Christodoulos Makris

I look forward to taking part in the 9th annual Doolin Writers Weekend (24-26 January 2020) . Taking place at Hotel Doolin (Doolin, Co Clare) the festival is this year guest-curated by Susan Tomaselli who has charged it with a definite experimental vibe. The festival artist-in-residence is sound, film & performance artist  Vicky Langan , and there will be readings, seminars, workshops, music/DJ sessions and open mics across the weekend featuring a host of excellent writers, poets, editors and publishers such as Darran Andreson, Patrick Chapman, Alice Lyons, Lucy Collins, Jessica Traynor, Gavin Corbett and many others. My contribution to the festival is twofold: First, on Saturday 25 January (2-5pm) I'll be giving a workshop with focus on sampling in poetry : "In music composition, sampling is the act of taking a portion of sound and reusing it as an element of a new recording. Similarly, poets at the cutting edge of the practice increasingly employ their critical...

A review of this is no longer entertainment appeared in The Irish Times on Thursday 26 December 2019. The review is by Gregory Betts, professor of English language & literature at Brock University, Ontario, Canada - who has recently served as Craig Dobbin Professor for Canadian Studies at University College Dublin. My book is reviewed in juxtaposition with Kimberly Campanello's MOTHERBABYHOME as a means of exploring how "as the world transforms, so too must its poetry, disregarding tradition." The two books are presented as examples of writing that "gives up the nationalist illusion of commonality to expose the fault lines of a society," which is "particularly necessary in an age of complex social turbulence on the precipice of even further changes." Commenting specifically on  this is no longer entertainment , Betts states that "[it] uses a conceptual writing approach to illuminate fissures in our social fabric," and that the col...