List of Past Events 2000-14

On this page you will find a complete listing of CPRC events from 2000-2014. For a record of events after this date please search the blog.

2014

Monday 10th February 2014
The CPRC Birkbeck welcomes Matvei Yankelevich
7.30 pm, Room G01, School of Arts, Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD.
Matvei is a poet, translator of Russian poetry, and one of the founding editors of Ugly Duckling Presse (Brooklyn, NY). This is a great opportunity to hear him reading from his own work.
His books include Boris by the Sea (Octopus, 2009) and Alpha Donut (United Artists, 2012), and he have a book-length poem coming out with Black Square Editions later this year. He also translated Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook / Duckworth, 2007; paperback, 2009).
All welcome – free entry

Thursday 13 March 2014
Quadruple Launch and Readings!
The CPRC Birkbeck welcomes Robert Fitterman, Marc Atkins and Rod Mengham.
7.30 pm, Room 151, Malet Street Main Building, Birkbeck College, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7HX.
Click here for a map link
All welcome – free entry
Featuring the launch of Robert Fitterman’s JUST ANOTHER SOFT MACHINE and Marc Atkins & Rod Mengham’s STILL moving (both new from Veer) PLUS the launch of Robert Fitterman’s No Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (new from Ugly Duckling Presse) AND the launch of the U.S. edition of Robert Fitterman’s Holocaust Museum(new from Counterpath) (originally published by Veer in 2011).
See here for more.

Saturday 15 March 2014
Veer at the Surrey New Writers Festival 2014
As part of the Surrey New Writers Festival Veer Books will co-host a launch for Robert Fitterman’s new Veer publication JUST ANOTHER SOFT MACHINE, as well as for his No Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (new from Ugly Duckling Presse) and his Holocaust Museum (new from Counterpath) (originally published by Veer in 2011).  Also taking place that evening will be the launch of the latest videogame from CMA Megacorp, plus some surprise performances from Guildford poets.
7pm, GLive, London Road, Guildford GU1 2AA.
Click here and here and here for more details and to book tickets.

13th December, 2014
Andrea Brady Symposium
Venue: Keynes Library, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
Keynote speaker: Professor Carol Watts (Birkbeck)
The symposium will be followed by a reading by Andrea Brady

Conference Abstract: In one of the prose sections of her 2012 book, Mutability, Andrea Brady notes her surprise when her first child, Ayla’s milk teeth just ‘happened’, arriving along with ‘a copia of words’. Ayla’s new, inventive and exploratory babblings tumble out with abundance or ‘plenty’ as the Latin copia has it. Brady is now surrounded by Ayla’s restlessly evolving reach for words. In his 1512 De copia, Erasmus describes copia as a form of rhetorical exercise in eloquence, a playful gymnastics producing linguistic plenitude, ‘surging along like a golden river, with thoughts and words pouring out in rich abundance.’ The word copia – plenty, from copis, well supplied – also contains within itself opis, meaning wealth, power or resources. In a rich and diverse poetic career, Brady has produced her own ‘copia of words’, not as mechanical exercise, but as a rhetorically and stylistically challenging body of chapbooks, collections and long sequences characterised by restless interrogation of wealth, excess, power and resources; the shadowy opis immanent in the language of capitalism and abundance.

Always inventive, always interrogative, Brady’s poems come in a variety of forms, but all of her work tries to capture that poetic space which, as she puts it in a piece on Mutability, holds ‘against the failed and limited reality which the bounty of language constitutes.’ Like the metaphysical poets whose words dapple her work, Brady’s intellectually rigorous poems mine all the resources of language and poetic technique to bear lyric witness and to provide the means by which to comprehend, constitute and critique the material and ideological forces of our contemporary world and its cultural industries. For further details see: http://andreabradysymposium.wordpress.com/

2013

Friday 15 March 2013
Veer Books launch – Martin Bakero and Doug Jones
Two new books from Veer: Martin Bakero’s abjects & Doug Jones’ Posts
7:30-9:00pm, Keynes Library, Birkbeck College, School of Arts building, 43 Gordon Square WC1H 0PD
– Click here for a map link
Martin Bakero and Doug Jones will read from their new Veer books at Birkbeck College.
This is an open event, so all welcome – free entry.
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/publications/veer-books

Saturday 16 March 2013
Veer Books at the Surrey New Writers Festival
Veer Books
will be hosting a reading and launch evening as part of the Surrey New Writers Festival in Guildford.
Featuring the launch of Allen Fisher’s Defamiliarising ____________*  and Martin Bakero’s abjects .
Readers will be: Allen Fisher, Martin Bakero, Adrian Clarke, Stephen Mooney
Hosted by Stephen Mooney and Holly Luhning. (free admission)
Venue: Three Pigeons, Guildford,169 High Street,Guildford,GU1 3AJb (click here for directions)
Time: 6-8pm
For more details of the Surrey New Writers Festival see here and here
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/publications/veer-books

Tuesday 14 May 2013
Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre welcomes Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte
A presentation:
Poems for the Millennium: Volume Four
The University of California Book of North African Literature
Followed by Domopoetics
from 7pm, Room 253, Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Square WC1
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/maps/interactive
Free and all welcome!

Saturday 18 May 2013
Militant Politics and Poetry
Birkbeck College, 10am-8pm.
This is a follow-up event to the Poetry and Revolution conference. The aim is to take discussion further and link it specifically to militant political action.
The format will be different: A one-day event with an on-going plenary session and a total of around 30 people attending. It will be organised as 2 round tables, each with six speakers presenting initial 5-10 minute stances, followed by discussion, with a view to reaching conclusions and decisions that relate to action, not simply to debate. We will aim to produce a document.
Speakers: Justin Katko, Jennifer Cooke, Keston Sutherland, Sean Bonney, Stephen Watts, Harry Gilonis, Danny Hayward, Sam Walton, Zoe Sutherland, Will Rowe, Jow Lindsay, David Grundy, Martin Bakero

Thursday 6 June 2013
Karen Mac Cormack and Steve McCaffery Reading & Launch
The CPRC Birkbeck welcomes Karen Mac Cormack and Steve McCaffery,
with a reading of new work by both poets, and the launch of Karen Mac Cormack’s new Veer book, AGAINST WHITE
7.30 pm, The Peltz room exhibition space in the School of Arts, Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD.
Click here for a map link
All welcome – free entry

Friday 7 June 2013
Chilean Poetry launch of Alba Londres 4
7.30 pm, Room 539, Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Square WC1
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/maps/interactive
Readings in Spanish by Javier Bello, Carmen García, Gustavo Barrera, Andrés Anwandter, and Adrian Fisher and Montenegro.
With translations read by Sarah Kelley and David Ashford
All Welcome

Saturday 8 June 2013
Veer Books will be hosting a reading and launch alongside Contraband Books as part of the Surrey Poetry Festival 2013 in Guildford, on Saturday June 8 2013.
The festival will run all day, from 11:00 to 20:30, in The Guildhall, 131 High Street, Guildford GU1 3AA.
The launch reading part if the festival will take place from 18:00 to 19:15.
Featuring the launch of:
Karen Mac Cormack – AGAINST WHITE (Veer Books)
Carol WattsSun Dog (Veer Books)
David Ashford – XARAGMATA (Veer Books)
Nat Rahacountersonnets (Contraband Press)
Other readers at the festival will be: Maggie O’Sullivan, Steve McCaffery, Ulli Freer, William Rowe, MJ Weller, Doug Jones, Mendoza, Sophie Robinson, Stephen Mooney, as well as students from the Contemporary British and American Poetry program at Surrey (Wafik Doss, Sophie Goodman, & Pippa Nayer).
For more details of the Surrey Poetry Festival click here

Thursday 13 June 2013
Veer Books launch as part of the Royal Holloway Contemporary Poetics Research Centre reading:
Lisa Jeschke, Andrew Spragg, Carol Watts
at which we’ll be launching Carol Watts’ new Veer book Sundog as part of the larger event.
The Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London WC1X 9NG
Free entry, 7pm

Wednesday 19 June 2013
Veer Books launch at XING THE LINE
David Ashford, Dorothy Lehane, Nat Raha
19:30, The Apple Tree, 45 Mount Pleasant, Clerkenwell, London WC1X 0AE
Two new books, XARAGMATA by David Ashford (Veer Books) and countersonnets by Nat Raha (Contraband) being given a push, if not a London shove.

Tuesday 09 July 2013
Susana Gardner reading @ BBK
Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre warmly welcomes Susana Gardner.
Susana will be reading in the gallery housing the exhibition Intellectual Tactility, curated by Holly Pester.
Tuesday 9 July, Peltz Room, (immediate left in the entrance to) 43 Gordon Square, London WC1,  7-9.
Free and all welcome!
http://blackradishbooks.com/authors/susana-gardner/

Monday 15 July 2013
The Contemporary Poetics Research Centre @ The Enemies Project
Hardy Tree gallery, 119 Pancras Road, London, NW1 1UN. 7.30pm.
A rare academic entity, the CPRC, based in Birkbeck College, University of London is a hub for avant garde poets featuring Dan O’Donnell, Ollie Evans, Mendoza, Dan Eltingham, Albert Pellicer, James Wilkes, Vicky Sparrow, Mark Jackson & more

Wednesday 24 July 2013
Reading and conversation with David Buuck
David will read poems that come directly out of thinking about Occupy Oakland & its more militant actions/offshoots/confrontations, put into context with broader questions about poetics and how Bay Area (& other North American) poet-activists are beginning to (re)think-through the always tangled questions of poetry/politics/etc.
7-9 pm, Keynes Library, Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H OPD
Free Entry – All Welcome

Saturday 07 September 2013
Veer Books will be manning a stall at the upcoming FREE VERSE Poetry Book Fair (September 7th 2013) at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1 (10 am to 5pm) – come and see us there.
Veer will also be hosting a reading at 11:30, with David Ashford reading from XARAGMATA, Ollie Evans reading from Kettles, and Drew Milne reading from Reactor Red Shoes
Admission is free to all events and readings – please see http://www.poetrybookfair.com/ for more details.

