Christodoulos Makris

Note:  With several scheduled activities postponed or cancelled outright due to COVID-19, I just wanted to place a note of thanks here to those people and organisations who have honoured or have committed to honouring our existing arrangements in whatever ways they can, or who are providing concrete, continued and true support through  the commissioning of work and in other forms . It's a deeper pleasure than ever, and maybe even a privilege, to be making and releasing new work during this time: I'm happy to report that two poems from a cycle I've been developing over the past couple of years were published on Berfrois earlier this week. Berfrois is a literary-intellectual online magazine updated daily, published by Pendant Publishing in London and edited by Russell Bennetts. Persistently and unashamedly internationalist and wide-ranging, it is , in the words of Don Share, senior editor at Poetry (Chicago) magazine, "lightning fast, yet deeply aware". T...

While in Amsterdam at the beginning of the month I was asked by Hotel magazine co-editor Dominic Jaeckle to read some extracts from this is no longer entertainment for audio publication on the Hotel online archive. Jaeckle has heard me read publicly from the book on a number of occasions, and his conception of a fundamental difference between the reading and hearing experiences, with regard to the material in this book in particular, prompted his invitation. In a perceptive note accompanying the publication of the recording , he writes: "The rolling composite voice on show in Makris’ this is no longer entertainment realizes a more complex relationship with polyphony than the page alone can allow. The experience of reading these texts can’t help but engineer a little bad detective work on the part of the reader; we’re accustomed to wading through a myriad of multi-authored opinions as we stroll a heavy thumb through the roll-call of comments that accompany any video, art...

Chromatics : An Evening of Hybrid Poetries and Cultures @ Club Chroma, Irish Museum of Modern Art IMMA invites "one of Ireland’s leading explorers of experimental poetics" Christodoulos Makris to co-curate an evening of playful experimentation, sampling poetry, readings, performance and artists’ moving image as they collide with fragments of club culture, in which to delight you in the sensual, visual and conceptual possibilities of word, sound and image. Guests include Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Kit Fryatt, James King, Vicky Langan, Rouzbeh Rashidi, Padraig Regan . Tues 24 March 2020 / 19:00 - 21:00 Project Spaces ***POSTPONED*** Christodoulos Makris co-curates an evening of playful experimentation – sampling poetry, readings, performance and artists’ moving image as they collide with fragments of club culture. Guests include Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Kit Fryatt, James King, Vicky Langan, Rouzbeh Rashidi, Padraig Regan and others whose work is invested in posing interesting ...

a cross-disciplinary exploration of the process of making chocolate: improvised sound, poetry, and live chocolate-making When: 8.30pm, Saturday 7 March 2020 Where: Unit 3, James Joyce Street, Dublin 1 (Kirkos Ensemble Dublin City Council Incubation Space) Tickets: €10 Featuring: Christodoulos Makris / Nick Roth / David Lacey / Sebastian Adams / The Proper Chocolate Company The Proper Chocolate Company are Dublin’s only bean-to-bar chocolate makers - sourcing, hand-sorting, roasting, cracking and winnowing their cocoa beans, before designing, refining, conching, ageing, tempering and moulding some of the finest chocolate to be found on the island. This unique event , curated by saxophonist and composer Nick Roth and presented by Kirkos Ensemble , is a cross-disciplinary exploration of the chocolate-making process, featuring experimental poet Christodoulos Makris , improvising musicians David Lacey and Sebastian Adams - and with Patrick & Kelli Marjolet bringing the aud...

I'm very pleased to be contributing to the Amsterdam edition of the Cities series of anthologies from Dostoyevsky Wannabe - publisher of  this is no longer entertainment . Dostoyevsky Wannabe Cities is an open source, collaborative project hosted by the press where each book offers a snapshot of a selection of writing from and around one city at one time as chosen by a guest editor. So far there have been books from Bristol, Norwich, Manchester, Dundee, Nottingham, Santiago, Paris and others, and more are set to come along (Brooklyn, Berlin, Boston, Manhattan, Coventry, Glasgow, Dublin, Los Angeles etc). DW Cities Amsterdam is edited by Nadia de Vries , and also features work by Lucia Dove, SJ Fowler, Helena Grande, Dominic Jaeckle, and Divya Nadkarni. My contribution takes the form of a long hybrid poem with title 'you used to want to be a rock star' which in interlinked prose and verse sections incorporates and juxtaposes sampled material, self-appropriations and ...

