News of News

Some recent writing:

--On So Much for Life, the new Mark Hyatt Selected Poems edited by Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts, for The Poetry Foundation.

--On Elaine Mitchener's forthcoming performance of Peter Maxwell-Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King for The Wire here. A longer piece on Eight Songs and its contexts is brewing somewhere along the line.

And some upcoming gigs:

--Following a gig at waterintobeer last month, a second outing for Multiple Melodicas (me, Douglas Benford, Steve Beresford, Georgina Brett, Martin Hackett) at Cafe Oto on the afternoon of Sunday 4th June, along with a solo piano set by Steve Beresford and a duo set by me on piano and Tansy Spinks on violin. Details here. 

--Also planning another gig by G.U.E. (me, Jacken Elswyth, Laurel Uziell) on a bill with Tom Betteridge making what I believe is a live solo debut and Regan Bowering on electronics/objects/snare drum. This one will be at waterintobeer in Brockley on Tuesday 13th June, doors at 18:30. Tickets here.

We've been going through hours' worth of GUE recordings made over the past year or so so a release of some sort will be on the cards at some point soon.

And in other news...

--Following the launch reading with James Goodwin and Candace Hill last month, Howard Slater's review of Candace's Short Leash Kept On at Northern Review of Books here. (The book is available at the Materials website.)

--And there's also a nice review from Tom Allen of Present Continuous at LA Review of Books.

Finally, Materials will be relocating to Berlin in July, joining Materialien in Germany, which may involve some logistical shuffling and slower processing for orders. But expect more news the other side of the move...

News and Views

In February I was interviewed about A Black Arts Poetry Machine by João Paulo Guimarães (University of Porto) and Elina Siltanen (University of Turku) for the online Poets Talk Politics Series hosted by the University of Porto. Thanks to João and Elina for the questions and discussion, and to João for the invitation. The event was live-streamed and should be uploaded to the Youtube channel of the Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa in the next few weeks. For now, it's available on Facebook, as embedded below (no need for an account) or at this link.

 

Also online is the video of the online launch for Present Continuous back in January, hosted by Malvika Jolly and with responses from Tyrone Williams, Linda Kemp, Ciarán Finlayson, and Ghazal Mosadeq, can be seen on the Pamenar Press Youtube channel here, or in the video embedded below. Many thanks to Malvika for hosting and Ghazal and Hamed for publishing, designing and typesetting the book!

Some photos from the 'Electro-Acoustic Responsiveness' gig at IKLECTIK with Eddie Prévost (percussion), John Butcher (tenor and soprano saxophones), N.O. Moore (guitar), Emmanuelle Waeckerlé (voice, objects), and Tony Hardie-Bick (electronics), courtesy of film-maker Stewart Morgan, whose film on Prévost should soon be nearing completion. 

Photo credit - Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz

And some photos from the Materials/Materialien reading at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, with James Goodwin (launching the new collection Faux Ice), Lütfiye Güzel and Laurel Uziell: thanks to curators Ann-Kathrin Eickohf and Elisa R. Linn. 

James will be doing a UK launch for his book at Café Oto in Dalston on Sunday 9th April; this will also be the launch for Candace Hill's astonishing book-length poem Short Leash Kept On. James will be in conversation with Nisha Ramayya and I'll be in conversation with Candace via Zoom. (Fred Moten will be reading, in his trio with Brandon Lopez and Gerald Cleaver, later in the evening.) Tickets from the Café Oto website.

Finally, in further Materials news, Anne Boyer's Money City Sick as Fuck and Lisa Jeschke's The Athology of Poems by Drunk Women are back in print and can be purchased from the Materials website at the following links: Boyer here and Jeschke here.

Present Continuous

The full version of Present Continuous, a book of lockdown essays/prose pieces, excerpts of which first appeared as a pamphlet with Phil Baber's The Last Books earlier this year, is now out from Ghazal Mosadeq's Pamenar Press, with grateful thanks to Ghazal and to Hamed Jaberha for his work in typesetting and design.

Copies available here.

Present Continuous was written during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic between March 2020 and April 2021 in Lewisham, London. Part I was written between March 2020 and June 2020: the movement from spring to summer, from the first announcement of a national lockdown to the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the United States and the death of Belly Mujinga in the UK. Part II was written during the autumn and winter of 2020 and 2021, during which time a “second wave”, peaking in December and January, prompted a second set of lockdown restrictions. Part III was written in Spring 2021, as restrictions eased and the issue of police violence raised its head once again with the murder of Sarah Everard and the early debates around the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill—as of April 2022, passed into law as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act—with its further criminalisation of protest by a government more viciously racist and repressive than any in recent memory. 

Over two years since the first declaration of lockdown, and following a seemingly endless series of virus variants and subvariants, an apparent shift from ‘pandemic’ to ‘endemic’, and a kind of exhaustion of vocabulary and will, I hope these essays provide some kind of record, not only of a particular moment in time, but of the tendencies going into and moving out of that moment, as we move forward into a future more uncertain than ever; not just where ‘we’ were in 2020 and 2021, but where ‘we’ are—or might be—now.