Wednesday 25 September 2013
The CPRC Birkbeck is delighted to welcome
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
for a reading on the occasion of her visit to London, from her new book of poems, Hello, The Roses.
Wednesday 25 September at 7pm
Room 101, 30 Russell Square WC1 (please note the building)
FREE & ALL WELCOME

Saturday 28 September 2013
William Rowe Jamboree – Poetics and politics
William Rowe, Anniversary Professor of Poetics at Birkbeck, will be retiring later this year – to celebrate both his poetry and his enormous contribution to contemporary poetry and poetic in English and Spanish, we are hosting a day of readings and talks on Sat 28th September at Birkbeck, to which everyone is invited.There will be talks and readings by Joan Retallack, Raul Zurita and a hots of others.
The draft programme is here – we hope we’ll see you there!
More details to follow.

Friday 16 – Saturday 16 November 2013
Veer Books at the Small Publishers Fair 2013
Veer Books
will be manning a stall at the upcoming Small Publishers Fair 2013, (November 15th & 16th 2013) at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1 (11am to 7pm) – come and see us there.
Poetry presses include Poetic Practice MA at Royal Holloway University, Reality Street, West House, Spanner, Shearsman, Veer, Etruscan Books, seekers of lice, Coracle & Equus Press.
At the fair this year we will be launching new Veer Books by Holly Pester and John Kinsella & Drew Milne, and showcasing the forthcoming VierSome 002 publication (featuring work from Francesca Lisette, nick-e melville, Jeroen Nieuwland, Samantha Walton).
Readings will be by Holly Pestrer, Drew Milne, and Francesca Lisette (4:00-4:30pm)
Admission is free to all events and readings
please see http://smallpublishersfair.co.uk/ for more details.

Monday 02nd December 2013
Will Alexander reading at BBK
Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre is delighted to welcome Will Alexander. A rare chance to hear him read in London.
Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, WC1, 7pm
Los Angeles poet Will Alexander works in multiple genres: the novel, essay, aphorism, play, philosophy, visual art, and music (as pianist). His influences range from poetic practitioners, such as Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to the encompassing paradigm of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, and the Egyptian worldview as understood by Cheikh Anta Diop and R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. His work explores the fields of art, physics, botany, history, astronomy, architecture, and poetics, amongst others. Alexander’s books include Kaleidoscopic Omniscience, Asia and Haiti, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, Compression and Purity, Sunrise In Armageddon, Diary As Sin, Inside the Earthquake Palace, Towards The Primeval Lightning Field, and Mirach Speaks To His Grammatical Transparents. His collected essays, Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat (Essay Press, 2013) received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/will-alexander
http://ndbooks.com/author/will-alexander
Thanks to Jonathan Skinner and the Warwick Writing Programme for this collaboration.
contact: Carol Watts c.watts@bbk.ac.uk and Sean Bonney

Wednesday 11th December 2013
Veer into Benefits 5 (Veer Books Launch)
7:30pm until 10:00pm
The Village Hall, Shoreditch Works, 33 Hoxton Square, N1 6NN
Introduction and short reading by Will Rowe
Extended reading from Elegy (London: Veer, 2013) by Steve Willey, featuring collaborative performances with Tom Bamford, and others.
Afterword and short reading by Sean Bonney
The première of ‘Other Noises’, composed by Edward Nesbit, and performed by Alice Barron.
Plus, there will also be a short talk (with space left for questions) by the Samaritans about the work they do to support people when life feels like it is getting too much
Further readers and performances T.B.A
Entrance: Free.
Booze situation: Bring your own. For more see here

Wednesday 18th December 2013
Reading and Conversation with David Buuck
David Buuck will read work that comes directly out of thinking about Occupy Oakland & its more militant actions/offshoots/confrontations, put into context with broader questions about poetics and how Bay Area (& other North American) poet-activists are beginning to (re)think-through the always tangled questions of poetry/politics/etc.
7-9 pm, Room G 15, Birkbeck College, Main Building, Torrington Square
David Buuck is a writer who lives in Oakland, CA. He is the founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, and co-founder and editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics. An Army of Lovers, co-written with Juliana Spahr, is forthcoming from City Lights this fall, and SITE CITE CITY will be out from Futurepoem in 2014. Some publications, writing & performance samples, etc. available via davidbuuck.com

2012

Saturday 14 January 2012
‘Where Horizons Meet’: A one day conference on Peter Riley
The Keynes Library, Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square WC1H 0PD – 9:30-17:00
jointly held by the CPRC Birkbeck and Royal Holloway & sponsored by Glyphi as part of the Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays book series
to register please send your name, your institution (if applicable) and whether you would like lunch to peterrileyconference@yahoo.co.uk
Click here for more details

Wednesday 15 February 2012
Becky Cremin & Alan Halsey @ XING the Line Veer Event
Upstairs at The Apple Tree, 45 Mount Pleasant, WC1X 0AE, 7:30-11:30pm
£5 waged, £3 unwaged
Becky will be reading from her new Veer book “LAY’D” and Alan will be launching his new Veer title “Even if only out of

Saturday 25 February 2012
Second Conceptual Gesture: The Found
TONY LOPEZREDELL OLSENJOHN SEED
Keynes Library 4.30-7pm, all welcome
Free, Open to all. The reading forms part of the second ‘Conceptual Gestures’ event organised by Carol Watts and Edmund Hardy at Birkbeck’s Contemporary Poetics Research Centre
43 Gordon Square WC1H 0PD – Click here for a map link

Friday 9 March 2012
A reading by and presentations on the work of JOHN JAMES
6-7.15pm  Short talks by ROD MENGHAMJOHN HALLSIMON PERRIL
presentation of theSalt Companion to John James
7.30-8.30pm
Readings
SIMON PERRIL, JOHN JAMES reading from his new IN ROMSEY TOWN (Equipage) and CLOUD BREAKING SUN (Oystercatcher). Both available on the night.
Keynes Library, all welcome
43 Gordon Square WC1H 0PD – Click here for a map link

Thursday 22 March 2012
CECILIA VICUÑA
Cecilia will show the film “kon kon pi” for the first time in London. This 13 minute film was exhibited at MoMA New York  in 2011. Followed by a performance.
Room 153, Malet Street building,
 Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury
, London WC1E 7HX (entrance on Torrington Sqr) – Click here for a map link
7.30-9pm, all welcome
Jointly hosted by Birkbeck CPRC and CILAVS (Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies)

Thursday 29 March 2012
BROKEN AND REDUCED
“I lost my mother tongue more than thirty years ago and am still searching for it.”
Hungarian visual poet MÁRTON KOPPÁNY talks about his work, and projects images. Introduced by Holly Pester.
Room B20, Birkbeck main building on Torrington Square
6.00-7.30pm, all welcome.
Map available here

Saturday 12 – Wednesday 16 May 2012
Veer Books at the Prague Microfestival 2012
Prague Microfestival is a festival centering on contemporary innovative poetry whose dazzling string of readings will take off daily at 6pm (with the exception of Tue May 15th) and will showcase thirty poets from eight countries, a gig at each festival night’s closing and an exhibition of art thematically related to the festival. The festival languages are English and Czech and the entry is free.  Among others, the festival will offer a launch of the freshly pressed PMF 2011 anthology Polibek s rozvodnou (including 17 authors in Czech translation), launch of the international revue  for literature and visual arts VLAK 3 and the title Cartographies of the In-Between, devoted to the poetry of Pierre Joris.
PMF poets share willingness to experiment and to examine language, boundary bewteen the word and sound, territories. Some of them are authors of “translocal” poetry, some of them members of the Prague anglophone scene, some of them poets associated with presses like Dusie, Veer Books, and others.
The festival is held with the kind support of the Psí Víno magazine, Petr Štengl Press, Polish Institute Prague,Litteraria Pragensia, Equus Press, A2 magazine,Kulturní noviny and others.
Venue: K4 student club (Celetná Street 20, Prague)
Featured this year from Veer Books will be readings by Ulli Freer, Stephen Mooney, Adrian Clarke, Becky Cremin and William Rowe, plus the launch of R.T.A Parker’s new book from Veer, The Traveller & The Defence of Heaven
Detailed info including the up-to-date programme, authors’ bios and photos from previous years can be found at http://praguemicrofestival.wordpress.com/
See here for more information

Wednesday 23 May 2012
Voiceworks 2012 free concert performance @ Wigmore Hall
The culmination of the Voiceworks 2012 programme will be performed live at Wigmore Hall on Wednesday 23 May 2012 at 17.30.
The performance lasts 45 minutes and is free to attend – do come, listen and support.
Voiceworks 2012 participants are:
Group 1: DANIEL BARROW & PATRICK BRENNAN & ROSEMARY CLIFFORD
Group 2: IRUM FAZAL & HELGI INGVARSSON & MATTHEW MCGUIGAN & CLAIRE CANDY
Group 3: NELL STEVENS & BENJAMIN GRAVES & ANTHONY BIRNIE
Group 4: OLLIE EVANS & MARTA LOZANO MOLANOMEGAN QUICK & ADAM GILBERT
Group 5: STEVEN FOWLER & THEODOROS CHATZIDIS & CLARE GHIGO
Group 6: BECKY CREMIN & MARK SIMPSON & GINA WALTER
Group 7: EDMUND HARDY & LOUIS CHIAPPETTA & OSKAR PALMBLAD
The performance is free to attend, but tickets need to be booked in advance (this is very simple to do, and costs nothing).
See the Wigmore Hall website here for more information.
A recording of the Voiceworks 2012 concert will be subsequently published on the voiceworks.org.uk website.
This digital project, led from the CPRC Birkbeck with Guildhall colleagues and partners Wigmore Learning is funded by the AHRC. It is allowing us to: archive materials and make new work available from the last five years of the project; document the ongoing collaborative process as it thinks through the practice and languages of diverse and complex traditions of voice, music composition, and text; record new work as it happens; create a major resource in the field for free access; and generate new kinds of practice, exchange and debate which might find a home on the site.
Contact Carol Watts on c.watts@bbk.ac.uk for more information or check out our www.voiceworks.org.uk website.
Click here and here for more details

