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EUROPOE (Kingston University Press) & European Poetry Festival 2019

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 contemporary, amorphously continental and generously innovative." - SJ Fowler.

My contribution consists of sections 3 and 9 from this is no longer entertainment, recently published on Dostoyevsky Wannabe originals.

Full contributors list: Pierre Alferi, Tomica Bajsić Aase Berg, Volodymyr Bilyk, Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim, Ida Börjel, Serena Braida, Kristian Carlsson, Sophie Carolin-Wagner, Theodoros Chiotis, Iris Colomb, Efe Duyan, Federico Federici, Orsolya Fenyvesi, Mária Ferenčuhová, Frédéric Forte, Lies Van Gasse, Pavlo Grazhdanskij, Ana Gorria, João Luís Barreto Guimarães, Max Höfler, Niillas Holmberg, Zuzana Husarova, Maja Jantar, Ragnhildur Jóhanns, Aušra Kaziliūnaitė, Frank Keizer, Anatol Knotek, Amadej Kraljevič, Gabrielė Labanauskaitė, Morten Langeland, Luljeta Lleshanaku, Léonce W. Lupette, Christodoulos Makris, Maria Malinskovskaya, Ricardo Marques, Immanuel Mifsud, Simona Nastac, Bruno Neiva, Eugene Ostashevsky, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Daniele Pantano, Astra Papachristodoulou, Cosmin Perţa, Jörg Piringer, Inga Pizane, Tomáš Přidal, Monika Rinck, Cia Rinne, Jon Ståle Ritland, Ekaterina Samigulina, Martin Glaz Serup, Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir, Muanis Sinanović, Morten Søndergaard, Esther Strauß, Kinga Toth, Nadia de Vries, Krišjānis Zeļģis

EUROPOE is available to purchase here.

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For last month's 2nd European Poetry Festival, and with generous sponsorship from Culture Ireland, I travelled to London and Manchester on separate weekends to present brand new collaborations with Pierre Alferi (London) and Tania Hershman (Manchester). Then it was back to Newbridge, Co Kildare, for the closing event of the festival which I co-curated and hosted, and which featured solo readings from 11 poets.

Pierre Alferi and I engaged in what we called a 'stonewash' translation process: we began by exchanging a new poem of ours and translating each from/to French/English in a series of five steps in which mistranslations, miscommunication, deviations and mutual disrespect were encouraged in order to liberate the little monsters lurking within the poems:



My collaboration with Tania Hershman again involved exchanging our poems as a starting point, but these were poems we had already published. We each produced an intralingual translation of / rewrite / conceptual response / homage to each other's poems - and after sending this back we each wrote a 'review' of the other's effort using some of the clichés of book reviews among other devices:



Then for my solo reading in Newbridge I presented a fragment from a new long poem called 'Capital' which will be published in the forthcoming Dublin edition (guest edited by Susan Tomaselli) of Dostoyevsky Wannabe's Cities series of anthologies. For this performance I decided to play around with amplification and audience perception by moving gingerly around the stage, resisting the pull of the microphone.



Footage of all EPF Ireland performances is available here.

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