Continuing my irregular series of readings in support of  this is no longer entertainment , I'll be in London to participate in three events in four days in celebration of Dostoyevsky Wannabe, publisher of the book. Dostoyevsky Wannabe  is at the forefront of 21st century independent and avant-garde publishing, championing innovative authors from across the world with beautifully designed publications. Devised and organised by SJ Fowler  under the Enemies Project banner to function as a launch of his own book with Dostoyevsky Wannabe, and also featuring a number of other authors publishing with the press, this mini tour begins on Saturday 22 February at the Rich Mix Arts Centre in Shoreditch, East London: with SJ Fowler, Christodoulos Makris, Nadia de Vries, Dominic Jaeckle, Andrew Hodgson, James Davies, Jessica Sequeira, Paul Hawkins, Colin Herd, and Russell Bennetts . The following evening ( Sunday 23 February ) we will be in North London at the long-estab...

I look forward to taking part in the 9th annual Doolin Writers Weekend (24-26 January 2020) . Taking place at Hotel Doolin (Doolin, Co Clare) the festival is this year guest-curated by Susan Tomaselli who has charged it with a definite experimental vibe. The festival artist-in-residence is sound, film & performance artist  Vicky Langan , and there will be readings, seminars, workshops, music/DJ sessions and open mics across the weekend featuring a host of excellent writers, poets, editors and publishers such as Darran Andreson, Patrick Chapman, Alice Lyons, Lucy Collins, Jessica Traynor, Gavin Corbett and many others. My contribution to the festival is twofold: First, on Saturday 25 January (2-5pm) I'll be giving a workshop with focus on sampling in poetry : "In music composition, sampling is the act of taking a portion of sound and reusing it as an element of a new recording. Similarly, poets at the cutting edge of the practice increasingly employ their critical...

A review of this is no longer entertainment appeared in The Irish Times on Thursday 26 December 2019. The review is by Gregory Betts, professor of English language & literature at Brock University, Ontario, Canada - who has recently served as Craig Dobbin Professor for Canadian Studies at University College Dublin. My book is reviewed in juxtaposition with Kimberly Campanello's MOTHERBABYHOME as a means of exploring how "as the world transforms, so too must its poetry, disregarding tradition." The two books are presented as examples of writing that "gives up the nationalist illusion of commonality to expose the fault lines of a society," which is "particularly necessary in an age of complex social turbulence on the precipice of even further changes." Commenting specifically on  this is no longer entertainment , Betts states that "[it] uses a conceptual writing approach to illuminate fissures in our social fabric," and that the col...

Beginning Thursday 5 March 2020 I will be teaching a weekly course (duration 8 weeks) with title  'Something Borrowed, Something New'  at the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin: "This is a course encouraging innovative approaches to writing: responding directly to our contemporary content-sharing culture, it will explore in practical terms ways in which this is altering all forms of literature. As a direct consequence of the superabundance of readily accessible text and other documentation, the nature of literary composition is undergoing radical transformation, with the contemporary writer increasingly relying on their reading, selection and manipulation skills. Participants on this course - which is nominally geared towards the advanced, but is suitable for inquisitive writers of all levels of experience - will explore approaches that make use of pre-existing material with an application to poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Issues relating to copyright and attribution...

In an exciting development connected to my recent reading in Belfast , The Lifeboat Press published a limited edition pamphlet of my work with title  yes to the above . yes to the above  is a collection of outtakes, or 'deleted scenes', from  this is no longer entertainment . Conceived as a 'bonus material' accompaniment to the book, it consists of seven of the sections I cut out the massive document I assembled over the timeline of the entertainment project in the process of composing the poem. The pamphlet,  a limited edition publication in 50 numbered copies , was produced for the reading on 12 November 2019 as  The Lifeboat  Issue Thirty Six, and sold for the nominal price of £1. A small number of copies remains available. If you're interested in acquiring one please email me to arrange.