Friday 25 – Sunday 27 May 2012
Poetry & Revolution International Converence at the CPRC Birkbeck
The current crisis makes it possible to think what couldn’t be thought before, which has always been the task of poetry.
With its echoes of previous crises of modern society, it places on the agenda a reappraisal of revolutionary art from the point of view of the necessities of the present.
Keynote Speakers
Joan Retallack, poet, essayist, activist, John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College, New York.
Jack Hirschman, poet, translator, essayist, activist, Poet Laureate of S. Francisco 2006, member of the Revolutionary Poets Brigade.
Mark Nowak, poet, activist, Director of Graduate Writing Programme at Manhattanville College, NY.
Poetry Readings
Friday Night (25 May 2012), 7.30pm, X-ing the Line, The Apple Tree, 45 Mount pleasant WC1
Tom Leonard, Jack Hirschman, Ziba Karbassi, Marianne Morris, Sean Bonney, Harry Gilonis.
Saturday Night (26 May 2012), 8-10:30pm, Polyply, 16 Acton St. WC1
Maggie O’Sullivan, Abdullah al-Udhari, Keston Sutherland, Joan Retallack, Ulli Freer, Mark Nowak.
VLAK: Special issue launch on Occupations one hour before Saturday night reading. (Times 7-8pm, tbc)
Papers: Approximately 45 papers on a wide range of issues over the Saturday and Sunday. Speakers from Portugal, Greece, the USA, Ireland, & the UK
Liaisons and co-operation with Occupied and Free Spaces
Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Sq. WC1
Contact: Stephen Mooney, estaphin@gmail.com
Supported by the Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities
Click here for further details
all welcome.

Thursday 31 May 2012
Poetry reading by Julie Carr, Christine Wertheim, Jennifer Karmin & Matias Viegener
Room 415, Birkbeck main building on Torrington Square
7.30-9.00pm, all welcome.
Map available here

Wednesday 06 June 2012
Poetry reading by Steve McCaffery, cris cheek & Karen Mac Cormack
Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square WC1H 0PD
7:30-9:00pm – all welcome
Click here for a map link

Thursday 19 July 2012
Memorial reading for James Harvey‏
Veer Books / Xing the Line / Writers Forum Workshop (New Series) and The Blue Bus have come together to celebrate the life and poetry of James Harvey, who died last month.  This memorial reading will take place at Birkbeck College on Thursday 19th July, from 18.00-21.00.
The address is Keynes Library, Birkbeck Centre for Poetics, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD. (When you  come in to the foyer, ask the person on the front desk who will give directions – it’s a room on the first floor overlooking the square.)
Readers/performers will include Carol Watts, Will Rowe, James Wilkes, matt martin, Jeff Hilson, Holly Pester, Michael Zand, Stephen Emmerson, Juliet Troy, John Gibbens, Keith Jebb, David Miller, Antony John, Edward Carey, Peter Philpott, S J Fowler, Elizabeth Guthrie, and The Children (Armorel Weston and John Gibbens).
Please note that this is a free event.
Click here for a map link

Wednesday 01 August 2012
Special Edition:
VierSomes/4somes double launch at the Poetry Library
Veer Books will launch a new series of variously named publications featuring work by younger innovative writers, four at a time, called ‘VierSomes’ (or ‘4somes’ or ‘Quartets’ …)
This event will launch the series with readings from some of the featured authors:
Becky Cremin, Amy Evans, Edward Hardy, Danny Hayward, Frances Kruk, slmendoza, Nat Raha
8:00pm, Poetry Library, Level 5, Royal Festival Hall, South Bank Centre, London SE1 8XX
Admission: FREE but  to book a place guests must email specialedition@poetrylibrary.org.uk
(
once these places have been filled, there may be spaces available on the night)

Tuesday 04 September 2012
Crater Press/Veer Books launch and readings
Birkbeck College, room 539, Malet Street building on Torrington Square, from 7.30-9pm.
Map available here
Free entry, all welcome
featuring the launch of new publications and readings from Robert Hampson, Jeff Hilson, and Richard Parker
Crater 21: August 2012. Robert Hampson, out of sight.
Crater 20: July 2012. Jeff Hilson, From ORGAN MUSIC: AN ANTI-MASQUE NOT FOR DANCING
Veer 048  R.T.A. Parker – ‘The Traveller & The Defence of Heaven’
http://www.craterpress.co.uk/
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/publications/veer-books

Tuesday 16 October 2012
Lisa Samuels Workshop: ‘Soundscapes, Polylogs, and Wild Dialectics’
Samuels is a renowned poet based in New Zealand.
Birkbeck College, room 540, Malet Street building, from 6.00-7:30.
Map available here
free entry, all welcome

Wednesday 17 October 2012
Voiceworks Alumni Concert
Wigmore Hall, 36 Wigmore Street, London W1U 2BP. 17.30-18:15
The performance lasts 45 minutes and is free to attend – do come, listen and support.
The performance is free to attend, but tickets need to be booked in advance (this is very simple to do, and costs nothing).
See the Wigmore Hall website here for more information.

Wednesday 17 October 2012
Maurice Scully Roundtable
Room 110, School of Arts building, 43 Gordon Square WC1H 0PD – Click here for a map link
19:30 to 21:30
An invited audience will participate in a roundtable discussion about Maurice Scully’s literary work, with the poet in attendance and taking part.

Friday 19 October 2012
Nick e Melville, Jennifer Cooke, and Willim Rowe reading at BBK
7:30pm. Birkbeck College, room 538, Malet Street building.
Map available here
free entry, all welcome – with wine.

Wednesday 24 October 2012
ON Seminar: On Voice
Please join us for a round table discussion on the subject of voice in poetics guided by  Chapter 3 of Mladen Dolar’s The Voice and Nothing More, ‘The Physics of the Voice’.
Birkbeck College, room 540, Malet Street building, from 6.00-7:30.
Map available here
(This ON Seminar is open only to Birkbeck students (others will be open to wider participation from outside of the university))

Wednesday 14 November 2012
Amiri Baraka: The Muscle In Yr Head
7.30pm, Room 540, Birkbeck College Main Malet Street Building.
Map available here
Colin Still will be showing his film Amiri Baraka: The Muscle In Yr Head, made for Channel 4.  Plus hitherto unseen out-takes, audio recordings, & footage from Baraka’s recent London readings.
Sean Bonney will respond to the film.
Followed by discussion.
Free entry. All welcome.

Friday 16 & Saturday 17 November 2012
Veer Books will be manning a stall at the upcoming Small Publishers Fair 2012 at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1
At the fair this year a new Veer book by Peter Larkin, Imparkments will be launched.
Reading will be Peter Larkin, William Rowe, Holly Pester, Doug Jones, Carol Watts, and Danny Hayward
Free entry, open to all

Wednesday 28 November 2012
ON Seminar: Jeffrey C. Robinson – ‘A radical continuum: Romanticism and contemporary innovative poetics’
6.00-8:00pm, Keynes Library, Birkbeck College, School of Arts building, 43 Gordon Square WC1H 0PD
– Click here for a map link
This is an open event, so all welcome – free entry.
Materials for the workshop are downloadable here and here

Friday 30 November 2012
The CPRC Birkbeck are happy to invite everyone to the launch of Alba Londres #03
7pm to 9pm, Room 632 in Birkbeck main building, University of LondonMalet Street, BloomsburyLondon WC1E 7HX
www.albalondres.com
The following superb poets will read at the event: Tim Atkins, Elizabeth Guthrie, Albert Pellicer, Tom Slingsby
Free entry, open to all

Wednesday 12 December 2012
ON Seminar: ‘Poetry’s Material Setting’
Round table, collaborative discussion on the silences and voices of the page.
6.00-7:30. Room 221, Birkbeck College, School of Arts building, 43 Gordon Square WC1H 0PD – Click here for a map link
Thus is an open event.

2011

February 2011
Veer Journal 3 ‘Veer About’ now online!
The new Veer Journal, in conjunction with Intercapillary Space is now available online
Veer 037 – ISSN 2046-3529
Edited by Adrian Clarke and William Rowe
Veer About includes work from: Jennifer Pike Cobbing, Scott Thurston, Karen McCormack, David Caddy, Gavin Selerie, John Cayley, David Miller, Maggie O’Sullivan, Harry Gilonis, Chris Paul, Matthew Martin, James Harvey, Antony John, Doug Jones, Steve McCaffery, Nat Raha, Wayne Clements, Steve Willey, Mike Weller, Martin Gubbins, Sean Bonney, Pansy Maurer-Alvarez, Richard Owens, Gregorio Fontén, Steve Fowler, Johan de Wit, Frances Presley, Rod Mengham, Becky Cremin, Justin Katko, Elizabeth Jane Burnett, Stephen Mooney, Greg Thomas, Mendoza, Rob Holloway, John Seed, Jimmy Cummins, Allen Fisher, Niamh O’Mahony, Keith Jebb, Carol Watts, Rosa van Hensbergen, Aodán McCardle, Peter Philpott, Tom White, Phillip Terry, Gilbert Adair, Ryan Ormonde, Edmund Hardy, Juha Virtanen
Published by Veer Books, London, in conjunction with Intercapillary Space in February 2011.
Click here to visit the Intercapillary Space site and to download a pdf of the journal
http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/

Tuesday 15th March 2011
Veer Books Launch: MJ Weller’s Beat generation Ballads (Veer 033⅓) and the 2nd edition of Sean Bonney’s Baudelaire in English (Veer 012) at The Blue Bus.
The Blue Bus is pleased to present a poetry event, with Sean Bonney and M J Weller, at The Lamb, 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1, in the upstairs room, on Tuesday 15th March, from 7.30. Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions). This is the forty-seventh event in THE BLUE BUS series.
See here for more details

