Poetry Marathon
Saturday and Sunday
17–18 October 2009
Poetry Marathon Day 1:
Saturday 17 October, 12 noon – 10 pm
Poetry Marathon Day 2:
Sunday 19 October, 12 noon – 10 pm
The Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon was an ambitious two-day poetry event taking place in London during Frieze Art Fair week and featuring unique performances from leading poets, writers, artists, philosophers, scholars and musicians.
An international group of major figures were brought together to perform in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009, designed by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the acclaimed Japanese practice SANAA. The event included performances of new work, collaborations, discussions and experiments.
There is a long and vivid history of exchange between artists and poets. Guillaume Apollinaire made a literary connection to Cubism with his great work of ‘visual poetry’ Calligrammes: Poems of War and Peace 1913-1916. In the same period, Hugo Ball wrote the Dada Manifesto (1916), a movement in which the poet, essayist and performance artist Tristan Tzara was also closely involved. A decade later, in 1924, André Breton, the proponent of ‘automatic writing’, published La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution).
In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was an art movement with strong creative connections with writing and poetry of the time, from the work of poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery to artist Robert Motherwell’s influential essays on the New York School. Later, in the 1960s, the international artistic network Fluxus formed innumerable close links between visual art and the written word.
The Poetry Marathon is the fourth in the series of Marathons staged in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion each year. The Marathon series was conceived by Serpentine Gallery Co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2006. The first in the series, the Interview Marathon in 2006, involved interviews with leading figures in contemporary culture over 24 hours, conducted by Obrist and architect Rem Koolhaas. This was followed by the Experiment Marathon, conceived by Obrist and artist Olafur Eliasson in 2007, which included 50 experiments by speakers across both arts and science, and the Manifesto Marathon in 2008.
The Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects. It is held in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA. The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion Commission was conceived by Julia Peyton-Jones, Serpentine Gallery Director and Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes in 2000.
SERPENTINE GALLERY POETRY MARATHON BLOG
The following blog was written during the Marathon by Laura Allsop and reflects a personal take on this event. All photographs © Mark Blower.
Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist introduction
This year’s marathon, devoted to poetry, kicks off with an introduction by the gallery directors, Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Poetry – an often neglected discipline in contemporary art practice – is ripe for a re-evaluation. Peyton-Jones talks of the “long exchange” that exists between artists and poets and cites Apollinaire, the Dada poets, the relationship between abstract expressionism and the New York School of poetry in the 1950s as examples of this relationship. “We aim to revitalise the historical links between poetry and art,” she says. These links are evident in the gardens of the Serpentine Gallery itself: the Scottish artist and concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay was commissioned to make work for the gardens just after it had been refurbished. As Peyton-Jones points out, for Hamilton Finlay the written word and visual art were no different to each other. “It is marvellous to remember him on this day”, she concludes.
Hans Ulrich Obrist reiterates her sentiments, claiming that the marathon is about the “dialogue between art and poetry” and speaks of his desire “to reconnect to this”. He says the germ of the project was Everstill/Siempretodavía, an exhibition he curated at the house of Federico Garcia Lorca in Spain, where artists were invited to make work that responded to poetry – and as we shall see, many of the guests invited to speak at the marathon reference Lorca in their readings and works.
Tracey Emin is the first to read her own poems. She has been a poet in residence at GQ but one can see her lyrical side in all her neon works, which are like haikus of desire and disappointment. She reads from her collection of poems entitled Those Who Suffer Love, which is illustrated with her spindly, beautiful drawings; they speak of vulnerability, pain and the wonder of being in love. Her performance is charming and Emin is open about the heartache that informs her short, fluid poems. She calls them old-fashioned. “A lot of my work is about love and a lot of it is about god”, she says, and indeed, the poems she reads tell of yearning, be it for an absent lover, or some higher spiritual guide, or simply for the words to accurately describe something in nature. “I need words as much as visuals in my life”, she says. “Writing poetry is a release for my mind. It makes my mind feel like a different kind of organ. Some are romantic and some are hard core and dirty.” Indeed they are: one is about a long distance relationship and the heartache entailed; another is about the size of her boyfriend’s genitalia, which is followed by the saucy aside: “Aren’t I a lucky girl?” Emin may claim to be an auto-didact and though she self-deprecatingly says her poems “aren’t brilliant”, the crowd evidently disagrees.
Biography
Tracey Emin is an artist born in London in 1963 and lives and works in London. She uses various media, including drawing, installation, and needlework, in highly personal and candid works. She represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Those Who Suffer Love, a collection of drawings and poems, was published in 2009. She currently poet-in-residence for GQ Magazine.
The British-born, Berlin-based artist is one of the protagonists of the Lorca exhibition Han Ulrich Obrist discussed in the introduction. This is an artist who has had many dialogues with the German poet Michael Hamburger, a man whose life and work is also eulogised in the book of now sadly deceased but enormously influential author WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. Dean made a film of the poet in 2006. She describes how during the process of filming, Hamburger found it hard to talk about his poetry as she filmed him, but his readiness to talk about his passion for apples and his apple orchard which became increasingly a metaphor for the passing of time and eventual death. She reads a poem about an apple that grew out of the pips given to Hamburger by one-time poet laureate Ted Hughes, written on the day that he died. She reads two other poems: they are mournful and wintry, stark but beautiful, and have a particular resonance in the encroaching October chill. An example of a line from a poem written shortly before Hanburger’s own death that illustrates this austere beauty: “Completion came with November’s full moon.”
Biography
Tacita Dean is an artist born in 1965 in England. She lives in Berlin. She has received numerous prizes including the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) and the Hugo Boss Prize (2006). Solo exhibitions include Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2009) and Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2009).
The godmother of the French New Wave Agnès Varda presents a multimedia installation performance, playing footage of waves lapping the shore of what looks like a Northern European beach on three screens around her. She reads poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (whose Rose cycle was in fact the subject of a recent series of colour-drenched paintings by Cy Twombly), Mallarme, Louise Labe, Jim Morrison and Federico Garcia Lorca. Before she reads each she lets us know the dates they died, suggesting that mortality is what binds these poems together and is indeed an increasingly important subject in her own film work, from the melancholy Les Glaneurs to the more recent The Beaches of Agnés Varda. She reads each poem in the language they were written – French, German, English, Spanish, demonstrating her flair for each. As the poet Kenneth Goldsmith says as he gets onto the stage, what could be better than hearing Agnés Varda read a poem by Jim Morrison?
Biography
Agnès Varda, French artist, born in 1928 in Belgium, lives and works in Paris. Directed films include Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961), Vagabond (1985), The Gleaners and I (2000) and The Beaches of Agnès (2009). Exhibitions include Patatutopia (50th Venice Biennale, 2003), L’île et elle (Fondation Cartier, Paris, 2006) and Three Shacks (Lyon Biennale, 2009).
Kenneth Goldsmith is an Amercian poet and founder of online poetry archive UbuWeb, as well as the editor of Pennsound. Goldsmith’s poem is about 9/11 but it is about more than that – it is about New York City, its history of being portrayed in literature and poetry as a sprawling, entropic mass, about the media and its connection to the public. He doesn’t read so much as perform, relaying information about the event in various guises, from confused member of the public, to newscaster, to pundit. In many ways, the work is about the failure of language in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe (words like “unbelievable” are repeated several times, while “Uhs” punctuate the narratives of the characters he enacts) but also its resurrection as the catastrophic event recedes from memory.
Biography
Kenneth Goldsmith is an American poet born in 1961. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb, teaches Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania and is Senior Editor of PENNsound. He hosts a weekly radio show and has published ten books of poetry including the trilogy The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008).
