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Showing posts from March, 2005

Arts Fairs International

http://www.artfairsinternational.com/articles/textfest_article.html

The Tragedy of

In the suite of Text Festival images available to the media, the one by me most often picked up is the tragedy of althusserianism (here’s a good place to look at it http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2005/03/text-festival-begins-in-ten-days.html ). The key moment in this visual poem is the following line, he is . One of the things the poem seeks to do is replicate the experience of mystery – the majority of readers (even if they have heard of Althusser) will not know what althusserianism is, or what the tragedy of it is. If that mystery is lived with, the question next is: is ‘he’ Althusser? Or is ‘he’ someone else? This set of questions is actually what the poem is about. You can stop there, you don’t know, that is the tragedy. Louis Althusser was a fascinating figure and he and his wife Helene are frequent references in my work. In the 60’s he was a major figure in French Marxism. Ten years his senior, Helene had been a communist fighter against the Nazis. Reading his autobiography The Futur

Poetry is being ruined by establishment - festival chief

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1441209,00.html

Text Day!

Today the Text Festival opens. The staff have done a remarkable thing to get it ready in time - special mention must be given to Laura Minta. The run up to opening has been characterised for me by end-to-end press and media work - Amusingly the Guardian story today simplifies the complex issues of text to poetry by personifying it into an argument between me and Andrew Motion (someone who I have never met and I expect has never heard of me), and an unfortunate seeming direct attack on Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy. Anyway, BBC Radio 4 have done a great piece on Friday's Front Row arts programme. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/frontrow/index.shtml

A Town That Shall Remain Nameless

A satellite of the City and a northern Metropolitan borough, the town has been a regeneration priority attracting government development funds for more than a decade. Early on when local government had little idea of how to regenerate the funds were spent on clearance and highway improvements; so the first phase was manifest with amble parking and empty plots. Later the landscape architects got their drawing boards on it so that new spaces were created with the human interest of walking through a diagram. I remember a great visiting sculptor commenting that the town landscape architect designed in two dimensions rather than three. As the years of urban banality carpeted the town, a separate thread was pursued through the arts; major and minor public art works were commissioned around the town. There came a point where the town was a neatly laid out as it was going to be and the real question of what the town was for as its manufacturing base declined became increasingly obvious. In the