Tuesday 3rd May 2011
Giles Goodland & Ron Silliman reading at BBK
7pm at 32 Tavistock Square, London WC1
click here for a map
free entry – all welcome

Wednesday 4th May 2011
POLYply: Voicings
a joint POLYply/CPRC event
Christian Bök, 
Lydia White
, Dan Scott, 
Frances Kruk
, Emmanuelle Waekerle
7pm, 
Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton St., London WC1
click here for a map
Free Entry – All Welcome

Thursday 5th May 2011
Christian Bök – ‘The Xenotext: A Progress Report’
Birkbeck Centre for Poetics welcomes Christian Bök
6-6.50pm, Birkbeck, venue tbc
‘The Xenotext: A Progress Report’
“The Xenotext is my nine-year long attempt to create an example of “living poetry.” I have been striving to write a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon I use a “chemical alphabet” to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium (in this case, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans—an extremophile, capable of surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile milieus, including the vacuum of outer space).
When translated into a gene and then integrated into the cell, my poem is going to constitute a set of instructions, all of which cause the organism to manufacture a viable, benign protein in response—a protein that, according to my original, chemical alphabet, is itself yet another text. I am, in effect, engineering a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem—one that can persist on the planet until the sun itself explodes…. come and hear how the Xenotext project is working!”
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-xenotext-works/
a public talk, all welcome

Monday 16th May 2011
Veer Books @ the Prague Microfestival 20113rd Prague Microfestival, 14-18 May, 2011As part of the Prague Microfestival, in collaboration with VLAK magazine (www.vlakmagazine.com) and Psí Víno (www.psivino.cz), and in co-operation with Versal Magazine (www.wordsinhere.com), Veer Books will present 2 readings/launch events:Monday 16 May 2011, 6pm & 9pm
Venue: Krásný Ztráty, Náprstkova 10, Praha 1, Staré Město (www.krasnyztraty.cz)Readings from Sean Bonney, Ulli Freer, Aodán McCardle, Stephen Mooney, plus Gilbert Adair & Maurice Scully, with transaltions in Czech read by Donna Stonecipher & Jan Těsnohlídek.with the launch of:Gilbert Adair’sSable Smoke‘ (Veer Books), 
Aodán McCardle’sIS ing‘ (Veer Books)
, Maurice Scully’sA Tour of the Lattice‘ (Veer Books)
 &
 Ulli Freer’sRecovery‘  (Rot Direkt)
*All events are in both English and Czech.
*Free entry.
Supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs, Ireland, the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory, and Centre for Irish Studies, Charles University, VLAK magazine, 
Psí Víno, 
Versal Magazine, & Veer Books.
See here for more details

Thursday 26 May 2011
Voiceworks 2011 free concert performance @ Wigmore Hall
The culmination of the Voiceworks 2011 programme will be performed live at Wigmore Hall on Thursday 26 May 2011 at 18.00.
The performance lasts 45 minutes and is free to attend – do come, listen and support.
Voiceworks 2011 participants are:
James Wilkes, Benjamin Graves
, Donna Lennard
, Daniel Rudge

Suzanne’s Secret II: Bechstein-Kultur-Film Version
Liz Adams
, Tom Kimber
, Ciarán O’Leary
Neon
Steven Fowler, Wenjing Wang, Hadleigh Adams
, 
Lucy Roberts

The Righteous Harmony Society Movement
John Mackay
, Peter Yarde Martin, Charlotte Beament
A Guide To Touching The Human Heart
Ghazal Mosadeq, Michail Palaiologou, 
Joseph Padfield

A Waning Bird
Vicky Sparrow, Jason Anderson
, Sarah Jenks, 
Claudia Myles

Seirenas
Frank Podmore
, Tom Bassett, Nick Allen, Marion Wyllie
Spectrum Of A Theory
The performance is free to attend, but tickets need to be booked in advance (this is very simple to do, and costs nothing).
See the Wigmore Hall website here for more information.
A recording of the Voiceworks 2011 concert will be subsequently published on the voiceworks.org.uk website.
Click here for more details

Thursday 2nd June 2011
Joint CPRC Birkbeck / Xing The Line event
Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery, Bill Bissett and Adeena Karasick reading at BBK
7.00pm start, 32 Tavistock Square, London WC1 – click here for a map
All welcome – free entry

Monday 20 June 2011
A double bill – a talk and related performances – of polyvocalia at Birkbeck
6pm, 43 Gordon Square, Room 124
Cris Cheek, ‘Before I am Anything Else: provisional transatlantic communities in polyvocal poetic performance’.
& then around the corner…
7.15pm, 32 Tavistock Square
FRIENDLY AMENDMENTS
Lawrence Upton, Chris Goode, Cris Cheek, Holly Pester & others revisit work by Sumner, bpnichol, Basinski, Cobbing, MacLow & other scores, poems and possibilities
Free and all welcome.

Thursday 23 June 2011
Veer Books Launch Readings @ Festina Lente III, Paris, France
24 Place Sainte Marthe, 75010, Paris – 8:30pm – 11:30pm
5€
Readers: Demosthenes Agriofotis, Aodán McCardle, Stephen Mooney
Featuring the French launch of:
Veer 038 Aodán McCardle – ‘IS ing’
Veer 036 Demosthenes Agriofotis – ‘+-graphies’
FESTINA LENTE III
poésie acousmantique
Un cycle activé par Martin Bakero, Eduard Escoffet et Eric Périer – see here for more details

Thursday 28 July 2011
Pugilistica: a literary celebration of boxing & Veer Books Launch @ Birkbeck
Birkbeck Cinema Theatre, Birkbeck College 43 Gordon Square WC1H 0PD – 7pm
Book launch: SJ Fowler’sFights – cycles I-XV‘ (Veer Books)
Also featuring:
Lynda Nead: ‘Stilling the Punch’ a talk & presentation on boxing imagery
Kasia Boddy: “Save the Public’s Soul by Punching Its Face”: Modernist Poetry and Pugilism
Tim Atkins celebrates Jack Johnson v. Arthur Cravan
Michael Zand: “The Klitova-Klinchko Kuntador”
Patrick Coyle: “The first painting i ever sold was of Muhammad Ali”
entrance free, all welcome – see here for more details.

hursday 08 September 2011
Wurm Im Apfel & Veer Books: Launch & Reading in Dublin, Ireland
@ Hello Operator, 12 Rutland Place, Dublin(It’s a gallery. So hip it aches / smokes like your granny’s joints. It’s actually not hard to find, but a little bit tucked away, so here’s a map)Readers: Aodán McCardle, Stephen Mooney, & Maurice Scully
Featuring the Irish launch of:
Veer 038  Aodán McCardle – ‘IS ing’
Veer 039 
Maurice Scully – ‘A Tour of the Lattice’
free admission, refreshments – see here and here for more

Thursday 22 September 2011
A talk by Craig Dworkin, ‘The Logic of Format: Prose into Poetry’ @ Birkbeck
Keynes Library, Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1 – 7pm
Introduced by Peter Jaeger
All welcome!
Jointly organised by Roehampton Centre for Creative and Professional Writing and by Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre.

Saturday 24 September 2011
Conceptual Gestures – Vanessa Place
A reading by Vanessa Place
6.30pm32 Tavistock Square, WC1
Free, Open to allThe reading forms part of the first ‘Conceptual Gestures’ event organised by Carol Watts and Edmund Hardy at Birkbeck’s Contemporary Poetics Research Centre
Interview at “Intercapillary Space”: http://www.intercapillaryspace.org/2011/08/that-quite-your-own-interview-with. – Click here for further details

Saturday 01 – Friday 07 October 2011
Veer Books in the USA: Readings and Launches in New York, Bard, & Brown
Featuring the US launches of Maggie O’Sullivan’sMurmur‘, Bruce Andrews’You can’t have everything . . . Where would you put it!‘, Robert Fitterman’sHOLOCAUST MUSEUM‘, Gilbert Adair’sSable Smoke‘, Demosthenes Agrafiotis’+-graphies‘ and Aodán McCardle’sIS ing‘, all from Veer Books.
More details to follow.

October 2011
Voiceworks, the Wigmore Hall Song Project, is an annual collaboration between Birkbeck, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the Wigmore Hall. Postgraduate poets (both MA and PhD) working through the CPRC and postgraduate composers from the Guildhall School collaborate to produce songs that are performed at the Wigmore Hall by professional singers and musicians as part of the main repertoire.
This year’s programme begins in October 2011, with a whole new cohort of students.

