A note on: Lexicon, performing at Marsden Woo - March 16th 2016

Such a beautiful experience, to curate a night of new poetry and performance responding to Alida Sayer's magnificent exhibition at Marsden Woo Gallery. We did it all on quite a tight timeframe, really through my friendship with Marsden Woo curator Siobhan Feeney and an immediate passion I felt for Alida's work. She is interrogating, in sculpture, what I am interested in digging into in poetry - language, its instability, its material qualities, its graphic glypic abstraction. So I asked Giovanna Coppola, Fabian Peake, Iris Colomb and Christian Patracchini to come and see the work and we all presented this on a really enthusiastic evening, on March 16th (2016), in the gallery. You can see all the performances www.theenemiesproject.com/lexicon

For my own performance, I have become increasingly interested in improvisation, in speech rhythms and crowd responses, and in breaking the 4th wall with readings and performances. In this case I spent quite a bit of time working out certain parameters, concepts, that I would adhere to, but deliberately, strictly, ignoring the 'content' I might produce. In this case, I pretended that I was performing only for to-be-edited youtube vignettes, like some televisual curator, highlighting Alida's exhibition. I hoped for it to be humorous but not flippant, and people seemed engaged anyway, so I was pleased I took the risk.

I would highly recommend visiting www.marsdenwoo.com and checking out www.alidasayer.com

Mahu: to Tom Raworth - June Tues 7th: the videos

Mahu: celebrating Blart & Homebaked Books - Sunday June 7th: the videos

A beautiful Sunday evening in Kings Cross. Thanks to Stephen Emmerson, Lucy Harvest Clarke & MJ Weller.

Beginning the work of Mahu - 25 hours of handwriting into my exhibition novel

A concept that cannot be understood until it is realised. I had three days from exhibition opening to when I arrived back in London from time in Wales. During that time I had three events, including the launch of my book. I spent 25 hours in those three days in the Hardy Tree Gallery, writing the beginning of my novel by hand. I did not plan the content, but I did try and keep it, strictly, narrative (if strange and menacing) and clear. I began by writing on the wall, then I realised this would be a profound waste. So we got scrolls of paper to hang on the wall. Then I wrote on the scrolls. Then after 5 hours and one scroll done, I got deep stress position pains. So I took the other scrolls down and wrote on them while at a desk, pulling the paper slack up as it was needed. 

The story is of a lonely, scholarly farm child called Mahu, living in the countryside of Wiltshire. The townspeople think him strange and he only goes into town to buy supplies for his ailing, if distant mother. His 12 brothers and sisters all have jobs, while he schemes of ways to keep from working so he can keep secretly reading the church histories and occult papers he has stolen in the company of his dog. He meets someone and his priorities shift. She disappears, and he begins to follow her, leaving Devizes for the first time in his life, down the polluted banks of the river Kennet.

Now I'll be writing a wall of the gallery for each week of the run, so by the end, by June 27th, all four walls will be covered and the novel will be finished. The first wall was an experience of chest pain and some agitation, but I have already forgotten that pain and the response from those who have seen it so far has been really pleasing. They say my handwriting is neat.

Auld Enemies diary - Aberdeen

I for one had a brilliant few days in Aberdeen, the imposition of the architecture, the clear city beneath the city, the windswept drama of the weather, the endless microcosms of humour and local culture, and the underbellies of that - finding great bookshops, trawling the long, almost uninhabited beaches, the funfair. I found it to be a strange place, and all the better for my experience, taking plenty of time as I did, to explore by myself, to walk and to read. Our hosts were very gracious and we read in cellar 35, below a pub, green lit like a David Lynch film. The idiosyncratic nature of the readings, and the atmosphere, uniformly warm but quixotic, added yet another look to our rapidly expanding tour. 
Auld Enemies: Aberdeen
SJ Fowler & William Letford https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6km9ykR0mm8
Keith Murray https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT2Cyw951Oo
Gerard Rochford & Richie Brown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sx6vqnCVyk
Colin Herd & Ryan Van Winkle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmIxnofK4Vk
Maureen Ross & Catriona Yule https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz6YQ-j0Yhk
Haworth Hodgkinson & Bernard Briggs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLeHB1pJZIY
nick-e melville & Ross Sutherland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ddd62svSWU