Christodoulos Makris

A review of this is no longer entertainment appeared on Stride magazine on 29 May 2020. Stride was founded in 1982 and is edited by Rupert Loydell. It has had various incarnations over the years, most recently in an online edition, with an archive of its content between 1999 and 2015 available at http://stridemagazine.co.uk . As of May 2016 it is being published at http://stridemagazine.blogspot.co.uk/ . The review is by writer, performer and teacher Mark Leahy , and it is titled 'move away from blatant plagiarism' - which is itself a quote from my book. Leahy places the book in the traditions of avant-garde writing and documentary poetics (in both film and poetry) and uses numerous examples from it to illuminate context, process and intention. To this end he also references  my 2017 StAnza Festival project  Browsing History and the recent audio recording of extracts from this is no longer entertainment for Hotel magazine . Crucially, he also picks up on the physicality...

Issue 130 of Poetry Ireland Review (April 2020) carries a review of  this is no longer entertainment . Written by David Toms, the review piece is titled 'Feeding The Engines' and in it my book is considered along with books by Matt Kirkham and Natasha Cuddington. Toms opens with a paragraph on Shoshana Zuboff's groundbreaking work  The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and in particular on her use of the term 'behaviour surplus', identified as 21st century capitalism's driving force and the internet's central product - which serves as an introduction to his discussion of my book. Writing about this is no longer entertainment  he argues that "the title itself is a stark warning, as strong as Zuboff's core argument" and calls the book "a sustained and at times terrifying glimpse of the world as it now exists". Later he writes: "We talk about the online and offline, although the line between one and the other - as Zuboff's work d...

On Friday 15 May I will present new poetry from current work-in-progress for the 13th edition of the online literary salon A Leap in the Dark - "a twice-weekly gathering best described as 'an online salon cold war bunker impro literary brains trust'." In the words of organiser David Collard : "A lifetime ago, on 29th February, I organised a ‘A Leap in the Dark’, a Dada cabaret staged in a dilapidated former Conservative Club in Paddington. The venue was unheated but there was plenty of whisky and cocoa and the performers all blazed with a hard gemlike flame... Such gatherings are now a thing of the future, but the same loose-knit group of writers and poets and musicians and performers all want to share their work with an audience and with each other, to spread some light and possibly even joy in these dark and difficult times. Because that’s something we can do, and something we all need to do, now and in the future, until the current crisis passes, and after t...

Note:  With several scheduled activities postponed or cancelled outright due to COVID-19, I just wanted to place a note of thanks here to those people and organisations who have honoured or have committed to honouring our existing arrangements in whatever ways they can, or who are providing concrete, continued and true support through  the commissioning of work and in other forms . It's a deeper pleasure than ever, and maybe even a privilege, to be making and releasing new work during this time: I'm happy to report that two poems from a cycle I've been developing over the past couple of years were published on Berfrois earlier this week. Berfrois is a literary-intellectual online magazine updated daily, published by Pendant Publishing in London and edited by Russell Bennetts. Persistently and unashamedly internationalist and wide-ranging, it is , in the words of Don Share, senior editor at Poetry (Chicago) magazine, "lightning fast, yet deeply aware". T...

While in Amsterdam at the beginning of the month I was asked by Hotel magazine co-editor Dominic Jaeckle to read some extracts from this is no longer entertainment for audio publication on the Hotel online archive. Jaeckle has heard me read publicly from the book on a number of occasions, and his conception of a fundamental difference between the reading and hearing experiences, with regard to the material in this book in particular, prompted his invitation. In a perceptive note accompanying the publication of the recording , he writes: "The rolling composite voice on show in Makris’ this is no longer entertainment realizes a more complex relationship with polyphony than the page alone can allow. The experience of reading these texts can’t help but engineer a little bad detective work on the part of the reader; we’re accustomed to wading through a myriad of multi-authored opinions as we stroll a heavy thumb through the roll-call of comments that accompany any video, art...

