Ross Sutherland was born in Edinburgh in 1979. He was included in The Times’s list of Top Ten Literary Stars of 2008. He has three collections of poetry: Things To Do Before You Leave Town (2009), Twelve Nudes (2010), and Hyakuretsu Kyaku (2011), all published by Penned In The Margins. Ross is also a member of the poetry collective Aisle16 with whom he runs Homework, an evening of literary miscellany in East London.
He has one-man show, The Three Stigmata of Pacman, and is currently developing a piece of interactive theatre: Comedian Dies In The Middle Of A Joke.
He also has a new documentary about whether computers will ever be able to write poetry. 'Every Rendition On A Broken Machine' is released Christmas 2011.
Stress Fractures is a collection of new essays on poetry, published at the end of last year by Penned In The Margins. Its a really surprising and unusual book, and I think it does a great job of presenting a huge amount of ideas in a really entertaining way: Luke Kennard talks about Krazy Kat and the ‘engine room’ of poetry, Tim Clare brings Slam Poetry back to Plato, and Sophie Mayer takes home the cash prize for her wonderful essay, “Emily Dickinson, Vampire Slayer.”
I’m in there as well, telling the story of my fifteen-year collaboration with Babelfish. I took a series of famous poems, and bounced them, line-by-line, through a series of automated translation programs. In Stress Fractures I talk about the successes and failures of the project, and how I discovered that my co-author was plotting to kill me.
Phil Brown wrote a nice precis of the essay over on Silkworms Ink, for which I’m really greatful. In addition, I thought I’d repost the film I made a couple of years ago, when I took some of my computer-generated poems down to the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden.
You can buy Stress Fractures directly from Penned In The Margins. There’s also a few sample essays on the site, so you can try before you buy.
I have a poem inside this month’s edition of Ekleksographia, along with new conceptual writing from Christian Bok, Harry Matthews and Ian Monk. There’s also a series of visual sonnets by artist David Miller (see above). My poem is a ‘univocalism’: a form of poetry invented by the OULIPO, where the author is only allowed to use one vowel. Anyone who saw the show Found In Translation will have basically seen an earlier version of this piece.
I was fortunate enough to do a reading with Ian Monk a few years ago at an OULIPO event in Waterloo. He was kind about my univocalism (although it uses ‘Y’, so isn’t technically a one-vowel poem… thanks to everyone who pointed that out) and the night ended with a bunch of us drunkenly pointing out all the univocalisms on the London tube map. We got so carried away that I nearly missed my connection home. I think there’s a horrible metaphor about my writing / my life hidden in there, and I think its probably best if I just ignore it altogether.
On the subject of Christian Bok, I found an interesting Q&A with him from a few years ago, where Bok chats about craft and discipline in poetry, and how, in general, “poets are the laziest, stupidest people I know.” You can hear the whole thing here.
And if you find that you don’t agree with the man, just remind yourself of me, head pressed against the wall, slurring “Chalk Farm…Woodford…Debden…” as the last train rolls off into the distance.
In the lead-up to new year, here’s a story I recently wrote for Radio Netherlands. Earth Beat is a great programme and I recommend dialling it into your DAB radio henceforth.
This week’s episode is called Things We Were Promised, and examines the art of predicting the future. I open the show with A Short Piece Of Science-Fiction, Set In The Distance Year 2000.
To listen online through NRW’s website, click here.
Or to download an mp3 version of the story featuring additional sci-fi spookery (plus, um, a little dash of Mousse-T’s Horny Horny Horny), right-click the link below:
That’s me for 2010. Next year should be a good one, though. Over 2011, I’m developing a new piece of interactive theatre, releasing an e-book of Street Fighter sonnets, taking The London Poetry Game nationwide, and (hopefully) me and Chris Hicks will be stepping up to finish our sci-fi feature with Warp Films. Christ its all so exciting I might have to jump in a lake and start air-guitarring a swan.
I’ve just been working with Mercy Design on some text art for the new Pedlars catalogue. Everything in the new collection is a collaboration between Pedlars and a series of old-school British brands.
I came up with the idea of connecting up famous quotations in order to create a strange dialogue between their authors. The end result is a series of increasingly gruesome twosomes: Henry Miller and Robert Louis Stevenson, Zeno and John Leonard, Nietzsche and Dirk Bogarde…please don’t think about it too much. I’m hoping the actual work doesn’t feel as disrespectful as it sounds in brief.
Mercy did an amazing job with the design, and I’m dead pleased with the end result. Here’s a selection of the pieces we made.
The Londonist is currently running a series of London-inspired poems. There’s been some great pieces so far (check out Kirsten Irving and John Osborne). I was at a bit of a loss, so I tried to use Google Streetview to help get me started. I just dropped the little man into the city at random and tried to write about the street I landed on. However, things didn’t work out quite to plan. Anyway, you can read the poem here.
