Subscribe by Email

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Almost Unpoetic": a review of my books

Sabne Raznik, a poet, book reviewer and freelance writer based in Kentucky in the US, has posted a review of my three books on Yahoo! Voices under the heading 'The Work of Christodoulos Makris' . It's a generally positive response to them, particularly to  Muses Walk ("With it, one begins to see that Makris is an important poet, not just for sleepy Ireland, but perhaps for the world," she writes) but not without expressing some reservations along the way. I must note a couple of factual inaccuracies: the project for which Muses Walk was originally conceived and made is an international one, called 'An Inventory of Al-Mutanabbi Street'; and,   much as I wish it were true, there has been no recent trip to Greece .
Read more

DIAL on Dublin Digital Radio

Tune in to Dublin Digital Radio  on Saturday 7 December 2024 at 2pm local time, where I will be performing excepts from my writing project DIAL , with sonic interventions by Joanna Mattrey, Keith Lindsay and Nick Roth, in a 60 minute broadcast presented by Diatribe Records. DIAL is a durational-procedural-aleatory work I composed by live-transcribing 5 minutes of talk radio broadcasting anywhere in the world each and every day across the entire calendar year 2021, and linking these transcripts with short pieces of 'original' writing produced contemporaneously. The radio station accessed each day depended on the previous day's text, and was determined by entering keywords from it as search terms on the TuneIn platform. The full manuscript runs to over 120k words, and it is divided into 12 chapters arranged as uninterrupted blocks of text. Over the past few months I have been working with Diatribe Records in translating DIAL back into sound by speaking the entire te...
Read more

gorse editorial

I was honoured and delighted to receive an invitation from Susan Tomaselli to join gorse  as poetry editor - an invitation I wasted no time in accepting. As I'd written  elsewhere , I consider gorse a unique and refreshing presence in the Irish literary landscape, with an outlook, temperament and set of interests that resonate deeply with mine. Getting the chance to contribute to it in an editorial capacity and to work towards strengthening the considerable impact it has already made in just two issues is a hugely exciting challenge, full of possibilities. It's hard to specify what kind of poetry I'm looking for, because above all I want to publish poetry I didn't know I was looking for. Likely to interest me, though, is writing that plays with boundaries of form, language and genre, that's aware of social, political, technological and cultural developments, that's interrogative and outward-looking, conceptually-rigorous and witty. We are beginning to work ...
Read more