Christodoulos Makris

Big thanks to everyone who made  the pilot edition of re:verb   such a joyous and remarkable experience: participating poets and artists, design and technical support, venue, bookshop, audience(s). It was a genuine pleasure to organise, programme, direct and host. Wonderful also to see a full or near-full house at all five sessions. An article on Asymptote journal - a leading online platform for international literature and translation - called re:verb "a daring and much needed enterprise" and "a one-of-a-kind literary festival in Ireland (and possibly the world)." I put together a short documentary of re:verb 2026 which I hope captures something of its spirit and vibe. Though you really had to be there. You can view it on YouTube  (with accompanying information and credits) or below.

On Saturday 22 March we will reprise our collaborative performance 'Housing Data ~ Sonified: The Sound and Poetry of Ireland's Housing Data' at Ormston House , a contemporary art gallery in Limerick city centre. This 10-movement composition incorporating my original poem 'Press Play' was created and is performed in collaboration with composer and pianist  David Bremner and violinist Larissa O'Grady . It  premiered on 23 April 2024 at TU Dublin Recital Hall . Ormston House says: Data related to Ireland's severe housing crisis converted into a multi-movement work for violin and keyboard, with readings of appropriated/found texts. The concert explores the ‘sonification’ of data related to Ireland’s severe housing crisis. The artists have sifted through data from sources including CSO, Central Bank, and Global Property Guide looking for insight about what is driving the crisis and the suffering caused by it. This data is converted into a multi-movement work for...

I had a wonderfully intense time in New York City in the first half of January, facilitated by a formal residency at Irish Arts Center awarded to me through a two-part cross-Atlantic residency programme led by St John's Theatre & Arts Centre, Listowel, Co Kerry. The core component of the residency was an opportunity to work further on my next poetry manuscript using the space and facilities at the Center, located on 11th Avenue, in the Hell's Kitchen neighbourhood in Manhattan, while feeding off the energy, sounds, images and the general tumult, urgency and creativity of New York City. While my time there was short I was able to add some new elements to the manuscript, but more importantly to begin to think of it and start editing in structural, macro terms. I have for a long time now recognised that I write or make hybrid-form work in book- or project-length cycles, rather than in shorter, standard poem-length forms, even though those cycles are sometimes composed of link...

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 ...

Such a pleasure to take part in the first live event organised by Mirror Lamp Press last Friday evening at The Complex Arts Centre in north inner city Dublin, where I performed a set constructed around my poem 'Bandsalat (Verse Chorus Verse)' - a poem specially commissioned for the journal's inaugural issue in April 2021. Mirror Lamp Press is an online journal exploring the intersection of art and literature. Edited by Gwen Burlington and Eoghan McIntyre, it has already amassed an impressive list of contributors across artforms. As well as celebrating publication of its eighth issue which went live earlier that day, the event sought to showcase writing from previous issues and presented screenings of four commissioned audiovisual essays. My poem 'Bandsalat (Verse Chorus Verse)' was composed in response to the editors' brief of writing on an object of my choice that brought some kind of relief or happiness during a time of prolonged home confinement and force...

I'm very pleased to be curating the closing event of the European Poetry Festival 2022 in partnership with festival director SJ Fowler. 'The European Camarade: Ireland' takes place at Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, Co Kildare, on Saturday 9 July 2022. My involvement with the festival - in a co-producing and programming role - began with the closing event of the 2019 edition , which I was able to produce in the context of my spell as Writer in Residence at Maynooth University & Kildare County Council Library and Arts Service (2018-19). Plans for follow-up events were undermined by the pandemic, but we are now in a position to resume this multi-body partnership with an event offering a unique approach to multi-genre, cross-border and collaborative poetics, and representing a significant legacy of my writing residency in Co Kildare. The European Poetry Festival is a predominantly UK-based festival celebrating the resurgence of avant-garde and literary poetry across E...

