Christodoulos Makris

My essay 'Shedding Poetry's National Baggage' was published in the European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture (Versopolis) last week. The European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture is an online literary journal funded by the European Union, aiming to create an anglophone publication platform with a focus on continental Europe and the world beyond. Commissioned by SJ Fowler, new Executive Editor of the Review, my essay takes the form of eight fragments cumulatively examining relationships between poetry and nation(alism) on various levels, and with references to personal experiences and to writers, poets & artists, current and historical, with an internationalist outlook. The essay was originally conceived in late 2014 in response to an invitation towards a Europe-wide anthology, now seemingly abandoned, of pieces on trans-local writing. I began re-editing it in early 2017, and presented a version of it at the Language & Migration symposium in NUI Galway...

I have  two new poems  made of fragments from unauthored commentary on media articles relating to 1/ terrorism and 2/ refugees in the latest issue of SAH Journal . Studies in Arts and Humanities (SAH) is an open-access magazine published both in print and online, based in the library at Dublin Business School. It is an interdisciplinary academic collaboration whose concern is with social, political and cultural practices in the context of mapping transformations in contemporary society. SAH ’s contributors oppose forging disciplinary limits in an attempt to establish experimental spaces for critical dialogue. Vol 3 No 2 of SAH Journal focuses on the theme of 'Minorities'. It also includes poetry from Nithy Kasa, Jennifer Matthews and Nita Mishra, as well as articles on endangered languages, Māori rights in New Zealand, the Roma and Irish Travelling communities, and more. My thanks to Patrick Chapman for the invitation to contribute to the issue.

‘Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers…’ gorse  No. 9 is now out. Themed around 'colour', it includes essays from Clare Archibald, Niamh Campbell, Zoe Comyns, Shoshana Kessler, Darragh McCausland, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Imogen Reid and Sydney Weinberg; fiction from Arnold Thomas Fanning, Uschi Gatward, David Hayden, Colm McDermott, Paula McGrath and Gavin Murphy; and work in Irish from Eilean Ni Chullieanain and Alan Titley. In this issue I'm very pleased to be publishing poetry from Amanda Bell in the form of two haibun pieces comprising a mixture of 'new nature' writing, local history and memoir; four poems by Mike Saunders  from a larger sequence considering the language of money; ‘Pass’, a new poem by Maurice Scully ; Zoe Skoulding 's ‘Prairial (from A Revolutionary Calendar)’ taken from her ongoing work on the French Republican Calendar; and two visual 'word terrain' poems by Nathan Walker . Susan Tomaselli's editorial revolves ...

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....