2 minutes of type

Last weekend (or was it the weekend before? The days are all the same now….), The St. Bride Foundation put out a call for Letterpress Artists and designers to provide a two-minute tour of their print studio as part of the St Bride Foundation’s Virtual Wayzgoose.

However, The Caseroom is as locked-down and as out of bounds as most of the rest of the country – so he put together a two-minute talk about his work instead. Although it was more like three minutes if he’s honest. He was going to try and re-record it to get it down to two minutes, but he’d already recorded about 12 takes and just gave up and pressed send on the video.

Here’s Becky Chilcott introducing the event.

See the St. Bride Foundation Vimeo account for about fifteen different two minutes’ worth of letterpress delights.

Advertisement

manifest 55

Barrie’s collaboration for Klang Farben Text was with the german writer, playwright and radio play director, FALKNER.

FALKNER sees her work, in whatever medium, as manifestos, so after discussing their project ideas, FALKNER wrote MANIFEST 55 for the event, and on the first day they worked out a typographic narrative in the format of a concertina book as a record their work together.

A film of a small mock-up of the book was played during their Klang Farben Text performance with the final concertina book to be made as a small edition that could be given to each of the contributors, as well as the British Council, National Poetry Library London and the Lyrik Kabinett.

However. The whole event took place about a week before social distancing laws came into effect, and, as a result of the current global pandemic and lock-down, the book currently exists as a series of unglued pages sitting in the Book Arts’ Space at the University of Lincoln. Quietly waiting for the world to turn again and ‘normal’ service to be resumed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

klang farben text

In early March of this year, Barrie was invited to take part in Klang Farben Text, a collaborative event of visual poetry at the Lyrik Kabinett in Munich. Organised by Chris McCabe and Steven J Fowler, ‘Klang Farben Text was a unique, one of a kind, three-day visual poetry festival of performance and exhibition inspired by the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s and 60s. The project celebrated how that movement has impacted a new generation of poets and artists by engaging a dozen of the UK and Germany’s most dynamic visual poets, key to the contemporary European scene. The printed word was transformed into collaboration, recitation, film and performance, demonstrating how concrete poetry has transcended beyond the book and printing press into an experiential art form for the 21st Century’.

The keynote speaker on the first day was a very special guest, Eugen Gomringer, who opened the event with readings from his works.

Each of the collaborating poets then performed a piece of their own work (Barrie chose ‘A Song For An Art School) and a piece of significant English or German concrete poetry – for this Barrie chose Stuart Mills’ ‘Poems for my Shorthand Typist’, which was performed with apologies to Victor Borge.

Recordings of all the performances can be found on the European Poetry Festival Site, the British Council‘s literature page, or the Lyric Kabinett website.

talking about the design of poetry

The Poetry by Design Symposium at Leeds University made for a fascinating day. Fiona Becket (above) and Emma Trott chaired the panel sessions – and there was a wealth of insight from the speakers, as well as a fascinating selection of work as part of the exhibition.

 

Photo by Bronac Ferran

Barrie was the first speaker of the day and amongst other things, discussed the difficulty of ‘drawing’ fire with a typewriter.

Photo by Emma Trott

Photo by Bronac Ferran

And the particular advantages, and disadvantages of working with commercially ‘obsolete’ technologies(Believe it or not, he says he’d actually ironed that shirt).

The day ended with a series of performances, including the extremely powerful MOTHERBABYHOME by Kimberly Campanello.

In other news – The Typographic Dante was mentioned in an interview with Chris Warren (part of the Poetry Mini Interviews Blog) – he mentioned Barrie in the same breath as Christian Bok and Derek Beaulieu, so praise indeed.

 

poetry by design: a re-appraisal of visual poetics

Barrie has been invited to speak at the Poetry By Design symposium on visual and concrete poetry. Its aim is to stimulate conversations about visual poetics from the immediate pre-computer period while also considering the present moment and the futures of visual poetry.

This event coincides with the exhibition, ‘Poetry By Design’, which is open now until 23rd August in the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds. Curated by Professor Fiona Becket and Dr Emma Trott, the exhibition displays work by poets including Bob Cobbing, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Kimberly Campanello.

Please get in touch with Emma Trott with any questions: e.j.g.trott@leeds.ac.uk

Poetry By Design: schedule

9:30: Registration and coffee (Sheppard Room)

9:55: Welcome (Fiona Becket) (Education Room)

10:00: Panel I: (Education Room). Barrie Tullett – The Typographic Dante, Iris Colomb – Spill: showing and discussing a project between poetry and design

10:45: Panel II: (Education Room), Bronac Ferran – Hansjörg Mayer’s futura, Fiona Becket – Bob Cobbing, a British Internationalist, Natalie Ferris – The Intelligent Hand: Ana Hatherly and Visualising the Creative Act

