pharmapoetica shortlisted for the ted hughes award

I'm really pleased that Pharmapoetica has been shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes Award. The shortlist is full of fascinating projects with a real focus on sound, performance and multimedia. Huge thanks to my brilliant collaborator - artist, bookmaker and medical herbalist - Maria Vlotides. She is an exceptional talent. I am also really grateful to Mario Petrucci for his beautifully written introduction to the book.

I have blogged about the process of writing the poems for Pharmapoetica on 'poems for sale' here. The project began life as a medical cabinet of poems which will be displayed as an art object in various venues.

The medical cabinet of poems

Maria and I have performed the texts from Pharmapoetica on a number of occasions, including at the Small Publishers Fair at Conway Hall in November last year. There will be an exhibition of Pharmapoetica at The Poetry Cafe in the Spring and we will also be running a workshop based on the project at Chelsea Physic Garden on National Poetry Day.
 
You can read a review of Pharmapoetica on Sabotage here

You can listen to a podcast about Pharmapoetica on the Londonist here

The book, printed in an edition of 500 copies, can be bought on the Pedestrian Publishing website here. 
                                                 
Pharmapoetica, the book

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the new concrete: an online course in attentive poetics

Image
‎ The editors of The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century , Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe, will be leading an online course for The Poetry School , beginning on 15th September 2015. The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayward Publishing, 2015) One of the narratives of visual poetry since the 1950s is that the form has become one that can be taken up by any poet at some stage of their writing life. The concrete movement had such a strong impact that it's impossible not to write poetry and to consider, at some point, how these techniques might be put into practice in a particular poem or sequence. Edwin Morgan is significant here. His work is remarkable for its variety, dexterity and energy. I have always felt that his concrete poetry allowed him to get right down into the syllables, particles and phonemes of poetic language which he could later put to such effective use in his non-concrete work. Like an arachnophile coming back from year
Read more

talk to that & other poems

Image
  This is my first poetry publication for two years, a series of poems exploring cities: Liverpool, New York, Munich and  Brasília.   The central poem imagines Federico García Lorca, Walt Whitman and Hart Crane meeting in New York. This limited edition chapbook is restricted to 53 copies and is published in Tangerine Press's latest 'Walking Wounded' series, alongside new publications by David Keenan and Wendy Erskine.  Order Talk to That & Other Poems from Tangerine Press for £12, inclusive of p&p. 
Read more

poetry objects

Image
Over the past few years I have been working on a series of 'poem objects', using a wide range of materials. I later discovered the work of Joan Brossa, who also worked at this intersection between the visual arts and poetry. Each of my 'poem objects' is numbered. poem object #7 'sound poem' poem object #4 'the monarchy' poem object #1 'the solar system'
Read more