Over the Irish Sea & Coastal Conversations

 

from Allan Sekula's Fish Story

This Thursday and Friday, the Atlantic Archipelagos Research Project is convening at UCD, Dublin, for ‘Over the Irish Sea‘, a symposium on maritime methodologies and the Irish coast, and I will be presenting on alternate traditions of British poetries of coastal passage, including Robert Hampson’s Seaport, Giles Goodland’s Littoral and Gerry Loose’s Eitgal. Those following the topic might also be interested in the screening of Allan Sekula and Noel Burch’s The Forgotten Space (2010), based on writings from Sekula’s Fish Story (2002) about trade’s encoding of the sea, tonight at the Tate with a panel discussion.

The AHRC Landscape and Environment project based at Nottingham has also recently launched Stephen Daniels and Lucy Veale’s Imagining Change: Coastal Conversations, a film essay on contemporary cultural articulations of coastal change. The film can be viewed here, with links to an account of its creation and the interviews with cartographic artist Simon Read, performer Mike Pearson and cultural geographer Caitlin DeSilvey. (Image below by Simon Read.)

Registration open for one day Peter Riley conference and readings

‘Where horizons meet’: a one-day conference on Peter Riley and readings of his work

Saturday 14th January 2012

Venue: The Keynes Library, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD, see map

Jointly held by Birkbeck and Royal Holloway and sponsored by Gylphi as part of the Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays book series (ed: Sarah Dillon, University of St Andrews)

Coffee: 10-10.30 am

Panel 1: Peter Riley and the British avant-garde (10.30 am-11.30 am)
Ian Heames: Reading on: eisogesis and the politics of refusal in Peter Riley’s accounts of contemporary difficulty
David Malcolm: Passing Measures? Peter Riley’s Poetics: Tradition and Avant Garde
Ian Brinton: Peter Riley as editor

Break: 11.30 am-11.45

Panel 2: Peter Riley and transfer (11.45-12.45)
Jamie Wilkes: ‘Limestone is the humanistic rock’: some limestone fantasies in the work of Adrian Stokes and Peter Riley
Alex Latter: The prose-work of Tracks and Mineshafts
Wolfgang Görtschacher: On translating Peter Riley

Lunch 12.45-1.30 pm

Panel 3: Peter Riley and landscape (1.30 pm-2.30 pm)
George Ttouli: Depth of Field: the quest for meaning in Alstonefield: a poem
Amy Cutler: The station and the port: monastic geography in Riley’s Llŷn
Peter Larkin: The Terrain across Text: poems eliding/guiding poems (Small Square Plots)

Break: 2.30 pm-2.45pm

Roundtable discussion: 2.45-3.45

Break: 3.45-4pm

Readings, 4pm

Peter Larkin reading ‘Small Square Plots’

Multi-vocal illustrated reading of ‘Distant Points’ by Emily Critchley, James Wilkes, Fabian Macpherson, Edmund Hardy and Amy Cutler, with images from a series of minimal landscape works by Derbyshire artist David Ainley

Peter Riley reading ‘The Ascent of Kinder Scout’

5.15pm(ish): Closing address and wine, followed by drinks and a meal nearby.

To register please send your name, your institution (if applicable) and whether you would like lunch to peterrileyconference@yahoo.co.uk.

Peter Riley extended CFP deadline – 18th Nov

We have extended the deadline for the Peter Riley conference at Birkbeck with the support of Gylphi: please disseminate widely! Abstracts of 250 words to peterrileyconference@yahoo.co.uk by Friday the 18th November.

abstract deadline now extended to Friday the 18th November

 

You are outside, lost somewhere

This Thursday I will be talking at the Intercapillary Places event You are outside, lost somewhere: Cutler & Fox on the 15th of September. I will be discussing British poetry and coastal politics, Dominic Fox will be launching and reading from his Half Cocks, and everyone will get free drinks and copies of the new Interior Ears. This event is run by Edmund Hardy and Felicity Roberts at the Parasol Unit, 14 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RW, and will begin at 6.30 for 7pm. £5/ £3 conc.

Wandering grasses

After hearing John Brannigan’s paper on 1930s cultural associations of islands and ‘Islomania’ in poetry a few days ago at the Regional Literary Cultures Conference in Nottingham, I’ve gone back to my work on peninsulas recharged.

As a remote outlying region, and an area of land which may even have its own private ecology (as Llyn does, the area I’m studying), are islands and peninsulas seen as ‘outposts on the borderlands of the real’, as Elizabeth Bletsoe puts it in her poetry volume Landscape from a Dream (2008)? Or can they be portrayed, too, as the most globally connected of places, given that the sea is understood by the modern, in Brannigan’s terms, as ‘a means of passage, communication and connection’? This is one of the questions lying behind Peter Riley’s texts about the capitalist grid in Wales leading to the austere coastline of Llyn, where it faces the ‘connecting and severing sea’. (Connecting and severing!)

For the time being, reading proper science books about fish, tides, ‘wandering grasses’ (patches of wandering vegetation), and the mobile quality of place at sea. This will possibly lead me to a pun about migrating plaice. See below.

Distemper Strikes

The rewriting/ re-inscribing of city space was the topic of my last talk (Friday 8th April), which compared the geographical and political structures of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year to those of the contemporary zombie narratives. We pasted ‘God Help Us’ signs and red crosses all over the Centre for Creative Collaboration and then analysed images such as these:

Well done to Peter Jones for also coming in costume to talk about Manzoni’s The Betrothed, and to Jennifer Cooke for (sort of) coming in costume for her part at the end – see her book Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film. Perhaps there should be more exhibitionistic academic events in costume… we even had a terrifying performance of the contemporary sermon by Thomas Vincent, ‘God’s Terrible Voice in the City’. Turns out the event was attended by a couple of other bloggers too: see Chris’s post and Frank’s post.

By the way, anyone similarly interested in geographical readings of contemporary films should follow up my new project, PASSENGERFILMS – ‘the carcrash of geography and cinema’. I’ve got 1k funding from my department to get cultural geographers and film goers to socialise (the former are very invested in teaching & exploring film, but they never seem to really interact with community projects in the filmgoing communities in London at the moment, some of which are pretty exciting, such as Hackney’s up and coming floating cinema from Studio Pavilion). For info on the monthly screenings and topics see the blog, Twitter (@passengerfilms) or find us on Facebook.

Also, shout out to the Contemporary Centre for Creative Collaboration for being such a confusingly multi-disciplinary venue! On my first visit I stumbled into a woman designing glow in the dark skirts, and also promised someone else to come back to the darkroom to try out my handmade pinhole camera. (Only hope the PhD doesn’t suffer.)

Geography and 20th C. British Poetry, Roundtable

Geography and Twentieth Century British Poetry

Round Table, 30^th November 2010, 2pm – 4pm

11 Bedford Square, London WC 1

 

 

On the 30^th November the Landscape Surgery group at Royal Holloway will be hosting a round table from 2 – 4pm in Bedford Square, with the support of the Social and Cultural Geography research group. This will be a forum to follow up the questions coming out of the RGS-IBG conference panel sessions and evening poetry reading which took place on the 2^nd September, under the title ‘Geography and Twentieth Century British Poetry’. Contributing speakers and poets from the conference will be invited to take part in this second conversation, which aims to discuss more explicitly the differences and blind spots between the two disciplines.

 

This aims to develop at a pre-publication stage the conversations which took place at the RGS, and to build on the individual presentations. The format will involve a discussion of a short preliminary reading, which will be sent around beforehand, followed by a chaired panel discussion and Q&A, with spokespeople from literature, geography, and from several interdisciplinary projects in progress. The focus of panel discussants may be theoretical or textual, but the aim of the session is to demonstrate the tools that allow poetry and geography to meet, to suggest the motives behind this, and to expose the areas in which there are still difficulties in communication.

 

Hayden Lorimer (2008) has written of the growing attraction between geographers and the discipline of poetry. This event aims to evaluate this ‘interdisciplinary attraction’ in terms of the usefulness of each discipline to the other, and also the fall out when combining two different sets of methodologies and principles.

 

If you would like to take part in the session, please email amycutler1985@gmail.com