12:00: Panel III: (Education Room), Julie Morrissy – “Looking and Listening”: Movement, Space, and Performance in Contemporary Irish Poetry, Florence Impens – The poem and the Archive: Kimberly Campanello’s MOTHERBABYHOME

12:45: Exhibition ‘tour’ and Q&A (Fiona Becket) (Education Room)

2pm: Panel IV: (Education Room), Alice Tarbuck – ‘‘An old frog/ jumps in’: Chinese and Japanese poetry in the work of Thomas A. Clark and Cid Corman’, Emma Trott – Language and Landscape: Simon Armitage’s Stanza Stones

2:45pm: Panel V: (Education Room), Greg Thomas – Poem Machines: Liliane Lijn, John Goodby – Purity, pop-up and performance: Peter Meilleur / Childe Roland and Anglo-Welsh-Quebecois concrete poetry

4pm: Roundtable (Workshop Theatre)

4:30pm: Readings: (Workshop Theatre), Sascha Aurora Akhtar, Vahni Capildeo, Kimberly Campanello

5:30pm: Finish

today is a truly blessed day, i have found a typewriter and cannot leave.

The Typographic Dante exhibition at the NCCD is now open to the public, and it looks absolutely wonderful.

It really is a delight to have the work showcased in its own space at the gallery.

The vitrines contain examples of sketchbooks and development work going back three decades.

As well as various editions of the Divine Comedy and other books inspired by it (apologies for the shadow).

 

A (working) typewriter from Barrie’s collection is part of the show, and it has proven to be very popular with visitors to the gallery (see the example above for the title of this post). Apparently, a few of the younger members of the staff team did need an induction into how to use the machine (‘It’s got margins and tabs… like Word!’).

The show is on in the Roof Gallery (4th floor) until the 13th of October and Barrie will be talking about the project at the Poetry by Design symposium at the University of Leeds, this Thursday (18th July).

carnival at birkbeck

Bronaċ Ferran recently organised a Reading and Discussion of Steve McCaffery’s Carnival at The Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (Birkbeck University).

After a reading/performance from Carnival by Steve McCaffery himself, there were responses by Karen Mac Cormack, Greg Thomas and Rebecca Kosick – as well as The Caseroom Press’ very own Barrie Tullett.

The event ended with a response to the comments and discussions by Steve McCaffery.

It was a fantastic evening, Barrie got to meet his heroes, and the papers by Greg and Rebecca were incredibly insightful. He just wanted to say a very big thank you to Bronaċ for organising it all and inviting him to be a part of it.

For more information on The Contemporary Poetics Research Centre see here: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/

For a list of forthcoming events see here: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/readings/

 

bookanista

A very big thank you to Mika Provata-Carlone – a Dante scholar, translator, editor and illustrator – for her very thoughtful and insightful review of The Typographic Dante exhibition over at Bookanista: http://bookanista.com/vision-eternity/.

Having worked on the project independently for so long, it was quite wonderful to discuss it in depth with someone who has such a deep understanding of Dante and the Divine Comedy. As you may know, Barrie discovered Dante’s Inferno through pop culture as a teenager and has never formally studied the life of Dante or the Divine Comedy, even though Dante has been with him as an ongoing project for 30 years now.

At the opening of the show, Barrie also met some medievalists from the British Library and the talk (and performance) inspired Philobiblon, [(on) the love of books], to write a blog post about the first printed editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Interestingly enough, the blog post mentions that as a medievalist, he rarely thinks of the printed history of Dante’s (Divine) Comedy – as a typographer Barrie rarely thought of the manuscripts of the Divine Comedy, until very recently. The British Library online archive (http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/) is a stunning resource and has inspired Barrie to look a little further back into history than his role as a graphic designer and lecturer usually takes him.

He would recommend the following books if you find it all as interesting as he does: Books Before Print by Erik Kwakkel and The Book by Keith Houston.

The Typographic Dante Show is on at the National Poetry Library, South Bank Center until the 30th June.

 

 

 

the typographic bloody dante

The Typographic Dante opened at the National Poetry Library on Tuesday night. A sold-out gig, Barrie took the opportunity to wax lyrical about Dante in popular culture, explain what else he’d been up to in the 30 years he’d been working on the project, and performed old favourites ‘Dead Birds’ and ‘A Song for an Art School’, as well as finding room to include some new material.

A big thank you to Chris McCabe for making the exhibition happen, and Dan, Dani and Mark for their technical support in hanging the show.

It’s an incredible venue and an absolute delight to be able to exhibit the work there.

https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/134923-typographic-dante-2019

 

talking typography in norwich

Barrie was out and about at the Norwich University of the Arts at the beginning of November – talking typography, poetry, artists’ books, Dante’s Inferno and various other stuff as it occurred to him – the lecture also included a performance of ‘A Song For An Art School’. If you’ve ever experienced that – you’ll know it’s worth the price of entry alone…

Thank you to Glen Robinson for the invite, and for the students for turning up – a full house and a real joy to be there.