Christodoulos Makris

... here's Auld Enemies: a poetry documentary by Ross Sutherland . Auld Enemies was a poetry collaborations tour of Scotland undertaken under the auspices of the Enemies Project in July. Yes But Are We Enemies kicks off at the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast, next Thursday 18 September. Full tour details here . And here's why my curatorial partner and overall Enemies Project curator Steven Fowler is excited by the prospect.

An essay I've been making notes towards for the best part of two years has now seen the light of day courtesy of Jacket2 , the online journal of contemporary poetry and poetics associated with PennSound and the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Titled 'Monoculture beer no more: other poetries from Ireland' , it aims to offer an interrogation of the territorial concerns of the vast majority of the poetry coming out of Ireland, and a discussion of emerging avant-garde tendencies brought about by political discontent and driven by poets and editors/curators straddling linguistic & national divisions. I like to think that the effect of the article having been written over a period of time is akin to that of long-exposure photography: in addition to capturing individual items it also records time. In it I discuss, link to and/or quote from the work of (among others) Catherine Walsh, Anamaría Crowe Serrano, Dylan Harris, Kit Fryatt a...

My mass collaboration poem 'Chances Are' is now live on 3:AM Magazine . very proud to publish @c_makris brilliant "Chances Are" on @3ammagazine a truly inventive conceptual widgettweet poem http://t.co/9DwR1gsqLO — Steven J Fowler (@stevenjfowler) August 9, 2014 "... it involves embedding the HTML code for a Twitter widget bringing up a feed with all tweets that include the word "chance". I have the code - the idea is to present it as it is as a 'conventional' poem in the new book, along with instructions to go to a specific web page for an online application of it. There's currently around 100 tweets per minute feeding through, so the poem gets constantly updated, and fast, by everybody/anybody (knowingly or not) and is in effect never the same twice."

I'm delighted to announce details of Yes But Are We Enemies , a major project & tour focusing on poetry in collaboration I'm curating in partnership with Steven Fowler: Yes But Are We Enemies English and Irish Poets Having Words A groundbreaking exploration of contemporary writing in which 6 poets from Ireland and England tour brand new work produced collaboratively in cross-national partnerships. The tour visits five venues across Ireland and concludes with a show in London, with each event featuring a unique combination of pairs. This is a project about the creation of collaborative work, but also about the integration of differing poetic communities. Therefore each event will additionally feature specially-commissioned collaborations between writers from the region. Core poets: from Ireland: Ailbhe Darcy, Billy Ramsell, Christodoulos Makris from England: Patrick Coyle, Sam Riviere, SJ Fowler Admission to all events is free Thu ...

To celebrate Bloomsday and the multiple language and cultural references in Ulysses, an evening of readings and music  takes place tomorrow evening at JF Studios. This is a multilingual/cultural event, with English, Irish, Gallego, Cypriot, French, Korean, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Tamil and Shona some of the languages included. Participating writers and poets: Christodoulos Makris, Fióna Bolger, John Kearns, Anamaria Crowe Serrano, Rob Doyle, Karl Parkinson, Liz McSkeane, Dessiree Ares, Phil Lynch, Antain MacLochlainn, Ola Kubiak, Vadhani, Alan Jude Moore, Yoon Kyung Chung, Lillian Ndumba and Dimitra Xidous. Gallery artist Mark Doherty will be drawing live, responding to the words and sounds around. This is a free event. Monday 16 June 2014, 6pm-8pm Olivier Cornet Gallery, 5 Cavendish Row, Dublin 1 The gallery would like to dedicate the event to the memory of artist, gallery owner and Joycean scholar Gerald Davis (1938 - 18th June 2005).

Over on Dave Lordan's blog  I discuss experimental writing as part of a short series featuring various writers & arts professionals invited to do so by Dave. This is part of the build up to the Circa Bloomsday weekend event at the Irish Writers' Centre over this coming weekend 14-15 June, which celebrates and showcases contemporary experimental literature in honour of the legacy of Joyce, and the Blast 100 modernist symposium at Trinity College in early July - in both of which Dave is participating. The other respondents so far are Rob Doyle , Máighréad Medbh , Graham Allen & Darran Anderson .

I'm really excited to be involved as the Dublin curator/editor of this project - part of a series of city-to-city collaborative poetry projects headed by Mexico's EBL-Cielo Abierto publishing house - as well as participating poet: at the end of last year 7 poets from Dublin were partnered with 7 from Guadalajara to exchange selections of their work and render the work of their collaborator into their language, be it English or Spanish. A resulting anthology,  Centrifugal: Contemporary Poetry from Dublin and Guadalajara,  is due out in September from EBL-Cielo Abierto as a dual-language volume, with support from Mexico's National Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA). There are unconfirmed plans for public presentations of the book in both cities. The poet pairings are as follows: Alan Jude Moore & Xitlálitil Rodríguez Anamaría Crowe Serrano & Mónica Nepote Catherine Walsh & Laura Solórzano Christodoulos Makris & Luis Eduardo Ga...

A 5-minute home video made last October for the project & exhibition 'Transcapes / The Halted Traveler' in which I read from Muses Walk under fading light.

A little over a year ago I received a request for permission to have some poems from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue translated into Croatian, which I happily granted. These poems are to be included in an anthology of contemporary European poetry to be published in Zagreb (Croatian Writers Society) in celebration of Croatia's recent entry to the EU. I'm grateful to the redoubtable Damir Šodan for selecting my work for the anthology, and for having a go at translating my poems - I remember him suggesting to me after a reading that he could hear them very clearly in Croatian. And it's great to be joining the likes of Raymond Carver, Allen Ginsberg and Leonard Cohen in having work rendered into Croatian by Damir! Part of a taster for this ambitious anthology - which features some really exciting young/younger poets hailing from Europe (Elisa Biagini, Valzhyna Mort, Ilya Kaminsky) alongside one or two luminaries (Tranströmer, Zagajewski, Armitage) and is due to appear in t...

Though I have written a smattering of poems in Greek from first principles, these occasions are extremely rare simply because it's ceased long ago to be the language I live in. My knowledge of it at mother tongue level, atrophied though it is, does enter what I write; and I have made use of it in conceptual/experimental ways. But writing directly into Greek and/or its Cypriot dialect seems more like an archaeological venture than a current, vital one. So when Dimitra Xidous asked me to translate her poem 'Onions' from her debut collection Keeping Bees , just out from Doire Press, I initially had some reservations. But I decided to take the task on: Dimitra wanted to speak the poem in Greek at the book's launch (which took place quite successfully in Dublin last Saturday) and I thought that would be an interesting exercise given her own removal from all things Greek in linguistic, generational and geographical terms. Below is 'Onions' as rendered by me into ...