Borrowed Bookshelves 19

In celebration of this month's Tour de France 

here's the single bookshelf at the Broken Spoke Bike Co-op, Oxford,

pleasant to browse while waiting for a spare tyre lever.

Upcoming Event: Oxford Poetry Library

I'm excited to be part of the birthday celebrations for the wonderful Oxford Poetry Library.

Come and join us on 11 May!

Reading with Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Oxford

New Lines | Old Maps - 16 November, Oxford

Roam cover image courtesy Éireann Lorsung

New Lines | Old Maps

Four writers read poems of maps, migrations and place: Nancy Campbell, Laressa Dickey, Carola Luther and Carol Rowntree Jones. 

Albion Beatnik Book Store, 34 Walton St, Oxford
Wednesday 16 November 2016
19:00, £2 entry, paid bar.

Nancy Campbell is a writer and book artist. Her poetry collection Disko Bay (Enitharmon Press, 2015) is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Other books include How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet which won the Birgit Skiöld Award; a new edition by MIEL books will be launched at this event.

Laressa Dickey is a writer based in Berlin. She’s the author of several chapbooks including A Piece of Information About His Invisibility and apparatus for manufacturing sunset, and the poetry collection Bottomland (Shearsman). Two books are forthcoming: Roam (Shearsman) in 2016, and Twang (Backwaters Press) in 2017. Laressa will launch Roam at this event.

Carola Luther’s first poetry collection, Walking the Animals (Carcanet Press) was shortlisted in 2004 for the Forward Prize for First Collection. Her second collection Arguing with Malarchy was published by Carcanet Press in 2011. Carola was Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust in 2012. Herd was published by The Wordsworth Trust in that same year. Carola now lives in West Yorkshire and works as a counsellor.

Carol Rowntree Jones’ work has been published in The North, Assent, Staple and 111O. She won the inaugural Overton Poetry Prize with her chapbook This Is Not Normal Behaviour and has a chapbook out with Dancing Girl Press in the US. As well as poetry, she writes essays and short fiction and was one of winners of the Asham Award for women’s short fiction in 2013, the award anthology being published by Virago. She runs Nottingham Poetry Series and teaches creative writing and poetry workshops.

Poets, clockwise from top right: 

Carola Luther, Carol Rowntree Jones, Laressa Dickey (by Dina Debbas) and Nancy Campbell (by Tom D. Jones)

Words for Winter: forthcoming events

Wood engraving by Thomas Bewick

Words for Winter

Welcome to the Albion Beatnik, for a hearty evening of cold poems from Theophilus Kwek, Michael Loveday, Lucy Newlyn, Lavinia Singer, Andrew Smardon and Kate Venables. I'll also be reading from - and launching - my poetry collection Disko Bay (available from Enitharmon Press).

The Albion Beatnik, 34 Walton Street, Oxford, OX2 6AA
28 January 2016
7pm for 7.30pm start
Entry £2 on the door; refreshments available.

*

Eco-Poetry Evening

Readings by Nancy Campbell, Isabel Galleymore, Sophie Herxheimer and Nathan Thompson.

Academy of Music and Theatre Arts, Penryn, Cornwall, TR10 9LX
27 January 2016
6pm
Free, book tickets here.

*

Poles Apart

I'm excited to be reading with poet and novelist Will Eaves at the legendary London bookshop.

Gay's the Word, 66 Marchmont Street, London, WC1N 1AB
3 March 2016
7pm
Entry £3 on the door, complimentary refreshments provided.

‘The Debate’ Commended

‘The Debate’, my poem about the geographic boundaries of the Arctic, has been commended in the 2015 Four Corners Poetry Competition judged by Mimi Khalvati and Giles Goodland. The competition’s theme was inspired by the motto of St Cross College: ‘Ad quattuor cardines mundi’. The prizewinners and other commended poets are listed here.

