SoundEye
Cork International Poetry Festival
•
language opening

 
As language strikes both ear and eye, the SoundEye Festival will bring
together poets, musicians, visual and video artists to note it and
respond. Practitioners, performers, theorists will gather to explore
language, to untie the familiar knots, unpack meaning, history, routine
and play, and reassemble them to offer a new field of possibilities.

Running from July 4-10 at the Christian Brothers School on O’Sullivan
Quay, the SoundEye Festival celebrates its ninth year in 2005, having
grown from a weekend of unconventional poetry into a week-long
exploration of the arts of the word.

The purpose in gathering almost fifty poets and performers to Cork for
this event is to celebrate the opening up of language to disciplines
and experiences beyond those familiar in Irish poetry, to enjoy the
achievement of those who have remade their medium here and elsewhere,
and, as always, to start over.

Participants in SoundEye 2005will include American poets such as
Charles Bernstein and Nathaniel Mackey who are noted not only for the
surprise and quality of their writing, but also for the power of their
performance. Susan Howe, with David Grubbs on computer and piano, will
perform a version of her poems Thorow and Melville's Marginalia in
which Irish and American history intermesh.

Fanny Howe, Mark Weiss, Catherine Wagner, Keith Tuma and Carlos
Blackburn complete the U.S. presence, along with Irish expatriates
David Lloyd and Mairéad Byrne.

 From further afield we have Yang Lian, in exile from China since 1989,
and Alison Croggon, poet, novelist, librettist from Australia. Amir Or,
Israeli coordinator of Poets for Peace, will be reading with English
poet and translator Fiona Sampson.

Participants coming from the U.K. will include Tom Leonard, Bill
Griffiths, John Wilkinson, Kelvin Corcoran, Lee Harwood and Peter
Riley, each with a record of over thirty years exploration and
achievement among the possibilities of language.

We will also have the world première of Wendy Mulford's The Unmaking,
specially commissioned for SoundEye, with music composed by Michael
Parsons and performed by Angharad Davies. This work is based on the
highland clearances on the Scottish island of Skye in the 1840s.

Maggie O'Sullivan, whose father was a sean-nós singer from Skibbereen
in west Cork, will work with traditional musicians from the Cork area
in her voicing of fragments from memory and lost traditions.

Among the Irish participants will be many who have worked over the
decades within the culture of small-press publication, where lack of
distribution and public profile is repaid by freedom to take risks,
fail better and more interestingly, and achieve new things.

Michael Smith, Geoffrey Squires, Augustus Youngand Trevor Joyce
represent the generation of New Writers' Press, to mark the 30th
anniversary of which SoundEye was founded in 1997. Maurice Scully,
Catherine Walsh, Randolph Healy and Billy Mills are voices from the 80s
and 90s in Ireland, still sounding, still strong. Hugh Maxton has been
another independent voice, throughout. SoundEye will pay also tribute
to the spirit of poets Brian Coffey and Robert Creeley in two
multi-reader sessions.

SoundEye 2005 occurs at the hinge moment between two other major events
in the programme for Cork as European Capital of Culture for 2005: the
Cork Caucus, and the Vinyl project.

We share a venue with Vinyl, and also a number of participants. From
the start of July until its own conclusion on August 13th, Vinyl will
provide a bookshop selling books by SoundEye poets, many unavailable
through normal channels.

We have in common with the Caucus a concern for where the arts, in our
case specifically the arts of language, stand in relation to society.
We will, therefore, 'exchange embassies' with the Caucus, with SoundEye
occupying a slot in their programme, and vice versa.

 
For more information on these events, please see www.cork2005.ie

All Sound Eye events except that at 6.30, Monday 4th, will be held in
the Christian Brother's School, Sullivan's Quay, Cork. (Entrance via
Cove Street)

Ticketing: Event €8/€5 Concession; Day €16/€10; Festival €90/€55
(Payable at venue)

For more information, please contact:

Trevor Joyce, +353 (0)21 4301223, email:
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www.soundeye.org/festival