Holly Pester is a performance poet currently working on a project with the Barry Museum in Manchester. I, raven, the is about the relationship between words and sound, and the title itself inevitably brings to mind Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in which the refrain “Never More” reads increasingly, as the poem progresses, as less like words and more like sounds.
Pester’s poem attempts to capture the “shape of words” and as she reads, her mouth contorts into shapes. The result is a series of sounds from everyday life that seem disconnected from the actual meaning of the words. “The sound is a square” is a constant refrain, and Pester duly shapes her mouth like a square, producing a churned-up sound. Words rhyming or related in sound to square (such as war) are similarly chewed over and mangled. Pester says of the poem’s protagonist that he “is concerned with the physical world ”, while the sounds of the physical world invade the piece, with growls and pips emerging from Pester’s mouth that variously emulate the noise of cars or machines.
Biography
Holly Pester was born in 1982 in Essex, UK, and lives and works in London. Her performance-driven poetry is concerned with transpositions and intermedial poetics. Her texts are playful experiments with ‘speech-sound’, drawing influence from Sound Poetry and Fluxus ‘events scores’. Forthcoming projects include Bury Art Gallery and Museum, Manchester.
The writer and actress Eleanor Bron is no stranger to the marathon format, having been involved in the very first interview marathon in 2006. Her career as an actress began in the 1960s, and Bron has appeared in seminal films such as Women in Love, Bedazzled and more recently, The House of Mirth.
She reads a few poems by Randall Jarrell, who died in 1965; one is directly related to art, and told from the perspective of a guard in a museum. The second is about an aging woman trying to deal with her growing invisibility in society. Jarrell seems concerned with the marginal, with those forgotten or ignored. Bron’s reading is tender, and she seems to have a fondness for her characters. Her reading, as befitting her profession, is dramatic and engaging, with numerous accents and characterful gestures deployed.
Biography
Eleanor Bron is a writer and actress. Her career started in satire in the 1960s and continued in both comedy and drama in film, theatre, television and radio. Among her films are Help (1965); Bedazzled (1967); Women In Love (1969) & The House of Mirth (2000). Her writing includes several books, comedy scripts and song cycles.
Enrique Juncosa is the director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and founded the biannual magazine Boulevard Magenta, which features visual art and poetry. He reads three poems originally written in Spanish, and translated into English by Michael Smith. He does read one poem in its Spanish version as well as its English version. He explains that though poetry is traditionally associated with giving away something emotional and personal, he doesn’t “like to write about things I am close to.” Instead he prefers to write about foreign travel. Indeed it seems somewhat revolutionary to write poetry that doesn’t originate from somewhere deep in the self, but rather somewhere external and alien. The poems that he reads are responses to travel in places as far-flung as the Andes and Indonesia.
Biography
Enrique Juncosa, born in 1961 in Palma de Mallorca, is a curator and poet. He has been the director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, since 2003. He has published six collections of poetry in Spanish. Two of these will be published in English translation by Dedalus Press in 2010.
Conceived by Enrique Juncosa, Boulevard Magenta is a biannual magazine of the arts and letters published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Echoing early international avant-garde magazines, it focuses on art practice without excluding any discipline. It brings together contributions from the visual arts, literature and poetry, architecture, design, music and film.
Up next, and concluding the first part of the marathon, is Michael Glover from the Bow Wow Shop, an online international forum for debate about contemporary poetry. He comes to the stage and says that when he first heard about the marathon, his principal feeling was one of physical exhaustion – happily, he decided to take part in it notwithstanding. He talks of his love for polysyllabic words like “serpentine”, which, he opines, are pregnant with possibilities.
He reads three poems from a collection of his entitled For the Sheer Hell of Living – a mix, it seems, of apercus from daily life and more philosophical concerns. The first is about the experience of being a passenger on a flight heading to the orient, and of the embarrassment he feels at the obsequiousness of the air hostesses. The second is entitled Keys to Locked Doors, which Glover precedes with the observation that poetry itself is rather like a locked door. It’s a neat metaphor, skilfully relayed in verse, with one particular line resonating across the rest of the piece: “There are so many locked doors and so many people calling behind the locked doors,” a line suggesting the relationship between reader and author can be frustrating and even fraught, filled with unheeded calls and misunderstandings. His third poem, and one which is apt to the aim of the marathon, is an imagined dialogue between the poet and Marcel Duchamp.
Biography
Michael Glover was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, and lives and works in London. He is a poet, art critic, fiction writer and magazine editor who has contributed regularly to several periodicals. He is also a London correspondent for ARTnews, New York. His poetry collections include For the Sheer Hell of Living (San Marco Press, 2008).
Created by Michael Glover, The Bow-Wow Shop (www.bowwowshop.org.uk) is an on-line international forum for debate about the nature and purpose of contemporary poetry. Its third issue has just gone live.
New Jersey-born, San Francisco-based August Kleinzahler opens the second part of the marathon. Kleinhalzer’s 2008 collection of poetry Sleeping it off in Rapid City won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award and he has since written a collection of music essays. He reads the title work of his book, Sleeping it off in Rapid City, a rhythmic piece about what he calls “the middle of the great heart of this great land”, an unnamed city in the Mid Western Plains.
It’s an incredibly lyrical piece written in the modernist tradition, and paints a picture of a coal train rushing to arrive at its destination at the heart of a great land mass. There are refrains of Dante’s Inferno – Kleinzahler cites the “Selva oscura” at the start of Dante’s famous Canticle – and at the end equates the weary traveller’s hotel to Circe’s island in the Odyssey. Such literary, travel-related references crop up in and among lovely, John Dos Passos-esque descriptions of billboards along the route, and the “buzzing, sodium-lit night” that envelops the city.
Biography
August Kleinzahler was born and raised in New Jersey. His most recent collection of poetry, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (FSG, 2008), won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest book is Music: I-LXXIV, a collection of music essays (Pressed Wafer, 2009). He lives in San Francisco.
Tom McCarthy and Henry Blofeld
Tom McCarthy’s debut award-winning novel Remainder, published in 2005 and since translated into 12 languages, has placed the London-based writer firmly on the literary map. He comes to the stage alongside legendary BBC Radio 4 cricket commentator Henry Blofeld. McCarthy explains the genesis of their talk: he tells of his interest in what he calls “the origins and essential framework of poetry”, talking particularly of traditional Hellenic epics that kept to the beat of a war drum. “It seems to me,” he says, “that the closest figure to the Ur-poets right now is the sports commentator.” Of course, not all sports commentators can lay claim to the gravitas of Blofeld; his rich, sonorous voice rings out across the pavilion and commands attention. “It helps,” he says, “to have a voice that comes across the ether, and to be able to string a set of words together...Cricket is like a symphony, it has its moments. The sound and fluency of words are extremely important.”
Biographies
Tom McCarthy is a London-based writer and artist born in 1969. His award-winning debut novel Remainder (2005) has been published in more than ten languages. He is also founder of the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network. His third novel, C, will be published next year.
Henry Blofeld was born in Norfolk in 1939. As the long-time commentator for Test Match Special on BBC Radio 4, as well as on Sky and ITV, he is known as ‘the voice of cricket’. His autobiography A Thirst for Life: With the Accent on Cricket was published in 2001.
John Giorno is yet another legendary figure on today’s line-up, having been the subject of Andy Warhol’s film infamous film Sleep (1963). The performance artist and poet released a survey of his poetry in 2007 that contained an astonishing forty-five- years- worth of poems. He reads one about flowers in which various blooms are given startling characteristics and symbolism: some are described as “suicides”; red roses symbolise all the people has made love to; and poppies are ominously “packed with narcotic treats.” His flowers bring to mind those of Robert Mapplethorpe, which also seem to have their own distinct identities. Giorno goes on to read a poem he wrote on his seventieth birthday, in which he gives thanks for the good, the bad and the ugly in his long life. Finally, he gives thanks for his profession as a poet – “a noble effort but a doomed choice.”
