Celebrate Poland’s Constitution Day with European Union of Imaginary Authors poet Jaroslav Biay

Celebrate Poland’s Constitution Day with European Union of Imaginary Authors poet Jaroslav Biay who was co-created by myself and Anamaria Crowe Seranno. A most extraordinary creature, I must say. And a most satisfying collaboration.

See here for more on Anamaria and here for more on Jaroslav.

As many of my regular readers know, I worked in collaboration, over a number of years, with a team of real writers, to create a lively and entertaining body of work of fictional European poets.

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. All the collaborators are accessible via links here.

Accompanied by biographical notes, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own; they are collected now in Twitters for a Lark, published by Shearsman.   

More on Twitters here and here. 

This collection marks a continuation of the work I ventriloquised through my solo creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here ).

I see these two books as the first two parts of a fictional poetry trilogy. So what will follow these? My ideas (as you'll see if you follow the other national holidays I've been trailing) waver between resurrecting Rene Van Valckenborch; trying to animate more work out of the 4 remaining poets I invented single-handed in A Translated Man who also feature in Twitters for a Lark (thus providing a LINK between the three parts); or (ignoring the link) diving into a completely different form of fictional poetry: the Manx modernists, the fictional 'Robert Sheppard', or (even) delving into time rather than space, and writing a historic fictional poetry. (I've no even fuzzy notion of how I would do this last one.) All options are capable of producing kitsch (though I've never been afraid of that) and need careful consideration. I will be posting more about future possibilities on Europe Day, next week.

Meet the EUOIA collaborators: Anamaría Crowe Serrano

Anamaría Crowe Serrano is an Irish poet and translator of Spanish and Italian to English. As well as having been anthologised and published widely in journals in Ireland and abroad, publications include KALEIDOgraph, written with Nina Karacosta (corrupt press, 2017), ^onwords and ^upwords (Shearsman, 2016), one columbus leap (corrupt press, 2011), Femispheres (Shearsman, 2008), and Paso Doble (Empirìa, 2006), written with Italian poet Annamaria Ferramosca.

She and Damir Sodan are now the only contributors to the project that I have not met, though I hope I shall one day. I asked her on board because she'd conducted an incisive interview with me about A Translated Man. For you see, Twitters marks a continuation of the work I ventriloquised through the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here ) More about her here!

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here.

More on Twitters for a Lark  here and here.

All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.

Poland’s Jaroslav Biały probably says Don't Leave the EUOIA

Poland’s Jaroslav Biały (1962-), co-created with Anamaria Crowe Serrano, probably says Don't Leave the EUOIA!

Jaroslav Biały, perhaps best known as an artist, archivist and maker of installations (in particular his ‘Museum’ series), has been, under the influence of his wife, Jadzia Biała, increasingly committing his ideas to paper (or screen), though he has yet to publish a dedicated full length volume of this work. He is known world-wide as the principal authority on Leon Chwistek, Zonism and the demise of post-Zonism. Chwistek’s influence on Biały can be seen in his early nonad compositions, which appeared as home-made pamphlets, where Biały challenges principles of formal logic, asserting the existence of nine levels of reality from which we interpret the world, including the abstract categories of invisireversibility and the incognifarious. Wisława Szymborska’s seminal essay, “The nomadic-nonadic of Jaroslav Biały” (Literatura na Świecie, nr 07-08, 1987, p. 416-421) was instrumental in bringing Biały’s poetry to the attention of the literary world. To this day, Biały leads a nomadic life. In an interview with Jocelyn Goos broadcast on Polskie Radio Program II (also known as Dwójka) on November 13^th 2003, he famously justified his lifestyle by saying, “Walls are unnecessary.”
 

Half of our collaboration and a nice note by Anamaria may be read on The Bogman’s Cannon: http://bogmanscannon.com/2015/05/06/poetic-fictions/, and more on her own work here.

