Boscombe Revolution Issue 1 — New Poetry Pamphlet on Place (@BoscombeR)

Inter­view with Paul Hawkins and Simon McCor­mak about Boscombe Revolution

http://tableglockpress.wordpress.com/

Q. What is Boscombe Revolu­tion all about? And how did it come about?

Si: We’re going to find more out as we go along, but BRev is in part about Boscombe using its voice & hear­ing oth­er voices. We depend on dia­logue for defin­i­tion, even if it’s just the voice in my head, what is said and what is heard, call and response; poetry is a pro­cess of defin­i­tion and trans­form­a­tion. We wanted to start a con­ver­sa­tion, and Boscombe Revolu­tion is an exten­sion of that.

Paul: We had an idea that came about from a com­pletely dif­fer­ent pro­ject that may or may not see the light of day; a spoof event and set of char­ac­ters who are based in Boscombe, a sub­urb of Bournemouth (the south coasts premi­er ven­ue for Stag and Hen nights) cre­ated entirely using social media, and being acted/played out on social media. One of the hasht­ags we thought of using was #BoscombeRevolu­tion; it grew and moved very rap­idly from there to plan­ning Issue 1.

Si: We also wanted to find out if we could turn an idea into an object. We found min­im­um fund­ing to cov­er a print run. We sent a call for sub­mis­sions via social media, gen­er­at­ing a massive response. We spent a long-time turn­ing 300 plus sub­mis­sions into 22 accep­ted poems. Then there were con­sid­er­a­tions of lay­out, size, paper qual­ity and weight, art­work, font type, bind­ing etc. I’m really happy with the fin­ished book, both in con­tent and presentation.

Paul: It has been a great exper­i­ence, and the suc­cess of Issue 1 and the Launch night has enabled us to see Boscombe Revolu­tion Issue 2 on the hori­zon of 2014.

Q. You got a full audi­ence for the launch night, what did you want to achieve by organ­ising these types of poetry slams?

Si: I wanted to cel­eb­rate the book, and sell enough of them to pro­duce anoth­er! What I liked about the night was the con­flu­ence of people and poetries–experimental film-poem from Greek poet watched by Lon­don per­form­ance poet;  Boscombe based Brazil­lian pho­to­graph­er talk­ing Por­tugese with a poet from Cov­entry; page and per­form­ance poetry spark­ing off each oth­er. I like the energy and fric­tion of live poetry, be that read­ing or per­form­ing, and I like the talk after­wards: new ideas, new com­bin­a­tions, new friends.

Paul: Like Si says, we wanted to cel­eb­rate pub­lish­ing these great poets, and spread the word about Issue 1, and Table­G­lock Press. Yeah, and also exper­i­ence the meet­ing of com­plete strangers; a ral­ly­ing point for a few hours of people who have mostly nev­er met before and who can per­form their work and find com­mon or uncom­mon ground in an inter­pret­a­tion of the vec­tors of place and revolution.

Q. What does poetry per­form­ance mean to you?
Si: See above.

Paul: An engine of expres­sion, of expan­sion made from the blunt edges and silky sub­tleties of lan­guage; voice, pos­ture, tone, the selec­tion of words (and of non-words — phys­ic­al­ity, move­ment and the use of silence) and the choice of how one orders them into a coher­ence of solid­ar­ity or oppos­i­tion, or maybe both…

Q. Do you think it is import­ant for artists to express them­selves con­sciously where they draw on their realities?

Si: Man! Big ques­tion. It depends what your goals are. It was import­ant to launch BRev in Boscombe because our goal was to start a con­ver­sa­tion there. I think prac­ti­cing art, the pro­cess from idea to real­isa­tion, can be a way of becom­ing more con­scious of your real­ity. Real­ity is argu­ably a coded exper­i­ence; it can be re-coded to per­form, or be exper­i­enced, in dif­fer­ent ways. Place is an import­ant con­sid­er­a­tion in that process.

Paul: Using words is a way of mak­ing sense of the world we live in, an expres­sion of what it means; of exper­i­ences with the anim­ate and inan­im­ate, of protest and cel­eb­ra­tion; an announce­ment of frus­tra­tion, joy and cel­eb­ra­tion. I guess it’s simply anoth­er form of com­mu­nic­a­tion, like art or speech or body lan­guage, a par­tic­u­lar pos­ture, a code, as Si says, of real­ity. We must use our expression-engines.

Q. What can we expect of Boscombe Revolu­tion in the future, along with… any oth­er projects/creations?
 

We’re dis­cuss­ing ideas and new projects–certainly anoth­er pub­lic­a­tion next year.

Q. What are your thoughts on the Poetry and Spoken word scene in Boscombe?

Si: There are some stun­ning poets and Spoken-word artists walk­ing the streets of Boscombe.

Paul: I couldn’t agree more…

Q. How can we buy issue 1, the poetry pamph­let of Boscombe Revolution?

Online at www.boscomberevolution.wordpress.com and at The Com­munity Shop in The Sov­er­eign Centre, Boscombe.

Boscombe Revolu­tion

Boscombe Revolu­tion Issue 1 ISSN 2054–2828 is an antho­logy of twenty one poems respond­ing to the pro­voca­tions of ‘place’ and ‘revolu­tion’, fea­tures a stel­lar bunch of poets; Matt Haw, Mike Castro, Craig Dob­son, Maur­een Jivani, klips­chutz, Ellie Walsh, Ross Taylor, Gra­ham Allin­son, Jack­ie Wills, Car­rie Etter, Mar­tin Malone, Sarah Crewe, Tim Suer­mondt, Lana Bell, Soph­ie May­er, Cat­fish McDar­is, Fran­cis K. John­son, Julia Boore, Tim Cum­ming, Iord­anis Papado­poulos and Mark Burnhope.

It is an A6, per­fect bound, lim­ited edi­tion pamph­let prin­ted on a Riso­graph sten­cil duplic­at­or, using soy based solvent free ink on 100% recycled paper from sus­tain­able sources.

Issue 1 comes in 3 lim­ited edi­tions of 50 cop­ies each in the fol­low­ing col­oured cov­ers; Man­dar­in, Stone and Vermillion.

Big thanks to Mark Lloyd for allow­ing Table­G­lock Press to use ‘three fear registers of arti­fi­cial real­ity’ as the front cov­er artwork.

Type­set­ting and prep by John Hawkins.
Prin­ted by Pic­to­gram Studio.

Pub­lished by Table­G­lock Press and edited by Simon McCor­mack and Paul Hawkins.

Issue 1 is avail­able to pur­chase at a sug­ges­ted dona­tion of £4.00 + p&p to any­where in the world and from some selec­ted out­lets in Bournemouth and London.