I very much look forward to this year's edition of the Belfast Book Festival, taking place 10-19 June, and in which I will be participating in a range of ways. Especially since my scheduled participation in 2020, arranged by a different programming team, unfortunately did not happen due to the festival's cancellation that year. So my contribution to the  Belfast Book Festival 2022 takes three different forms: 1/ Reading and Conversation -  Literary Collage With Sophie Herxheimer & Christodoulos Makris : This intimate event will query the potential of the many sources of found and discarded language as source texts for the creation of new literary material. Come along and join poets Sophie Herxheimer and Christodoulos Makris for an evening of readings and conversation. Wednesday 15 June 2022 | 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM | Tickets: Pay What You Want – recommended price £7  | The Crescent Arts Centre 2/ Workshop -  Text As Material: Remake Reuse Recycle With Christodoulos...

My experimental poetry film 'Documentary Poetics reprise', commissioned by Máighréad Medbh for the Fingal Libraries Culture Night 2021 programme, premiered on 17 September. Part of the digital event 'Oblique Techniques: Poetry of Present-Absent Place', my film appeared alongside contributions by Alice Lyons and Catherine Walsh and with short introductions from Máighréad Medbh . The brief was to make a home video of no longer than twenty minutes presenting (an aspect of) our own practice, with the unifying concept of "a notion of the contemporary as coupled with shifts in perception and concepts of space". Responding to a short list of phrases compiled by Medbh and taken from our recent books, was an additional option or constraint. From the event description: Fingal Libraries present three poets whose work explores the contemporary world in unusual ways. Documenting the moment in its various forms - public, private, elemental, intellectual, abstract and materi...

I'm delighted to be working with Kildare Readers Festival once again this year. Please join us for States of Flux: Ways of Writing Poetry , an event devised, programmed and hosted by myself, and premiering on Vimeo on 6 October 2021: In an event deviating from the usual reading and panel discussion format, three contemporary poets give short talks on their writing process. Join Ellen Dillon , Kit Fryatt and Dimitra Xidous as they each present one of their recent poems and discuss inspirations, raw material and references, drafts and rewrites, practical and publication concerns, its place within their overall work and interests, and other elements framing their compositional decisions. Linked by fresh and innovative approaches to making poetry, and by operating in modes of linguistic, cultural, formal, and other states of flux, these three poets promise to provoke rich cross-commentary towards elucidating and demystifying aspects of contemporary poetic practice. Devised, programm...

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...

On Thursday 15 October I will take part in an event focusing on experimental writing as part of this year's Red Line Book Festival. Held in October each year, the Red Line Book Festival takes place in various venues across South Dublin County. It is funded by South Dublin County Council and managed by South Dublin Libraries and Arts. This year's edition features a blended programme of online and offline events. 'Experimental Writing with...' is an online event also featuring  Kimberly Campanello and Alice Lyons , and hosted/moderated by Gregory Betts . From the event description: Experimental Writing has experienced a resurgence of late and the work of poets Kimberly Campanello and Christodoulos Makris, as well as novelist Alice Lyons, have been held up as part of its current re-emergence. Noted experimental poet and academic Gregory Betts will be hosting this fascinating discussion of where experimental writing is today, and where it will go next. Start time is 6.30...

I am pleased to announce the release of a video with title 'framed entertainment'. Enabled through receipt of an Arts Council of Ireland Covid-19 Crisis Response Award, 'framed entertainment' presents raw footage from a private reading of a hybrid text composed of sections from my third book  this is no longer entertainment  interspersed with fragments of theoretical framework taken from my introductory essay 'Poetry and Cultures of Feedback' . Conforming to full Government of Ireland lockdown restrictions (Phase One) the reading was for an audience of one and it took place on a remote beach within 2km of my home; it was filmed by a member of my immediate family on their personal device, and the video was home-edited using widely-available amateur tools. With thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for the award. The Arts Council of Ireland introduced this special award in April 2020 to support Ireland-based professional artists across all disciplines in creatin...

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...