Biography
John Giorno is a poet born in 1936 whose work has been of enormous influence, particularly in the realm of Spoken Word and in his many innovative projects exploring emergent technologies and distribution methods. A survey of his poetry is published in Subduing Demons In America, Selected Poems 1962-2007 (2007).
Mladen Stilinović represented with Martha Swann
Mladen Stilinović was born and lives in Zagreb. An experimental filmmaker, photographer and gallerist, Stilinović wears many hats. His poem is read by the actress Martha Swann and works through the first letter of the alphabet, taking each word and following it with the word “Pain.” It’s surprising how well so many words pair with the word, stressing its universality as an experience. Occasional repetitions keep the recital from descending into senselessness, while sequential variations from the dictionary make for the most lyrically playful pairings, such as “Absent pain, absentee pain” and the like. It’s a simple conceit, and sparse, but beautifully executed and quietly affecting.
Biography
Mladen Stilinović, born in 1947, lives and works in Zagreb. From 1969 to 1976 he worked with experimental film. He was a member of the Group of Six Artists from 1975 to 1979, and ran the PM Gallery in Zagreb from 1982 to 1991. His works include collages, photographs, artist books, paintings, installations, actions, films and video.
Biography
Tim Griffin is editor of Artforum International. His poetry has recently appeared in such publications as Fence and The Hat, as well as in the volume Free Radicals: American Poets Before their First Books (2004); and he lectured last month on the Ugly Duckling Presse book Notes on Conceptualisms (2009) at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York.
Sculptor and poet Jimmie Durham comes on to the stage looking rather like a benign bishop, in a fiery red cape I quickly learn is in fact a blanket – it’s starting to get really quite chilly now. There’s an autumn leaf in his lapel. The piece he reads revels in wordplay, emphasising the often inherent absurdities found in popular sayings and ready platitudes. His next piece has a more political bent, and describes a wedding in Kabul, whose celebration, right through to the platters of dates eaten by the guests, is cruelly disrupted by the vagaries of war.
Biography
Jimmie Durham was born in the USA in 1940 and currently lives in Europe. Primarily a sculptor, he began publishing poetry in the early 1960s. His work is included in the Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry (1988), and his collection of poems Columbus Day (1983) won an award from the American Society of Poetry.
British-born James Fenton has had a long and distinguished career as a poet, war correspondent and political journalist. He was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1994-1999 and has been awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry. The pieces he reads today are very much informed by his experiences as a war correspondent. One poem, entitled Out of the East, is set in what one assumes is Vietnam, detailing a weary soldier’s trudge through rice paddies and a pervasive fear of napalm. Though morose in subject, the piece has a stirring rhythm, some it written in rhyming couplets that emulates the sound of rapid fire. He reads another entitled Blood and Lead, in which he instructs us to “Listen to the blood, listen to the drum”, making one think of the Ur-poets Tom McCarthy mentioned earlier in his set, and the way they set their works to the portentous beat of a war drum.
Biography
James Fenton is a poet born in England in 1949 and has worked as political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war correspondent, foreign correspondent and columnist. He was Oxford Professor of Poetry between 1994-99, and has been awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. His Selected Poems (2006) was published by Penguin.
Nick Laird is a young poet and novelist from County Tyrone in Ireland. He is also, interestingly and perhaps surprisingly, a lawyer. His 2007 collection of poems On Purpose won both the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 2008. He arrives on stage and reads a couple of poems that mention art and artists in them, in keeping with the aim of the marathon. One features a line about a “kidney-shaped swimming pool, the very shade of Hockney blue”; another, about his beloved pug dog (and which, along with the TLS, was published by Cruft’s), mentions Hogarth’s love of the fact that, for the first year of the dog’s life, it “hardly differed from a rabbit.”
Of particular mention is a harrowing poem about allied soldiers arriving in Bergen Belsen. “How to adequately describe that camp?” the narrator asks. Laird focuses on a real historical event after the camp’s liberation, in which boxes of red lipstick were mistakenly delivered instead of food and medical supplies. He describes the horror he feels when the emaciated women in the camp hysterically begin to smear the grisly red grease on their mouths in droves, looking “clown-like and lost”. He continues to be haunted by this colour in civilian life, and the poem ends with him seeing it on the lips of “a skinny girl, who coloured in the sound of her screams.”
Biography
Nick Laird is a lawyer, poet, novelist and critic from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland. His collections of poetry are To A Fault (2005) and On Purpose (2007), of which the latter won a 2008 Somerset Maugham Award and the 2009 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His novels include Utterly Monkey (2005) and Glover’s Mistake (2009).
Christodoulos Panayiotou represented by Max Mackintosh
Cyprus-born, Berlin-based Christodoulos Panayiotou is an artist who works across a range of media, including video, photography and sound installations. For these works, he frequently enlists the help of musicians and actors.
Panayiotou is represented by the actor Max Mackintosh who wears a fetching jumper covered in Rupert in the Bear motifs. He reads a whimsical piece outlining the thematic similarities between children’s classic Mary Poppins and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s decidedly more adult film Teorema (1968), in which a mysterious young man arrives at the home of a bourgeois family and affects the lives of all within. In-between mini-critiques of each film, he picks up a guitar and sings songs from Mary Poppins, including Just a Spoonful of Sugar, emphasising its “ornithological” themes, and later Let’s Go Fly a Kite – a hymn, he says, “to the aesthetics of resolution.”
Biography
Christodoulos Panayiotou (born 1978, Limassol, Cyprus) lives and works in Berlin. His works are articulated across a range of media, incorporating video, photography and sound within installations. He is the winner of the 2005 DESTE prize. Recent exhibitions include Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2009); MoCA Miami (2009) and Witte de With, Rotterdam (2009). He is currently a resident artist at IASPIS, Stockholm.
French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster is introduced to the stage. Hans Ulrich Obrist mentions her interest in literature and their many discussions about Georges Perec and the Oulipo group. “I had no idea what I was going to read,” she says, when she was first asked by Obrist to participate in the marathon, “certainly, none of my own notes or writings.”
Instead, she elects to read some poems by Jacques Roubaud, the result of a moment of clarity she enjoyed while perusing the poetry titles in a bookshop in New York late at night. The poems are from a collection entitled The form of a city changes faster, alas, than the human heart, the first of which details the narrator’s inability to accurately remember various stops on the Paris metro, including one that shut down during the war, never to reopen. The poems are a rich mix of English and French, including one where each line begins with the anguished cry “Raining!”, and which is followed by streams of words in both languages.
Biography
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster is an artist born in 1965 in France, working across various media. She has presented solo exhibitions at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2002), Tate Modern, London (2008), and MUSAC (2008), Castile. She lives and works in Paris and Rio de Janeiro.
Following Gonzalez-Foerster is multitalented American poet Maria Mirabal, whose backgrounds include art, poetry and acting. Her almost conversational poems, which are filled with provisos and clarifiers such as “I mean...”, try to get into the very stuff of words. Her delivery is deliberate and unhurried, with each word emphasised and almost – just almost – disconnected from the sentence which it is a part of, forcing the audience to hear it anew and reconsider its meanings. She tries to describe the sounds of words as distinct from their accepted definitions: for example, when thinking of the word “black”, she imagines it as a thing, “cold and sticky.” She asks: “What is a word?” and answers, enigmatically: “A word is what’s unsaid.”
