Christodoulos Makris

I'm happy to have been  invited back to Kildare Readers Festival. For this year's (10th) edition I will run a workshop with title 'Persona Poetry' : "Participants will be guided by Christodoulos Makris to make use of public texts to compose poetry in the personae of a range of current figures. This is a fun and interactive workshop, with the techniques employed adaptable to writing other kinds of poetry. Participants will also create an 'exquisite corpse' (a communally composed poem). Christodoulos is acclaimed as one of the leading practitioners of experimental poetry. All levels of experience welcome." The workshop takes place on Saturday 19 October at 2pm , at the Riverbank Arts Centre in Newbridge, Co Kildare. Participation is free, but booking is required. You can book a place here . Workshop participants will have the opportunity to share the poetry they produced in  'Hot Off The Press' , an event directly following the workshop wh...

I look forward to travelling to the west coast of Norway for events in Ålesund and Bergen on 17 & 18 September, part of  the Nordic & European Poetry Festival . Ålesund: First at 7pm on Tuesday 17 September I'll be in Ålesund reading from this is no longer entertainment  in  a showcase of solo readings by poets from across Europe as well as a selection of poets from Norway. Venue: Mottaket (Nedre Strandgate 2A, 6004 Ålesund). In association with  Ålesund Literary Salon . Free Entry. Line up: Hilde Myklebust / Kaisa Aglen / SJ Fowler / Jon Ståle Ritland / Harry Man / Maja Jantar / Endre Ruset / Dan Andersen / Eli Fossdal Waage / Christodoulos Makris / Maria Malinovskaya / David Spittle. Bergen: Then the following evening Wednesday 18th (7pm start) I'll be in Bergen for an evening of poetry in pairs, where I'll present a brand new collaboration with Endre Ruset . This takes place in Bergen Public Library (Strømgaten 6, Bergen). Aga...

My short essay 'Poetry and Cultures of Feedback', which discusses some of the impulses, concepts, processes and influences behind my book this is no longer entertainment , was published in The Irish Times on 9 May 2019. Read 'Poetry and Cultures of Feedback' . Fragments from the essay while in progress were previously presented as elements in two performative, audience-participation papers I gave at two separate conferences: Gestures (Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 15 February 2019), and Text / Sound / Performance (University College Dublin, 25 April 2019). Thanks to Martin Doyle, Books Editor at The Irish Times , for publishing the essay.

Earlier this year I contributed an excerpt from my new long poem 'Capital' (the full poem will be published in the forthcoming Dublin edition in the Dostoyevsky Wannabe Cities series of anthologies ) to the Field Guide to Experimental Irish Literature , a project and exhibition by New York artist Dannielle Tegeder in the Irish Arts Center in New York City. For this project, subtitled 'Drawing Room' and active 11 January - 7 April 2019, "Dannielle Tegeder reached out to select contemporary Irish poets, asking them to contribute a work of theirs, in some way evoking or thematically related to Ireland. Using sheets of archival paper printed with these pieces, Tegeder has begun - and will continue - responding to their words through abstract drawing and collage. The exhibition will have several different iterations, changing and evolving as new collaborations between artist and poet emerge. "Tegeder found inspiration for this abstracted anthology of experime...

For episode 23 of Words Lightly Spoken, a weekly podcast of poetry from Ireland, I read section 5 from my book this is no longer entertainment . This section of the book is a borderless prose piece composed of fragments from 'below-the-line' commentary on an online article from 2016 that featured testimonies by young mother refugees to the US and Europe. Each episode of Words Lightly Spoken features one poem read by the poet, with a short introduction. Poets previously featured in the series include Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Ailbhe Darcy, Paul Perry, Paul Muldoon and Anamaría Crowe Serrano. Words Lightly Spoken is produced by Claire Cunningham and funded by the Arts Council of Ireland. The podcast series is available on the Poetry Ireland website , on i-tunes , Spotify , and other platforms.