Ken Edwards has more to say here: http://www.kenedwards.eu/2016/06/yourope-me-and-us.html

Robert Sheppard and Anamaria Crowe Serrano (Jaroslav Bialy and update on my EUOIA collaborative project) Tears in the Fence

Anamaría Crowe Serrano and I have been working on my EUOIA project and have created

Jaroslav Biały (1962-),  a Polish poet. He is

perhaps best known as an artist, archivist and maker of installations (in particular his ‘Museum’ series), has been, under the influence of his wife, Jadzia Biała, increasingly committing his ideas to paper (or screen), though he has yet to publish a dedicated full length volume of this work. He is known world-wide as the principal authority on Leon Chwistek, Zonism and the demise of post-Zonism. Chwistek’s influence on Biały can be seen in his early nonad compositions, which appeared as home-made pamphlets, where Biały challenges principles of formal logic, asserting the existence of nine levels of reality from which we interpret the world, including the abstract categories of invisireversibility and the incognifarious. Wisława Szymborska’s seminal essay, “The nomadic-nonadic of Jaroslav Biały” (Literatura na Świecie, nr 07-08, 1987, p. 416-421) was instrumental in bringing Biały’s poetry to the attention of the literary world. To this day, Biały leads a nomadic life. In an interview with Jocelyn Goos broadcast on Polskie Radio Program II (also known as Dwójka) on November 13^th 2003, he famously justified his lifestyle by saying, "Walls are unnecessary."

Some of his work may be seen here on

The Bogman’s Cannon: http://bogmanscannon.com/2015/05/06/poetic-fictions/, and more may be read in the latest edition of Tears in the Fence, 62!

The Tears in the Fence blog carries my recent update on the whole EUOIA project. Read it Here. It's the sort of post I would otherwise put on Pages.

Thanks Anamaria, thanks David Caddy of Tears and thanks to Jaroslav. 

The EUOIA website is still live at http://euoia.weebly.com.

News:

I am pleased to announce that Shearsman Books will be publishing the EUOIA anthology.  It will be called Twitters for a Lark and will appear in June or July 2017, in time for the EUOIA evening at The Other Room, Manchester.

EUOIA: Anamaria Crowe Serrano and Robert Sheppard's Jaroslav Biały now on The Bogman's Cannon

Poland’s Jaroslav Biały (1962-) 'Museum of Polish Military Defeat'
is at The Bogman’s Cannon, at http://bogmanscannon.com/2015/05/06/poetic-fictions

as created by Anamaría Crowe Serrano and Robert Sheppard

Read Anamaria’s introduction and some of the collaboration.

Thanks to her for the generosity of her gesture and the intensity of the collaboration. Read more about the EUOIA here. And here.

Jaroslav Biały, perhaps best known as an artist, archivist and maker of installations (in particular his ‘Museum’ series), has been, under the influence of his wife, Jadzia Biała, increasingly committing his ideas to paper (or screen), though he has yet to publish a dedicated full length volume of this work. He is known world-wide as the principal authority on Leon Chwistek, Zonism and the demise of post-Zonism. Chwistek’s influence on Biały can be seen in his early nonad compositions, which appeared as home-made pamphlets, where Biały challenges principles of formal logic, asserting the existence of nine levels of reality from which we interpret the world, including the abstract categories of invisireversibility and the incognifarious. Wisława Szymborska’s seminal essay, “The nomadic-nonadic of Jaroslav Biały” (Literatura na Świecie, nr 07-08, 1987, p. 416-421) was instrumental in bringing Biały’s poetry to the attention of the literary world. To this day, Biały leads a nomadic life. In an interview with Jocelyn Goos broadcast on Polskie Radio Program II (also known as Dwójka) on November 13^th 2003, he famously justified his lifestyle by saying, “Walls are unnecessary.”

More of his work is available in Tears in the Fence 63. See their blog here, with a post by mysrlf on the progress of the EUOIA project.

Robert Sheppard Interview on new online journal Colony

The new online journal from Dublin, COLONY, has just gone live.It is an exciting magazine, featuring poetry, fiction, non-fiction, music, spoken word (a good innovation there) and translation. Each has a separate section. In TRANSLATION there is an interview, conducted by Anamaria Serrano, with me about the Rene Van Valckenborch 'translations' published in A Translated Man. (There are lots of posts about that on Pages.) The issue is themed 'Counterfeits, Fakes & Hoaxes', and I feel a little of at least one of those since the 'translations' are fictional (and the others are real!). Read it either through the 'Translation' link above or here. It was conducted a few months ago, immediately preceding the interview with Chris Madden for The Wolf which you can still read here.

The interview has now moved to the archives of COLONY, and may be found here too: http://media.wix.com/ugd/7b1b68_f26473f8c1d9456abe9303b0aee7717e.pdf