Recent Press (Part II): Poetry People (RTÉ Radio) / Business Post / Dublin Inquirer / Books Ireland

As well as making work for books and other publication formats, my practice extends to performance and other modes of presentation, while my editorial and curatorial activities operate in tandem with my creative work feeding and influencing each other.

Following on from the first part of this double post, which rounded up recent responses to my published work, below I log some press on my curated exhibition Is this a poem? - whose run at Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) I'm happy to report has been extended to 22 September 2024 - and of the premiere of 'Press Play,' a collaborative cross-disciplinary composition and performance relating to Ireland's housing crisis.

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On 7 April 2024, the inaugural episode of the radio programme Poetry People on Ireland's state broadcaster RTÉ Radio One included a segment called 'What is Poetry?' For this segment, prompted by the advent of Is this a poem?, the show's producers commissioned a short essay from Museum of Literature Ireland director, Simon O'Connor, on the subject. This is O'Connor's opening paragraph: "Right now at MoLI, Christodoulos Makris has presented an exhibition called Is This a Poem?. He has filled the museum with sculpture, image, sound, twitter feeds, braille confetti and performance, and he tells us that these are all poems, by artists who are working at poetry’s outer limits. So what is a poem?" He proceeds to consider this question through several lenses - through items in the exhibition as well as artworks from the historical avant-garde such as John Cage's 1952 composition 4'33'' - and, reflecting on my poem 'Chances Are' streaming on the walls of the museum, concludes with a realisation that "a poem is maybe not a way of writing - perhaps poetry is a way of watching, listening, telling."

Though the producers at Poetry People edited the essay heavily for broadcast, and gave the segment in the show a mainstream direction away from the exhibition itself, you can read the full original text of Simon O'Connor's 'What is a Poem?', with his kind permission, on the page on this site dedicated to Is this a poem?.

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On 19 April 2024, Business Post - a national Sunday newspaper and online publication - published an article by Sara Keating with title 'Is this a poem, and other thought-provoking questions' reporting on two initiatives that "invite us to reconsider our perception of the art form." In the second part focusing on Is this a poem?, Keating writes that the exhibition "offers a deep dive into the infinite diversity of the art form. Curated by Christodoulos Makris, Is This a Poem? Adventures on the Edge of an Artform, asks visitors to consider how poetry can exist beyond words on a page..." Keating notes that the exhibition challenges "the very idea of literary language ... the idea of text on a page ... the idea of authorship ... our ideas of appropriate subject matter ..." It concludes with: "at the end [...] you may decide to answer the exhibition’s title with a negative: fair enough. But you may also be inspired to write your own verse, and, appropriately, in the final exhibit, Is this your poem?, you are invited to."

Thanks to Sara Keating. The full article is available online, but it is only accessible in its entirety with an account with Business Post.

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On 1 May 2024, Dublin Inquirer - an independent newspaper dedicated to public-interest journalism - published a piece on the premiere of the collaborative, 10-movement composition and performance 'Press Play' (David Bremner - composition/piano; Larissa O'Grady - violin; myself - poetry/speech) which took place on 23 April at TU Dublin Conservatoire Recital Hall. Michael Lanigan's review, aided by a brief post-performance interview he conducted with Bremner and myself, focuses predominantly on the music composition aspect of the project, and specifically on the practice of Data Sonification. Writing about 'Press Play,' Lanigan notes that each movement "tackles a different strand of the housing crisis - including planning permissions, investment funds, government policy, construction output, homelessness, living at home, and the far right." In a section titled 'Fragments of Information' focusing on my poem and performance, Lanigan notes that "Makris begins to speak, reading a text assembled from numerous studies, reports and transcripts." Later, he writes: "Makris’ narration is a collage of statements. They are enigmatically vague. But so too do they help the audience to grasp which specific aspects of the housing crisis Bremner and O’Grady are exploring," adding that "for about 30 minutes, there are abrupt pauses and volatile tempos. Sudden melodic flurries fade into a gentle solo violin, only to be interrupted by piano keys with an ominous plod."

The full article is available on the Dublin Inquirer website. With thanks to Michael Lanigan. Below is a video trailer with footage from the performance at TU Dublin.

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By far the most immersive piece on Is this a poem? yet, situating it in the context of my broader creative practice, was published on 11 July 2024 in Books Ireland magazine - a key resource in the Irish book world established in 1976. In a feature with title 'Is this a poem? Pushing the boundaries in a sensory, questioning project' which functions as a hybrid review/interview with me, academic, critic and poet Catherine Gander begins by describing my practice thus: "Christodoulos Makris has spent most of his artistic career pushing the boundaries of aesthetic categories. Over several collections of poetry, digital artworks and other poem-objects, he has explored poetry’s capacity not only to hold and deepen the reader’s attention, but to activate the reader’s creative responses, and to put those responses to use ... Working in a country whose rich poetic history is so closely associated with the lyric and the land, Makris invites his readers to widen their poetic perspectives, to query the very definition of poetry, and to consider the biases that underly our comfortable aesthetic preferences." Reflecting on the exhibition as a whole, Gander writes: "Political and personal, playfully self-aware and formally inventive, the pieces in Is this a poem? exist beyond the page and outside the parameters of what the Irish literary mainstream regards as poetry." After the introductory paragraph, the main feature is structured in four sections ('An Irish avant-garde'; 'Encountering the poem'; 'The medium is the message'; and 'This is (y)our poem') through which Gander considers a range of themes and threads running through the exhibition and my practice more broadly. She does so by weaving her impressions of individual items exhibited in Is this a poem? and the exhibition as a whole through my responses to her questions, often quoting directly from a conversation we conducted in a backroom studio at MoLI.

The full piece is available on the Books Ireland website under its 'Interviews' strand. Thanks to Catherine for her initiative, her immersion into the exhibition, its themes and my work, and for the long, vibrant and generative conversation. Thanks also to Books Ireland editor Ruth McKee for commissioning the feature.