Giant Rat of Sumatra

Another year of Interrobang, the music, literary and independent publishing festival based in London. I was working as MC for The Clove Hitch’s prose-poets, featuring Nisha Ramayya, Holly Corfield Carr, Kate Potts, Preti Taneja and Anna Kirk, and later reading with Annexe Introduces‘ authors Gary Budden, Gabriel Moreno and Charlotte Newman, and then again as part of S J Fowler‘s Camarade lineup.

Thanks to Nick Murray for organising the day, to The Clove Hitch’s writers for their great work and to Prue Chamberlain: you can see footage of our ongoing collaborative work below, with performances from the other Camaradauts available on the We Are Enemies video series.

Many thanks to the final year undergraduates at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama  for their time and attention this week, with Prue Chamberlain, Nisha Ramayya, Kate Potts and I leading a day of exercises and workshops as part of the Generative Constraints collective. Hosted by Diana Damian Martin, the day concentrated upon the joists and grist shared between poetics and performance: featuring curated and created cut-ups, improvised dictionaries, écriture féminine, measured breathing and freshly Labradorean work, it was a privilege to work with the year group and be part of their term’s activities.

I’ll be reading with other poets, writers and practitioners as part of this year’s Small Publishers Fair, based at the Conway Hall in Bloomsbury on Friday and Saturday 14th-15th November. This annual event gives space to an international selection of over 60 creators and publishers to showcase their wares and launch new work – as well as names such as X Marks the Bökship, Veer,  Shearsman and The Saison Poetry Library, these range from Akerman Daly and Alex Czinczel (The Chinchilla) in London, the Netherlands’ Knust, MIEL  from Belgium, Canada’s Perro Verlag to Yasushi Cho / Laughter from Tokyo.

As well as stalls and exhibitions, there are a number of talks and readings on the Saturday in the main hall and the Brockway Room. I will be reading with the Royal Holloway cohort including Bob T. Bright, Carrie Foulkes, Robert Hampson and Prue Chamberlain at 4pm. Free!

I’ll be reading with Prue Chamberlain this evening as support act for Tom O. C. Wilson’s Freeze Puppy and the launch of his new album The Night Attendant.

Tom – a fantastic composer in his own right, with his site here – will be performing with his band consisting of James Ashdown (drums), Steve Haynes (bass) and Steve Troughton (keyboard). Their debut gig saw them supporting Micachu and the Shapes in 2012.

“The Night Attendant: tuneful and unpredictable in equal measure, drawing upon the classic pop songwriting tradition (Lennon and McCartney, Brian Wilson / Van Dyke Parks), the exuberance of contemporary jazz (Denys Baptiste, John Hollenbeck) and the radical experimentalism of modern classical composition (Harry Partch, Gyorgy Ligeti)”

All taking place downstairs at the Betsey Trotwood in Farringdon: doors at 8.30pm, £5