Biography
Maria Mirabal’s poetry comes from art, acting and fiction. She has read and published from New York to Europe. Her poems are dreamscapes reported as hard, cold facts; reading aloud, she embeds each word in its own space and time, as if it is an island, and as if she is in a space-bubble.
New York artist Sean Landers read the numerous little scraps of writing that cover one of his text-based paintings. “I fill my paintings with the thoughts I am having,” he says, and his reading is a riotous jaunt through the various muddled thoughts and observations he has while working. They include moments of self-reflection (“I’m sorry these epithets aren’t that interesting), to flagellation (“I feel low and guilty of all I have been accused of”), to hubris (“This is the best painting I have ever made, I mean it”).
Images of his text-based work are projected on three screens around him, zooming in to reveal the cartoonish-scrawlings, and out again to reveal a whole filled with what look from afar like newspaper columns. He says, with not a little irony, that his painting has rather economically used up just a single tube of paint.
Biography
Sean Landers is an artist living in New York, whose paintings frequently combine text and image. His book [sic] (1993) ‘…shows readers the world through his eyes, all misspellings intact.’ His work is the focus of a 2004 solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich, and a forthcoming exhibition at CAM St. Louis.
Australian writer and Frieze contributor Dominic Eichler comes to the stage and his reading, says Hans Ulrich Obrist, is a world premier of his new collection of poetry. These are touching, sparse pieces that Eichler admits are all “somehow dedicated to former lovers”. Some are sexually charged, some are simply yearning and all detail loss in some way – be it the loss of a lover, or the steady depletion of a wad of Euros on a night out in a continental city.
Biography
Dominic Eichler was born in Australia in 1966 and lives in Berlin. He is an art critic, artist, musician and curator, who co-founded the contemporary art space Silberkuppe. He is also a contributing editor of frieze magazine. In 2005 he was awarded the AdKV Prize for Art Criticism. He is a member of the pop band Dominique.
US-born, London-based poet Barry Schwabsky comes to the stage as the night chill sets in. The audience in front of him seem rather like children waiting to hear bed-time stories, many of them wrapped in blankets.
Shwabsky, who is the art critic for The Nation, and who has published a new book of poems just this year entitled Book Left Open in the Rain, starts his recitation with a poem called The Letter O, which describes the process of trying to draw someone’s face. He then reads some poems from a collaborative project he initiated with various other poets, which involved asking them to give him a failed or abandoned poem for him to look over. These donors include the poet’s friend Richard Hell, and, rather amusingly, 14th century Italian poet, Petrarch.
Biography
Barry Schwabsky is an American poet living in London and the art critic for The Nation. Among his poetry publications are Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (2003) and Book Left Open in the Rain (2009). He is the author of many works of art criticism, including The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (1997).
Biography
Sean Bonney is a poet and polemicist who combines formal experiment with a sarcastic voice rooted in punk, providing an account of London’s threatened psychogeography. His new book Document (2009) charts a course from the London suicide bombings through to Blair's resignation. Previous publications include Baudelaire in English (2008) and Blade Pitch Control (2005).
Biography
Eileen Myles (born 1949, Cambridge, MA), lives in New York. Recent books include The Importance of Being Iceland (essays, 2009) and Sorry, Tree (poems, 2007). She ran St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the 1980s. In 1992 she conducted an openly female write-in campaign for President of the US. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego.
Olivier Garbay; Cerith Wyn Evans & friends
Biography
Olivier Garbay is a French London-based artist and poet who devotes himself to ‘capturing the in between of things’. He has exhibited internationally, and his publications include The Cloud (2007); God is Dad, (2005), and The Mug (2008), both with Sarah Lucas.
Biography
Richard Hell is an American writer and musician. Having set up his own press as a teenager, and having been an originator of punk in the 1970s, he has gone on to publish novels including Go Now (1996), and Godlike (2005), as well as volumes of poems and essays. He is currently working on an autobiography.
Biographies
Keren Cytter was born 1977 in Israel and lives in Berlin. As an artist she works experimentally in film, engaging in methods that challenge the restraints of both written and cinematic genres and languages. She is also a novelist, poet and librettist, and in 2008 she formed the dance theatre group Dance International Europe Now.
Andrew Kerton was born in London in 1981 and is an artist working in video and live performance. He attended de Ateliers artist's programme in Amsterdam and currently lives and works in Berlin. In 2009 he premièred a new performance starring Jonny Woo at HAU 1 Theatre in Berlin.
Kenneth G. Bostock, Cibelle & Pablo León de la Barra
Biographies
Kenneth G. Bostock was born in Mexico City and lives in London. Writing in both English and Spanish, he has published five books of poetry, including Linea (1994) and Three Icelandic Poems (2008). As an artist, he has worked with Guillermo Santamarina in various group exhibitions. His forthcoming book For With will appear in late 2009.
Cibelle is a singer, music producer, and visual artist born in São Paulo and living in London. Her album The Shine of Electric Dead Leaves (2007) included collaborations with Seu Jorge and Devendra Banhart. She is a member of the art collective FUR, a collaborator with Assume Vivid Astro Focus and a DJ at Diesel:u:music.
Pablo León de la Barra lives in London, born in Mexico City, 1972. He works internationally among other things as a curator and cultural producer. He is author of http://centrefortheaestheticrevolution.blogspot.com, publisher of Pablo Internacional Magazine/Editions, co-curator of White Cubicle Toilet Gallery, and founding member of the Cooperativa Internacional Tropical.
Biography
Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963. He works as an editor and musician, and lectures at the University of St Andrews. His most recent poetry collection is Rain (2009).
Biography
Charlie Dark is a poet, DJ, producer and teacher based in London, and is a founding figure of the urban poetry scene. In the 1990s he formed The Urban Poets Society, a collective uniting rappers, MCs and poets. He is currently working on his first collection of poems The God of Road.
Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist introduction
This is the first of Karl Holmqvist’s readings – he is due to read again just before Brian Eno’s reading at the end of the marathon. Holmqvist uses text in many of his works and Hans Ulrich Obrist mentions that he has worked with poet and artist Vito Acconci, who will be later reading work as well.
He sings the words “Do you like that? Did you like that?” in an ominous voice, with various cadences and modulations in volume. “Treat you like an animal”, he says, “like a fucking clown”, a “slave to the rhythm of your corporate prison”.
“Pray for me”, he intones, and indeed the piece sounds like a Roman Catholic incantation. It’s an alien voice that could be that of a priest, or a computer. His work is a “gospel of greed”, telling of “Somali pirates” and “Ponzi schemes”. Interspersed throughout are well worn phrases from the Bible - “Treat others the way you would like others to treat you” and “the word made flesh”. “I’m a man”, he repeats, “Pray for me”, and it sounds like a howl from an isolated character adrift in a messy modern world. “Mind – body – division/ Separation from church and state.” The numerous elisions in his piece emphasis certain phrases – “I am a man”, “Declare Independence!” which in isolation sound like primordial howls but are soon followed by anticlimaxes that could be culled from popular culture or the media – “I am a man... eating machine”, “Declare independence...Israel and Palestine.”
Olivia Plender, Craig Burnett and Dr Roger Quallen
Artist Olivia Plender and writer and art critic Craig Burnett take to the stage.
