Poetry. This book collects seven texts written between 1981 and 1999, by UK-born, US-based poet/multimedia artist cris cheek. cheek was one of the key figures in the London poetry scene of the 1980s--the so-called "linguistically-innovative poetry" grouping later anthologized in Robert Sheppard and Adrian Clarke's FLOATING CAPITAL: NEW POETS FROM LONDON. Likewise, he became central to developments in Performance Writing emerging out of variant distributed networks during the following decade. He has remained a prolific, genre-slipping figure: poet, performance artist and musician, whose activities range from the ambitious conceptual project Things Not Worth Keeping to recordings with the ensembles Slant and Garam Masala. Yet to date his publications have been relatively scarce and elusive, a situation which PART: SHORT LIFE HOUSING goes far to rectify.
"Finally a good and rich span of writings from cris cheek. Here's an artist and writer whose work has always taken up active tenancy of the languages and the streets of urban living, recording them and composing them back into the dense abstract neighborhoods of his pieces. With this careful selection, cris cheek reminds us that he is a Londoner and as such is as inhabited by Dickens' dark maze of industrial streets as by mind-altering years of activist art lodgings, smoggy thoughtful wanderings or the eerie shock of the thatcheritic city. That's at least two hundred years of grime, greed and energy you'll find distilled in the cellular lines and ink splashes of this great volume."—Caroline Bergvall
Author Hometown: OXFORD, OH USA
About the author: Cris Cheek was born in London in 1955. He lived and worked there until the early 1990s, a performance writer very much a part of what was going on with poetry in that capital city. Besides a lifelong pursuit of poetry he is an occasional book-maker, a sound artist, a photographer, mixed-media practitioner and interdisciplinary performer, whose texts have been commissioned and shown locally and trans-locally, in multiple versions using diverse media for their production and circulation. Cris has produced substantial bodies of work that explore models of full interdisciplinary collaboration; most extensively with Sianed Jones (aspects of which are documented in "Songs from Navigation" Reality Street, 1998, and CDs by Slant with Phillip Jeck) and with Kirsten Lavers at TNWK (www.tnwk.net). His most recent publication is the live talk-based sequence "the church, the school, the beer" from Critical Documents (2007). The poetry has been widely anthologized and he is known for exploring the many traditional and contemporary boundaries between poetry and writing and performance, often with a keen attention to site-specificity. He currently lives and works in the southwest Ohio River Valley.
Reviews:
http://beescope.blogspot.com/2009/07/imagine-life.html
