A event on Friday 25th October. The event starts at 19:00.
*Ticket (£6) includes refreshments & 10% off the author's book. 20 capacity, seated & accessible. Some tickets are allocated as PWYC starting at £0.00: please select this option if you need to do so.*
Tottering State: Poetry for Unsteady Times. Readings & Q&A featuring the best in experimental, small press & innovative poetry from the UK & beyond.
Tottering State #4: Experiments in Landscape. Join us for an evening of radical landscape poetry to celebrate the launch of Harriet Tarlo's latest collection "Cut Flowers II" (Guillemot Press, 2024), with poetry from Bristol poet Rowan Evans (A Method, A Path), followed by discussion and audience Q&A.
Some time in 2016, Harriet Tarlo found a form and started writing "Cut Flowers." All kinds of materials found a place to go that might allow, to some extent, for the contradictory nature of life and language, their depth and shallowness. This is the second volume of "Cut Flowers" to be published by Guillemot Press of a series that Tarlo says she might never stop writing. It holds four sections engaged with ‘Forestry, Folk,’ ‘Passed, Passing,’ ‘Coastal Kestrel’ and ‘Gallery, Ground’ reflecting engagement with place, environment, art, music and death. Ultimately however, "Cut Flowers 2" is as much about this elusive, alluring little form as anything. The artwork is from the late & much-missed Judy Tucker's series of paintings, *Dark Marsh*.
On "Cut Flowers":
“Cut Flowers” is a collection I have made many return visits to and journeys through. Like Tarlo’s earlier collection, "Field," the only tether present on the page is the turn of the seasons. Beyond this familiar rhythm (or perhaps increasingly unfamiliar rhythm) lies an inventive and playful form which seems to simultaneously provide structure whilst remaining rangy and generous with the potential of the page and the images and ideas that leap from it, depending of course, on how you choose to read it. These tiny poems inhabit both the deeply intimate and the universal – the refutation of the linear here is wonderfully expansive and gives way to multiple meanderings, meanings and readings.
––Fiona Cameron
Each poem has an initial line or question followed by eight lines which are arranged into two columns, with the left-hand column much narrower than the right hand one. [...] the constraining columns seem to take us deeper into landscape and life, suggesting new directions, in spite of, or because of, the complexity of creating and understanding the different versions of the poem - how it is cut up.
––Frances Presley
On "A Method, A Path":
Formally inventive, rich in aslant borrowings, unafraid of visual and textual experiment, it is an exhilarating debut'
––The Guardian
Harriet Tarlo is a poet and academic, working in experimental and open forms on the page and in art spaces. She is interested in place, landscape and environment, modernist and avant-garde poetry, and gender. Her poetry is published by Shearsman, Etruscan and Wild Pansy Press and featured in numerous poetry magazines and journals. She collaborated for over ten years with the artist Judith Tucker, exhibiting widely here and abroad and publishing five artists’ books with Wild Pansy Press. Her most recent publications are "Cut Flowers" (2021); with Judith Tucker, "Saltwort" (2022) and with Kym Martindale, 2Spillways2 (2022). She edited the influential anthology "The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry" (Shearsman, 2011). She is a Professor of Ecopoetry and Poetics at Sheffield Hallam University.
Rowan Evans is a poet, composer and sound artist whose debut poetry collection is A Method, A Path (Bloomsbury Poetry, 2023). His chapbook The Last Verses of Beccán (Guillemot Press, 2019) won the Michael Marks Award for Poetry. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2015 and a selection of his work appears in Penguin Modern Poets 7: These Hard and Shining Things (Penguin, 2018). Rowan writes and produces music for theatre, performance, film and installation, with recent work including “Meadow Wall” (Limbic Cinema, 2022), Antigone (Bristol Old Vic Young Company, 2020) and “How to Start a Fire” (Stockroom / FEN / Rising Arts, 2020. He was a Creative Fellow at University College London 2019-20 and in 2022 completed his practice-based PhD research, “Ancient Tongues: Radical Encounters with the Early Medieval in Late Modernist and Experimental Poetry”, at Royal Holloway University of London.
Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio)
Tottering State: Poetry for Unsteady Times. Readings & Q&A featuring the best in experimental, small press & innovative poetry from the UK & beyond.
Tottering State #4: Experiments in Landscape. Join us for an evening of radical landscape poetry to celebrate the launch of Harriet Tarlo's latest collection "Cut Flowers II" (Guillemot Press, 2024), with poetry from Bristol poet Rowan Evans (A Method, A Path), followed by discussion and audience Q&A.
Some time in 2016, Harriet Tarlo found a form and started writing "Cut Flowers." All kinds of materials found a place to go that might allow, to some extent, for the contradictory nature of life and language, their depth and shallowness. This is the second volume of "Cut Flowers" to be published by Guillemot Press of a series that Tarlo says she might never stop writing. It holds four sections engaged with ‘Forestry, Folk,’ ‘Passed, Passing,’ ‘Coastal Kestrel’ and ‘Gallery, Ground’ reflecting engagement with place, environment, art, music and death. Ultimately however, "Cut Flowers 2" is as much about this elusive, alluring little form as anything. The artwork is from the late & much-missed Judy Tucker's series of paintings, *Dark Marsh*.
On "Cut Flowers":
“Cut Flowers” is a collection I have made many return visits to and journeys through. Like Tarlo’s earlier collection, "Field," the only tether present on the page is the turn of the seasons. Beyond this familiar rhythm (or perhaps increasingly unfamiliar rhythm) lies an inventive and playful form which seems to simultaneously provide structure whilst remaining rangy and generous with the potential of the page and the images and ideas that leap from it, depending of course, on how you choose to read it. These tiny poems inhabit both the deeply intimate and the universal – the refutation of the linear here is wonderfully expansive and gives way to multiple meanderings, meanings and readings.
––Fiona Cameron
Each poem has an initial line or question followed by eight lines which are arranged into two columns, with the left-hand column much narrower than the right hand one. [...] the constraining columns seem to take us deeper into landscape and life, suggesting new directions, in spite of, or because of, the complexity of creating and understanding the different versions of the poem - how it is cut up.
––Frances Presley
On "A Method, A Path":
Formally inventive, rich in aslant borrowings, unafraid of visual and textual experiment, it is an exhilarating debut'
––The Guardian
Harriet Tarlo is a poet and academic, working in experimental and open forms on the page and in art spaces. She is interested in place, landscape and environment, modernist and avant-garde poetry, and gender. Her poetry is published by Shearsman, Etruscan and Wild Pansy Press and featured in numerous poetry magazines and journals. She collaborated for over ten years with the artist Judith Tucker, exhibiting widely here and abroad and publishing five artists’ books with Wild Pansy Press. Her most recent publications are "Cut Flowers" (2021); with Judith Tucker, "Saltwort" (2022) and with Kym Martindale, 2Spillways2 (2022). She edited the influential anthology "The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry" (Shearsman, 2011). She is a Professor of Ecopoetry and Poetics at Sheffield Hallam University.
Rowan Evans is a poet, composer and sound artist whose debut poetry collection is A Method, A Path (Bloomsbury Poetry, 2023). His chapbook The Last Verses of Beccán (Guillemot Press, 2019) won the Michael Marks Award for Poetry. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2015 and a selection of his work appears in Penguin Modern Poets 7: These Hard and Shining Things (Penguin, 2018). Rowan writes and produces music for theatre, performance, film and installation, with recent work including “Meadow Wall” (Limbic Cinema, 2022), Antigone (Bristol Old Vic Young Company, 2020) and “How to Start a Fire” (Stockroom / FEN / Rising Arts, 2020. He was a Creative Fellow at University College London 2019-20 and in 2022 completed his practice-based PhD research, “Ancient Tongues: Radical Encounters with the Early Medieval in Late Modernist and Experimental Poetry”, at Royal Holloway University of London.
Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio)