[Cross-posted, more or less, sorry]
Allen Fisher is now Professor of Poetry and Art at Roehampton Institute,
University of Surrey, where he is head of department in the school of
arts. He gave his inaugural lecture this evening. Entitled 'Traps, or
Tools and Damage' it was really splendid, combining a careful and rather
lucid account of his ideas and the development of his own work, which
are deeply and widely concerned with scientific theories and
representations, including the central concepts of 'momenergy', the
space-time continuum and catastrophe theory; further illustrated with
discussions (& slides) of work by Kitaj and Beuys, readings of poems
from AF's books Brixton Fractals and Gravity as a Consequence of Shape,
and a short video of AF in the process of making, and damaging, a
painting. Obviously this is a very reductive summary of a lecture that
lasted an hour. There was a formal response from Isobel Armstrong,
Emeritus Prof. from Birkbeck, U. of London, who reformatted some of what
Allen had said, and compared him (in an OK way, I thought) to Blake. It
was a heartening event.
Later That Same Night: Alan Halsey & Geraldine Monk reading at Camden
People's Theatre. The audience was tiny, which was rather great for
those present -- tiptoeing in terribly late after travelling back from
Barnes it felt like some almost illegal underground gathering,
especially as the poets were energetically trangressing the no-smoking
rule. In this situation presentation flowed back and forth into
conversation, but nothing casual about either poet's reading
performance. More objectively, it was a pity that not more made it. They
are both terrific readers, and great work. Inter alia, Alan read from
Kelvin Corcoran's poems in response to AH visuals in 'Your Thinking
Tracts of Nations', and from his own sequence of brief 'Lives of the
Poets', which do not 'sum up' the individuals concerned but rather boil
down their biographical data to distil a different subtle flavour of
each. Geraldine's new poems, around Mary, Queen of Scots during her
imprisonment in Sheffield, are really beautiful.
And then to curry ...
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