Christodoulos Makris

Two new poems of mine are included in issue 17 of Critical Bastards magazine, published last month and revolving around the theme of 'Lies'. Critical Bastards is an interdisciplinary arts magazine that has been operating out of Ireland since 2011. It's currently edited by Lily Cahill, Dorothy Hunter, Deborah Madden, and Sara O'Brien. Themes for past issues have included 'Bilocation', 'Expectation and Disappointment in Art' - as well as the all-audio issue 'Work' which included my performance piece 'Work Sharing' . Issue 17: Lies aims to "explore the lie as strategy, as means of disruption, as method. It [...] questions the reliability of what is produced through art and writing. Can a lie function differently in these contexts? Do the parameters of truth, fact and fiction shift? How might various realities and unrealities assume form, collide and co-exist?" In response to the brief my two poems printed in the issue - 'Di...

I'm honoured to be awarded the inaugural Joseph M. Hassett Creativity Bursary (Poetry) for 2021-22 at UCD College of Arts and Humanities. Full details in the University's press release  (text below): --- We are delighted to announce that the poet Christodoulos Makris has been awarded the inaugural Joseph M. Hassett Creativity Bursary (Poetry) 2021-22.  Starting 1 September 2021, Christodoulos Makris will work with the RTÉ Radio Scripts Collection in the UCD Archives . He intends to work with ephemera held in the archive relating to historical programming on RTÉ Radio to compose poetic text(s) through juxtaposition (parataxis) as a response to communication motifs and other undercurrents in relations between public and private at the level of institution, and to propose extrapolations across time into our current moment. Makris is the first recipient of the Joseph M. Hassett Creativity Bursary , which for 2021-22 is dedicated to poetry. Worth €5,000, it is funded by the College...

I recently had the opportunity to programme a season of mixed media publications for Hotel magazine (London) expanding on selected performances from across our nine Phonica events (Dublin, January 2016 - November 2018). These publications appeared at regular intervals between April and August 2021, and the season is now complete. Phonica is a Dublin-based performance series rooted in Word and Sound, with an emphasis on multiformity and the experimental. Directed, programmed and hosted by myself and Olesya Zdorovetska , Phonica aims to explore compositional and performative ideas and to encourage a melting pot of audiences and artists from across artforms and borders. It has been in receipt of financial and operational support from the Arts Council of Ireland, Dublin City Council, Poetry Ireland and Smock Alley Theatre, as well as a range of international partners. The full Phonica history is documented here . After nine iterations, activities were interrupted due to a number of facto...

The inaugural issue of Belfield Literary Review , co-published by University College Dublin (UCD) and Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), is now out and it includes my original poem 'Hoax'. Belfield Literary Review has grown out of the creative writing community at UCD and it is edited by Paul Perry. As Perry writes in his editorial, the journal "aims to represent the excellence of its activities and outreaches in creativity," and it is "particularly interested in the interface between critical and creative work, hybrid texts, and the experimental." Issue 1 - titled 'New TransAtlantic Dialogues' - is guest-edited by Gregory Betts and Lucy Collins, and consists of work from a fusion of Irish, Canadian and Indigenous writers predominantly working in the avant-garde, and who participated in the combined conferences The Writer's Voice and text / sound / performance  convened at UCD in April 2019. My poem 'Hoax' was originally written in re...

A new poem of mine with title 'it begins with Eileen' was published in issue 91 of Cyphers , released at the beginning of May 2021. Founded in 1975 by Leland Bardwell, Pearse Hutchinson, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Macdara Woods, Cyphers is one of Ireland's longest-established literary magazines , publishing poetry, prose, graphics and reviews. It's currently edited by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin  with assistance from Léan Ní Chuilleanáin and Natasha Cuddington. Cyphers was one of the first poetry magazines I encountered when I moved from London to Dublin in 2001 so the invitation to contribute was very welcome. 'it begins with Eileen' relates to 'languages on the street' as one of the issue's loose framing concerns, and it's taken from my recent cycle of poems responding to aspects of digital gesture and performativity. There was a modest online launch on the evening of 19 May featuring readings from Luke Morgan, Nell Regan, Simon Ó Faoláin, Mary Mo...