An anthology of the winning and commended poems will be launched with a drinks reception and reading at St Cross College, Oxford on Tuesday 13 October. The event will open at 5.30pm, with readings from the judges and several commended poets starting at 6.00pm. All are welcome - please inform Ella Bedrock if you are coming: ella.bedrock@stx.ox.ac.uk

Arctic Events in Oxford

You are warmly invited to come and celebrate the launch of my (small) UK tour at The Albion Beatnik in Oxford on 30 October. I will be joined on stage by the magnificent MacGillivray, of whom more below. (Other readings will happen in Newcastle, Brighton, Bristol, Bedford and London this winter.)

The Albion Beatnik
34 Walton St, Oxford, OX2 6AA
30 October 2014
7.30pm
Free entry
Wine bar available

MACGILLIVRAY has walked in a straight line with a dead wolf on her shoulders through the back streets of Vegas into the Nevada desert, eaten broken chandelier glass in a derelict East Berlin shopping mall, headbanged in gold medieval stocks in Birmingham allotments, burnt on a sun bed wearing conquistador armour in Edinburgh’s underground city, breast-fed a Highland swan in Oxford and regurgitated red roses in Greenland.

She remains the clan chief.

Vantar | Missing At Lady Margaret Hall

My year as Visual & Performing Artist in Residence at Lady Margaret Hall is drawing to a close, and this month the building was transformed by the appearance of Icelandic snowscapes: my new work, Vantar | Missing. Rather than turning one of the grand function rooms into a conventional exhibition space, Vantar | Missing was installed in the winding corridors at the heart of the college, which corresponded to the zigzag paths of the avalanche defences featured in the work. 

The avalanche is a subject that has haunted me since I first spent time in Iceland in 2012. Avalanches caused 198 deaths in Iceland during the twentieth century, but it was not until 1999 that avalanche defences were built around Siglufjörður, the small town at the northernmost tip of the island where I was living. Now, these subtle feats of engineering Stóri-boli (Big bull) and Litli-boli (Little bull) have become part of the mountain landscape, a barely perceptible human intervention dividing the town’s remaining inhabitants from the wilderness. 

This project has led to the publication of a new book and a print series, in which diptychs record changes in mountain snow cover and domestic interiors. The Icelandic word ‘vantar’ refers both to a lost object or person and to the experience of loss. People lost in the mountains are a frequent trope of Icelandic literature, from the sagas to contemporary crime fiction. I wanted to consider this theme from the angle of the people left behind.

Vantar | Missing

Vantar / Missing

My new print series Vantar / Missing has just come off the press at Centre for Fine Print Research in Bristol.

The series of six diptychs record the transitory fields of mountain snow cover and domestic linen over one winter in Siglufjörður, Iceland. The photographs were taken during a residency at Siglufjörður in Iceland during 2012.

Missing (‘Vantar’ in Icelandic) can refer both to a lost object or person and the experience of loss.

Avalanches caused 193 deaths in Iceland during the twentieth century. It was not until 1999 that avalanche defences were built around the northern town of Siglufjörður. Stóri-boli (Big bull) and Litli-boli (Little bull) wind around the mountains just above the town’s highest buildings. This barely perceptible human intervention divides the town from the mountain wilderness.

Vantar / Missing will be exhibited at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in May this year.

LMH Oxford Residency - Talk

My year as Artist in Residence at Lady Margaret Hall is now under way. I've been working in the library on the early stages of a print series which will combine my interest in Arctic landscapes with a response to the college site. I visit Bristol next week to meet with Arthur Buxton at the Centre for Fine Print Research, who will be advising me on the project.

More on this scheme as it develops. Meanwhile I will be giving a public talk to introduce my work at the end of the month. All are welcome, whether members of the university or not. 

No More Words for Snow: Arctic Alphabets

Nancy Campbell will discuss the influence of the vanishing languages and landscapes of the Arctic on her work. This illustrated talk will reflect on poetry and artist’s books created during residencies at institutions including the most northern museum in the world on the remote island of Upernavik in Greenland.

Refreshments will be served.

Venue: Old Library, Lady Margaret Hall, Norham Gardens, Oxford, OX2 6QA. 

