the MARIAN REDWAN PRIZE has just been awarded to the winner of our literary competition last year for (and OFF_ quotes here) “the overall level of texts and work presented as relating to literature at the festival, sponsored by the friends of the Award Patron, the sum of 1000 zł is received ex aequo by:
the city needs my blood
between Bracka and Bankowa Streets marked ambulances
fog falling on provincial walls broken berliner is almost next door
the London variety falling on Jack the Ripper
he’s from round here Silesian vampire with a hammer
over me a low from Scandinavia
Jesus what kitsch reindeer blue post-ice-age lakes by numbers
I stumble on the remains of my own blood
take my body and the blood divide amongst yourselves
“Historically, few genres have faced more derision (or parody) than performance poetry. The common charge? That it’s boring, embarrassing, or both, capable of inducing deep sleep and a clenched sphincter at the same time. Worse still, it’s got a reputation for taking itself too seriously. And to material-thirsty comics, that’s the equivalent of labelling your milk in a communal student fridge.”
From Kevin Eldon to Tim Clare, Edinburgh has showcased the increasingly blurred boundaries between comedy and poetry…
Nancy Groves in the Guarian Online… click image below to read more
The entire Maintenant series can be viewed here – www.maintenant.co.uk & we have now confirmed the date of the next Maintenant reading:
Ny Poesi: 3am magazine’s Maintenant interview series presents New Norwegian Poetry at the Rich mix (35 – 47 Bethnal Green Road, London. E1 6LA)
Saturday September 25th – 7pm – Entrance free to all
Jenny Hval / Endre Ruset / Paal Bjelke Andersen / Audun Mortensen
click image to learn more…
Write on. A cold writing.
Unutterably pale and desiccate.
Like a less than friendly dream, lunacy’s confidant.
Write on into the future, which has no gender or soul.
Driving through ashes. Through the dusk it crosses
with horrendous features, eyes of no colour.
Where a river runs trembling through dead quills.
Neil Bartlett enters a post-communist world in which gays hanker after the bad old days;
“If the official narrative of gay men’s lives over the last 50 years has been that of liberation and assimilation, then the unofficial storyline – shrieked in 1,000 bars, whispered in 1,000 cruising grounds – has been an equal and opposite one, celebrating the pleasures, energies and sheer indestructibility of unreconstructed queendom. And the queens in this first novel from Polish author Michal Witkowski, originally published in 2005, are as unreconstructed as they come.”
link via image below,
Antisemitism never went away.
It took on various new guises but it’s here and today raises its ugly head in various forms of deligitmisation of Israel and steady drip feeds of Anti Jewish feeling worldwide.
Aro Korol, A Catholic Polish film maker, has decided to tackle the issue using his film making talent to expose what happens even today in his own birth country and show how it is linked to global events. He is working on a documentary film, Hitler’s Daughter. The film will highlight Polish anti-Semitism, which Korol feels is rife. It will show links with the world’s current spate of demonization of Israel by Europe and the radical Islamic world…
read more by clicking on image below…
TO ALL VISITORS
the problem at present is not lack of material to publish, it is its excess… in getting ready to publish two books with two films in two countries in two months time, we’re finding it hard to keep fresh content updated each day.
rest assured good things are in the pipeline - an anthology of Poland’s 32 finest contemporary poets, with Rafal Gawin singled out with his own book as the promising voice of the future, with three more books planned before the year is out.
hold on to your horses, therefore, hold your hats, and trust our translations – the off_tide is rising…
marek kazmierski, editor
The Global Translation Initiative (GTI) is a joint venture of Dalkey Archive Press, English PEN, the Free Word Centre, and Arts Council England, in partnership with organizations throughout the global translation community as well as national arts councils in Canada, US, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
The Initiative was born out of a conference at the British Council in February 2008, where it was found that the crisis facing literary and cultural translation into the English language is in fact a shared problem of all the English-speaking countries. The translation crisis is a global crisis, and yet efforts to advocate for greater support for the translation community have up to now been contained mostly within each national community, with the result that the primary international relevance of the issue has not yet been fully established.
The goals of the GTI are to share information from the various sectors of English-language translation communities throughout the world (including funders, booksellers, writers, translators, media, and academic translation programs); to identify specific obstacles and sites of opportunity; to document the current state of translation into English globally and widely disseminate the results; and to create a multi-year campaign for change.
The first stage of the Initiative–an international survey of the various sectors of the translation community–is currently under way.
get more info by clicking image below…
A small group of leading French poets and mathematicians, the OULIPO work within a series of rigid rules and restrictions as a way of breaking into their subconscious minds.
Adapting a famous OLIPO constraint, Joe Dunthorne, Tim Clare and Ross Sutherland took up the challenge of the Univocalism – a poem using only one type of vowel. Discipline soon gave way to obsession, and as the rules began to take hold, the poets started to find hidden messages in the strangest of places.
Covering everything from Biblical mistranslation to school bullies and former WWE wrestler, Mr. Perfect, Found in Translation is a quest of arbitrary limits and new frontiers.
click on image below for more info…
“The Macbeth at La Monnaie is phenomenal – in theatrical as well as musical terms. Paul Daniel, the British conductor, brilliantly combines the visionariness of Warlikowski’s staging with the nervousness of Verdi’s music. He clashes the extremity-thundering winds with the lyricism of the strings, raising the volume, intensifying rhythms, amplifying the contrasts. Off-stage music is heard from a recording, which only enhances the adaptation’s filmic feel.”
BY Tomasz Cyz
to read more on BIWEEKLY, click image below…
A week of late night slam and jam performances celebrating the 80th birthday of Fringe legend and impresario Richard Demarco. In the anarchic spirit of artists/performers Tadeusz Kantor, Joseph Beuys and others (first brought to Edinburgh by Demarco), groups from the UK, Poland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Iceland, plus guest acts, converge on the Roxy after-hours to celebrate 20th and 21st century experimentation. Featuring a Polish vodka bar, this is late-night theatre of the new and unique. Curated by Michael Earley and Alexia Kokkali, with an introduction to each performance by Ricky Demarco.
it is early evening camp fires, aniseed
particles on women’s lips. it is listening to
the whisper of motorways coated in a transparent
film of lights like the preparation of our epoch,
the chill of equalizers made by Diora, Radiotechnika,
Unitra. it was all that. boys
carrying the cobalt seas in their eyes and a spade,
