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'this is no longer entertainment' reviewed on Stride magazine

A review of this is no longer entertainment appeared on Stride magazine on 29 May 2020.

Stride was founded in 1982 and is edited by Rupert Loydell. It has had various incarnations over the years, most recently in an online edition, with an archive of its content between 1999 and 2015 available at http://stridemagazine.co.uk. As of May 2016 it is being published at http://stridemagazine.blogspot.co.uk/.

The review is by writer, performer and teacher Mark Leahy, and it is titled 'move away from blatant plagiarism' - which is itself a quote from my book. Leahy places the book in the traditions of avant-garde writing and documentary poetics (in both film and poetry) and uses numerous examples from it to illuminate context, process and intention. To this end he also references my 2017 StAnza Festival project Browsing History and the recent audio recording of extracts from this is no longer entertainment for Hotel magazine. Crucially, he also picks up on the physicality of the book as a contrast to the digital nature of the poem's source material:

"The printed text of the book, in its clear Times New Roman 11-point font, likewise shifts the material into a smoothened environment. The stitches don’t show on the page surface, the joins are invisible (beyond the use of line or paragraph breaks which in their way visually nudge the text further toward poetry and away from their source). The words don’t look like they do on a screen. They have a bookishness, a different materiality that contributes to a different reading experience, less scanning and scrolling is prompted, more attention to the operation, the functioning of the phrases and words. And these words operate in particular ways, with recurrent patterns, rhetorical, thematic, topical, verbal."

And after linking the book to "Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I in documentary film, or Nat Raha’s Of Sirens, Body and Faultlines in documentary poetry," Leahy ends the review commenting that "this is a reading, that is open to other and others’ readings, it frames a view without determining what another will see there."

My thanks to him for his immersive review, and to Rupert Loydell for commissioning it.

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