The poem 'Search Engine' from my 2015 book The Architecture of Chance was selected for exhibition as part of the 'Poems for Patience' project at Galway University Hospitals earlier this year. Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust launched 'Poems for Patience' during the Cúirt International Festival of Literature in 2004, and it has since become an annual event. Twenty poems are published in poster format to be displayed across the waiting room network of the hospitals, and poets featured have included Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Galway Kinnell and Celia de Fréine among others. A poet reading at each year's Cúirt Festival is invited to select the poems, and in 2019 Ailbhe Darcy made the selection. My poem is accompanied by others from an eclectic range of contemporary and historical, avant-garde and literary poets, including Miriam Gamble, Marianne Moore, Trevor Joyce, Jennifer L. Knox, Aifric Mac Aodha, Muriel Rukeyser, Zaffar Kunial, and Tara B...

Two new poems of mine from an emerging cycle are featured in the latest issue of Irish University Review (Spring / Summer 2019) - a special issue focusing on Food, Energy, Climate, Irish Culture and World-Ecology. The Irish University Review was founded in 1970 at University College Dublin as a journal of Irish literary criticism. Since then it has become the leading global journal of Irish literary studies. It is affiliated to the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures  and it is published by Edinburgh University Press. The current editor of Irish University Review is Emilie Pine - though the issue in question is guest-edited by Lucy Collins and Sharae Deckard. In addition to  my two poems 'doctrine' and 'the risk' , Lucy Collins in her article  'If that's not a shock to the system I don't know what'  offers an introduction to my work and a discerning reading of the two published poems, describing them as "poems of co...

For the second installment of 'a heap of language', an ongoing event series organised between Paper Visual Art Journal and the School of Visual Culture at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) , I will lead a 'Transcription Writing' workshop where participants will engage with public language towards making and publishing new work. 4pm, Wednesday 29 May 2019, Goethe-Institut , 37 Merrion Square East, Dublin 2. Places are limited, and registration is required ( you can register here  - update 23/5/19: booked out ). The workshop will involve a short walk with the transcription activity taking place outdoors, in a covered space. - 'a heap of language #002: radical publishing'  also includes a number of contributors speaking about radical (artists', small press, activist, and samizdat) publishing, followed by the launch of a publication assembled by current students of the MA/MFA Art in the Contemporary World, collaboratively produced in respons...

I am very pleased to have two pieces in EUROPOE , an exciting and remarkable anthology of contemporary European poetry published by Kingston University Press. Compiled and edited by SJ Fowler , and published to coincide with the 2nd European Poetry Festival, EUROPOE showcases 60 of Europe's most innovative poets, the vast majority writing from an avant-garde standpoint. A "modern and thoroughly European means of experiencing literature," EUROPOE is also an initiative and a document resisting Brexit and the forces bringing it about. "Celebrating the grand resurgence in literary and avant-garde poetry that has marked the 21st century in Europe, poets from over forty nations present works developing the lyric, sonic, visual, abstract and conceptual traditions. A volume that seeks not to offer a taxonomy but a brief glimpse of the brilliance of so many poets working at the forefront of the language arts, this is a book unified by a fidelity to that which is truly c...

Transcription Factor is a chapbook by  Gregory Betts ,  Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi ,  Julie Morrissy  and myself. Published in April 2019 on  derek beaulieu 's No Press  (Banff, Alberta, Canada), Transcription Factor consists of four poems all written collaboratively by the four of us. Each poem was produced through a four-stage (re)writing process, and the overall project was in response to 'Hox', an original sound composition by Barry O'Halpin for the 'Text / Sound / Performance' conference at University College Dublin (25-27 April 2019). Transcription Factor was published in 100 copies, all of which were disseminated to delegates and other conference attendees, and was performed by Gregory, Julie and myself at the wonderfully communal Riverrun reading (Poetry Ireland, 26 April 2019). photo: Lucy Collins From the chapbook blurb: "The following four poems were written collaboratively by Gregory Betts, Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Christodoulos Makris, a...