On Wednesday 16 June I'll be reading for the Arvon Foundation's 'Arvon at Home' series of weekly online Live Guest Readings. Arvon has been the UK's home of creative writing for over 50 years, offering residential courses and retreats led by acclaimed writers. Due to the current Covid-19 restrictions it has created an online programme of activities called 'Arvon at Home'  offering Writing Weeks, Masterclasses, Live Guest Readings and other sessions. The Live Guest Readings take place every Wednesday evening, when a guest reads from their work and answers questions live and in person online. Kindly invited in the context of the 'Hybrid Writing'  course led by Roy Claire Potter and Joanna Walsh (14-18 June) I will read some recent poetry and also for the first time from a new work in progress. The event starts at 7.15pm (UK / Ireland time) and will include a Q&A session. Tickets cost £5.00 and are bookable through the Arvon website (participan...

On Wednesday 26 May I will be discussing my book this is no longer entertainment in the second instalment of 'Poets Talk Politics', a series of events run by The University of Porto's Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa (ILCML) . 'Poets Talk Politics' is an online series organised by João Guimarães where poets are invited to read from their work and talk about political topics related to it with researchers and academics from The University of Porto and elsewhere. The series is livestreamed on Facebook - and in this session I will be talking with Guimarães and his colleagues Elina Siltanen (University of Eastern Finland), Daae Jung (SUNY Buffalo) and Lígia Bernardino (ILCML). In the second session of our series, Makris will read some poems from his latest book and talk to us about the political implications of social media, from which much of the material that the author appropriates and recontextualizes in his work comes. We will discuss, among ot...

My essay 'The Psycho-delic European Trek' commissioned for the project Kaleidoscope II: Europe in Ireland , an initiative of The European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS) based in Leuven, Belgium, was published last week. This essay represents a temporary gear change for me, and was written very much against type:  'The Psycho-delic European Trek' makes use of aspects of my personal life and experience presented in a formally fragmented structure to comment on the shifts and instabilities in European identity and borders (internal and external) across time, in parallel with considerations of composite personal identity and outlook - all under the light cast by Brexit. As a form-driven interpretation of Europe, with its strengths and challenges residing in how the pieces fit together - not always entirely smoothly or coherently - the essay relies on the interplay between its form and content. Europe in Ireland is the second in the EFACI...

A brand new specially-commissioned poem of mine with title 'Bandsalat (Verse Chorus Verse)' appears in the inaugural issue (April 2021) of Mirror Lamp Press , a new Dublin-based journal operating at the intersections of visual art and writing. Mirror Lamp Press is a free quarterly magazine edited by Gwen Burlington and Eoghan McIntyre. Each issue explores the intersection of art and literature through newly commissioned texts and selected works of an illustrator or visual artist. It lives in the digital sphere and has been designed to be read online, with each issue made available as a freely downloadable PDF. If you fancy holding the words in your hands, we encourage you to print it too. Each issue is formatted linguistically and features five sections under the headings Subject, Object, Verb, Word, and Place. Issue 1 is themed around Happiness.  My poem occupies the Object section as a response to the issue's theme through "a personal or art object." As the e...

On 6 April I'll be taking part in the third of four events comprising 'Conversations with the Contemporary' , a series of readings and discussions about craft and context conceived, programmed and hosted by Niamh Campbell, University College Dublin (UCD) Writer in Residence 2021. From the introduction to the series: Style is the writer's ghost in the language machine: a series of decisions about what to write and how to write it which is both unconscious and deliberate. With this series UCD Writer in Residence Niamh Campbell is delighted to invite 8 writers to describe and discuss their process, craft, and the context of contemporary life - a world mediated by the internet, ruminating on recent history, making room for new stories, or pushing back against these - in relation to their work and their sense of style. We will talk about possible selves, multiple selves, found or concrete iterations of 'self'; the self online, the self on drugs, the embodied or disem...