The Hi Zero Reading series in Brighton was, judging from my one trip there, a very successful sequence of events. It was a monthly evening of poetry readings that took place at the Hope and Ruin, 2011–2020. Organised by Joe Luna, the one I attended was a rambunctious affair, with an audience that responded in a fashion more akin to stand up or open mic. Quite different, in fact, from SubVoicive in London in the 1980s, or Storm and Golden Sky inLiverpool, co-organised by me, until 2017. The work presented, though, was (to use the shorthand) linguistically innovative, and also an offshoot of Sussex University. (The name of the series, of course, alludes to Cambridge poetry.) The whole is now archived
HERE: you can find the poster for each event, plus recordings of many of them: Hi Zero | Index.
As you can see, I read there in 2015, with two others, and I wrote a long account of the reading on this
blog, here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2015/05/robert-sheppard-hi-zero-reading.html
My reading was recorded and it may be accessed here: https://www.hizero.org/readings/33
As I say in that longer post, I read the following set:
The ‘Berlin Bursts’ sequence from Berlin Bursts and History or Sleep.
A selection of texts from Words Out of Time, from The Given part 1 (The ‘I Don’t Remember’ passages. Read my piece on The Given here ).
And from Arrival, part two of Words Out of Time. One poem I read may be found at the end of this excerpt from Arrival here.) . More here.
I read some of the prose too, from this, my ‘autrebiography’. (It featured snippets of growing up near Brighton.)
I finished with two versions from Ovid’s Tristia that Rene Van Valckenborch supposedly translated, from A Translated Man ( Pages: Meet the final and most important EUOIA collaborator: Rene Van Valckenborch (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
All of
these texts are now published and I write about them elsewhere on this blog.
Late thanks to Joe Luna for presenting the series and present thanks for archiving it so accessibly.