Organised by Gregory Betts - poet, scholar, editor, and 2018-19 Craig Dobbin professor of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin (UCD) - and taking place at UCD and associated spaces over three days 25-27 April 2019, TEXT / SOUND / PERFORMANCE: Making in Canadian Space is a highly ambitious conference and gathering of scholars, students, writers, and community partners. There's a keynote address and masterclass workshop on each of the three pillars of the conference, alongside academic and creative panels, roundtables, and performances. A masterclass on digitization and archival practices is also being offered, in collaboration with the Irish Poetry Reading Archive (UCD) and the SpokenWeb Project (Concordia). Other forms of nontraditional engagement, including performances, thematic unconference-style discussions, and exhibitions, will supplement the panels, classes, and plenary talks. The conference will feature papers and presentations that expand, trouble, decentraliz...

A while ago I recorded six poems from my 2015 book The Architecture of Chance for the Irish Poetry Reading Archive, an initiative of University College Dublin (UCD) Library Special Collections, with footage now uploaded to the Special Collections YouTube channel. These recordings, along with handwritten manuscripts of some of these poems that I made specially for the reading, will form part of the collection's digital archive. The Irish Poetry Reading Archive is a central repository that holds recordings of Irish poets and writers reading their work and giving a brief overview of the context and circumstances that influenced the writing of the poems. The collection aims to capture and preserve the contemporary poetry landscape in Ireland, and includes established and emerging poets, performance and avant-garde poets, English and Irish language poets, and diaspora poets. Recordings began in April 2014, and the archive was launched in December 2015 by the Minister of Arts, H...

A new poem with title 'Lady Liberty with a deaths head visage...' is included in Paris Lit Up no. 4 , nominally published in 2016 but out just last month. This fourth edition of Paris Lit Up magazine - published by the Paris-based umbrella organisation of the same name that maintains an emphasis on transnational writers, artists and musicians - arrives, as the editors write in their foreword, at a crossroads: "as the world darkens with increasingly rigid identities, we ask ourselves how our creative endeavours can contest this narrowing vision". An answer appears in the notion of trans- ("transnational, transgressive, transitional, translational") which is the overall theme and title of the issue. My piece is included in one of two specially curated sections: Malik Crumpler & Pansy Maurer-Alvarez ( Poets Live ) and Jennifer K Dick ( Ivy Writers Paris ) invited a small selection of participants in their respective series to contribute to the issue....

I was honoured and delighted to receive an invitation from Susan Tomaselli to join gorse  as poetry editor - an invitation I wasted no time in accepting. As I'd written  elsewhere , I consider gorse a unique and refreshing presence in the Irish literary landscape, with an outlook, temperament and set of interests that resonate deeply with mine. Getting the chance to contribute to it in an editorial capacity and to work towards strengthening the considerable impact it has already made in just two issues is a hugely exciting challenge, full of possibilities. It's hard to specify what kind of poetry I'm looking for, because above all I want to publish poetry I didn't know I was looking for. Likely to interest me, though, is writing that plays with boundaries of form, language and genre, that's aware of social, political, technological and cultural developments, that's interrogative and outward-looking, conceptually-rigorous and witty. We are beginning to work ...

Issue 3 of online journal  Colony , published last month, focuses on the theme of Magic and includes my piece 'Heaney after Rauschenberg'. My thanks to poetry editor Kimberly Campanello for featuring it within what is a strong poetry section, also including excellent work by Paul Casey, Aodán McCardle, Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Ryan Van Winkle. 'Heaney after Rauschenberg' is a piece of erasure, which reduces Seamus Heaney's collection Death of a Naturalist to its four-letter words, in order of their appearance in the text. Here's Robert Rauschenberg talking about his 1953 work 'Erased de Kooning Drawing':

In the course of my participation in the 3rd ISLA Festival in October, I was interviewed by Eleanor Molloy at the Dámaso Alonso Library of the Instituto Cervantes in Dublin for the Institute's YouTube channel: