The Cemetery

'The Cemetery' - a pantoum from my Arctic series - has just been published in the online magazine Ink, Sweat and Tears.

News from New York

The Night Hunter

Roni Gross - a longtime friend and more recently collaborator - has put up some amazing images of recent work on her website. Here you can see a generous spread of the Zitouna offerings that Gross has printed biannually for Valentine's Day and Hallowe'en since 1989. To me, who only gets around to making a Christmas card every other year, this output seems phenomenal. Especially when the rest of Gross' work is taken into account. More of that here, too: a selection of poetry broadsides, and for those curious to see more images of The Night Hunter than have appeared on this blog to date, there's a slideshow of sorts, with the artist's commentary.

Tertulia: 14th July 2011

A Tertulia? The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie, Luis Buñuel

‘Tertulia’ is a Spanish word ordinarily applied to social gatherings with literary, artistic or bohemian overtones. "One would speak of ‘going to a tertulia’ as in ‘going to a dinner’," explain Phil Owen and Megan Wakefield, founders of Bristol’s Tertulia - a salon for people working with or interested in language from a range of different disciplinary and methodological perspectives.

Tertulia is held in the Reading Room at the Arnolfini. The next salon falls on Bastille Day, 14th July, 7.30pm (free entry). Responding to a gauntlet thrown down in Cambridge last month, I’ll be presenting How to say ‘I love you’ in Greenlandic through performance rather than print, re-imagining it as a sound work that befits the oral culture it documents. I’m looking forward to seeing the other contributions, particularly Rachel Flynn’s analysis of Graham Sutherland’s writings on the landscapes of Wales and Mary Crowder’s subversion of medical texts. Not to mention the coda: ‘Sam Playford-Greenwell will attempt to balance a banana on his head.’

Andrew Lee's London

Andrew Lee explores the darker side of London signage. Regular readers will remember his work Gangland Caff, the menu board featuring some gruesome Cockney morsels. This macabre humour is also evident in Lee’s recent photographic work, including the topical NHS Cuts at the Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital (above).

Visit Lee's website for more photographs, as well as graphic work on urban life and urban nature - some favourite subjects being 'birds' nests, geezers, pears, and bull terriers.'