Burnett introduces the piece by saying that he and Plender share an interest in the filmmaker Johann Riding. He explains that his films are in tatters and a book that they are collaborating on is to bring these scraps together. Burnett introduces Dr Roger Quallen to the audience as one of the world’s experts on Johann Riding, who then proceeds to read some biographical details about the filmmaker. “Johann Riding was born in the forest and died in obscurity,” he says, and that sadly no one will ever have the pleasure of seeing one of his films in their entirety. “It is essential” he says, “to collect his scraps and fragments into a whole” – a point that recalls TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, perhaps, in which the narrator is tasked with shoring up the fragments of his life. It’s a necessarily onerous task. Their project is one of excavation, trying to piece together the various scraps into a narrative yet so much of what is reported is unreliable. Dr Quallen litters his biographical account with phrases such as “fanciful history” and “risibly implausible”.
We arrive at The Lost Clown, Riding’s supposed masterpiece. Dr Quallen mentions that because of its “excoriating” content, it never received any institutional support from the artworld. Burnett takes over to give a synopsis of the script, or what exists of it, and what results sounds rather like an Orwellian tale of political upheaval: a clown is tasked with improving the performance of a flagging circus, rife with dissident voices. In order to properly take control, he is advised to “Dish out a little abuse from time to time”. He is himself shortly overthrown by a chant devised by his disillusioned circus colleagues.
The three then proceed to read the script – an “artefact” found in the filmmaker’s apartment when he died. They read from page 78 (which they suppose is the denouement of the film) and the chant, a childlike, mean little ditty punctuated with dirty language, is finally given voice.
Biography
Olivia Plender was born in London in 1977, where she lives and works. A visual artist, her work draws from a wide range of sources, from 18th century political satire and popular printing to Theatre of the Absurd. Recent exhibitions include her solo show Aadieu Adieu Apa (Goodbye, Goodbye Father) at Gasworks and Tate Triennial 2009, Tate Britain.
THE WEEK-END BOOK, published on the occassion of the Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon, Sara MacKillop, 2009.
Biography
Sara MacKillop is an artist living and working in London. Recently she has been included in group exhibitions at Dicksmith Gallery, London; Manuela Klerkx, Milan; and a two person show with Ian Kiaer at the International Project Space, Birmingham. Her book works include 50 Envelope Windows (2008) and 32 Photocopied Pages (2009).
Biographies
Susan Hiller's work has been described as an archaeology of the unconscious of our culture' and is exhibited internationally. She was born in the USA and is based in London. Her recent books include The Provisional Texture of Reality (2008) and Auras and Levitations: Homage to Marcel Duchamp/Homage to Yves Klein (2008)
Sue Hubbard is a freelance art critic, novelist and award-winning poet. Her publications include the poetry volumes Everything Begins with the Skin (1994) and Ghost Station (2004), the novel Depth of Field (2000) and a short story collection Rothko’s Red (2008). She writes regularly on contemporary art for a variety of publications.
The artist Susan Hiller presents poet Sue Hubbard, who is also a freelance art critic.
“I’m not a performance poet”, she says, “I’m a lyrical poet, though I do write a lot about art and some say my poems resemble paintings.” She reads one taken from Bonnard’s Nude in the bathtub, after explaining that it is of his wife, who was neurasthenic. It’s an extremely touching piece about intimacy and the desire to protect one’s partner from their demons.
She proceeds to read the poem that features on the walls of a tunnel linking Waterloo to the IMAX cinema on the Southbank. It’s a lovely piece, urging us to be unafraid of the subterranean world. She also reads a love poem – or rather an “after-love poem”. As she wisely points out, when you’re in love you’re far too busy being in love to be able to write poetry. It’s full of painterly descriptions of the Norfolk coast and tells of the anguish that swells when a relationship dies.
Michael Horvitz is introduced to the stage, a poet who famously performed at the legendary 1965 International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall alongside Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. “If you get cold, feel free to dance and leap. We’re not in church” he says. He takes his own advice, gesticulating and throwing his limbs around to a frantic poem about London living. He goes on to read from a picture poem whose subject is the word Serpentine. With bouncing urgency he recites:
Serpentine,
Elephantine,
Turpentine!
Horovitz sings, he speaks in various accents, he plays what looks like a homemade instrument – he seems as much an entertainer as a poet, and the audience is rapt.
His experimental bent is communicated in a poem dedicated to the late composer John Cage. His words were originally set to a score in which the only notes used were C-A-G-E - D-E-A-D. Here is an example from it:
Cage, Dead
Uncaged, Head
Flying ears
Soundless bones
[He coughs] That was an interpolation.
Biography
Michael Horovitz is an internationalist polymath. He has edited and published New Departures, and coordinated the Poetry Olympics festivals for 50 years: www.poetryolympics.com His magnum opus, A New Waste Land (New Departures/Central Books, 2007) was described in The Independent as "A deeply-felt clarion call from the radical underground".
French-Norwegian writer Caroline Bergvall is something of a polyglot, writing in French, Norwegian and English. Her work moves across various media and as a result she has not only been published but also worked on projects at art institutions including the Tate Modern and MoMA in New York. She reads a poem in English, though peppered with the odd French phrase. The recital is replete with tics and alien sounds, words mangled and shortened. As she performs, her whole body moves and sways, suggesting her recital is as much a musical experience as a traditional reading. A last poem shows her linguistic skills, split as it is between English and Norwegian. The lines seem to run into each other, with the English cut short only to be taken up and continued in Norwegian.
Biography
Caroline Bergvall is a French-Norwegian writer and interdisciplinary poet based in London, working across media, languages, and artforms. Publications include: Eclat (1996), Goan Atom (2001), Fig (2005), and chapbooks Cropper (2008), and Plessjør (2008). She has worked with MukHa, Antwerp; Tate Modern, London; Hammer Museum, LA; and MOMA, New York.
Gerhard Ruehm & Monika Lichtenfeld
Biographies
Gerhard Rühm was born 1930 in Vienna. A writer, composer and visual artist, he lives in Cologne and Vienna. In the 1950s he was a founding member of the ‘Wiener Gruppe’. Recent literary works include Momentgedichte und Kurzgeschichten (2001) and Masoch – Eine Rituelle Rezitation (2003). His collected works are published by Matthes & Seitz, Berlin. Courtesy Christine König Galerie, Wien/Vienna.
Monika Lichtenfeld was born in 1938 in Düsseldorf. She is a critic, music publicist and poetry editor. Since the 1980s she has also been a performer and interpreter of experimental poetry. She was the editor of the Collected Writings by György Ligeti (2007).
Artist Liliane Lijn plays a poetic game with the audience. With the gusto that comes from years of performance work that required audience participation, she rallies four volunteers to come up to the stage to “play”, after distributing sheets of paper detailing the rules of the game. The aim is to write a poem that is written by a group, turning upside down the notion that poetry is an inherently solipsistic activity.
Four women take to the stage to participate. They are each dealt cards from a stack Lijn holds, all of them bearing words. Of the handful of cards they are dealt, they must choose the ones they want to keep. The result? A kind of scrabble board in which the tiles are words instead of letters and the results are the lines of a poem. It’s an interesting concept that raises the question of whether or not one requires solitude to compose poetry, or indeed the rules of grammar and syntax. A game with its own rules that dispenses with those that traditionally govern speech makes this fun indeed for all the family. Finally, all the cards are flipped over to make a new poem.
Biography
Liliane Lijn is an American artist working in London. She is known for her Poem Machines (1962) and her work with light. Her Poemcones (1965-1968) were exhibited in Poor.Old.Tired.Horse (2009) at the ICA, London. In the context of this exhibition, Lijn staged the performance Power Game. Her work is held in numerous public collections.
Biography
M/M (Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag) live and work in Paris and have worked on projects together since 1992. Their work encompasses contemporary art, design, and fashion contexts, and their production includes books, exhibitions, opera sets, fashion branding, and music graphics. In 2008 their major exhibition Vision Tenace, took place at Centre Georges Pompidou.
Hans Ulrich Obrist tells an anecdote about Alasdair Gray: on a visit of various artists’ studios in Glasgow, he noticed that each one contained a collection by Gray. Hugely influential in the artworld, from Glasgow to its outposts, Scotsman Gray is a multitalented painter, playwright, poet and literary historian. He reads from a collection entitled Old Negatives (all about love’s passing, he explains) including a poem entitled Married that takes inspiration from an ancient Egyptian engraving of an entwined royal couple. The sculptor, he reads, gives form to what only a man and wife can feel: it is an ancient but universal portrait of intimacy. Moving on to another, more political collection, he reads what he calls “an old-fashioned one about old-fashioned dictators”, a poem that describes a character desperately wanting attention, with a penchant for bloodshed and loud speeches. Another poem called Post-Modernism raises a titter from the audience with its sweeping, self-reflexive title. He finished his set with a poem about the history of Britain and, of course, its relationship with Scotland.
Biography
Alasdair Gray was born in 1934 and after training as a painter became a playwright, novelist, poet and literary historian. Among his publications are the novel Lanark (1981), the poetry collections Old Negatives (1989) and Sixteen Occasional Poems (2000), and the collection of plays A Gray Play Book (2009).
Jacques Roubaud comes to the stage, and those who attended yesterday will have already heard some of his poems, recited by artist Dominique Gonzalez Foerster. A former member of the Oulipo group, Roubaud is, as Hans Ulrich Obrist points out, a “hero to many, many artists.” He reads a lively piece in English that details an interchange in which a writer asks someone, in amusingly over-formal language, to confirm whether or not they have received a letter from him. The rejoinder plays with the conventions of letter-writing, courteously replying to the question of receipt but evading everything else.
He proceeds to read a poem in memory of his grandmother, who moved from Vichy France in 1942 to the US. Roubaud recalls her incredible descriptions of the plentiful breakfasts she enjoyed in America, which impressed his family so much that they decided to move there via steam-liner. The poem is a touching piece that imagines a steam-liner asking questions of the moon.
Lamenting the fact that those who do not read French cannot understand his poems, he decided to write one that “would be easy for most people to understand”. His poem, Zero Un, involves repetitions of those numbers over and over again, with the sounds relayed as though in a multi-voice conversation.
Biography
Jacques Roubaud was born in 1932, and is a poet and mathematician. He has been a member of the Oulipo group since 1966. A former professor of mathematics and poetics, his publications in English translation include: The Loop (2008).
Writer and artist Stuart Brisley reads several poems while three screens project a video that bears striking stylistic similarities to those of Paul McCarthy: a revolting, paint-splattered artist is shown at work in his studio, smearing his face and body with paint. It’s an absurd picture, and it ends with the image of the artist’s mouth covered with white paint and open in what looks like a scream or hysterical laugh. Brisley accompanies the video by reading a dark poem called Death Fugue.
Biography
Stuart Brisley has been at the forefront of the social and political debate within the visual arts for five decades as a multi media artist in performance, painting, sculpture and installation, film, video and as a writer. Currently he has a one person show at England & Co in London.
Gilbert and George arrive and Hans Ulrich Obrist says that there could not be a marathon without them, as they have been involved in the Serpentine Gallery Marathon events since their inception in 2006. They greet the audience in unison and proceed to read a series of limericks, each of which begins with the word “Two young men”. Some are youthfully innocent, some tragic.
They continue with poems from Eight Pink Elephants, 1973, a humorous series that detail various booze-fuelled encounters, all delivered with typical gentlemanly charm, and readings from their 1981 video The World of Gilbert and George.
Biography
Since first meeting at Saint Martin's School of Art, London, in 1967, Gilbert & George have devoted their lives to the creation of their art. They have subsequently achieved international acclaim, across successive generations, for a body of work that is as deeply felt as it is universally accessible. Their art is moral, violent, tirelessly questioning and visually extreme. The themes explored by the artists are common to all humankind: sex, money, nationhood, individual and social relationships, language and nature.
David Robilliard read by The Robilliards (Leo Burley & Rosemary Turner)
David Robilliard’s representatives, The Robilliards (Leo Burley & Rosemary Turner), are introduced by Gilbert and George, and they read poems by the late author. His conversational poems deliver sharp observations about chattering society that suggest a hatred of superficiality and platitudes. Wise words stream forth on the subject of relationships such as “the object of one’s perception, becomes the subject of the self”. Tempering the sadness that arises out of various failed relationships are brief sexual experiences that are saucily imparted.
Biographies
David Robilliard (1952-1988) was born in Guernsey. In 1970 he moved to London to become an artist and poet. Gilbert & George published his first book, Inevitable (1984) as well as the posthumous volume Life Isn’t Good, It’s Excellent (1993). The Van Abbemuseum have also published Swallowing Helmets (1987). He was the subject of a retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1993.
‘David Robilliard was the sweetest, kindest, most infuriating, artistic, foul-mouthed, witty, sexy, charming, handsome, thoughtful, unhappy, loving, and friendly person we ever met. Over the nine years of our friendship David came closer to us than any other person. He will live forever in our hearts and minds.
Starting with pockets filled with disorganized writings and sketches, he went on to produce highly original poetry, drawings, and paintings. His truthfulness, sadness, desperation, and love of people gave his work a brilliance and beauty that stands out a mile.
Not a day passes without our thinking of David. His works live on for us all as a spiritual, cultural force and a great lesson in human love.’
-Gilbert and George
Leo D. Burley met David Robilliard at a performance poetry gig in the late 1980s and promptly enlisted in The Robilliards - a stand-up duo that read David's poetry in clubs and bars around London. After David's death, Leo went on to become a journalist and documentary maker. His forthcoming films include The Marchioness and Me on 13th October on BBC1, 10.35pm and on BBCiplayer during the Poetry Marathon weekend.
Original 1980s style icon Rosemary Turner’s career has taken in amongst others Cafe de Paris, Limelight, Ministry of Sound and EGG to include promotions, event management and showcasing new talent. She has worked with some of Britain’s most unique and talented individuals, including David Robilliard. Such is her respect for David she named her son Callum Robilliard Turner.
Artist and lyricist Nathan Cash Davidson brings a more contemporary definition of poetry to the event, rapping to a beat transmitted through speakers. His lyrical picture of a dark metropolis suggests that the city has its own poetic language, though it’s often not pretty. He is quite literally breathless after his rapid-fire recitation.
Biography
Nathan Cash Davidson was born in 1988 in London. He graduated as a painter from Wimbledon College of Art in 2007, with works whose ‘hallucinatory reality’ are accompanied by poetic written narratives. He is also a lyricist and occasional rapper with The Juliets.
The legendary Vito Acconci takes the mike. The poet, performance artist, pioneer of the avant-garde and creator of poetry magazine 0-9, Acconci provides one of the best examples of a dialogue between art and the spoken word.
He starts with what he calls “page space” poetry, which he worked on in the mid-to-late 1960s. Projected on screens around him is a poem in which words intercut a series of blank spaces. The second part deals with what Acconci calls “people space” and installations from the late 70’s. One is called Gangster Sister from Chicago and details a conversation absorbed by two walls. He reads in a gravelly Michigan accent that is horribly threatening, delivering snippets about dead bodies and the like, and recalls the old saying that walls have ears. His reading proceeds to the 1980s and to an essay about architecture and the structure of a house, with the object as sculpture progressing eventually to actual dwelling. The fourth part of the reading moves to the 1990s and to the notion of public space which, he says, is the city itself, its circuits and roads. In other words, “public space is life on the loose”.
