Christodoulos Makris

On Thursday 30 November I'll be taking part in  'You were also there'  at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. Part of the  Book Week Scotland  programme, and held in the context of  Jacqueline Donachie's exhibition 'Right Here Among Them' , this is an event with a pronounced social-political dimension, and also features  Julie Morrissy  as well as Scots author and NHS campaigner Rab Wilson and Edinburgh charity Upward Mobility’s band The UpMo Experience. The event is free but ticketed ( book via Eventbrite ) and runs from 5.30pm till 8.00pm. With thanks to Iain Morrison for the invitation.

In July,  Nathan O'Donnell ,   Suzanne Walsh  and I operating as a collaborative unit received one of three project commissions from the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) to create new work in response to the ROSC 50 exhibition. After a four-month research and composition period, our resulting collaborative text and performance 'Inflammatory Speech' will be presented on  Saturday 11 November at 2pm in The Johnston Suite at IMMA  as part of  an event showcasing the ROSC 50 artist research commissions. Admission is free, but  booking is required  as places are limited : "Audiences are invited to attend a seminar comprising of artists’ performance, lecture presentations, screening and a panel discussion. This includes research projects in response to the Rosc exhibitions: 'Prologue' by artist Amanda Coogan , 'Poverty of Vision' by Emma Haugh and a collaborative project titled ‘Inflammatory Speech’ by Christodoulos Makris, Nathan O’Donnell and...

Phonica: Seven Monday 27 November 2017 7.30pm  Boys School, Smock Alley Theatre Admission: €7.00 / €5.00 with Anna Jordan Doireann Ní Ghríofa The Quiet Club Mark Tokar Nerys Williams Jona Xhepa Phonica: Seven features performances from a range of vibrant, award-winning poets, musicians and artists with international outlooks and reputations working in the fields of electronic music, contemporary multilingual poetry, jazz composition, sound art, improvisation and theatrics, classical vocals, broken narratives, and more. Phonica is a series of linked events rooted in Word and Sound and with an emphasis on multiformity and the experimental. Conceived, programmed and hosted since early 2016 by Christodoulos Makris and Olesya Zdorovetska , Phonica aims to explore compositional and performative ideas and to encourage a melting pot of audiences and artists from across artforms. Featured Artists: Anna Jordan  is no stranger to creating intriguing sounds...

I have three new pieces in issue 3.3 (Winter 2017) of The Pickled Body - an issue subtitled 'A lot of what I like is trash'. The Pickled Body is an online poetry and art magazine running since 2013 that focuses on the sensual. It is edited, designed and produced by Dimitra Xidous and Patrick Chapman. The 3.3 'trash' issue ("all poetry is experience recycled") also features contributions from Margaret O'Brien, Nicola Jennings, Jeff Grubek, Órla Fay, Richard Biddle and Susanna Galbraith, while the featured artist is Martin de Porres Wright. My three untitled poems are "created out of untreated text from anonymous sources on the internet," and are taken from a book-length piece I've been working on over the past while. My thanks to Dimitra and Patrick for publishing them.

On Monday 9 October I'll be reading at the opening of the poetry & photography exhibition  Stone and Sea  in Pafos Municipal Gallery. Part of the Pafos2017 European Capital of Culture programme, Stone and Sea is "a poetic meeting and a photographic exhibition by Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot photographers, that have the stone and the sea as their points of reference; elements that are inextricably linked with the fate of Cypriot people and of crucial importance for the shaping of their temperament. The project combines a walk through rocks deeply rooted in the soil, statues and pebbles of the coastline, with the reflective gazing of the sea, which is anticipated as an uncorrupted cultural value, a place of eutopia open to diversity." Readings by several invited poets with links to Cyprus will be accompanied by a trilingual presentation of the poems - in Greek, Turkish and English. I'm delighted that as part of this my poem 'Full Circle' from The A...

