The Liverpool Camarade at Open Eye Gallery : May 2023: the videos of my collaboration with Sarah-Clare Conlon

The Liverpool Camarade at Open Eye Gallery : May Thursday 11th 2023

Here's the traditional readers' photo-shoot. I decided to grin stupidly (for once). It hurt. 

As ever, all the vidoes of the event are online, accessible in two places: 

All the performances are online here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/liverpool

And can be found directly here too https://www.youtube.com/fowlerpoetry/videos

 See more here:

https://europeanpoetryfestival.com/liverpool 

Venue and hosts: openeye.org.uk 19 Mann Island, Liverpool Waterfront. L3 1BP. This is part of EUROFESTIVAL: exhibitions and events at the Open Eye Gallery.

Organised by SJ Fowler (see below for links to my accounts of his collaborative practice and theories of collaboration), who has been organising collaborative events, and 'European' ones, long before Eurovision blew in from Ukraine (and long before Brexit). The readers were 

• Kārlis Vērdiņš and James Byrne
• Hanna Komar and Michael Sutton
• Katerina Koulouri and Patricia Farrell
• Yasmin Hafedh and Sarah Dawson
• Ailsa Holland and Stephen Sunderland
• Robert Sheppard and Sarah-Clare Conlon
• Tom Jenks and SJ Fowler
• Stanimir Dimitrov and Michael Egan
• 
  

My collaborator wrote about the upcoming event AND its participants in quite some detail, here: European Poetry Festival European Camarade at Open Eye Gallery Liverpool | Literature | Creative Tourist

Thanks Steve

 

This remarkable Camarade took place in one of Liverpool’s most brilliant galleries celebrating European poetry in collaboration with local writers (more or less).

This is the first Liverpool Camarade since 2015, about which I wrote here: Pages: Liverpool Camarade 2015: general introduction (set list) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) with videos, of course. I was deep in the writing of what became the collaborative anthology Twitters for a Lark at that time. But now we have real  European writers.

This event is part of Open Eye Gallery’s programme as a commissioned organisation for EuroFestival, which will take over Liverpool in the lead up to The Eurovision Song Contest. Sarah-Clare and I were vaguely working on the non-theme of rivers, as you can discern from our non-introduction! 

Here's a video of us. We were on first. Robert Sheppard and Sarah-Claire Conlon : EPF 2023 - Liverpool Camarade at Open Eye - YouTube

The text has now, January 2024, been published in Blackbox Manifold 31: see here: Pages: UNTITLED by Sarah-Clare Conlon and Robert Sheppard is published in Blackbox Manifold 31

A quiet day, [my diary tells me], with writing tasks and reading Baraka (Blues People) then - just as the heavens opened, out to the Open Eye, through the drenched but happy crowds at the Eurovision, for the L'pool Camarade. Len, David, and Alyssa were new crowds, but good to see and talk to Clare and David, albiet brtiefly. Pete Clarke there too. [Ailsa, Stephen (lives locally), Michael Sutton, Sarah Dawson: all folk I'd not met before.] The reading was pretty good, ... Clare and I did our stuff, first on (!) , and then P(atricia) and Katarina were good. The best was Michael Sutton (from Edge Hill) and Hanna Komar (a Bellarussian poet). James political, poets at the Palace spleen. To the Lion to talk to Michael Egan, Paul, Chris, and others... A good vibe!'

It's all there online for you.

Here's my accounts of earlier collaborations in these series: 

Pages: Twitters for a Launch part of the European Poetry Festival Manchester April 13th (set list) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) (This features my European Union of Imaginary Authors project: if you've not heard of that yet, try this for size: European Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) - Home (weebly.com). All Euro poets will be REAL for May's event!

Pages: Untitled by Joanne Ashcroft and Robert Sheppard performed at the European Camarade 2021(video and links) (This was a one-off with Joanne, with our text (and video) here.)

Some of my previous collaborative readings (in Manchester) are featured here:

Pages: Rimas Uzgiris and Robert Sheppard: collaborative poem 'Unreadable Expressions': text and video and notes

Patricia and I have collaborated and these two posts are about that (with video)

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/03/robert-sheppard-and-patricia-farrell_25.html

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/04/robert-sheppard-and-patricia-passionate.html

I write about the Camarade/European Poetry Festivals in some of my ‘Collaborations’ posts, beginning here, and review SJ Fowler’s book of selected collaborations. The introductory part one, flags up the themes and surveys the territory, here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html

Part 10 is an account of Fowler’s poetics of collaboration. It is important for tracing the impetus behind the hospitality that directs these events. Here:
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/04/robert-sheppard-thoughts-on_3.html

It was good to finally read at the Open Eye Gallery, third time lucky: the first talk on poetry and photography was called off, illness, though my text is on this blog here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Talk for the Open Eye Gallery on Poetry and Photography December 2016. The second time was a launch for Charms and Glitter, killed by Covid and copyright. The sad story is told here: Pages: Whatever happened to the book Charms and Glitter? (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). So, third time lucky, but I hope not the last...

*

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

Liverpool Camarade 2015: Tom Jenks and Steven Fowler

 

Steven Fowler (see here) and Tom Jenks (see here) read from their new Knives Forks and Spoons book 1000 Proverbs. You could live your live according to these mots. (Don't.)



