay, aphorism, play, philosophy, visual art, and music (as pianist). His influences range from poetic practitioners, such as Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to the encompassing paradigm of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, and the Egyptian worldview as understood by Cheikh Anta Diop and R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. His work explores the fields of art, physics, botany, history, astronomy, architecture, and poetics, amongst others. Alexander’s books include Kaleidoscopic Omniscience, Asia and Haiti, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, Compression and Purity, Sunrise In Armageddon, Diary As Sin, Inside the Earthquake Palace, Towards The Primeval Lightning Field, and Mirach Speaks To His Grammatical Transparents. His collected essays, Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat (Essay Press, 2013) received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. 
 
 

Will Rowe anthology by Veer books

To celebrate the reading which celebrates the career of Will Rowe on the eve of his retirement from Birkbeck college and the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Veer books, of which Will is one of the founders, have published a remarkable anthology of original work dedicated to Will and his achievements. The poets include Bruce Andrews, Allen Fisher, Peter Jaeger, Alan Halsey, Geraldine Monk, Sean Bonney, Maggie O'Sullivan, and many others, and my work, written specifically for Will, found, pictured, below. Go here and email them and buy a copy! http://www.veerbooks.com/

Enemies: Contemporary Poetics Research Centre

Really hot, really well attended - a beautiful atmosphere of exchange. The reading celebrated the groundbreaking Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck College, University of London, a rare academic entity which facilitates the research and understanding of innovative and dynamic poetry happening in the present day. http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/