Wednesday 26 October 2011
Launch of the Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan, & launch/reading of Maggie O’Sullivan’s ‘murmur’ and Jennifer Pike Cobbing’s ‘The Conglomorization of Wot’
18:00-19:00: Launch of the ‘Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan
19:30-21:00: Launch readings for the Veer Books ‘murmur‘ by Maggie O’Sullivan and ‘The Conglomorization of Wot‘ by Jennifer Pike Cobbing
The Council Room, Birkbeck College Main Building, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX (entrance on Torrington Sqr), free entry, all welcome
Click here for a map link

Wednesday 02 November 2011
Veer Books launch (Gilbert Adair, David Miller, Tom White)
UK Launch readings for the Veer Books:
sable smoke‘ by Gilbert Adair //  ‘Black, Grey and White – a book of visual sonnets‘ by David Miller //  ‘My Camp‘ by Tom White
19:30-21:00, Room 112, Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square Building, Bloomsbury, London WC1H 0PD
Free entry – all welcome
Click here for a map link

Friday 11 & Saturday 12 November 2011
Veer Books will be manning a stall at the upcoming Small Publishers Fair 2011 at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1
At the fair this year Veer Books will be launching 6 new books:  Johan de Wit’sLord Howe and His Sandwich‘, Alan Halsey’sEven if only out of‘, Rebecca Cremin’sLAYD‘, Simon Smith’sGravesend‘, Aodán McCardle’sIS ing,Esther Leslie’sBouleversed Baudelairizing: On Poetics and Terror‘.
Reading will be Johan de Wit, Alan Halsey, Rebecca Cremin, Simon Smith, Aodán McCardle, Esther Leslie & Adrian Clarke

Friday 09 December 2011
Veer Books launch: Demosthenes Agriofotis, James Cummins, & Justin Katko
UK Launch readings for the Veer Books:
 +-graphies by Demosthenes Agriofotis,  FLASH BANG by James Cummins, & The Death of Pringle by Justin Katko
Birkbeck Cinema Theatre, Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD – Click here for a map link
7pm, entrance free, all welcome
See here for more

Friday 16 December 2011
Launch of Alba Londres 2, a journal of multi-lingual translation
The CPRC Birkbeck presents:
Room 624, Malet Street building,
 Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury
, London WC1E 7HX (entrance on Torrington Sqr) – Click here for a map link
19:30-21:00, Free Entry. All Welcome
Guillermo Bravo (editor of Alba Paris) will present the magazine and the following poets will read their work:
Amy De’Ath
, Noèlia Díaz Vicedo, Carlos Fernández López, Aurèlia Lassaque, Richard Parker, & William Rowe
See here for more information: http://albalondres.com/2011/10/launch-of-alba-londres-2/

2010

Tuesday 2nd February 2010
Readings 5 webjournal goes online
see http://www.bbk.ac.uk/readings/issues/issue5

Wednesday 10th February 2009
The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs periodically on Wednesdays at Birkbeck, and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL.
7:30 pm, Room 401, 30 Russell Square (Dept of English & Humanities building), Birkbeck College.
Amy Cutler will speak on ‘Poetry and Cartography’
Free Entry, All Welcome

Wednesday 17h February 2010
Launch: Bill Griffiths: Collected Earlier Poems (1966-80)
Published by Reality Street in association with West House Books
7.30pm, Birkbeck College, University of London in Room 203, Clore Management Centre (Torrington Square, facing Birkbeck main entrance)
featuring a reading of the complete Cycles by Sean Bonney, Ken Edwards, Allen Fisher, Alan Halsey, Geraldine Monk & Maggie O’Sullivan
All welcome – Free Entry

Wednesday 24th February 2010
The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs periodically on Wednesdays at Birkbeck, and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL.
The Centre welcomes Simon Smith, who will talk on ‘The Fragment’
7:30 pm, Room 401, 30 Russell Square (Dept of English & Humanities building), Birkbeck College.
Free Entry, All Welcome

Wednesday 3rd March 2010
Booklaunch & Reading: Raul Zurita’s ‘INRI, translated by William Rowe
with readings by Raul Zurita and William Rowe, followed by refreshments
8:00 pm, The Council Room, Birkbeck College Main Building, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX.
All Welcome
See here for more details

Monday 29th March 2010
Reading: the Centre welcomes Gilbert Adair and Robert Hampson.
7.00 pm, Room G01, Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck College, Torrington Square, WC1.
This event will see the launch of Robert Hampson’s new publication from Veer Books:
Veer 028    Robert Hampson – ‘an explanation of colours’
Gilbert Adair’s Sable Smoke will be published by Veer Books later in 2010
All welcome – free entry

Wednesday 19th May 2010
Reading & Talk: The Centre welcomes Mark Weiss, US poet translator and editor of the celebrated new anthology The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry.
Details of his work can be found at: http://www.wildhoneypress.com/featured/weiss/weiss.htm, http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/ebooks/ebooks_pdfs/weiss_db.pdf, http://molossus.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/three-poems-from-cuba/#comment-124
The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of California Press): “Not since the 1982 publication of Paul Auster’s Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual anthology so effectively broadened the sense of poetic terrain outside the United States and also created a superb collection of foreign poems in English. There is nothing else like it.”   John Palattella in The Nation http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland
7.30 pm, Room G01, Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck College, Torrington Square, WC1.
All welcome – free entry

Thursday 20th May 2010
Voiceworks 2010 collaborations between the CPRC Birkbeck and Guildhall School of Music and Drama
There will be a performance of the Voiceworks 2010 compositions in the Wigmore Hall on Thursday May 20th, at 18:00 (for 45 minutes) – this is free to attend, but will require that tickets are booked in advance (this is very simple to do, and again, costs nothing).
See: http://www.wigmore-hall.org.uk/whats-on/productions/voiceworks-25340 for more information.
This is the fourth year of this collaboration between CPRC Birkbeck poets and Guildhall composers, singers and instrumentalists. Voiceworks 2010 participants are:
Francisco Coll Garcia, Albert Pellicer, Iria Perestrelo
Antonia Barnett-McIntosh, Emma Bennett, Adam Crockatt
David Moore, Ben Gwalchmai, Luke Tracey
Raymond Yiu, Kim Patrick, Luis Gomes, Clément Dionet
Patrick Brennan, James Wilkes, Robert Elibay-Hartog
Nick Scott, Frances Kruk, Lucy Hall
Matthew Mendez, Holly Pester, Victor Sicard

Wednesday 9th & Thursday 10th June 2010
Steve McCaffery and Karen Mac Cormack coming to London
Wednesday 9th June 2010
Reading: The CPRC Birkbeck welcomes Steve McCaffery and Karen Mac Cormack
7.00 pm, with a reading of new work by both poets.
Room 417, Malet Street main building, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX (entrance on Torrington Sqr)
See map link below:
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=529810&y=182106&z=110&sv=torrington+square&st=6&tl=Map+of+Torrington+Square,+London,+WC1e&searchp=ids.srf&mapp=map.srf
All welcome – free entry

Thursday 10th June 2010
TALKTALKTALK: The Department of English, RHUL welcomes Steve McCaffery and Karen Mac Cormack speaking on what’s new in poetry.
Mac Cormack: ‘Taking Reality by Surprise’
McCaffery: a performance of  his essay ‘Zarathrustran ‘Pataphysics”
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, RHUL, 6.45-8.45 pm
See map link below:
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srfx=529831&y=181669&z=110&sv=Bedford+Square&st=6&tl=Map+of+Bedford+Square,+London,+WC1b&searchp=ids.srf&mapp=map.srf
All welcome – free entry
The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs periodically and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL.

Wednesday 14th – Friday 16th July 2010
Conference: Women’s Innovative Poetry & Cross-Genre Work
Co-hosted by the CPRC Birkbeck and the University of Greenwich.
Venue: University of Greenwich
Confirmed writers and speakers so far:
Caroline Bergvall, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Andrea Brady, Lee Ann Brown, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Mairead Byrne, Jennifer Cooke, Corina Copp, Emily Critchley, Jean Day, Carrie Etter, Steve Evans, Robert Hampson, Edmund Hardy, Susana Gardner, Lisa Jarnot, Daniel Kane, Christine Kennedy, Frances Kruk, Francesca Lisette, Marianne Morris, Jennifer Moxley, Redell Olsen, Holly Pester, Frances Presley, Luke Roberts, Lisa Robertson, Sophie Robinson, Rebecca Rosier, Lisa Samuels, Eleni Sikelianos, Juliana Spahr, Zoë Skoulding, Harriet Tarlo, Fiona Templeton, Cathy Wagner, Samantha Walton, Carol Watts, Sara Wintz
Admission is free (donations requested).

Tuesday 20th July 2010
Veer Books Launch: Jeff Hilson’s ‘In The Assarts’ (Veer 030) at the Blue Bus.
Blue Bus: reading by Carol Watts and Jeff Hilson at The Lamb, 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1, in the upstairs room, from 7.30. Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions). This is the fortieth event in THE BLUE BUS series.

Wednesday 21st July 2010
Talk/Reading: David Buuck ‘Bay Area Sneaks: Writing/Framing/Space’
7.30 pm, The Council Room, Malet Street main building, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX (entrance on Torrington Sqr)
David Buuck lives in Oakland, California, where he teaches & is a freelance editor & critic. He is the founder of BARGE – the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, and the co-founder and editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics. Recent publications include THE SHUNT (Palm Press, 2009), 17 Reasons Why (Mission17 Gallery, 2009), Buried Treasure Island: a detour of the future (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2008), SITE/CITE/CITY (BARGE, 2008), Paranoia Agent (OMG, 2007), among others. More materials available at buuckbarge.wordpress.com and davidbuuck.com/barge

Saturday 24th July 2010
Veer Books Launch: Out To Lunch ‘Smooch Tentet Resolve‘ (Veer 026) & Cris Paulstenia cultus handbook‘ (Veer 026) @ Birkbeck
The Council Room, Birkbeck College Main Building, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX.
7.00 pm
Free Entry. All Welcome

Tuesday 17th August 2010
Veer Books Launch: Wayne Clements ‘Clerical Work’ (Veer 031) at The Blue Bus.
The Blue Bus
is pleased to present a poetry reading by Adrian Clarke, Wayne Clements and Michael Zand, at The Lamb, 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1, in the upstairs room, from 7.30.
Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions). This is the forty-first event in THE BLUE BUS series.

Monday 23rd August 2010
Reading: the Centre welcomes Robert Fitterman and Kim Rosenfield
7.30 pm, The Council Room, Birkbeck College Main Building, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX.
This reading by two outstandingly interesting American poets is not to be missed.
All welcome – voluntary contribution: £5 waged and £3 unwaged

Tuesday 14th September 2010
Veer Books Launch: Harry Gilonis’ ‘eye-blink’ (Veer 032) at The Blue Bus.
The Blue Bus
is pleased to present a poetry reading by Ken Edwards and Harry Gilonis, at The Lamb, 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1, in the upstairs room, on Tuesday 14th September, from 7.30. Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions). This is the forty-second event in THE BLUE BUS series.

