Christodoulos Makris

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...

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 stat...

On Sunday 23 June I'll be reading at Barnaby Festival  in Macclesfield, Cheshire, as part of the last in the Speaking Volumes-produced Poetry Parnassus Postscript events. "With views of the Peak District as a backdrop, established national poets Christodoulos Makris and Avaes Mohammad join forces with local wordsmith Mark Rawlins in the intimate open-air setting of Sparrow Park. From transforming found texts to examining cultural shifts in the age of austerity, the trio will explore the significance of metamorphosis to both our words and our society." Sparrow Park, Churchside , Macclesfield, Cheshire SK10 1HW Sunday 23 June 2013, 2pm Free admission

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...

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; a part from commemorating the Rain of Poems in London, it will be used to explain C...