Christodoulos Makris

To celebrate Bloomsday and the multiple language and cultural references in Ulysses, an evening of readings and music  takes place tomorrow evening at JF Studios. This is a multilingual/cultural event, with English, Irish, Gallego, Cypriot, French, Korean, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Tamil and Shona some of the languages included. Participating writers and poets: Christodoulos Makris, Fióna Bolger, John Kearns, Anamaria Crowe Serrano, Rob Doyle, Karl Parkinson, Liz McSkeane, Dessiree Ares, Phil Lynch, Antain MacLochlainn, Ola Kubiak, Vadhani, Alan Jude Moore, Yoon Kyung Chung, Lillian Ndumba and Dimitra Xidous. Gallery artist Mark Doherty will be drawing live, responding to the words and sounds around. This is a free event. Monday 16 June 2014, 6pm-8pm Olivier Cornet Gallery, 5 Cavendish Row, Dublin 1 The gallery would like to dedicate the event to the memory of artist, gallery owner and Joycean scholar Gerald Davis (1938 - 18th June 2005).

Over on Dave Lordan's blog  I discuss experimental writing as part of a short series featuring various writers & arts professionals invited to do so by Dave. This is part of the build up to the Circa Bloomsday weekend event at the Irish Writers' Centre over this coming weekend 14-15 June, which celebrates and showcases contemporary experimental literature in honour of the legacy of Joyce, and the Blast 100 modernist symposium at Trinity College in early July - in both of which Dave is participating. The other respondents so far are Rob Doyle , Máighréad Medbh , Graham Allen & Darran Anderson .

I'm really excited to be involved as the Dublin curator/editor of this project - part of a series of city-to-city collaborative poetry projects headed by Mexico's EBL-Cielo Abierto publishing house - as well as participating poet: at the end of last year 7 poets from Dublin were partnered with 7 from Guadalajara to exchange selections of their work and render the work of their collaborator into their language, be it English or Spanish. A resulting anthology,  Centrifugal: Contemporary Poetry from Dublin and Guadalajara,  is due out in September from EBL-Cielo Abierto as a dual-language volume, with support from Mexico's National Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA). There are unconfirmed plans for public presentations of the book in both cities. The poet pairings are as follows: Alan Jude Moore & Xitlálitil Rodríguez Anamaría Crowe Serrano & Mónica Nepote Catherine Walsh & Laura Solórzano Christodoulos Makris & Luis Eduardo Ga...

A 5-minute home video made last October for the project & exhibition 'Transcapes / The Halted Traveler' in which I read from Muses Walk under fading light.

A little over a year ago I received a request for permission to have some poems from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue translated into Croatian, which I happily granted. These poems are to be included in an anthology of contemporary European poetry to be published in Zagreb (Croatian Writers Society) in celebration of Croatia's recent entry to the EU. I'm grateful to the redoubtable Damir Šodan for selecting my work for the anthology, and for having a go at translating my poems - I remember him suggesting to me after a reading that he could hear them very clearly in Croatian. And it's great to be joining the likes of Raymond Carver, Allen Ginsberg and Leonard Cohen in having work rendered into Croatian by Damir! Part of a taster for this ambitious anthology - which features some really exciting young/younger poets hailing from Europe (Elisa Biagini, Valzhyna Mort, Ilya Kaminsky) alongside one or two luminaries (Tranströmer, Zagajewski, Armitage) and is due to appear in t...

Though I have written a smattering of poems in Greek from first principles, these occasions are extremely rare simply because it's ceased long ago to be the language I live in. My knowledge of it at mother tongue level, atrophied though it is, does enter what I write; and I have made use of it in conceptual/experimental ways. But writing directly into Greek and/or its Cypriot dialect seems more like an archaeological venture than a current, vital one. So when Dimitra Xidous asked me to translate her poem 'Onions' from her debut collection Keeping Bees , just out from Doire Press, I initially had some reservations. But I decided to take the task on: Dimitra wanted to speak the poem in Greek at the book's launch (which took place quite successfully in Dublin last Saturday) and I thought that would be an interesting exercise given her own removal from all things Greek in linguistic, generational and geographical terms. Below is 'Onions' as rendered by me into ...

Colony   is one of a flurry of recently-established Ireland-based journals interested in a break from a traditional-institutional understanding of literature (or at least, as Colony 's first editorial statement puts it, in an area of "healthy tension" between the traditional and the avant garde). A group of exciting writers and artists make up its editorial team. It's to appear online three times a year, with a fourth, print issue including the best of the online material plus new work set to be published annually. Colony 's inaugural issue presents work that "exemplifies [a] spirit of playfulness, glee, and anarchic invention" by "some of the best writers and most gifted artists and thinkers in Ireland (and beyond)." I'm delighted to be contributing  two poems to it: 'xxxxx' and '16 X 16' are concerned with ideas of appropriation, re-framing, constraint and process, while extending a sideways glance at the issue's t...

I look forward to taking part in this reading  alongside two of the other poets featured in the Ash Wednesday Series: How to Speak Poetry, this coming Wednesday 5 March 2014 : Kicking off the Ranelagh Spring Salon, a reading of poets featured in the Ash Wednesday Poetry Series: How to Speak Poetry will be held on Ash Wednesday March 5, 2014 at the Ranelagh Arts Centre. The evening will start at 7pm and it will feature the following poets: Christodoulos Makris Billy Ramsell Máighréad Medbh The musical act for the evening will be the lovely and melodic Red Sail. Admission: 5 Euro

The Ash Wednesday Poetry Series is part of the Ash Sessions initiative , a poetry and music showcase (named after a Leonard Cohen quote) curated by Dimitra Xidous and taking place at Nick's Coffee Company in Dublin's Ranelagh village. This year the series examines "the line, real or perceived, between the page and the stage, the written and the spoken, and how and where these two worlds collide (and whether or not they are best conceived as two worlds at all)." Taking its cue from Cohen’s ‘How to Speak Poetry' (from his book  Death of a Lady's Man ) the series will feature the work of 8 poets and their thoughts on Cohen’s positions on speaking poetry. The series began on Wednesday 8 January. Each week it showcases the work of one featured poet on the chalkboard at Nick’s Coffee Company. In addition, the 'How to Speak Poetry' series blog includes a small interview with each poet, as well as a soundcloud link of a performance of the poem showcas...

It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that SJ Fowler  has charged the poetry scene in London (and elsewhere) with a fresh vitality. Since he entered the ring of writing, editing and, particularly, event-organising some years ago, the diverse factions that poetry habitually splinters into seem to have converged that little bit. The scene(s) have brightened that little bit. It's probably for his relentless curatorial efforts that he is known best - for Steven a worthy and totally valid way to grapple with poetry. The byproduct being that he has created fertile ground for those working under the umbrella of avant-garde and literary writing to begin conversing anew. His poetics, residing squarely in the avant-garde, are not altogether distinct from his role as event organiser.  Enemies , his recently-published book from Penned In The Margins, which collects extracts from his numerous collaborations, is a comprehensive statement on his perspective on writing. Benefit...