Wednesday 15th September 2010
A Celebration of Anna Mendelssohn
There will be a celebration of the life and poetry of Anna Mendelssohn/Grace Lake on 15 September, 6-9 pm, to be held in the Council Room in Birkbeck College, Torrington Square, London WC1. The event is jointly hosted by Birkbeck Poetics Centre and The Centre for Modernist Studies at Sussex, and has been organised with her family and friends, as well as those interested in her poetry.
There will be readings from Anna’s work and other poems from among others Ian Patterson, Sean Bonney, Barry Schwabsky, Frances Presley, Chloe Harries, and Jane Liddell-King, and words from those who knew her, including members of her family and Peter Riley, who worked to save her extraordinary archive after her death.
The event is open to all, and if you’d like to read please let either Sara Crangle (skcrangle@gmail.com) or Carol Watts know (c.watts@bbk.ac.uk), so that we can plan the evening with room for everyone. Also do drop us a line if attending, so we have a sense of the numbers for refreshment. If anyone has any images of artwork or photos of Anna that we can receive in jpeg form, that would also be great – we’ll display them on the evening.
Hope you can join us to celebrate the work of an astonishing poet.

Wednesday 6th October 2010
Allen Fisher Talk – The Complexity Manifold (one of three talks)
assemblage and empathy: paying attention to poetic composition with regard to aspects of spacetime, catastrophe theory, decoherence and proprioception
Venue: 8 pm, Poetry Library, Southbank Centre, London SE1
Free entry –  ticket required from the Southbank Centre – Click here for further details

Wednesday 13th October 2010
Allen Fisher Talk – The  Complexity Manifold (second talk)
reiterates the process of the first talk and develops those proposals through ideas of situation and dislocation
Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck College, University of London,
Venue: 7:30 pm, Room 541, Malet Street Main Building, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7HX
Click here for a map link
Free entry –  all welcome – no booking required

Wednesday 20th October 2010
Latin American Poetry Multilingual Reading and Booklaunch
Co-sponsored by the Native Spirit Festival www.nativespiritfoundation.org/ and the Poetics Centre at Birkbeck College.
7.30 pm in Room 421, Birkbeck College, Main Building, followed by a reception.
Cecilia Vicuña will be presenting the recently published Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry in Translation. One of the editors of the book, Cecilia Vicuña is a highly respected Chilean poet, performer, and filmmaker. She will be showing a short film of the visual poetry included in the book and reading her work and work by other poets.
Readers from English: Sean Bonney, Ruth Fainlight, Harry Gilonis, Frances Kruk, Stephen Mooney, James O’Hern, William Rowe
Readers from Spanish: Cecilia Vicuña, Albert Pellicer, Gregorio Fontén
From Portuguese: Goia
from Quechua: Cecilia Vicuña
from Latin: Harry Gilonis

Thursday 21st October 2010
Allen Fisher Talk – The Complexity Manifold (third talk)
Poetics Research Group at Royal Holloway University of London,
Venue: 7 pm, Room G3, 2 Gower Street, Bedford Square, WC1
Click here for a map link
Free entry –  all welcome – no booking required

Friday 29th October 2010
VLAK in London
To mark the launch of the inaugural issue of VLAK MAGAZINE: CONTEMPORARY POETICS & THE ARTS, there will be an evening of wine & poetry at the Birkbeck College rooms on Tavistock Square, 29th of October, from 6pm, featuring readings by Allen Fisher, Caroline Bergvall, Carol Watts, Louis Armand, Sean Bonney, Holly Pester, Steve Willey, Richard Tipping, Lawrence Upton & Benedict Taylor … & more!
Time: 18:00 – 21:00 on 29 October 2010
Location: Birkbeck College, 32 Tavistock Square, London, United Kingdom – Venue map link here
Everyone welcome!
Please visit the VLAK website for further details: www.vlakmagazine.com

Wednesday 3rd November 2010
The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs periodically on Wednesdays at Birkbeck, and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL.
The Centre welcomes Chris Beckett of the British Library, who will speak on the Bob Cobbing papers at the BL.
7:30 pm, Council Room, Birkbeck College Main Building, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX (entrance on Torrington Sqr)
Click here for a map link
Free Entry, All Welcome

Wednesday 10th November 2010
The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs periodically on Wednesdays at Birkbeck, and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL.
The Centre welcomes Lytle Shaw (NYU) on ‘Baraka’s Newark: Performing the Black Arts’
7 pm, 11 Bedford Square, RHUL
Free Entry, All Welcome

Friday 12th & Saturday 13th November 2010
Veer at the Small Publishers Fair 2010
Veer Books
will be manning a stall at this year’s Small Publishers Fair, (November 12th & 13th 2010) at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1 (11am to 7pm) – come and see us there.
At the fair this year we will be launching 2 new Veer Books: (033) Adrian Clarke – ‘Drastic Measures’ & (Burner 008) Nat Raha – ‘Octet’
The full schedule of readings on Saturday 13th is:
1:00 Hafod Press: Noelle Griffiths & Kim Atkinson launch Bird Song
1:30 Shangwe: Hair Power—Skin Revolution Nicole Moore, Pauline Walker and Fiona Joseph
2:00 Royal Holloway Poetic Practice MA Students: Christa Bloom, Prudence Chamberlain, Anna Lawrence, Robert Kilshaw, Jooyeon Park, Rachel Porcheret
2:30 John Bevis Aaaaw to Zzzzd: The Words of Birds
3:00 Holland Park Press: Arnold Jansen op de Haar
3:30 Sara Ranchouse Publishing: Sally Alatalo
4:00 Centre des Livres d’Artistes launch: herman de vries a random sample of the seeings of my beings and Nick Thurston il avait, il pourrait trouver, il allait
4:30 Reality Street & West House Books: readings from Bill Griffiths Collected Earlier Poems; Richard Makin andJohan de Wit with Juli Jana
5:30 Editions Héros-Limite: Simon Cutts Monotonie
6:00 Veer Books: Adrian Clarke, Out To Lunch, Nat Raha, Cris Paul, Aodan McCardle, Harry Gilonis, & Wayne Clements
Free admission to fair & readings
please see http://www.rgap.co.uk/spf.php for more details.

Wednesday 1st December 2010
+++ POSTPONED+++
The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs periodically on Wednesdays at Birkbeck, and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL.
The Centre welcomes the visual artist Katherine Meynell will be talking about her work.
7:30 pm, Room 225, Birkbeck College Main Building, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX (entrance on Torrington Sqr)
Click here for a map link
Free Entry, All Welcome

2009

January 2009
Publication:
Magdalena Chocanootro desenlace  published by Veer Books (Veer 016) – available now – see the Veer Books page for publication details.


February 2009
Publication: Readings 4 to go online.
Wednesday 11th February 2009.
Launch & Reading: the Centre welcomes Alan Halsey, launching Lives of The Poets
7.00-9.00 pm, The Council Room, Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Square, WC1.
There will be a reading from 7.30 – 8.00. Wine will be served.   All Welcome.


Wednesday 18th February 2009
TALKSTALKSTALKS – first session of the Spring term.
7.30-9.00 pm, Birkbeck College, room tbc (all welcome)
Stephen MooneyDiscontinuous Visuality – Brakhage’s ‘just seeing’, and Background Temporality in contemporary poetics
The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs periodically on Wednesdays at Birkbeck, and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL.


Wednesday 4th March 2009
TALKSTALKSTALKS – second session of the Spring term – More details to follow.
7.30-9.00 pm, Birkbeck College, room tbc (all welcome)
The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs periodically on Wednesdays at Birkbeck, and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL.


Wednesday 18th March 2009
TALKSTALKSTALKS – third session of the Spring term – More details to follow.
7.30-9.00 pm, Birkbeck College, room tbc (all welcome)
The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs periodically on Wednesdays at Birkbeck, and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL.


Saturday18th April 2009

Launch & Reading: the Centre welcomes Gilbert Adair and Tom White.
6.00 pm, The Council Room, Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Square, WC1.
plus the launch of Tom White’s ‘Old Sense‘  from Veer Books [Burner Veer 002]
All welcome – free entry – refreshments will be provided
Tuesday April 28th 2009
Reading: the Centre welcomes Dimosthenis Agrafiotis.
19.30-21.00 in Room 629, Malet Street building, Birkbeck College, London WC1E 7HX
•Reading  •Performance  •Video Presentations: ‘“24” Pideo–Voetry’, ‘Α/Ω’, & ‘Calligraphein’  •Lecture – ‘Poetics of the letter and the letter of poetics’
With the participation of Michail Palaiologou (composer from the University of Guildhall, and musicians.
All welcome – free entry – refreshments will be provided


Tuesday 5th May 2009

The Centre for Poetics welcomes Ron Silliman for A Reading and Conversation
7.00-8.00pm, Room 101, 30 Russell Square, London WC1.
American poet Ron Silliman has emerged as a major figure in international post-avant poetry. Since 1974, Silliman has been working on a single poem, entitled Ketjak. Silliman’s Ketjak project is composed of four works: The Age of Huts, Tjanting, The Alphabet, and Universe. His work includes ongoing participation in the experiment in collaborative autobiography, the Grand Pianoproject. His 1986 anthology In the American Tree remains a primary resource for the discussion of Language Poetry, and the Silliman blog is internationally regarded as the must-read source of world-wide developments in poetry.
Ron will also be talking with postgraduates at the Centre in the afternoon.
Ron will be fresh from his first UK readings at the Bury Text Festival which kicks off on 1 May for twelve weeks of readings, performances and exhibitions. http://www.textfestival.com/
All welcome