The final section deals with the current, soon-to-end decade and its architecture, taking its cue from the strange architectural glass pods, or “nodes” that dot art institutions and plazas in cities all over the western world.
Biography
From a background of writing and then art in the 1960s and 1970s, Vito Acconci became a designer and architect, and formed Acconci Studio in 1988. They mix poetry and geometry, computer-scripting and sentence-structure, narrative and biology. They are now working on a floating park above train-tracks in Vienna, face-to-face seating for an amphitheatre in Stavanger, a strip-mall makeover in Georgia.
Geoffrey Hill begins his reading telling the audience that in all his years reading poetry out loud, he has never been as nervous as he currently is. It’s something to do with the wrist-bands we’re all given to wear to the event – they remind him of hospitals.
He tells the audience he has written some raps, collected in a book entitled Speech Speech. There are 120 poems collected therein, the number taken after de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. He reads several of these, which address some of the more toxic and pressing political issues of the day. He reads one responding to the death of Princess Diana, with whom, he quickly assures the audience, he is “most sympathetic”. An example of a line from the piece: “Christ almighty, even the buses are kneeling.”
Biography
Geoffrey Hill was born in 1932 in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England. His collections of poetry include For the Unfallen (1958) and The Triumph of Love (1998). His Selected Poems was published by Penguin in 2006. He has received numerous honours and awards and is now University Professor Emeritus of Boston University, Massachusetts.
Jeremy Reed/Itchy Ear/The Ginger Light
Night falls. Poet, writer and protégé of the late JG Ballard, Jeremy Reed, and musician Itchy Ear, present an encounter between poetry and music with a multimedia performance called Gingerlight.
Reed recites a poem about Rimbaud set to the propulsive beat of electronic music played by Itchy Ear, while behind them three screens project a fast-moving video. Reed intermittently hurls sequins over the stage and at the audience, a gesture that puts one in mind of a transitory, dissolving disco ball. “May you all dazzle with sequins from the gingerlight”, he says, before proceeding to read what he describes as the “best pop poem ever”: it probably is. The music is hypnotic, while Reed’s recital is mellifluous and dreamy. They go on to perform a sombre and moving elegy to the late actress Katrin Cartlidge – a reminder of how powerful the setting of words to minor chords can be.
Biography
The Ginger Light is a unique collaboration between poet and novelist Jeremy Reed and musician Itchy Ear. Together they create a performance dynamic unparalleled in British poetry, and an excitement usually only generated by pop. Jeremy Reed has been called by J. G. Ballard 'the most gifted poet working today,' and has published more than 40 books of award winning poetry and fiction, the latest being This Is How You Disappear (2007), West End Survival Kit (2009) and Bona Drag (2009). Of his recent novel The Grid, Pete Doherty wrote, 'Jeremy Reed is a legend. What more can you fucking ask?' His musical collaborations with Gerry McNee as The Ginger Light have taken in sold out performances at the ICA and the Horse Hospital in 2009. They aim for the stars.
There is a brief break in the live performances as the gallery screens Reading Dante by the artist Joan Jonas. Jonas’s interest in poetry was on display this summer at Daniel Birnbaum’s Arsenale show in Venice, in a video that gave a visual response to Dante’s Inferno. In the video screened tonight, the beginning of Purgatory is read aloud and accompanied initially by shadowy monochrome visuals and progressively light-filtered footage, reflecting the canticle’s trajectory from the dark at the bottom of Mount Purgatory to eventual light.
Biography
Joan Jonas was born in 1930 in New York City, where she lives and works. A pioneer of video/performance art, her work explores the relationship between new digital media and performance. Recent exhibitions include 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), Museu d’art contemporanei de Barcelona, Spain (2007) and Queens Museum of Art, New York (2003).
Up next, a musical performance set to Jonas Mekas’s work Requiem for the 20th Century. Its shadowy footage of upheaval, industry, leisure and cities on the move, is accompanied by a doleful violin, atmospheric electronic music and the frenzied reading of performer Edward Eke. “I embrace you new millennium, full of fool’s hope,” he howls at the performance’s climax, to the high-pitched screech of the violin.
Biographies
Jonas Mekas, born 1922 in Semeniskiai, Lithuania. He lives in New York City. A filmmaker, poet, curator, editor, distributor, archivist and artist. Mekas is one of the leading figures of independent and avant garde cinema. His film and video work is screened extensively worldwide and his poetry and diaries have been published internationally and translated into over 12 languages.
Edward Eke, born in London in 1986, is a musician, writer, performer and curator. He has released music under various guises, recently as 'The Pan I Am'. He co-runs the independent film company Machine Channel and the film society O DREAMLAND. His play Camusflage Krokodial featured at London Word Festival last year.
Poet Eileen Myles takes to the stage, having also read the day before. She observes that the event is something of a post-modern one – it’s the first poetry marathon she has experienced out of the poetry circuit. She reads a poem chosen by artist and activist Nancy Spero.
“When artists take on poetry the result is a little low-tech, much like any creative person who takes on a new creative discipline ... But if she’s about low-tech, then I’m about no-tech”. Accordingly, she reads a piece from her collection The Importance of Being Iceland, about a person visiting Iceland and being confronted by its awesome, largely tech-free landscape. She proceeds to reads another piece about unknowing, which she says is apt – after all, the marathon itself is all about unknowing and the process of acquiring knowledge. It’s about Icelandic song and poetry and Myles’s enthusiasm for the subject is infectious.
Poet, actor and musician Saul Williams arrives at the mike. He recites without reading or use of a cue, which is incredibly impressive given the density of his poem – an excerpt from a book called Said the bullet to the head – and the speed at which he delivers it. The performance eddies and flows, speeding up and slowing down, varying in volume and tone as it progresses. Like a preacher at a pulpit, he manages to hold the attention of the weary and now freezing audience. “Your weapons are phallic, all of them,” he admonishes, shortly before ending on the sober note: “We will wait for the past to die.”
Biography
Saul Williams was born in 1972 in Newburgh, New York. He is a poet, writer, actor and musician. His poetry has been published in The New York Times, Esquire, Bomb Magazine and African Voices, and he has released four poetry collections including Said the Shotgun to the Head (2003) and The Dead Emcee Scrolls (2008). He has toured and lectured worldwide.
Philippe Parreno* & Johan Olander* represented by Lizzie Waterworth
Actress Lizzie Waterworth (the voice of children’s cartoon Horrid Henry) reads from artist Philippe Parreno and Johan Olander’s book Parade She delivers the poems in a child’s voice, lending a jarring innocence to the initial tale of corruption and propaganda. “This is no child’s play”, she says, eyes wide. The other poems are charmingly ingenuous responses to such befuddling concepts as “reality”, for example, and phenomena of the natural world.
Biography
Philippe Parreno was born in Oran, Algeria in 1964. Working in a diverse range of media, Parreno creates works that question the boundaries between reality and fiction. Recent solo exhibitions include Musée National d'Art Moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou (2009) and Kunsthalle Zürich (2009). Parreno lives and works in Paris.
Karl Holmqvist returns to the stage. “It’s been a long day, and now we have darkness and silence,” he says, and after a pause: “Which is very nice.” He proceeds to read a poem he wrote for “Hans and for all of you.” It’s similar in sound to the piece he read at the beginning of the day, which was delivered almost as a song or invocation.
“I be a hurricane, rip-rip-ripping up trees”, he intones, sometimes in that order, sometimes with the word sequence rearranged. The line is also, incidentally, a lyric from Grace Jones’s song Hurricane/Cradle to Grave. Jones was originally meant to be reading as part of the marathon but sadly couldn’t attend – the piece is a rather touching homage to her.
Biographies
Karl Holmqvist is an artist living in Berlin and working with spoken and written text. His most recent publication is What's My Name? (2009). He has had solo exhibitions this year at Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch (Berlin), Gaga ARTE CONTEMPORANEO (Mexico City), Argos Arts in (Brussels) and at The White Cubicle Toilet Gallery (London).
Grace Jones is a Jamaican-American actress, model, and singer of enormous influence on popular and dance music, through albums such as Slave to the Rhythm (1985). She is a style icon, and has been a muse of Andy Warhol. She has collaborated with songwriters and poets such as Mark van Eyck and Brigitte Fontaine.
On finally to the last act of the marathon, who is none other than the prolific musician, producer and artist Brian Eno. He is joined Karl Hyde, from the band Underworld. Eno makes a quip about bringing a vase to the event – it could so easily have been a pottery marathon.
They read a poem to the tinkling, sombre tones of a piece of piano music. It’s really a duet, filled with random observations about the experiences of travel, films they have seen, conversations with family members and encounters with newsagents.
They proceed to a more up-tempo piece. Through the speakers come other voices: a breathy female one and a mangled, ghostly voice. All of a sudden numerous voices invade the airspace, creating a cacophony of competing, incomprehensible words. This is followed by a sinister duet between the two. Eno repeatedly asks the question What If? which Hyde responds to in a whispery, phone-stalker voice about the movements of a ‘waitress’. A dark and menacing piano tune plays in the background. “What if… He watched the waitress every day for years? What if… He secretly loved her?” It’s truly chilling.
A burst of industrial sounds comes through the speakers, and all of a sudden, the audience – lulled into a daze by the disturbing duet – snaps back to attention. It’s a loud, thumping send-off that reverberates in the surrounding trees: a breathtaking end to a magnificent day.
Biographies
Brian Eno, born 1948, is a composer, record producer, visual artist and theorist. Among others, he has worked with Roxy Music, David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, U2, Talking Heads, Coldplay and John Cale, and is one of the principal innovators of Ambient Music and Generative Music. He is a cofounder of The Long Now Foundation.
Karl Hyde is the lyricist, vocalist, and founding member of Underworld, which he and Rick Smith began in 1980. They have released around 30 albums, 2 books of poetry Mmm, Skyscraper I Love You (1994) and In the Belly of St Paul (2003), and are members of the creative collective Tomato.
Remote Participants
Etel Adnan*
Biography
Etel Adnan was born in Beirut in 1925 and is a renowned Lebanese-American poet, novelist, essayist and painter living in California and Paris. Among her works are Sitt Marie-Rose (1977), a novel on the Lebanese civil war and the poetic works The Arab-Apocalypse (1989) and Seasons (2008).
John Ashbery* (interviewed by Tim Griffin)
Édouard Glissant* (interviewed by Tim Griffin)
Biography
Édouard Glissant is a West Indian French-speaking poet, novelist and essayist, one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought. He founded the social sciences publication Acoma and, three years ago, the Institut du Tout-Monde. He lives between Martinique, Paris and New York, where he is Distinguished Professor of French Literature at CUNY.
Eugen Gomringer*
Biography
Eugen Gomringer is a Swiss-Bolivian poet living in Germany. As a leading initiator of Concrete Poetry, he is one of its most enduring proponents, having published the series konkrete poesie/poesia concreta (1960-5). Among several volumes of poetry, the collection das stundenbuch (1965) is published in five languages.
Grace Jones* and Mark van Eyck
Biography
Mark van Eyck was born in Oxford in 1966, and grew up in France. His father was a poet and painter. He has worked in many different artistic fields, and most recently collaborated with Grace Jones writing the lyrics on her latest albums. He lives in London.
Daljit Nagra*
Biography
Daljit Nagra comes from a Punjabi background and he was born and raised in London then Sheffield. His first collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! was published by Faber & Faber in 2007, and is winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection and Arts Council England Decibel Award.
Nancy Spero* (read by Eileen Myles)
Biography
Nancy Spero (born 1926 in Cleveland, Ohio), lives and works in New York City. As both artist and activist, Nancy Spero’s career has spanned fifty years. Recent exhibitions include Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2009), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2008), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) (2008), and the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007).
Please click here to download Hans Urlich Obrist's eulogy to the late Nancy Spero.
Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon Blog written by Laura Allsop, photographs by Mark Blower 2009
The Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects. It is held in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA. The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion Commission was conceived by Julia Peyton-Jones, Serpentine Gallery Director and Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes in 2000.
Head of Programmes: Sally Tallant
Public Programmes Curator: Nicola Lees
Public Programmes Assistants: Mia Jankowicz, Yesomi Umolu, Lucia Pietroiusti,
Special thanks to
Senior advisor: Tim Griffin
With additional advice from: Caroline Bergvall, Kenneth Goldsmith, Enrique Juncosa, Nick Laird, Eileen Myles, Vikram Seth, and the late Czesław Miłosz
Jacques Roubaud presenting at the Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon by Mathias Augustyniak (M/M)
Poetry Marathon, Park Nights 2009, Photograph Mark Blower
Poetry Marathon Programme
Saturday 17 October 2009
12.30 – 9.00 pm
Julia Peyton-Jones
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Tracey Emin
Tacita Dean
Agnès Varda
Kenneth Goldsmith
Holly Pester
Eleanor Bron
Enrique Juncosa/Boulevard Magenta
Michael Glover/The Bow Wow Shop
August Kleinzahler
Tom McCarthy & Henry Blofeld
John Giorno
Mladen Stilinović
Tim Griffin
Édouard Glissant*
John Ashbery*
Jimmie Durham
James Fenton
Nick Laird
Christodoulos Panayiotou
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Maria Mirabal
Sean Landers
Dominic Eichler
Barry Schwabsky
Sean Bonney
Eileen Myles
Olivier Garbay; Cerith Wyn Evans & friends
Richard Hell
Keren Cytter & Andrew Kerton
Kenneth G. Bostock, Cibelle & Pablo León de la Barra
Don Paterson
Charlie Dark
Nancy Spero*
Sunday 18 October 2009
12:00 – 8:00 pm
Julia Peyton-Jones
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Karl Holmqvist
Olivia Plender, Craig Burnett and Dr Roger Quallen
Sara MacKillop
Susan Hiller & Sue Hubbard
Michael Horovitz
Caroline Bergvall
Gerhard Rühm & Monika Lichtenfeld
Franz West* read by Gerhard Rühm
Liliane Lijn
Mathias Augustyniak (M/M)
Alasdair Gray
Jacques Roubaud
Stuart Brisley
Gilbert & George
David Robilliard read by The Robilliards (Leo Burley & Rosemary Turner)
Nathan Cash Davidson
Vito Acconci
Geoffrey Hill
Jeremy Reed/Itchy Ear/The Ginger Light
Joan Jonas*
Jonas Mekas* & Edward Eke
Eileen Myles
Saul Williams
Philippe Parreno* and Johan Olander* represented by Lizzie Waterworth
Grace Jones* & Karl Holmqvist
Brian Eno & Karl Hyde
Daljit Nagra*
Etel Adnan*
Eugen Gomringer*
All contributions will be approximately 15 minutes long
*Remote participant
Gustav Metzger attending the Poetry Marathon
Poetry Marathon programme conceived and designed by Scott King and George Shaw.
'Recently discovered letters from Philip Larkin to Monica Jones disclose that the poet became so obsessed with the hit television show ‘Baywatch’ that he considered writing to the producers and offering his services as their new leading man.'
Julia Peyton-Jones addressing the audience at the end of the Poetry Marathon
All photographs © Mark Blower, except where marked.
