In addition to the European Camarade there were readings from European Union of Imaginary Author poets with me, but mainly featuring my collaborators
Patricia Farrell
SJ Fowler
Tom Jenks
Joanne Ashcroft
Scott Thurston
James Byrne
Sandeep Parmar
and our creations:
Ivalyo Dimitrov (Bulgaria)
Kasja Bergstrom (Sweden)
Georg Bleinstein (Luxembourg)
Matus Dobres (Slovakia)
Hubert Zuba (Malta)
Martina Markovic (Croatia)
Carte-Vitale (French resident)
I introduced the event, using this 'script':
I decided to write the poems of the European Union of
Imaginary Authors (the EUOIA) long before I thought it would feature as part of
a European Union of REAL Authors festival, for which, many thanks to Steven
Fowler, MC extraordinaire of the Camarades. I decided to write them long before
the ugly neologism (now not so neo) BREXIT arrived to complicate the project –
and give to it a fresh political edge. If
the right poets for the times don’t exist, it seems, then they have to be
invented.
I decided to write these poems – working through a list of 28
imaginary poets drawn up for another project – collaboratively, to ensure the variety that such a project
deserves. I took my lead from the collaborators: they chose the country and
poet and often wrote the biographies that are sprinkled among the biographies
of the real poets in this newly published volume Twitters for a Lark which we are launching tonight – and which I am
hoping you will want to buy. Some of the poems were first devised for Camarades
of various kinds, so that again makes tonight pertinent.
I decided in performance that, apart from a number of
two-voiced pieces, the results of the processes of collaboration – the
production of a third voice, as collaboration theory suggests, and in our case,
the production of persons and personas and pessaos
to inhabit that voice – demanded that a single voice should render the
single and singular poems, which is not the characteristic practice of collaborative
performance. So remember that everything you hear was produced collaboratively
between my seven guests and myself, although you may hear only one voice, and
not a lot of me. That means tonight, in this section, there are 15 poets
reading, not all of them real.
Then Patricia Farrell and I performed a simultaneous two
voiced piece by Ivalyo Dimitrov (Bulgaria). Then SJ Fowler and I
read ‘Flak’ by Kasja Bergstrom (Sweden), Steven first poem, me the second. Tom Jenks and I performed
a simultaneous 2 voiced verision of the single enigmatic poem by Georg
Bleinstein (Luxembourg). Matus Dobres (Slovakia) was next up, with Joanne
Ashcroft reading the single poem.
Scott Thurston read the single poem of Hubert Zuba (Malta). (Scott
was carrying evidence of Zuba’s demise, but this was not revealed to the
public, a bit like the evidence surrounding Scripal’s poisoning.) James Byrne and I read ‘Memorials’
by Martina Markovic (Croatia), James
number 7; me 26. Sandeep Parmar read the single long poem by Carte-Vitale
(French resident).
Read more about the European Poetry Festival here:
All the videos are to be found here:
and embedded on the website with some pictures too
 |
| Most of the evening's performers |
At the Manchester
gig I was also collaborating with a real Lithuanian poet Rimas Uzgiris, https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/rimas-uzgiris
which I thought went well.You may see that here.
Read
more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here
and here. All the collaborators are
accessible via links here.
This will probably be the last Twitters for a Lark launch reading.
Read about the August 2017 Other Room Manchester reading of the EUOIA poets (pre-launch of Twitters) here.
Read about the August 2017 Other Room Manchester reading of the EUOIA poets (pre-launch of Twitters) here.
Read about the November 2017
mini-launch in Luton here.
And the Leicester (States of Independence) launch:
Read about the Bangor launch here.
