cris cheek
part: short life housing
This book collects seven texts written between 1981 and 1999, by UK-
born, US-based poet/multimedia artist cris cheek. cheek was one of
the key figures in the London poetry scene of the 1980s — the so-
called “linguistically-innovative poetry” grouping later
anthologized in Robert Sheppard and Adrian Clarke’s Floating
Capital: New Poets from London. Likewise, he became central to
developments in Performance Writing emerging out of variant
distributed networks during the following decade. He has remained a
prolific, genre-slipping figure: poet, performance artist and
musician, whose activities range from the ambitious conceptual
project Things Not Worth Keeping to recordings with the ensembles
Slant and Garam Masala. Yet to date his publications have been
relatively scarce and elusive, a situation which part: short life
housing goes far to rectify.
At the heart of this book are two long sequences, previously
unpublished aside from short extracts: “canning town chronicles,”
a scathing set of verbal accretions that emerged from the wreckage of
the Thatcher era; and “f o g s,” a series of typestracts quarried
from verbal improvisations recorded during outdoor walks in densely
foggy weather. Also included are several shorter pieces, including a
selection of early 1980s work and “plain speaking yet,” cheek’s
memorial to the novelist Kathy Acker. The poems have, in keeping with
the author’s concern for the specificity of occasion and
publication, been revised and visually reimagined with this volume in
mind.
*
For all its thickness, unanticipated moves, visual beauty, and
playful language acrobatics, the poetry of part: short life housing
consistently retains the edge of serious critique. There are few
poets as attuned to the sounds and ambient fogs of everyday life as
cris cheek, yet his record is tuned and sharply turned toward the
reimagining of social knowledge. This volume is a generous move
towards the full representation of cheek’s crucial project.
— Carla Harryman
Finally a good and rich span of writings from cris cheek. Here’s an
artist and writer whose work has always taken up active tenancy of
the languages and the streets of urban living, recording them and
composing them back into the dense abstract neighbourhoods of his
pieces. With this careful selection, cris cheek reminds us that he is
a Londoner and as such is as inhabited by Dickens’ dark maze of
industrial streets as by mind-altering years of activist art
lodgings, smoggy thoughtful wanderings or the eerie shock of the
thatcheritic city. That’s at least two hundred years of grime, greed
and energy you’ll find distilled in the cellular lines and ink
splashes of this great volume.
– Caroline Bergvall
“i s y o u r t o n g u e a g l o m / w e a p o n t h a t
s t a i n s ?” cris cheek is the Kepler of Chisenhale Dance Space.
After a century of developments in poetic form best understood as a
series of metaphors for transcribed speech, cheek’s poetry often
actually is transcribed speech, throwing shapes on the page that pay
homage to (and lay the ghosts of) all the dead metaphors. As in Alvin
Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, the speech in cheek’s work
functions as something like echolocation: its reflections (on him and
in us) mapping out an ever more complex and multifocal shape for the
public sphere, “w h e r e o t h e r s f e a r t o / t / r e a
d.”
— Peter Manson
*
cris cheek, part: short life housing. The Gig, 2009. ISBN
978-0-9735875-5-5. 270pp, 6″ x 9″, perfectbound.
ORDERING INFORMATION (with a special deal!)
Within Canada: $22.50 — Within the US: $22.50 US
UK: £17 — Euro: €22
All prices include postage.
A special deal: for $8 Cdn / $8 US / £5 / €7, add one of the
following:
* Slant, the canning town chronicles, sound&language (CD with
cheek, Sianed Jones, Phillip Jeck — music based around texts
collected in part: short life housing, as well as a reading of a
Kinks tune…!)
* cris cheek, the church, the school, the beer (Critical Documents)
* Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada
* Maggie O’Sullivan, Palace of Reptiles
* Allen Fisher, Entanglement
Please make out cheques to “Nate Dorward”, & send to:
109 Hounslow Ave, North York, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
(email: ndorward [at-sign] ndorward [dot] com)
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