Christodoulos Makris

As well as making work for books and other publication formats, my practice extends to performance and other modes of presentation, while my editorial and curatorial activities operate in tandem with my creative work feeding and influencing each other. Following on from the first part of this double post, which rounded up recent responses to my published work , below I log some press on my curated exhibition Is this a poem?  - whose run at Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) I'm happy to report has been extended to 22 September 2024 - and of the premiere of 'Press Play,' a collaborative cross-disciplinary composition and performance relating to Ireland's housing crisis. * On 7 April 2024, the inaugural episode of the radio programme Poetry People on Ireland's state broadcaster RTÉ Radio One included a segment called 'What is Poetry?' For this segment, prompted by the advent of Is this a poem? , the show's producers commissioned a short essay from Museum

I'm grateful for attention my work continues to receive from other poets and writers, reviewers and editors, essayists and academics. I'm especially pleased when this is not confined to discussions of the most recent book, but extends to the broader arc of my practice, giving a multifaceted and cumulative reading of it. This is Part One of a two-part post rounding up some commentary that appeared over the first half of 2024. It focuses on reviews and essays on my books or other published work. Part Two ( coming soon now available here ) will log coverage of activities of mine that extend beyond print publishing. * On 11 January 2024, UK-based  Stride Magazine published a review of  Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document (Veer Books, 2023) which I was happy to note given the attention Stride gives to poetry from small presses and in broadly experimental modes, and especially since in the past the magazine published one of the most comprehensive reviews of my third book this

I'm very pleased to be partnering with Poetry Ireland on two connected initiatives taking place this summer and autumn: I will be offering a guided tour (in person) of the exhibition Is this a poem? which I devised and curated and which runs at Museum of Literature Ireland until 21 July 22 September 2024; and I will be leading a 6-week (online) course with title 'Poetry in the Contemporary World'. Full details below. You can book a place on the tour and/or the course through the relevant links. /// Christodoulos Makris - Is this a poem? Curator Tour Saturday, July 13, 10:30am - 12:30pm In Person: Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), 86 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2 Cost: €25 [BOOK HERE] Join Christodoulos at MoLI for a special guided tour in which he will introduce and discuss the individual items comprising Is this a poem? He will explore and speak about the concepts underpinning the exhibition and how we experience and view poetry. Devised and curated by Christodou

I'm excited to be taking part in the Listowel - New York International Residency programme 2024-25, a unique two-part residency aiming to connect artists from the experimental theatre, dance, and performance scenes in Ireland and New York City. Led by St John's Theatre & Arts Centre in Listowel, Co Kerry, and supported by The Arts Council of Ireland, Kerry County Arts Office, and the Irish Arts Center in New York City, this initiative supports 7 selected artists - four from Ireland and three from New York - to spend two weeks (20 May - 2 June 2024) in Listowel, a small town in north Co Kerry known for its literary heritage, and one week in January 2025 at the Irish Arts Centre in New York. I'm participating in this cool generative opportunity alongside six other artists operating in experimental performance modes and active in a range of artforms and locations: Anthony Keigher, Emily Davis, Gabriel Graves, Amanda Horowitz, Jane Deasy, and Hayley Stahl. According to th

I'm partnering once again with Kildare County Council Arts and Libraries Service, Riverbank Arts Centre in Newbridge, Co Kildare, and the European Poetry Festival through its director SJ Fowler, to co-programme my third European Poetry Festival event in Ireland, following editions in 2019 and 2022 . Thursday 2 May 2024, Riverbank Arts Centre. 7.30pm start. Click here to book your free ticket . Full details through the link, and below. A special event offering a unique approach to poetry in performance: 5 poets/artists based in Ireland and 4 visiting poets/artists from the rest of Europe pair up to produce brand new, specially commissioned collaborative works to premiere on the night. Representing a legacy of poet Christodoulos Makris’ spell as Writer in Residence at Maynooth University and Kildare County Council Arts & Library Service, this is his third programming partnership with European Poetry Festival to be presented at Riverbank Arts Centre . The European Poetry Festival

Join us on Tuesday 23 April 2024 in the Recital Hall at Technological University (TU) Dublin Conservatoire for the premiere of a new work - a sonic-poetic treatment of Ireland's housing data composed and performed in collaboration with David Bremner (piano) and Larissa O'Grady (violin). Produced and curated by David Bremner, and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, this project has been in development over several months during which David, Larissa and I engaged in regular generative sessions where we gathered, sifted, discussed, and crunched vast amounts of data - numerical and linguistic - from a wide range of sources including the Central Statistics Office, Council meetings and Dáil sessions, public testimonies and media reports, The Central Bank, Global Property Guides, and more, on the causes and effects of the severe housing crisis in Ireland. We then converted these data points directly to a multi-movement work for violin, piano, and text, through which patterns r

A couple of months ago I was interviewed on film by Dr Lucy Collins, associate professor at University College Dublin (UCD) School of English, Drama and Film, about my book It Reeks of Radio  (BLR Editions, 2023). In the same session I also read some excerpts from the book. These videos have now been released by UCD Special Collections as part of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive. They can be viewed on YouTube ( interview | reading ), on the Archive playlist , or below. The Irish Poetry Reading Archive  is "Ireland's only curated digital collection, where the voices of Irish poets, both North and South, doing readings, scholarly masterclasses, and in conversation, along with digital copies of poetry related materials (anthologies, programmes, posters) are preserved for future generations. Recordings are also made freely available in the UCD Digital Library." This is my second contribution to the Archive, following a bundle of poems from my second book The Architecture of

The Arts Council of Ireland recently published a profile on my work as a poet operating in a post-digital landscape, specifically in relation to  sorry that you were not moved , my digital project in collaboration with Kimberly Campanello that was released by Fallow Media in February 2022. This study of my work and our project is one of five such profile pieces commissioned by The Arts Council. It was produced in the context of  its new drive to support the Digital Arts in Ireland  and in connection with the recent launch of its  Digital Arts Policy . Titled 'Reimagining literature in a digital space' , the study was authored by Denise McDonagh of Culture Works , with an accompanying video element created by Kate Costello of Narrator & Co . It was composed following a transcribed informal conversation and interview with me - as director and lead artist on  sorry that you were not moved  - about the aims, development and impact of the project, as well as the conditions of m

I'm very excited to announce my most ambitious curatorial project to date, which opens to the public today, Saturday 24 February 2024, at Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) in Dublin, and which will run until 21 July  (now extended to 22 September): Is this a Poem? is a mixed-media exhibition and event programme that collects works of poetry whose common characteristic is having been specifically conceived to operate beyond the page, sometimes in non-verbal modes. Accompanied by the tagline 'Adventures on the edge of an artform', Is this a poem? is an exhibition about poetry’s furthest frontiers. "Explore the entire museum to discover works of poetry that exist beyond the page: poems that are sound, sculpture, image, film, performances, software, and objects you can touch. The poems collected in this exhibition were mostly made in Ireland over the last decade, but are sometimes seen as a footnote to Irish poetry. Is this a poem? celebrates their playful capacity to

My essay on the making of the long poem that constitutes my most recent book  It Reeks of Radio  (BLR Editions, 2023) appears in the latest issue No. 141 of Poetry Ireland Review . Commissioned by the issue's guest editor,  Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe , my essay broadly considers the background interests that led to my decision to work with radio archives - and specifically with the archived correspondence around historical broadcasts on RTÉ Radio rather than the radio scripts themselves - my practical and compositional working process, and the considerations that led to the poem embedding a visual dimension and the result taking the form of a book. The concluding paragraph offers brief commentary on the tensions in the relationship between poetry - an artform that at its keenest exists in the hyper-present - and archival documents, and consequently on the concept of commemoration through poetry, as well as the democratising potential of public media, while inviting each reader to contr