Date: Friday 25 October 2013

Time: 5.15pm

Oxford University Residency

Lady Margaret Hall, The Library

I have been offered the Lady Margaret Hall Visual and Performing Arts Residency for the academic year 2013–2014. During this time I will be based at the Oxford college and will contribute to its cultural life. Details of the residency programme will be announced soon.

Oxford Christmas Light Night

Every year, bicycles sputtering trails of sparks soar above Oxford's High Street...

Last week the the city's season of lights was launched with a Christmas Light Night parade. I had been lured out on a frosty evening to sell my cards at one of the roadside stalls, and witnessed the slow procession of lanterns made by local schoolchildren. To my delight, they all had a polar theme that echoed my own work.

It was hard to capture such magical movement, but I hope the following images will give an idea of those wonderful paper creations.

...and after the event, a tired penguin waits for service at the kebab hut:

Altered Books Workshop: Albion Beatnik, Oxford

An altered book created by Mike Sims (Poetry Society Publications Manager) 

at a workshop during the Free Verse Book Fair in London. 

I'll be running an Altered Books Workshop in the Albion Beatnik bookshop in Oxford in December - details below. This will be a twist on previous workshops, as participants will be invited to pick their own book from the bookshop's shelves - and then turn it into an entirely new work.

Many thanks to Dennis Harrison for deciding to offer another bookish event so soon after the phenomenal series of poetry readings that was this month's The Sounds of Surprise festival (still going strong - come along!). Also a big thank you to the bookshop's resident bookbinder Lucie Forejtová, who runs Immaginacija and makes a beautiful range of handmade stationery. I've snaffled one of her coptic-bound appointment diaries for next year, and now I can't wait for January.

ALTERED BOOKS 
5 December 2012, 18.30

In this workshop we select existing books from Albion Beatnik's shelves and adapt them using cut-up, collage and mark-making techniques to create completely new structures and texts. For inspiration, we'll examine altered books made by artists and writers including Tom Phillips' A Humument and Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes. We'll discuss poetry beyond the text including visual elements, invisible elements and the role of chance in writing. Come prepared to think in three dimensions, and forget all you were ever taught about not scribbling in books.

Cost: £12 per person. Includes materials and a £5 voucher towards the cost of a book from Albion Beatnik.
To book your place leave a comment below and I'll get back to you!
Venue: Albion Beatnik Bookshop, 34 Walton Street, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX2 6AA

Book Artists Aloft

As the summer drew to a close, book artists Mette-Sofie D. Ambeck (Ambeck Design) and Mike Nicholson (Ensixteen Editions) visited me in Oxford. How would I entertain the two travellers, one fresh from the flatlands of Jutland, and the other, a vertigo-suffering Londoner?

We went as high as it's possible to go in this city of spires, climbing up the tower of the University Church of St. Mary. I hoped the candy-cane pillars, the gargoyles and the crumbling finials might interest Ambeck, whose latest book (pictured above) is a celebration of the stone-carvings found among the curious, shadowed pathways and tombs of Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, North London. Ambeck has worked with Tom Sowden in the studio at Centre for Fine Print Research in Bristol to replicate her photo-archive through laser cutting. In this process, the laser sears into the paper fibres, creating a ghostly image that is not only the perfect technique to represent the crumbling, eroded gravestones but also evoking mortality itself.

The clouds lowered as we climbed - on the east side of the tower our faces were stung with rain - from the west we saw patches of sunshine break through thunderous skies to illuminate the cornfields on the far side of the city. Pressed in against the ancient walls as other sightseers passed us on the balcony, we noticed an abundance of graffiti left by earlier climbers.

Deciphering the amateur carvings in the Tower's winding stairwell, the descent was giddying. The image below, from the cover of Mike Nicholson's new edition Glass Half-Full/Glass-Half Empty, was penned many days before our climb, but it captures the sense of disorientation we felt on returning to the cobbled ground, and to the present moment. 

Readers are encouraged to visit the Small Publishers Fair in London on 16th and 17th November, to take a closer look at both Ambeck's and Nicholson's books.