Thursday 7th May 2009

Voiceworks 2009 collaborations between the CPRC Birkbeck and Guildhall School of Music and Drama
There will be a performance of the Voiceworks 2009 compositions in the Wigmore Hall on Thursday May 7th, at 18:00 (for 45 minutes) – this is free to attend, but will require that tickets are booked in advance (this is very simple to do, and again, costs nothing).
See: http://www.wigmore-hall.org.uk/whats-on/productions/voiceworks-23314 for more information.
This is the third year of this collaboration between CPRC Birkbeck poets and Guildhall composers, singers and musicians. Voiceworks 2009 participants are: William Rowe & Francisco Coll Garcia, Sean Bonney & Jane Hebberd, Steve Willey & Edward Nesbit, Holly Pester & Joshua Kaye, Nancy Jones & Marcus Barcham-Stevens, Marianne Burton & Alastair Putt, Charlotte Newman & Aaron Holloway-Nahum.
all welcome
Saturday 23rd May 2009
TEXTMUSICTEXTMUSIC SYMPOSIUM
The Birkbeck Poetics Centre will be holding a Symposium on Text and Music in their multiple relationships, both in theory and in poetic and musical practice, with special emphasis on collaboration as a process. Apart from offering a forum for papers, videos and performances, the event will give an opportunity for people working with text and music to meet.
10.00 am – 6.15 pm – Symposium:  £20 and £10 concessions
7.00 pm – 11.00 pm – Performances: £10 and £5 concessions
All Welcome.
Full programme details here

Thursday 1st October 2009
Veer Books launch at ‘Crossing the Line’
7.30, The Leather Exchange, Leathermarket Street, London Bridge, London SE1 3HN
(click here for directions), £5, £3.
Books to be launched by Tom White (Old Sense), Out To Lunch (Swift Blab Residue), Jon Clay (Here 1-24), James Harvey (Temporary Structures), James Wilkes (Reviews) and Jow Lindsey (OCTOPUS PUKE & other songs & tales, by Francis Crot et. al)
See the Veer Books page for publication details.
Readers: Out To Lunch, Jon Clay, James Harvey, James Wilkes, and Antony John

Wednesday 7th October 2009
Susan Howe and David Grubbs Seminar @ BBK
3-5 pm, Birkbeck College, B35 Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Square, London WC1
Susan Howe and David Grubbs will speak about the ideas that have nourished their collaboration as poet and musician. Howe and Grubbs have released two CDs, Thiefth (2005) and Souls of the Labadie Tract (2006), works which take the encounter between poetry and music into new territory. Each will speak for around 25 minutes and the second hour will be devoted to questions and discussion.
Presented jointly by the Poetics Research Group at Royal Holloway, University of London and Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre. Their appearances in London are supported by the Humanities and Arts Research Centre, the Faculty of Arts and the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Thursday 8th October 2009
Susan Howe and David Grubbs Performance @ the South Bank Centre
Purcell Room, South Bank Centre
Thursday 8 October 2009, 7.45pm
£10.00 (some concession tickets also available)
“Howe and Grubbs take the encounter between poetry and sound into entirely new territory. They will perform separately and together.”
Presented jointly by the Poetics Research Group at Royal Holloway, University of London and Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre. Their appearances in London are supported by the Humanities and Arts Research Centre, the Faculty of Arts and the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

October 2009
Voiceworks, the Wigmore Hall Song Project, is an annual collaboration between Birkbeck and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the Wigmore Hall. Postgraduate poets (both MA and PhD) working through the CPRC and postgraduate composers from the Guildhall School collaborate to produce songs that are performed at the Wigmore Hall by professional singers and musicians as part of the main repertoire.
This year’s programme begins in October 2009.

Wednesday 21st October 2009
Launch: Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry
7:30 pm, Room B29, Birkbeck College, Main Building, Malet St.
There will be speeches and discussion of the journal, as well as an opportunity for readers and contributors to the journal to meet with editorial board members.
Speakers:
Caroline Bergvall, Poet and performer, Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Southampton
Andrea Brady, Poet, Lecturer, Department of English, Queen Mary College
Robert Hampson, Poet, Professor, Department of English, Royal Holloway
Scott Thurston and Robert Sheppard, Editors, Journal of Innovative British and Irish Poetry
Followed by discussion and drinks. All Welcome.
see http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry for more information.

Wednesday 28th October 2009
The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs periodically on Wednesdays at Birkbeck, and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL.
7:30 pm, Room B29, Birkbeck College Main Building.
The series resumes on Wednesday 28th October, welcoming Jonathan Kauphmann. ‘Work in Progress’.
Drawing on his current studies of acoustics and notation, composer and improvising soloist Styles J. Kauphmann will question whether language and music aren’t fundamentally immiscible, and the results of their collaboration inevitable failures.
Kauphmann was raised in Botswana and the United Kingdom, and educated at Cambridge and in Berlin.
Examples of his work are available at http://www.stylesjkauphmann.org
Free Entry, All Welcome

Wednesday 11th November 2009
The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs periodically on Wednesdays at Birkbeck, and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL.
7:30 pm, Room B29, Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Square, WC1
The Centre welcomes Alison Croggon, ‘Rewriting The Black Monk: texts in space‘.
Alison will be talking about her work in the theatre and her collaboration with actors, amongst other things.
Sponsored by the Austrailian Council for the Arts.
Free Entry, All Welcome

Friday 13th & Saturday 14th November 2009
Veer Books will be manning a stall at the upcoming Small Publishers Fair 2009 at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1
Poetry presses include Colin Sackett, Coracle, Essence, Leafe/Bamboo, Moschatel, Reality Street, Shearsman, Veer & West House.
Exhibition of vintage NY mimeos curated by Les Coleman & John Janssen
At the fair this year we will be launching 5 new Veer Books:
018 Piers Hugill – ‘Il canzoniere’
021 Tony Trehy – ‘Space The Soldier Who Died For Perspective’
022 William Rowe – ‘The Earth Has Been Destroyed’
023 Antony John – ‘now than it used to be, but in the past’
024 Aodán McCardle, Piers Hugill, Stephen Mooney – ‘Shuddered’
We will also be presenting a reading at the Small Publishers Fair event on Sat Nov 14th, from 5:30 pm.  Joining us will be Torque Press, launching Caroline Bergvall’s Cropper, and Carol Watts’ this is red.
Reading will be: Carol Watts, William Rowe, Tony Trehy, Piers Hugill, Antony John, and Aodán McCardle, with readings from Caroline Bergvall’s Cropper.
See the Veer Books page for publication details.

Wednesday 25th November 2009
The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs periodically on Wednesdays at Birkbeck, and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL.
7:30 pm, Room B29, Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Square, WC1
The Centre welcomes Kristen Kreider and James O’Leary, ‘Video Shakkei: live drawing and borrowed landscape’.
Free Entry, All Welcome

Wednesday 9th December 2009
The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs periodically on Wednesdays at Birkbeck, and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL.
7:30 pm, Room 351, Birkbeck College Main Building, Torrington Square, WC1
The Centre welcomes Ryan Omonde and Becky Cremin, ‘How To Talk‘.
Free Entry, All Welcome

Wednesday 16th December 2009
Veer Books Launch / Writers Forum Celebration @ BBK
19:30, The Council Room, Birkbeck College Main Building, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX.
3 new Veer Books to be launched:
017 Maggie O’Sullivan – ‘ALTO – London Poems 1975-1984’
019 Johan de Wit – ‘No Hand Signals: the invisibility of language in poetry’
025 Jennifer Pike Cobbing – ‘
SCRUNCH
All three poets have had strong links to Writers Forum in the past and the present – they will be joined by Writers Forum Co-Convenor Adrian Clarke for this event.
Readers: Adrian Clarke, Jenny Cobbing, Johan de Wit, and Maggie O’Sullivan.
Directions: the Birkbeck Main Building is sandwiched between Malet Street and Torrington Square, and the main entrance is on the Torrington Square side, at the Senate House end of the square/plaza.
Click this link for a map.
All Welcome
Contact Veer Books at veerbooks@gmail.com for more details.

2008

Thursday 2 October 2008
Veer Books launch at ‘Crossing the Line’
Sean Bonney
(Baudelaire in English), Johan de Wit (Up To You Munro), Piers Hugill (‘Ways Through a Field’: 13 Lyrics), Stephen Mooney (DCLP) and Jow Lindsey (OCTOPUS PUKE & other songs & tales, by Francis Crot et. al) will be reading from their recently published books, as well as from the new Bill Griffiths book (The Lion Man and others).
7.30 THE LEATHER EXCHANGE 15 Leathermarket Street, London Bridge, SE1 3HN. £5 / £3
See the Veer Books page for publication details.
Friday 10 October 2008
Publication: A Constellation on Alice Notley, an online collection of responses to her poetry and linked footage of her reading, emerging from our symposium last June, in collaboration with intercapillary space and Openned.
Curated by Edmund Hardy and Carol Watts, film by Steve Willey.


Voiceworks
, the Wigmore Hall Song Project, is an annual collaboration between Birkbeck and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the Wigmore Hall. Postgraduate poets (both MA and PhD) working through the CPRC and postgraduate composers from the Guildhall School collaborate to produce songs that are performed at the Wigmore Hall by professional singers and musicians as part of the main repertoire.
This year’s programme begins on Tuesday 14 October 2008.
Friday 24 & Saturday 25 October 2008
Veer Books will be manning a stall at the upcoming Small Publishers Fair 2008 at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1We will also be presenting a reading of recent work at that event on Oct 25th, from 5:30 pm
Veer Books will launch Bill Griffiths’ new book (The Lion Man and others), with readings from the book by Alan Halsey, Geraldine Monk, Ulli Freer, William Rowe, Sean Bonney, Stephen Mooney, and others.
See the Veer Books page for publication details.


