Liverpool Camarade/ Robert Sheppard and James Byrne, Patricia Farrell, Steven Fowler, Tom Jenks, Scott Thurston : the European Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) (set list)

The Running Order of the EUOIA

Very Short Introduction (Robert)

I outlined the nature of the project (See the website here). I pointed out that all of the texts were joint compositions (despite who is reading them: we weren’t reading our own ‘bits’. Part of the artifice here is to hide the collaboration!). Then we read the collaborative fictional poets, in this order:

1. Croatia Martina Marković (1982-) with James Byrne

Memorials: James part 7; Robert part 26.

2. Bulgaria Ivaylo Dimitrov (1979-) with Patricia Farrell

Simultaneous two voice piece by the authors.

3. Sweden Kajsa Bergström (1956-) with Steven Fowler

poem 1: Steven

poem 2: Robert

4. Malta Hubert Zuba (1964-2015) with Scott Thurston

Scott read the single poem so far. I announced suddenly that Zuba had just died.

(The last time I read in the Fly in the Loaf (also with Scott), may be seen here.)

'Last but not least', I said, and I meant it:

5. Luxembourg Georg Bleinstein (1965-2046)  with Tom Jenks

poem: Tom and Robert read one word each. Very short…

Distribution of The Life and Death of Georg Bleinstein, by Tom Jenks and Robert Sheppard, a pamphlet put together for the occasion (complete with portrait of self-saucing sausage), which the audience was invited to take away absolutely free but at great cost to its sanity. Here's a taster:

Bleinstein changed tack with 13,333 Ways of Looking at a Sausage, a durational piece in which he wrote the same poem 13,333 times whilst looking at a sausage for 76 hours in an undisclosed location near Bochum. No footage exists and Bleinstein destroyed the poems at the end of the performance by plunging them into a deep fat fryer. The sausage itself is believed to have been purchased by Kenneth Goldsmith, who hailed 13,333 Ways of Looking at a Sausage as a proto-conceptual masterpiece. Expelled from the Euroulipo for ‘conceptualist meanderings’, Bleinstein fell into a deep depression and a cave while hiking in the Swabian Alps. He took up false flag pseudonyms to produce a multi-faceted poetic oeuvre. Even to this day it is not clear how many of the 1990s Submergist Poets were in fact Bleinstein in disguise, transgressing the Grand Duchy’s motto: ‘Mir wëlle bleiwe, war mir sin.’ (‘We want to remain what we are.’) He is estimated to have been responsible for as much as 33% of Luxembourgish poetry published since 1995: from the works of Erwin Wertheim, Vampire Poet and schitzel champion, to those of the minimalist enigma aurélian, author of the w*rst is yet to come!; from Jean Portante’s innovative investigations of loss of memory and identity in Le Travail du Poumon (The Work of the Lung), to Claudio Lombardeli’s nautical epic Lushaborg (the ancient Cornish name for Luxembourg), where the ‘old sausage trick’, as critic Titania Schenk put it, supposedly gave the game away. ‘Wherever there’s a sausage, present or absent, there shall ye find Bleinstein!’ she declared. Bleinstein famously misquoted his father, the famous TV psycho-guru, in his defence: ‘Sometimes a sausage is just a sausage!’...

.... there's plenty more where that came from!

Future posts on Pages will be exploring and tracking the development of this project and reporting on it, particularly the work of the fictional EUOIA poet Sophie Poppmeier, whose work I am writing on my own (though Jason Argleton is helping with this project too). See here for the general website.