I’ve recorded a brief reading for the ‘International Poetry Circle’ hashtag over on Twitter (on the Pragma account, as I don’t do social media personally). You can find it here.
Text for the first poem: ‘II’ from Ars Felixium (the second appeared here on Sunday, as part of my daily posting of poems from N in Scrabble).
I unexpectedly performed read these two at Volta (The Birdcage, Norwich) the other week.
Good enough for Zukofsky, etc.
Anyway, hello. I hope you are well / productive / productive in making yourself well, in the face of COVID-19 and otherwise. This should be a reasonably concise bulletin.
Pragma:
The print journal of “poetry, prose, and praxis” I am helping to organise responsible for was due to produce its debut edition in the first half of this year. This is now no longer a possibility, and even in the most fortuitous circumstances my prediction sets a likely date for its arrival towards the very end of 2020. Please see https://mobile.twitter.com/PragmaJournal for more information.
Poetry:
My next pamphlet, N in Scrabble, is nearly ready for publication. Given the current situation, however, it will not be appearing in print for some time. I will be posting regular batches of poems in this blog over the coming weeks, in lieu of mustering anything material, and some of these will be selected from that manuscript. The long(ish) ‘prosimetrum’ Hetrombiopen will arrive here also when it is complete, as will two other longer works.
Music:
As always, head to https://sovietdistrict.bandcamp.com/ for that sort of thing. I am slowly releasing a series of solo double bass free improvisation sessions, recorded at various points over the last couple of years, and will inevitably be adding to these with new work over the coming weeks. The same goes for guitar. The Reif album ‘The Imagined Band’ is nearly ready, but before unleashing that I would like to finish recording my solo record of Actual Songs, ‘Templates/Demonstrations’. I may even remember to post details here of forthcoming live appearances!!
There’s more but I’m quite drunk so that’ll do for now. Cheers, and please stay inside.
Matt
I’ve started a small poetry press. Or rather, I’ve produced a short collection of old poems I couldn’t really find homes for elsewhere and, more importantly, printed a sequence of fifteen poems titled Ars Felixium I got tired of shopping around to publishers hence put out myself to ‘get it out of the way’ in order to concentrate on new work. They’re cheap and links to purchase them are below (please and thank you) though you can of course read them digitally in their entirety by pressing the ‘Preview’ button on the storefront.
Ars Felixium (£4.00, 46 pages) https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/9590682-ars-felixium
One Age Work-House (£2.99, 24 pages) https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/9591018-one-age-work-house
soviet district 