Liverpool Camarade 2015: Joanne Ashcroft and Patricia Farrell

Joanne Ashcroft (see here) and Patricia Farrell (dressed for the part, I think; see here), perform Conversational Nuisance, to be published as a poster by Zimzalla.

Video of Joanne at The Other Room here. Patricia at The Other Room here.

Joanne reflects on the nature of this collaboration here.

Liverpool Camarade 2015: James Byrne and Sandeep Parmar

James Byrne and Sandeep Parmar read from their Oystercatcher collaboration, Myth of the Savage Tribes, Myth of Civilised Nations. See here.

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.

25 Edge Hill Poets/Liverpool Camarade: Elio Lomas and Luke Thurogood

Luke Thurogood 

Poetry Magazine: http://threeandahalfpoint9.weebly.com/  

Poetry blog: https://lukekarlthurogood.wordpress.com/  

My Poetics: Poetry is everywhere, it just needs editing. And Dracula’s Oracular Vernacular Spectacular. I find a Burnt Tongue is always helpful, taking the normal and twisting it or bringing the unusual up.  

 My Time at Edge Hill: Ainsley Harriott, Pasta, Clomping, late nights at the LINC, Poetry. As Hicks said – “It’s just a ride.” Always for Roberto Bolaño. 

Elio Lomas 

Poetry Magazine: http://ikleftiko.weebly.com/  

Poetics: Ever chancing and changing. Poetics the membrane, membranial, membranic , membraniac, membraneal, membranicial, membrantic, membranistic, the insipid cousin who I do not see very often but whom I speak with on most days unknowingly. Passing through poetics like oxygen through alveoli.‘The only constant I am sure of is this accelerating rate of change’—  Peter Gabriel. 

My time at Edge Hill: 76 million 844 thousand one hundred and thirty-seven seconds (not that I’m counting). Also Clomping and Ainsley Harriott. Edge Hill has certainly provided an environment.  

When collaborating we operate under the name ‘Embryo and Dilettante’ 

We wrote the following poem together:  

Bon

 

Man has knob

knob goes in keyhole

man uses centrifugal force to break the lock

Fort Knox

crack rocks #GymSocks

woman has fanny. Bullion goes in fanny.

Another successful heist for

Fanny and (Long John) Clyde.

 

Long john hides an ice-pick in his urethra carefully avoid catastrophic trauma to the soft tissue that Klyle loves- quick, fetch the prostate gloves. The gooch is tender.

 

Raw-

mother goose her ducklings lay dead on the road from the night before

on Renal Failure avenue. One curry, two curry, our produce we take care in finding, three curry four- use these ducklings from the night before

 

Fanny has had an extra large space created in the artificial va-gin to store AK-47s and as previously stated vast quantities of loot.

 

Attach that labyrinth of incomprehensible tales spoken may as well by quails. Quail pasta is a delicacy on Mars because there are no quails there.

Black lights put black on black nights black tar in lungs black with smoke/stop/getting/cancer/daddy.

 

Liverpool Camarade 2015: Andrew Oldham and Lindsey Holland

They discovered they were distantly related before they wrote this together. Andrew Oldham: see here. And here for his own fulsome site. Lindsey Holland here and here.

Liverpool Camarade 2015: Michael Egan and Steve Van-Hagen

Michael Egan (see here) and Steve Van-Hagen (see here) collaborated on the idea of abandoned buildings.

Liverpool Camarade 2015: general introduction (set list)

The LIVERPOOL CAMARADE took place on Wednesday 18^th February 2015, at the Fly in the Loaf, Liverpool.

An evening of collaborative pairings and the launch of 1000 Proverbs by Steven Fowler and Tom Jenks.

Here's the running order and the order of Steven Fowler's videos that I have embedded for daily release as the next few posts on Pages (they will bisect with my 25 Edge Hill Poets and my serial posts about the EUOIA).

Part One

Michael Egan and Steve Van-Hagen here

Lindsey Holland and Andrew Oldham here

Scott Thurston and Steve Boyland here

Elio Lomas and Luke Thurogood here

Robert Sheppard and The European Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) (with James Byrne, Patricia Farrell, Steven Fowler, Scott Thurston and Tom Jenks). See below. And here.

Part Two

James Byrne and Sandeep Parmar here

Patricia Farrell and Joanne Ashcroft here
 

Tom Jenks and SJ Fowler (launching their KFS Proverbs) here

Hosts: SJ Fowler and James Byrne

Liverpool Camaraders: (front row: Lindsey Holland, Elio Lomas, Joanne Ashcroft, Steven Fowler (tongue out), Patricia Farrell (in buuny-ears and corset), Scott Thurston; back row: James Byrne, Andrew Oldham, Luke Thurogood, Tom Jenks, Michael Egan (behind Steven Fowler), Steve Van-Hagen (behind Patricia Farrell's bunny-ears), me, Steve 'Blazes' Boyland. 

The Running Order for the EUOIA

Very Short Introduction (Robert Sheppard)

Robert Sheppard introduces

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

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

3. Sweden Kajsa Bergström (1956-) with Steven Fowler
4. Malta Hubert Zuba (1964-18/2/2015) with Scott Thurston
5. Luxembourg Georg Bleinstein (1965-2046) with Tom Jenks