Beyond Text Innovative Poetry Festival: Sunday

We have invited a diverse range of poets and artists from Folkestone, Kent, London, and beyond to show the ins and outs of contemporary innovative poetry. Some of them are experimental artists, some of them sit in the sweet spot between mainstream and innovative. What do they have in common? Their poetry and art are very now, very current, and very, very good.

Sunday's event begins with a participatory sound poetry performance. After which it will feature three poetry readings with Janani Ambikapathy, Iris Colomb, Stephen Mooney, Nell Perry, Michał Kamil Piotrowski and Karenjit Sandhu, concluding with a panel of experts talking about the visual side of poetry.

3-3.45pm
Participatory sound poetry performance with Sophie Stone and Jason Hodgson

4-4.50pm
Reading 5 - Iris Colomb, Nell Perry

5-5.50pm
Reading 6 - Janani Ambikapathy, Karenjit Sandhu

5.50-6.30pm BREAK

6.45-7.35pm
Reading 7 - Stephen Mooney, Michał Kamil Piotrowski

7.45pm-8.45pm
Presentation and print of innovative poetry
Expert panel with Janani Ambikapathy, Iris Colomb, Stephen Mooney, Nell Perry and Karenjit Sandhu. Hosted by Michał Kamil Piotrowski.

Download the full programme and view the festival website here (suitable for desktop and tablets).

Sophie Stone and Jason Hodgson will perform four sound works exploring the spoken word. Sophie and Jason both have a background in composing and performing experimental music, which includes improvisation, graphic scores, installations, and taking music outside of the concert hall. They will perform spoken word pieces including Sophie Stone’s “As Sure as Time...” (2016), Steve Gisby’s com-bi-na-to-ri-al-ly (revised 2018), Jason Hodgson’s Language is a Fictitious Fact (2013), and a new collaborative piece based on the text of John Cage’s Silence: Lectures and Writings (1939). Three duets will be followed by a performance including audience participation.

Janani Ambikapathy feels oddly estranged from/in English. She is perfectly fluent, proficient even and yet she can’t shake off the feeling that she is an interloper or that English has been loaned to her provisionally. This has nothing to do with being an Indian person writing in English or a colonial, aspirational complex. The complexities of Indian English writing, and vernacular literature etc., are not relevant here.

Iris Colomb’s practice merges poetry and other art forms to explore different relationships between visual and spoken forms of text through projects involving performance, book-objects and experimental translation. Her performances have involved human collaborators as well as metal tubes, massive spools, hand-held shredders, red bins, hundreds of cigarettes, shouting over hairdryers, spitting in books and faces, and turning audiences into poetry machines.

Jason Hodgson is a composer who is averse to labels, but if you were to label the work they compose the closest label would be musical games. The more mainstream term would be “experimental”, however they believe that this implies there are some formal processes involved, when largely their process (for want of a better word) is “play”.

Stephen Mooney is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Poetry Coordinator at the University of Surrey. Amongst other things, he co-runs the small poetry press, Veer Books. His practice varies across modes, but is often connected to gaming methodologies and mechanics as these collide with language and poetry, from visual to lexical to performative to sculptural to sound.

Nell Perry’s poetic practice is deeply informed by an interest in the politics of voice – of what it means to speak, who is able to speak and who is not, what speaking does and does not mean, what it means to be spoken for and spoken to, and how poetry might explore modes of inarticulacy, as well as what is unspeakable, in both a literal and figurative sense.

Michał Kamil Piotrowski is a visual poet and text artist living and working in London/Folkestone. He writes experimental, visual and technology-powered poetry. He enjoys making poetry interactive and he mostly works with found text. The themes he explores the most are technology, politics, love and mental illnesses.

Karenjit Sandhu is a poet and artist. Her interests include artists' books, archives, performance poetry, and poetry costumes. Her debut poetry collection "young girls!" focuses on the art and life of artist Amrita Sher-Gil.

Sophie Stone is a composer of experimental music based in Kent, England. Her interests include open notation, drone and ambient music, quiet music, improvisation, listening, experiences of silence, longform music, collaboration and audio-visual work.

Age recommendation:
18+

Beyond Text's COVID-19 policy

We want to make sure that everyone is safe. We would please encourage you to do a lateral flow test before attending and do not come if you show any COVID symptoms. We would also encourage you to wear a mask to keep others safe. Thank you for your understanding!