Walking with Gerry Loose

There is about a week left to share some time with poet Gerry Loose down at Dawyck Botanic Gardens near Peebles in Scotland. He will be there until the end of September.

The gardens are full of the sugar and spicy smells of evergreen trees, the high quiet repetitive call of goldcrests (I saw a family working the branches together overhead) and when I visited the omnipresent sounds of the Scrape Burn after heavy rain the day before. Not to mention the jewel like blusher mushrooms I thought were a precious stone caught in the stones of the path.

Find out more about what is happening on Gerry's blog here http://walkingwithpoets.com/

Riverbank listening – a world listening day project

An epically poetandgeek kind of way to spend Thursday week by listening to a river and writing about it.

Do you want to join international artists and environmentalists in a global listening project? People from all over the world are invited to spend some time during the day listening to their environment, be it urban, rural or wilderness.

Are you interested in contributing to a creative celebration of the River Tweed and its tributaries or of your own nearest river system?

Celebrate world listening day on the 18th July in this case by lying down by a river junction pool and writing down what you hear...

You can find out more here http://workingthetweed.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/riverbank-listening-a-world-listening-day-project/

More on Bob Cobbing

An original recording from 1972,  a selection of Bob Cobbing's sound poems and interview with Charles Amirkhanian recorded in Cobbing’s home. Bob Cobbing (1920 - 2002) was a British sound, visual, concrete and performance poet and a central figure in what has been described as the British Poetry Revival.

Here for the recording http://radiom.org/detail.php?omid=OTG.1972.09.20.c1. You will have to register first.

Soundart Radio

Have you ever wanted to make your own radio show? Then Soundart Radio can help you. Poet radio time again.

Perhaps you recorded a show on
 a cassette when you were a teenager and spent a lot of time alone. Maybe you have a list in your head that you could read out. Or perhaps you're a poet who lives in the trees, an angel, a roadkill chef or can recognise birds by their songs. If so, send some poems to poetandgeek.com.

If you are interested in more technical skills, go here: http://www.soundartradio.org.uk/projects/creative-radio-course/

Or just listen to birds and other cool stuff here http://www.soundartradio.org.uk/

Super highway sound art Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik was a sound and video artist born in Korea in 1932 who worked in America and Germany. A global artist, he is often said to be the first video artist. He also coined the term super highway in 1974; one of the first to do so. His last works centred on our fragmentary response to the internet. He died in 2006.

He said that life is half natural and half technological. "Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life". His works TV garden and Video fish seem to exemplify this feeling. You can view the latter here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiOeZxE5twQ. (It is labelled as the former btw.)

Samples of his work can be found here: http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/821234899001/ and http://www.ubu.com/sound/paik.html

More on Nam June Paik at http://www.paikstudios.com/

SoundCloud

An interactive way to share a poetry podcast; your users can comment on what you do line by line. Not to mention a recording feature and the waveform where you can see the shape of your sounds via a waveform player.

The timed comments feature lets you get feedback at specific moments throughout the waveform. Pinpoint exactly what's working well and you can chat about it. I like it.

Find out more at:
http://soundcloud.com/

or check out some readings at;

http://soundcloud.com/search?q%5Bfulltext%5D=poetry.

E-Poetry [ 2011 ] : International Digital Language | Media | Arts Festival

E-Poetry runs from May 18-21, 2011 at State University of New York at Buffalo, United States. The event claims to be the "longest-running and definitive digital literature festival in the world"; previous events have been all over the western world including West Virginia, London, Paris, and Barcelona. 

There is still time for proposals for presentations that are truly exceptional in nature.

The festival promises 4 days of:

• festival performances
• exhibitions
• artistic presentations of poetics statements
• scholarly papers
• talks
• and celebration of creative, visionary, and imaginative poeisis at the cutting edge of the triumphant spirit of the arts in the digital age.

The festival presents world class e-poetry, digital and media arts, multilingual poetics, dance, music, and other forms of avant-garde artistic language, media and scholarly practice.

Find out more about the E-Poetry festival at: http://epc.buffalo.edu/e-poetry/2011/. Also take a look at the Electronic Poetry Centre at Buffalo http://epc.buffalo.edu/ which is interesting. And here is a definition of poiesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poiesis which I had never heard of before but probably you like me kind of guessed right both what it means and what it implies.