Christodoulos Makris

You Loved it Here: Poetry Bench Queen Elizabeth Hall Roof, Southbank Centre, 26 June 2012, 10:00am - 1 July 2012, 22:00pm If you like sitting down, listening and feeling special, this will be a dream come true. Once a day a poet will sit and read a poem to whoever happens to be sat on the bench.

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 writ

Maintenant Blue Room, Spirit Level, Southbank Centre, Tuesday 26 June 2012, 7:00pm This reading celebrates some of the most vivid and exciting poets currently writing in Europe, all of whom have featured in the Maintenant interview series: Sylva Fischerová, Pekko Kappi, Christodoulos Makris, Damir Šodan, Serhij Zhadan, Kārlis Vērdiņš and Endre Ruset. The Maintenant dictum has been to introduce poets who might lie outside of the Anglo-American scene, or be overlooked until they have reached the prominence of middle age, alongside great figures of the present day, who look eye to eye with their towering forebears. The reading is hosted in English by Steven Fowler.

The World Poetry Summit: Finding Poetry's Place in the World Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, Tuesday 26 June 2012, 9.30am-6.30pm A global gathering of leading directors, publishers and writers to help locate poetry's place in the world and revolutionise how we work in the 21st Century. Programme includes: Thinking Outside the Book: Tradition Vs Innovation The Future of Poetry The Front Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, 10.30am – 11.30am This discussion explores Brion Gysin’s claim that ‘Writing is 50 years behind painting’ and asks how new collaborations, events, independent publishers and magazines are shaping poetry in the 21st century. Speakers include: Christodoulos Makris (Cyprus), Rocío Cerón (Mexico), Tishani Doshi (India) and Tom Chivers Chaired by Steven Fowler

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 Serra

This coming weekend I'll be part of the Irish Writers' Centre's Read for the World event, a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Centre - and an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for 'Most Authors Reading Consecutively From Their Own Books'. The current holder of this title is the Berlin International Literature Festival, with 75 authors. For this marathon public reading lasting 28 hours,  111 authors have been scheduled to read in strict 15 minute slots from 10am on Friday 15 June all the way to 2pm on Saturday 16 June (Bloomsday). Audiences will be welcome at the Centre throughout, while the event will also be live-streamed on its website . I'm scheduled to read from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue on Saturday 16th at 1.15am (British/Irish time).

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.

On Wednesday (6 June) I'll be a guest of the Seven Towers Agency for their monthly First Wednesday lunchtime reading . We'll be at the Twisted Pepper on Dublin's Middle Abbey Street, and I'll be reading with Peadar O'Donoghue . Start time is 1.15pm.