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Mirror Lamp Press No.1: Happiness

A brand new specially-commissioned poem of mine with title 'Bandsalat (Verse Chorus Verse)' appears in the inaugural issue (April 2021) of Mirror Lamp Press, a new Dublin-based journal operating at the intersections of visual art and writing.

Mirror Lamp Press is a free quarterly magazine edited by Gwen Burlington and Eoghan McIntyre. Each issue explores the intersection of art and literature through newly commissioned texts and selected works of an illustrator or visual artist. It lives in the digital sphere and has been designed to be read online, with each issue made available as a freely downloadable PDF. If you fancy holding the words in your hands, we encourage you to print it too.

Each issue is formatted linguistically and features five sections under the headings Subject, Object, Verb, Word, and Place.


Issue 1 is themed around Happiness. My poem occupies the Object section as a response to the issue's theme through "a personal or art object." As the editors note in their editorial:

For Object, Christodoulos Makris has composed a poem, 'Bandsalat,' which roughly translates as 'tape jam,' in response to the Nirvana album Nevermind. It is an assemblage of sorts, constructed through a process of collecting, mixing and disassembling documentary and critical writing on the album and cassette culture of the time. Makris wrote it, coincidentally, before the inventor of the cassette tape, Lou Ottens died earlier this month.

Mirror Lamp Press No. 1: Happiness also features contributions from Laurence Counihan, Julia Dubsky, Chris Hayes, Ingrid Lyons, and Jenny Smith.

The issue was launched with a one hour radio show broadcast on Dublin Digital Radio on 28 March 2021 as a sonic counterpart  to the issue, in which the editors presented a compilation of audio bytes suggested by the contributors in a collage of formats - from songs, to film clips, to voice recordings, to readings - drew links between the selections and discussed relationships between happiness and culture:


My thanks to Eoghan and Gwen for this really exciting commission. You can support Mirror Lamp Press on their Patreon.

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