as part of Writing from Radius
Group Publication – RADII book launch 26.10.24 at Small Publishers Fair 2 pm – edited by Briony Hughes in collaboration with Osmosis Press and RHUL Poetics Research centre.
Bookwork and Performance by Redell Olsen
Photograph by Sam Jones
Out of Practice Seminar (Oops)
This talk considers the contexts and motivations of two recent works: a poem and performance. Each explores relationships to music, visual art and the noise of cultural and critical dissent. E.P. Thompson’s survey of the long standing European traditions of ‘Rough Music’ reveals the uncomfortable tensions between community-based rituals and the local enforcement of law. This talk will demonstrate how Thompson’s archival survey of folk traditions is highly generative for the formation of a contemporary poetics alive to its own fragility, even complicity with its apparent objects of subversion. Olsen’s recent performance, Frownlands, 1969 both celebrates and resists aspects of the commonality and energy of 60’s counterculture. At Bury Art Gallery she presented a feminist inflected performance-text, a nominy delivered karaoke style in a non-site plywood replica of the original scene of production: the Californian Woodland Hills house where the infamous album, Trout Mask Replica was recorded. The talk will explore the overlaps and gaps between imagined and empirical audiences. What happens when the reality of performance and poetic language come up against wider conflicts of interest and power relations at large in the speculative imaginaries and curatorial fantasies of public engagement and participation?
Bedford Room, G37, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Speakers Redell Olsen (Royal Holloway, University of London), Christopher Ohge (Institute of English Studies, SAS) 19 March 2024, 5:00PM – 7:00PM
Contact IESEvents@sas.ac.uk
https://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/shifting-audiences-reconfiguring-pasts
A question of measurement arises both in relation to weather and noise. How to take a ruler to the weather or a gauge to more than rain: the flicker of wings in swarm, a memory of crushed insects on a car windscreen.
The naming of clouds proves a starting point. In possibility we name the shapes as if to produce an inventory of natural phenomenon of the unnoticed or forgotten. A change in climate affects the dew point. An increase in humidity magnifying the effects of heat waves. A body unable to cool.
Noise of silence as music is not a new approach. Thunder sheet. A roar on the other of silence. Go back into the things dismissed as noise with new parameters of attention, make new sense of the data. Parameters set while agreeing that it cannot know how to in advance of itself. A process of unfolding.
Distinctions between central and peripheral tone are eroded or bagged out into new stories. This is not about the expansion of everyday sounds into music but concerns the attention and tuning of location to the everyday.
Once the containers and containment of measurement are exhumed we find ourselves in the frame as prime enemies of climate justice and more. Facts picked up in the data with the question of what is noticed, how and for what purpose?
How to find ways to monitor wildlife in our skies through the repurposing of older technologies once developed for war. Radio Research. Research Radio. The colocation of the question.
What was later a possibility for the detection of insects began with the identification of destroyers.
Friday 3 November 2017, 7pm-9pm
The Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, 14 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RW
Redell Olsen in conversation with Carolyn Pedwell
S A L O N – LONDON, a site for reading and responding to the present through women’s experimental writing, is pleased to announce its launch event, featuring Redell Olsen, who will be reading from two recent works, ‘Woolf / Apelles’ and ‘Atomic Guildswomen’, followed by conversation with Carolyn Pedwell.
Redell Olsen’s poetic practice comprises poetry as well as texts for performance, film and installation. Her publications include Film Poems (Les Figues, 2014), ‘Punk Faun: a bar rock pastel’ (Subpress, 2012), ‘Secure Portable Space’ (Reality Street, 2004), ‘Book of the Fur’ (rem press 2000), and, in collaboration with the bookartist Susan Johanknecht, ‘Here Are My Instructions’ (Gefn, 2004). Her work is included in Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010), I’ll Drown My Book: ‘Conceptual Writing
by Women’ (Les Figues Press, 2011) and Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK (Reality Street Press, 2016). In 2017 she published two bookworks Smock and Mox Nox. She has also published a number of critical articles on contemporary poetry and the relationship between contemporary poetics and the visual arts. In 2002 she set up the influential MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway which she still runs as part of the MA in Creative Writing. From 2006 – 2010 she was the editor of How2, the international online journal for Modernist and contemporary writing by women. In 2013-14 she was the visiting Judith E. Wilson fellow at the University of Cambridge. In 2016-17, in association with other members of staff from English and Modern Languages at Royal Holloway, she led the HARC funded project ‘Nature and Other Forms of That Matter’. She is Director of the Poetics Research Centre at Royal Holloway. redellolsen.co.uk
Carolyn Pedwell is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent, where she is Head of Cultural Studies and Media. Carolyn has been Visiting Fellow at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney; the Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary University of London; and the Gender Institute, London School of Economics. She is the author of Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014) and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice (Routledge, 2010). Her new book, Transforming Habit: Revolution, Routine and Social Change, is under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press. Carolyn is also an Editor of Feminist Theory journal.
S A L O N – LONDON is organized by Georgina Colby and Susan Rudy. The launch of S A L O N – LONDON has been funded by the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, the Centre for Poetry, Queen Mary University of London, and the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London.
Please register here: Eventbrite
Reading at ENTROPICS / Southampton
MAY 3RD 7 pm
Further details here
ANATHEMA is a new reading series for experimental poetry and writing in Bristol, curated by Moot Press + Hesterglock Press + Sad Press
The Light Room
Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol
BS1 4QA
Friday 31st March
6.30pm
Free (donation)
Poetry Reading in Bristol at the Arnolfini – More details here.
FRIDAY, 10 March
Poetry Reading
Drew Milne, Jeff Hilson, Redell Olsen
Drew Milne was educated in Edinburgh and Cambridge. He has previously taught at the universities of Edinburgh and Sussex and since 1997 he has been the Judith E Wilson Lecture in Drama and Poetry, Faculty of English, University of Cambrige. In 1995 he was poet in residence at the Tate Gallery, London. His books of poems include: Sheet Mettle (London: Alfred David Editions, 1994), Bench Marks (London: Alfred David Editions, 1998), The Damage: new and selected poems (Cambridge: Salt, 2001), Mars Disarmed (Barrington, M.A.: The Figures, 2002), Go Figure (Cambridge: Salt, 2003).
Jeff Hilson has been a prominent figure in London poetry since the 1980s. His publications includestretchers (Reality Street, 2006), Bird Bird (Landfill, 2009) and In the Assarts (Veer, 2010). He editedThe Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008) and runs the reading series Xing the Line. He teaches at the University of Roehampton.
Redell Olsen is a poet and visual artist whose work includes performance, writing and installed texts. Her recent publications include Secure Portable Space (Reality Street, 2004), Punk Faun (Subpress Books, 2012) and Film Poems (Les Figues, 2014). She was, for many years, the editor of the influential online journal HOW2 (How2journal.com), which promotes modernist and contemporary innovative poetry by women. She was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge for 2013-14, and she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Royal Holloway.
7.00-8.45 11 Bedford Square, London WC1
Runnymede Festival
curated by Robert Hampson
All Welcome
Abstract Keynote: Redell Olsen
‘Proposals For Landscapes: and other mutual antipathies’
This talk will offer a series of proposals For landscapes, a recalibration of the optics for a poetics of the conceptual. This reading will explore these possibilities across multiple registers of the material and linguistic possibilities of felt-thought. It will assert a space for itself between the symptomatic dismissal by the visual arts of poetry as ‘literary costume’ and the more recent neglectful mis-readings of conceptual art by writing at the expense of the conceptual histories of the lyric genre.