A friend of mine read it this morning and directed me to the Jon Rafman’s tumblr blog of found Streetview images. Christ it’s awesome. Above is one of my favourites, but I urge you to go to it right now and keep scrolling down till you can scroll no more.
This coming Tuesday (the 7th) I’m reading at the newly opened Ministry of Stories in Hoxton, alongside Robert Newman and Nick Hornby. Get tickets while they last.
A few videos from the last Homework of season 3. The event was based on the successful US storytelling night, The Moth. All true stories, told without notes. The theme of the night was ‘My Worst Gig.’
Chris Hicks: “The darkest hour is just before the dawn”
Back in July this year, I was part of the city-wide translation manhunt, The London Poetry Game. There’s an earlier post about the project here.
I was commissioned by Sarah Ellis (Apples and Snakes) and Alex Fleetwood (Hide and Seek) to write a new poem for the LPG project. Once the poem was finished, every line was translated into a different language found in London: German, Hindi, Russian, Cantonese, Yoruba and Farsi, among 20 others.
On the 5th, the poem was published online, and the game was afoot. Participants were asked to seek out native speakers of each language, and request their help retranslating the poem back into English. The translators phoned through each new interpretation to the LPG answering machine. The person who managed to translate the most lines was declared the winner.
On Sunday 11th July, a new version of the poem was assembled from these collected audio recordings & broadcast at the National Theatre as part of the Hide&Seek Weekender. I was away doing a gig in Manchester at the time, but Sarah held up her mobile phone to the speaker so I could listen in.
Three months later, I’ve now remixed this final recording into a short film, using screen capture software, a camera phone, and two seconds of John Travolta’s debut, The Boy In The Plastic Bubble. This film debuted at Revolutions In Form at the Bluecoat Gallery last weekend, as part of the Liverpool Biennial 2010. Thanks to Nafe Jones and Mercy for the northwest support on this.
The song I’ve sampled is “Kt” by Bexar Bexar. If you listen to This American Life on WBEZ, I think you will appreciate knowing this. It’s the incidental music they always use when a character has an unwanted epiphany. ie. bad sunrise music. The best kind
I’ve had a longstanding involvement with Liverpool live/art collective Mercy. When I lived in Liverpool at the start of the decade, I was the host of Fiction@FACT: a night of poetry/video collaborations at the art cinema, working alongside Mercy’s resident poet Nafe Jones.
Although now I’ve moved south, I always try to keep one hand in the Mercy thresher. For the last few years I’ve working with the team on their huge live collaborations with the band Wave Machines. Some of the footage of those gigs has recently gone online- Here’s a poem written by Joe Dunthorne with me and Chris Hicks filling in the blanks. This was recorded at St Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch last year:
I’m back up in Liverpool this weekend for two gigs, tied in with the Liverpool Biennial. The first is at Mercy’s new home, The Cooperative: a converted gallery space in the old Rapid Paint Shop. Mercy shares the space with six other Liverpool collectives (so, thats a collective of collectives: Lost Soul, Stranger Service Station, Jump Ship Rat, The Royal Standard, Sound Network, Red Wire & Arena Studios and Gallery.)
Myself and fellow Aisle16 member Tim Clare will be doing a midnight gig at the Cooperative on Saturday 16th October, in collaboration with Liverpool electronica masterchefs HIVE. The event is called DESTROY ALL LINGUISTS- Tim and I will be doing a series of poems, while HIVE digitally distorts and re-interpret the performance behind us. I’ve wanted to do some stuff with voice recognition software for a while, so I’m dead excited about this. Also on the bill, an exclusive set from Forest Swords:
The following night, I’m performing at Revolutions in Form at The Bluecoat gallery. Revolutions in Form is curated by Bluecoat poet-in-residence Nafe Jones and also features new work from Caroline Bergvall, Laura Dockril & Hannah Silva. I’ll be debuting a new animation, which is the culmination of the London Poetry Game project I did in July this year.
Finally, I’ve written a piece for Mercy’s Biennial Audioguide. This is a collection of mp3s that you can download direct from Mercy’s website, and features work from myself, Byron Vincent, Luke Kennard and Jack Underwood, among others. The idea was to ask a series of writers to create audioguides for conceptual art installations that (as yet) don’t exist.
If you live in Liverpool, you can go stand where the artwork should be, stick on your mp3 walkman, and imagine the artwork appearing in front of you. If you don’t live in Liverpool, then you can stand anywhere, I guess. You just have to imagine all of Liverpool as well.
It was raved about in The Independent this week. So now you have to buy it, you bloody gorgeous automaton. If you’d like to hear a sample before you buy, listen in the the excellent podcast series that Mercy are running throughout the Biennial, hosted by Nick Holloway (Nick is secretly responsible for all my best work- without him I am a puddle of a man). Episode 2 has one of my contributions at the end of the show, entitled “I Hate Your Mates, Your Mates’ Mates, And Your Mates’ Mates’ Mates.”
