zimZalla online with Philip Terry and Sophie Herxheimer

This marks the first-ever online event hosted by Manchester-based publishing project zimZalla, a small independent press releasing literary objects, not simply books as you know them, and interested in new work in new forms. The press is headed up by founder and editor Tom Jenks, one-third of CT Literature Desk reading series favourite The Other Room; sadly no longer with us. We have high hopes, therefore, for this online foray from zimZalla, and hope it is a forerunner of more outings to follow. The online event is free – just register via Eventbrite and a Zoom link will be yours – and will feature readings and discussion by two of zimZalla’s contributors.

The first-ever online event hosted by Manchester-based publishing project zimZalla, a small independent press releasing literary objects, not simply books as you know them, and interested in new work in new forms.

Philip Terry is a poet, translator and Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at the University of Essex. His interests include the theory and practice of creative writing, experimental translation, hybrid forms of writing and poetry, and the work of Oulipo. Short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (‘workshop of potential literature’), Oulipo was founded in France in the Sixties to explore and invent new forms and create works using constrained writing techniques – notable members included Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec, and Terry is the translator of Queneau’s Elementary Morality and Perec’s I Remember. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Oulipo – just out in paperback – and the forthcoming Oulipo supplement in literary journal PN Review (a bi-product of Manchester publishing stalwart Carcanet Press).

Terry’s books include the anthology of short stories Ovid Metamorphosed (Penguin Vintage, 2000), the poetry collections Oulipoems (Ahadada, 2007), Oulipoems 2 (Ahadada, 2009), Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Carcanet, 2011) and Advanced Immorality (If P Then Q, 2012), plus the novel tapestry (Reality Street, 2013), which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Dante’s Inferno, which relocates the epic poem to contemporary Essex, was published by Carcanet in 2014 and was an Independent poetry title of the year. It was followed by Quennets (Carcanet, 2016), Dictator (Carcanet, 2018) and the memoir A Belfast Childhood (Muscaliet, 2019).

Philip Terry will be reading from and talking about his interactive Oulipian assemblage text object TURNS, recently published by zimZalla and available now. He will be joined by poet and artist Sophie Herxheimer, who will be reading from and talking about her zimZalla object INDEX, a collection of 76 collaged index cards, to be published in early 2021. Described as ‘a pack of prophetic playing cards’ ‘that can be played or read by anyone seeking to shuffle some subversion into the hand dealt to them by ignominious Destiny’, INDEX forms part of zimZalla’s long-running Poetry Objects series. Over the last year, Herxheimer has been cutting up discarded and outdated instructional books and formulaic fiction and re-arranging their phrases as collage poems mounted on standard pastel coloured index cards, creating sometimes funny, sometimes touching and always imaginative standalone works in their own right.

Sophie has held residencies at Museum of Liverpool, London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), Southbank Centre, The National Maritime Museum, The Migration Museum and Transport for London. Exhibitions include The Whitworth, Tate Modern, The Poetry Library and The National Portrait Gallery. Among other things, she’s illustrated five fairy-tale collections, made several artists books, created a Southwark Bridge-length tablecloth featuring the food stories of 1,000 Londoners, and made a life-size concrete poem in the shape of Mrs Beeton sited next to her grave.

Her poems have appeared in Long Poem Magazine, Poems in Which and Tears in the Fence, among others, and she won first prize in the inaugural Poetry Book Fair Competition. Recent publications include: Your Candle Accompanies the Sun (Henningham Family Press, 2017), Velkom to Inklandt (Short Books, 2017) and, with fellow poet Chris McCabe, The Practical Visionary (Hercules Editions, 2018). She is working on an ongoing project collecting stories live in ink from members of the public, by listening and drawing.