On Friday 29 September I will give a talk & performance at 'My Story: My Words' - a symposium on Language and Migration at NUI Galway. Developed under the Irish Research Council's 'New Foundations' scheme in partnership with the Immigrant Council of Ireland, and organised by Anne O'Connor and Andrea Ciribuco of The School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at NUI Galway, the symposium brings together scholars and practitioners in the fields of translation, new media, visual art, film, theatre and poetry, and will run for the full day in the Hardiman Research Building. The title of my talk is 'Travelling Light: Shedding Poetry's National Baggage', and will consist of fragments from an essay I've been re-working which considers poetry from the position of the trans- or post-national mind, interspersed with my own poetry. In the run up to the symposium I was interviewed by Andrea Ciribuco on my writing and its relation to themes that ...

A new poem with title 'Lady Liberty with a deaths head visage...' is included in Paris Lit Up no. 4 , nominally published in 2016 but out just last month. This fourth edition of Paris Lit Up magazine - published by the Paris-based umbrella organisation of the same name that maintains an emphasis on transnational writers, artists and musicians - arrives, as the editors write in their foreword, at a crossroads: "as the world darkens with increasingly rigid identities, we ask ourselves how our creative endeavours can contest this narrowing vision". An answer appears in the notion of trans- ("transnational, transgressive, transitional, translational") which is the overall theme and title of the issue. My piece is included in one of two specially curated sections: Malik Crumpler & Pansy Maurer-Alvarez ( Poets Live ) and Jennifer K Dick ( Ivy Writers Paris ) invited a small selection of participants in their respective series to contribute to the issue....

It was a total pleasure and a privilege to work with Ailbhe & Steven as editor of this extraordinary book. My interventions were minimal, in truth, since the concept and execution of the work, despite or because of the presence of two individually strong poetic sensibilities, was of the highest order. Having witnessed this collaboration at its genesis while we toured together in September 2014  I was hardly surprised by this, and I'm very proud to be associated with this work. Subcritical Tests , a book of poetry by Ailbhe Darcy & SJ Fowler, with cover design and interior illustrations by Niall McCormack, is now out. Subcritical Tests is the first title published by gorse editions. "The nearness of nuclear holocaust, always just one clumsy accident away, forms an entry point into this record of a friendship. The poems in Subcritical Tests stubbornly make connections, ever conscious of the impending threat of annihilation. Oblique, modern, lyrical, humorous, thes...

Phonica: Six Monday 17 July 2017 7.30pm  Boys School, Smock Alley Theatre Admission: €7.00 / €5.00 with Lina Andonovska Jessica Foley IRIDE PROJECT Claire Potter Billy Ramsell Nazgul Shukaeva   Phonica: Six will feature performances from a host of trailblazing and award-winning Irish and international writers, musicians and artists working in the realms of new and electroacoustic music, contemporary poetry, installation and audio-visual composition, improvisational writing, telecommunications research, ethno-jazz, and more. Phonica  is a primarily poetry and music series with an emphasis on multiformity and the experimental. Conceived, programmed and hosted since early 2016 by Christodoulos Makris and Olesya Zdorovetska,  Phonica  aims to explore compositional and performative ideas and to encourage a melting pot of audiences and artists from across artforms. Featured Artists: Quickly gaining recognition internationally as a fearless a...

I'm very happy to be contributing to the first issue of  CORDA , a new biannual magazine published in London and exploring communal experience of connections in a time of new borders. Started in direct response to the Brexit vote, and edited by Livia Franchini with art direction by Sean P Haughton, CORDA publishes both writing and visual material. My contribution has the title 'tanks rolled through our streets', and it is a borderless mashup of testimonies by young mother refugees to the US and 'below-the-line' commentary on the online article in which they were published. Thanks to Livia Franchini for asking and for publishing this piece, and kudos to Livia and Sean for creating a space for writers & artists across Europe and elsewhere to "grieve/rage/celebrate friendship together in the wake of Brexit". Full list of contributors to CORDA #1 : Cecilia Zoe Grandi, Ginevra Shay, Craig Clark & Caterina Pinzauti, Laura Merizalde & Dizz Tat...