lapsus linguae

An Ocean of Static

The launch of my debut poetry collection will take place at the British Library in London on Friday 27 April 2018, 19:30. Join us for an evening of digital projection, live performance, and a conversation with Peter Jaeger. The event is hosted by Penned in the Margins and the Eccles Centre for American Studies. It’s FREE but booking is essential. RSVP now to reserve your place.

Published in paperback by the ever-excellent Penned in the Margins, with silver cover foiling and French flaps, An Ocean of Static, will be available for purchase 24 April 2018.

Pre-order 9-20 April for £9.99. (regular price £12)

An Ocean of Static || J. R. Carpenter, Penned in the Margins, 2018

From the late 15th century onwards, a flurry of voyages were made into the North Atlantic in search of fish, the fabled Northwest Passage, and beyond into the territories purely imaginary. Today, this vast expanse is crisscrossed with ocean and wind currents, submarine cables and wireless signals, seabirds and passengers, static and cargo ships.

This book transforms the dense, fragmented archive of the North Atlantic into a sea of fresh new text.

What surfaces in An Ocean of Static are arrays of language, “arguments” that can be read as a chorus of subtle alternatives or sometimes like confused cries in a nautical crisis, along with records of journeys from centuries apart. J. R. Carpenter draws language through the icy passage of code’s style, gripping the rigging with a performative voice developed in many presentations of this work. The book that results is in the ancient form of the cento (literally, a patchwork), but one that fits together like whole cloth, functioning as a sail, allowing air, human effort, and machinery to work together to carry us along.

–Nick Montfort, author of The Truelist

This book is made of other books. The poems in this book are composed of facts, fictions, fragments, and codes collected from accounts of voyages undertaken over the past 2,340 years or so, into the North Atlantic, in search of the Northwest Passage, and beyond, into territories purely imaginary. The poems in this book are intended to be read on the page and to serve as scripts for the live performance of a body of web-based works.

Portions of this work first appeared, often in very different forms, in a wide range of print, digital, and live performance contexts. A full list of links and references is available here.

Performing Etheric Ocean at The Museum of Water

Saturday 21 June 2014 I will re-sound the uncanny islands, wireless signals, jellyfish drones, and found nautical field recordings of my new underwater web-based project Etheric Ocean in a live poly-vocal performance with poet Alison Gibb as part Amy Sharrock’s Museum of Water exhibition at Somerset House, London, 6-29 June 2014.

Penned in the Margins has curated a packed programme of water-themed poetry and performance. Join us in the spoken word room for nautical field recordings, durational water performances, and poems inspired by rivers, estuaries, sewers and the sea.

Performances will run from 12pm – 5.30pm. Alison and I go on at around 4:30pm.

Etheric Ocean || J. R. Carpenter

Etheric Ocean is an underwater web art audio writing noise site. It is an imprecise survey of sounds both animal and mechanical, and of signs both real and imaginary, of distortions born of the difficulty of communicating through the medium of deep dense dark ocean. Like stations dotting a radio dial, murky diagrams, shifting definitions, appropriated texts, nautical associations, and wonky word plays are strung along a very long, horizontally scrolling browser window. This is a world of inversions. Sounds are deep harbours, or are they depths? Sounds purposefully unfold. Out of its element, uncannily airborne, a flying jellyfish drone wobbles about. Noises are made. Islands are Heard.

Etheric Ocean is commissioned by Electronic Voice Pheneomena, an experimental literature and new media project exploring contemporary approaches to sound, voice, technology and writing, brought to you by Mercy and Penned in the Margins, Liverpool and London UK.

Saturday 21 June
12pm – 5.30pm

Somerset House
Strand, London
WC2R 1LA

Reading in London: 7 Poets for Oxfam Autumn Fundraiser

I will be reading some very short prose pieces at Back To School: 7 Poets for Oxfam Autumn 2010 Fundraiser, Wednesday, 29 September, 2010 – 7 pm, at Oxfam Books and Music shop, 91 Marylebone High Street, London W1 (10 minutes walk from Baker Street tube station).

The evening will feature seven poets, from Canada, Britain, Ireland, and New Zealand:

Carole Baldock – British poet and editor-publisher of Kudos and Orbis magazines

Charles Boyle – Faber poet, publisher and novelist, shortlisted for TS Eliot Prize

JR Carpenter – Prize-winning Quebec writer, poet and performance artist

CL Dallat – Irish poet, writer and musician of significance

Helen Oswald – shortlisted for the current Forward Prize for Best First Collection

Anna Smaill – a leading younger poet from New Zealand

Anthony Thwaite – legendary poet-critic, and editor of Larkin’s Collected Poems and Selected Letters

This event is supported by Kingston University and hosted by Todd Swift.

Please reserve seats for these events by contacting shop manager Martin Penny by email or phone 020 7487 3570 or oxfammarylebone [at] hotmail [dot] com

Admission free. All money raised goes to Oxfam, a registered charity.

For more information, please visit the Eyeware blog.