Christodoulos Makris

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...

Last Saturday's edition of The Irish Times (24 June 2023) carries Jessica Traynor's review of my recent book Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document . The review begins with Traynor stating that "the fourth full-length collection by [...] one of Ireland's foremost avant-garde poets, submerges the reader in the arch - and sometimes frighteningly sentient - language of the internet." Its subject, she continues, is "the self as seen through many online filters" with the poems within it "concerned with the commodification of language, and how it can serve as a cunning apparatus to conceal our baser intentions." While excerpting from the poems 'cubist debrief', 'everybody knows but you', and 'Paul Scholes' foot' to elaborate on her reading of the work, Traynor remains attuned to the whole book as the prevailing unit of composition. "These are tightly sprung poems capable of startling juxtapositions," she writes...

I was pleased to accept an invitation from Limerick City and County Council Arts Office to edit this year's 45th issue of Stony Thursday Book . The Stony Thursday Poetry Book is one of Ireland's longest running literary journals, with its policy of a rotating editorship ensuring freshness and diversity in editorial focus, approach and content across the years. For this year's edition, expected to be published in the autumn of 2023, I will consider submissions of poetry running to between 3 and 6 pages, and particularly welcome work in experimental, unconventional or pioneering forms. Limerick Arts Office issued an open call for submissions and announced my editorship  on this year's Poetry Day Ireland. The full details of the submission call can be found at this link , and are also reproduced below. Guidelines are also available at the portal where submissions can be made . Deadline is  5pm, Wednesday 31 May 2023 . I look forward to reading your work. --- The Stony Thur...

My poem 'insert name here' was published in the online edition of  Granta  magazine last week. "like us or not don’t be afraid toss us a follow it counts":  Read 'insert name here' . Granta  is  a quarterly magazine of new writing. It was founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University as  The Granta , and in 1979, Bill Buford and Pete de Bolla transformed it from a student publication to the literary quarterly it remains today. Granta Books came ten years later, and now publishes around thirty new titles a year.  Granta  is most celebrated for its ‘Best of Young’ issues, which introduce the most important voices of each generation - in Britain, America, Brazil and Spain - defining the contours of the literary landscape. It has published twenty-seven Nobel Prize laureates. My thanks to Granta poetry editor  Rachael Allen , online editor  Josie Mitchell , and editorial assistant  Brodie Crellin . 'insert name here' is...

I'm excited to announce that my new book of poems  Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document is publishing this month with the Veer2 imprint of Veer Books. The book will be launched on Sunday 26 March at 3pm in Books Upstairs in central Dublin. More details below. Copies will be available to purchase at the launch. The book is also available to order directly from Veer Books , and from other outlets. About the Book: Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document is a cycle of poems composed through a process of remixing automatic writing, direct transcriptions of public speech, and samples from pop culture and social media sources, collectively exploring patterns of digital gesture, (self-)branding, and themes of identity dispersal and anxiety. The critique of self-absorption, mounted formally in the unpunctuated flow of the poetic voice, is also explored thematically in the transmutation of all forms of movement into opportunities for advantage. In the poem ‘risk’, motion is the arch...

A new piece of mine in collaboration with visual artist Niamh McCann and theatre-maker Richard Walsh appears in  Exit. Music. Lights.,  a publication from the Numbered Editions imprint with commissioned contributions from artists across forms. Designed by Clare Bell  and released in late 2022,  Exit. Music. Lights.  features contributions from a group of visual artists, writers and theatre-makers exploring theatre, performance and the idea of the ‘black out’ in a variety of ways. It's the second in a series of Numbered Editions, a Dublin-based experimental imprint  co-edited by Nathan O’Donnell and Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll . Numbered Editions is described as "an occasional platform for writing by artists across artforms," and it is interested in points of intersection. Operating on the principle of serialisation, it publishes neither books nor magazines but something in between. (I was pleased also to be part of the first title in the series, figure | gr...

Issue 11 of Poetry Ireland's occasional literary pamphlet Trumpet  - a minor-key publishing project continuing to grow in significance, offering essays and reviews as well as original poetry - was released last month. The focus of this issue, edited by Tapasya Narang , is on ephemeral poetic forms as a means of querying the value of 'publishing' and the assumption that poetry is organised around the achievement of posterity. Trumpet 11 closes with a full page reproduction of my poem 'Browsing History #4', made as part of  my project as Digital Poet in Residence at StAnza International Poetry Festival (2017)  in St Andrews, Scotland. The full outcome of the Browsing History project is  available as a set of postcards from zimZalla avant objects . On publication of the postcards in March 2018,  I wrote a short essay for the StAnza Festival website  reflecting on the project's concept and compositional & publication processes, and its relationship to eph...

Following a long hiatus in publishing operations at gorse - the previous issue No. 10 , a special mixed-media book-in-a-box issue I edited in full, was released back in September 2018 - I'm very pleased to report that we're back with issue No. 11, published last month and now available for purchase. gorse No. 11 has been produced as a tête-bêche (meaning 'head-to-tail', where a publication is printed in two halves, upside down and back-to-back, so you can read one half then flip it over to start reading the other) and which reflects the issue's guiding concept of 'Borders', with a North/South (Whins/Furze) editorial structure. According to A.T. Lucas, in his book Furze, A Survey and History of its Uses in Ireland (1960), "There are two general English names [for gorse] current in the country. A line drawn from east to west across the country from the neighbourhood of Drogheda to that of Westport approximately divides the territories where these name...

Join us on Thursday 15 December at Unit 44 in Stoneybatter (44 Park Shopping Centre, Prussia Street, Dublin 7) for  INTERFERENCE: experimental poetic texts and sounds with Christodoulos Makris, Suzanne Walsh, Aodán McCardle and Tom Roseingrave . Unit 44 is  "a brand new DIY space for music that can't find a home anywhere else in Dublin", an open-minded hub with a radically open approach to programming, sometimes incorporating other artforms. Formerly the Harvard Hair Academy, it is a beautiful space operated by Kirkos Ensemble  - a new music group founded in 2012 by Sebastian Adams and focusing on high-concept performances threading the line between experimental and contemporary classical music. INTERFERENCE emerged out of a mentoring arrangement and a series of developmental meetings I undertook with Suzanne Walsh during the difficult months of the pandemic, facilitated through the Arts + Disability Connect scheme . To (belatedly) mark the conclusion of this ar...

Nine years in the making, the 500-page European Poetry Anthology Ima li pjesnika u Monte Carlu?,  edited by Damir Šodan, was published by Croatia PEN Centre this summer. It includes four poems from my first book  Spitting Out the Mother Tongue  (Wurm Press, 2011) , in Šodan's translation into Croatian. The anthology - whose title roughly translates as  Are There any Poets in Monte Carlo?  - gathers poetry from across the continent through the work of one poet 'representing' each European nation, or in some cases like Cyprus and Ireland of two (one for each official language). It was conceived by Šodan in the wake of  Poetry Parnassus , a week-long festival at Southbank Centre part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, in which (almost) every nation in the world was represented by one poet, and in which Šodan and I both participated . The anthology was  launched in Zagreb last June  on what was the tenth anniversary of Poetry Parnassus. (Incidental...