Wednesday 29 October 2008

The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs periodically on Wednesdays at Birkbeck, and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL.
The series resumes on Wednesday 29 October, welcoming Charles Alexander, poet, bookmaker  and publisher, to talk on Poetry & The Book: Chax Press 1984-2008
7.30-9.00 pm, The Council Room, Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Square, WC1
Charles Alexander is the Executive Director of Chax Press. His books of poetry include Hopeful Buildings (Chax Press), Arc of Light / Dark Matter (Segue Books), Near or Random Acts (Singing Horse Press), Certain Slants (Junction Press), and several chapbooks. He attended Stanford University as an undergraduate, and later obtained a graduate degree in Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he also studied hand bookmaking with the renowned book artist Walter Hamady. Alexander has been designing and printing handmade book arts works for almost 30 years. He was formerly the director of Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and he edited the book Talking the Boundless Book: Language and the Book Arts (MCBA). In summer 2007 he was a participant in the TAMAAS poetry translation atelier in Paris. He teaches periodically at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. He is the most recent recipient of the distinguished Arizona Artist Award, given to one artist annually.

Wednesday 12 November 2008
TALKSTALKSTALKS welcomes Steve Willey.
7.30-9.00 pm, The Council Room, Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Square, WC1
Steve Willey – Documents of Collaboration: The poem in Song and Opera
This talk will also be the launch of a new work: Portmanteaux///Document  by  Edward Nesbit///Steve Willey
A fragment of the work as it exists in performance is available on the Openned website. [http://openned.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/03-track-03-2.mp3]
An additional document of the work will also be added to the Openned website in due course [http://openned.com/].
Thursday 20 November 2008
Reading: the Centre welcomes Michael Heller
The Council Room, Birkbeck College Main Building, Torrington Square, WC1, @ 7.30pm.
Michael Heller has published seven volumes of poetry, the most recent being Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems. His collection of essays on George Oppen, Speaking the Estranged, has just appeared. Uncertain Poetries, a book of essays appeared in 2006. His memoir, Living Root, was published by the State University of New York Press in the Fall of 2000. Eschaton, a new volume of poems and Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The Study are to be published in 2008. His libretto for the opera Benjamin, based on the life of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, has been set to music by the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson and performed at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. His poetry and criticism have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.
“There is a classic largeness to these poems, whether of means or of reference–a consummately civilized response to our time that makes the intimate and the physical still primary despite the generalizing chaos Heller confronts so movingly.”–Robert Creeley “…tone perfect poems-the tone, the scale, note by note, interval by interval–attack on the ‘gods of ennui and loneliness.'” –George Oppen

Frances Presley and Tilla Brading: a collaborating performance. 16th April 2008, 7.30-9.00 pm. Council Room, Birkbeck College.

Lisa Samuels, Seminar on Leslie Scalapino: Clore Management Centre, Room 203, Birkbeck College, 2pm. Organised jointly with Queen Mary Poetry Seminar.

The TALKSTALKSTALKS series runs fortnightly on Wednesdays at Birkbeck, and is curated by Professor Robert Hampson at RHUL. Andrea Brady, ‘Making use of this pain: a report from the John Weiners Archives.’ Wednesday 23rd April 7.30-9.00 pm, Council Rook, Birkbeck College. The series will resume in October 2008.

Symposium with Alice Notley: Saturday May 10th 2008 10.15 – 5.30, Council Room, Birkbeck College.
see http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/events/alicenotleyconstellation for more details, recordings and texts.

Martin Bakero & Christine Wertheim Reading/Booklaunch: Thursday May 29th, 7.30pm, room: B18 Malet Street building (on the basement floor) – FREE for all – Martin Bakero (Chile) will launch his tri-lingual VICEVERSA here in the UK. Christine Wertheim (Los Angeles) will perform her work.

Karen Mac Cormack & Steve McCaffery reading and booklaunches: West House Books & the CPRC announce a reading by Karen Mac Cormack (launching the complete edition of Implexures – Chax Press & West House) & Steve McCaffery (launching Slightly Left of Thinking – Chax, UK distribution by West House). Room 540, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, WC1, Thursday 12th June, 7.30 pm, free admission – enquiries to info@westhousebooks.co.uk

Susan Howe: A Celebration: 21 June 2008, Room B35, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, 9.25am – 6.30pm.
Co-organised with Catherine Martin. In this, the first conference devoted to her work, we aim to recognise the impact Howe’s writing has had on contemporary poetics, and to provide a focus for new critical approaches to her poetry.
The symposium begins at 9.25am with the keynote lecture by Elizabeth Willis, followed by four panels of papers, and finishing with a drinks reception at 6.30pm.  All welcome.  Coffee and tea served from 9am.
With papers from Elizabeth Willis, Stephen Collis, Drew Milne, Mandy Bloomfield, Redell Olsen, Tony Lopez, Anna Reckin, Nick Selby, Catherine Martin, Carol Watts, Will Montgomery, Jess Wilkinson, Susan Nurmi-Schomers, & a recording of ‘Thiefth’ by Susan Howe and David Grubbs.
This event is sponsored by the Centre for Poetics and School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck,  and the University of Sussex.

‘Readings’ webjournal relaunched (June 2008)
Readings webjournal relaunched with issue 3 in June 2008.
See http://www.bbk.ac.uk/readings

PORES webjournal issue 5 (July 2008)
Part 1: Poetry and Public Language published in July 2008.
See http://www.pores.bbk.ac.uk

Susan Howe: A Celebration: 21 June 2008, Room B35, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, 9.25am – 6.30pm. Co-organised with Catherine Martin. In this, the first conference devoted to her work, we aim to recognise the impact Howe’s writing has had on contemporary poetics, and to provide a focus for new critical approaches to her poetry. The symposium begins at 9.25am with the keynote lecture by Elizabeth Willis, followed by four panels of papers, and finishing with a drinks reception at 6.30pm.  All welcome.  Coffee and tea served from 9am. With papers from Elizabeth Willis, Stephen Collis, Drew Milne, Mandy Bloomfield, Redell Olsen, Tony Lopez, Anna Reckin, Nick Selby, Catherine Martin, Carol Watts, Will Montgomery, Jess Wilkinson, Susan Nurmi-Schomers, & a recording of ‘Thiefth’ by Susan Howe and David Grubbs. This event is sponsored by the Centre for Poetics and School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck,  and the University of Sussex.

Symposium with Alice Notley: Saturday May 10th 2008 10.15 – 5.30, Council Room, Birkbeck College.
see http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/events/alicenotleyconstellation for more details, recordings and texts.

 

2007

Poetry and Public Language: Panel Discussion and Booklaunch December 5th 2007. Panel discussion with Tony Lopez, Cathy Martin, Peter Middleton, John Hall, Will Rowe, on the occasion of the launch of Poetry and Public Language, ed. by Tony Lopez and Anthony Caleshu (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2007).

Bill Griffiths: A Commemoration Saturday 17th November. 2-5 pm
Council Room, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London WC1.
Recordings of Bill’s words and music.
Readings and tributes by Allen Fisher, John Griffiths, Jennifer Cobbing, Ken Edwards, Keith Musgrove, John Seed, Geraldine Monk, Alan Halsey, Samantha Paxton, Nicholas Johnson, Gavin Selerie, Paula Claire, Ulli Freer, Clive Bush, Steve Clews, Clive Fencott, Steve Cox, Harry Gilonis, Sean Bonney and Will Rowe. Music by Bartok, Brahms and Bach. Displays of Bill’s work. A double audio CD of this event is available from Alan Halsey <alan@nethedge.demon.co.uk>

Performance by JUStin!katKO (Brown University), 29 October 2007.

Reading by Jerome Rothenberg  4 October 2007. Co-sponsored by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Performance exchange led by Sean Bonney, 14 June 2007.

Lecture by John Cayley: ‘Writing on Complex Surfaces’ 3 May 2007. On poetry and digital media.

Performance at Wigmore Hall 22 March 2007. Performance of ‘Voiceworks: A Showcase of New Music for Voice’. Texts by Birkbeck, London Consortium and Royal Holloway Students, with music composed by Guildhall School of Music and Drama students, sung and performed by Guildhall Students.

 

2006

Reading Prynne: talks by Keston Sutherland and John Hall, May 2006.

2005

Psychogeography: talks by Ben Watson and Sean Bonney, May 2005.

Forum on women writers: 15th January 2005, with Redell Olsen, Andrea Brady, Susan Johanknecht, Nicky Marsh, Stephen Mooney, Aodhan McCardle, Piers Hugill, Lucy Sheerman, Elizabeth James, Val Pancucci, Robert Hampson, Brigid McClear, Frances Presley, Kai Fierle-Hedrick, Ceridwen Buckmaster, Gillian Wylde, Marianne Morris, Carol Watts.

E-Poetry Festival, 28th September – 1st October 2005, with financial support from the British Academy and LCACE, co-organised with Loss Pequeño Glazier and John Cayley, and in collaboration with Royal Holloway University of London. With contributions by Jean-Pierre Balpe, Talon Memmott, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Phillipe Bootz, Sandy Baldwin, Liro Tolley, Judd Morrissey, John Cayley, Kirsten Lavers, Brigid McLeer, Jim Rosenberg, Joerg Piringer, John Drever, Lawrence Upton, Kustin Katko, John Sparrow, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, and others.

2004

Workshop on working with found materials, led by Redell Olsen, October 2004.

Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Conference: ‘(the) language & the Design of Poetry’, May 7th & 8th, 2004, with financial support from the British Academy. With contributions by Bruce Andrews, Redell Olsen, Jed Rasula, Robert Sheppard, John Cayley, Rob Holloway, Brian Kim Stefans, Ulli Freer, Bill Griffiths, Rod Mengham, Pierre Joris, Peter Middleton, Brian Catling, chris cheek, Iain Sinclair, Lawrence Upton, Gilbert Adair, Aaron Williamson, Nicole Peyrafitte.

2003

‘Hands on Poetics’: Talk on rhythm in poetry, by Nicholas Johnson, 20th November 2003.

Panel on the Contemporary in Poetry, with Robert Potts and William Rowe. May 2003.

2001

Fifth Subvoicive Colloquium, 2001.

2000

Inaugural Talk on ‘Ecstatic form in poetry’, to mark the launch of CPRC, by Jeff Nuttall, May 2000.

Bitnami