Chromatics : An Evening of Hybrid Poetries and Cultures @ Club Chroma, Irish Museum of Modern Art IMMA invites "one of Ireland’s leading explorers of experimental poetics" Christodoulos Makris to co-curate an evening of playful experimentation, sampling poetry, readings, performance and artists’ moving image as they collide with fragments of club culture, in which to delight you in the sensual, visual and conceptual possibilities of word, sound and image. Guests include Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Kit Fryatt, James King, Vicky Langan, Rouzbeh Rashidi, Padraig Regan . Tues 24 March 2020 / 19:00 - 21:00 Project Spaces ***POSTPONED*** Christodoulos Makris co-curates an evening of playful experimentation – sampling poetry, readings, performance and artists’ moving image as they collide with fragments of club culture. Guests include Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Kit Fryatt, James King, Vicky Langan, Rouzbeh Rashidi, Padraig Regan and others whose work is invested in posing interesting ...

a cross-disciplinary exploration of the process of making chocolate: improvised sound, poetry, and live chocolate-making When: 8.30pm, Saturday 7 March 2020 Where: Unit 3, James Joyce Street, Dublin 1 (Kirkos Ensemble Dublin City Council Incubation Space) Tickets: €10 Featuring: Christodoulos Makris / Nick Roth / David Lacey / Sebastian Adams / The Proper Chocolate Company The Proper Chocolate Company are Dublin’s only bean-to-bar chocolate makers - sourcing, hand-sorting, roasting, cracking and winnowing their cocoa beans, before designing, refining, conching, ageing, tempering and moulding some of the finest chocolate to be found on the island. This unique event , curated by saxophonist and composer Nick Roth and presented by Kirkos Ensemble , is a cross-disciplinary exploration of the chocolate-making process, featuring experimental poet Christodoulos Makris , improvising musicians David Lacey and Sebastian Adams - and with Patrick & Kelli Marjolet bringing the aud...

I'm very pleased to be contributing to the Amsterdam edition of the Cities series of anthologies from Dostoyevsky Wannabe - publisher of  this is no longer entertainment . Dostoyevsky Wannabe Cities is an open source, collaborative project hosted by the press where each book offers a snapshot of a selection of writing from and around one city at one time as chosen by a guest editor. So far there have been books from Bristol, Norwich, Manchester, Dundee, Nottingham, Santiago, Paris and others, and more are set to come along (Brooklyn, Berlin, Boston, Manhattan, Coventry, Glasgow, Dublin, Los Angeles etc). DW Cities Amsterdam is edited by Nadia de Vries , and also features work by Lucia Dove, SJ Fowler, Helena Grande, Dominic Jaeckle, and Divya Nadkarni. My contribution takes the form of a long hybrid poem with title 'you used to want to be a rock star' which in interlinked prose and verse sections incorporates and juxtaposes sampled material, self-appropriations and ...

Continuing my irregular series of readings in support of  this is no longer entertainment , I'll be in London to participate in three events in four days in celebration of Dostoyevsky Wannabe, publisher of the book. Dostoyevsky Wannabe  is at the forefront of 21st century independent and avant-garde publishing, championing innovative authors from across the world with beautifully designed publications. Devised and organised by SJ Fowler  under the Enemies Project banner to function as a launch of his own book with Dostoyevsky Wannabe, and also featuring a number of other authors publishing with the press, this mini tour begins on Saturday 22 February at the Rich Mix Arts Centre in Shoreditch, East London: with SJ Fowler, Christodoulos Makris, Nadia de Vries, Dominic Jaeckle, Andrew Hodgson, James Davies, Jessica Sequeira, Paul Hawkins, Colin Herd, and Russell Bennetts . The following evening ( Sunday 23 February ) we will be in North London at the long-estab...

I look forward to taking part in the 9th annual Doolin Writers Weekend (24-26 January 2020) . Taking place at Hotel Doolin (Doolin, Co Clare) the festival is this year guest-curated by Susan Tomaselli who has charged it with a definite experimental vibe. The festival artist-in-residence is sound, film & performance artist  Vicky Langan , and there will be readings, seminars, workshops, music/DJ sessions and open mics across the weekend featuring a host of excellent writers, poets, editors and publishers such as Darran Andreson, Patrick Chapman, Alice Lyons, Lucy Collins, Jessica Traynor, Gavin Corbett and many others. My contribution to the festival is twofold: First, on Saturday 25 January (2-5pm) I'll be giving a workshop with focus on sampling in poetry : "In music composition, sampling is the act of taking a portion of sound and reusing it as an element of a new recording. Similarly, poets at the cutting edge of the practice increasingly employ their critical...