Cris Cheek

cris cheek (intentionally uncapitalized) is a multimodal poet, and currently professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Born in London in 1955, he lived and worked in that capital until the early 1990s influenced by working alongside Bill Griffiths and Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society printshop in London and the Writers Forum group of poets who met with regularity on the premises in Earls Court, such as Allen Fisher, Jeremy Adler. He co-founded the influential sound poetry performance group jgjgjg . . . (as long as you can say it that's our name) in 1976 (with PC Fencott and Lawrence Upton), which blazed a trail through Europe's avant-garde scene and then disbanded in less than 3 years. Subsequently he and ee vonna-michel worked on electronic music improvisations as Bang Crash Whallop releasing material as cassette tapes on Balsam Flex. In 1981 he was a co-founder of Chisenhale Dance Space and for much of that decade worked on diverse projects alongside musicians from the London Musicians Collective, choreographers and live artists. Choreographers he worked with in diverse capacities include Michael Clarke, Jacky Lansley, Mary Prestidge, Kirstie Simson, Fergus Early, Patricia Bardi, Sue MacLennan and Miranda Tufnell.

His music and sound collaborations include Slant (a trio with Philip Jeck and Sianed Jones). His radio program "Music of Madagascar" produced for BBC Radio 3 won a Sony Gold Specialist Award (now Radio Academy Awards) in 1995. Between 1994-2005 he and Sianed Jones were based in the most easterly English town of Lowestoft. He taught on the Performance Writing course from 1995 at Dartington College of Arts where he became a Research Fellow in interdisciplinary text (2000-2002). A large body of interdisciplinary performance writing was produced in collaboration with Kirsten Lavers under the author function Things Not Worth Keeping between 1999-2007. In 2005 he became a professor at Miami University in Ohio. He was Altman Fellow in The Humanities Center Miami University 2011-12, co-presenting the Networks and Power symposium and a conference on Network Archaeology from which an issue of the online journal Amodern, co-edited with Nicole Starosielski and Braxton Soderman, was published. He lives in Cincinnati, London and Labastide-Rouairoux.

Early life and work

cris cheek was born in Enfield, London and educated at Highgate School, graduating in 1972. He worked at the printshop of the Consortium of London Presses in the basement of the Earls Court premises of the National Poetry Centre between 1975-77. Initially he helped Bill Griffiths and Bob Cobbing to produce in-house volumes of Poetry Review there under the editorship of Eric Mottram and became print shop manager in 1977. He is among a wave of poets in London following the lead of the British Poetry Revival whose poetry integrates spatial, sonic and semantic performative concerns. His early live performance work was in duet with Clive Fencott and then a trio with the addition of Lawrence Upton as JGJGJJGJG (as long as you can say it that's our name). They were on occasion joined by Bill Griffiths and Jeremy Adler. He ran several little press imprints such as Bluff Books, Shabby Editions and the little worry interrupt as well as editing the short-lived magazine RAWZ. Through his work with Jacky Lansley and Fergus Early on their production I Giselle he became involved with X6 Dance Space and then Chisenhale Dance Space and subsequently made collaborations with influential New Dance choreographers such as Mary Prestidge, Kirstie Simson, Miranda Tufnell and Dennis Greenwood, Patricia Bardi, Michael Clark and Sue MacLennan between 1982-1986. In 1987 he and Sianed Jones traveled to Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania and Madagascar researching into social forms of music and dance.

Recent life and works

cris cheek lived in Hackney and Canning Town between 1981-1994. Whilst working for dance and performance artists and improvising music groups, he began writing songs with Sianed Jones, performing and recording with Philip Jeck as Slant. Slant released 3 albums, Hive (These Records, 1989), Slant (Sound & Language, 1993) and The Canning Town Chronicle (Sound & Language, 1994). Jones and cheek moved to Lowestoft as global internet networks bloomed. He was very active in poetics e-list communities for the following twenty years. During this time, he taught Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts, working alongside Caroline Bergvall as well as many others. cheek also made contemporary vaudeville shows with folk musician Chris Foster that toured to village halls and community centers around England.

While working at Dartington cris began teaching with and subsequently working with Kirsten Lavers to produce a substantial web of projects under the author function Thinks Not Worth Keeping, shortened to TNWK.

Bibliography

cheek's creative writing works include:

a present. London: Bluff Books, 1980
Mud. London: London: Spanner/Open Field, 1984
Cloud Eyes. London: Microbrigade, 1991
Skin upon skin. Lowestoft: CD, Sound & Language, 1996
Stranger. Lowestoft: Sound & Language, 1996
Songs from Navigation. Hastings: book+CD, Reality Street, 1998
the church, the school, the beer. Oxford, Ohio: Critical Documents, 2007
part: short life housing. Toronto: The Gig, 2009
Pickles & Jams. Buffalo: BlazeVOX, 2017

His works have been published in various magazines, literary miscellanies and anthologies, including:

Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry.Oxford University Press, 2001
Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999
The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Carbondale: Southern Indiana University, 1984
Conductors of Chaos. Picador: London, 1996
Floating Capital. Elmwood, Connecticut: Poets & Poets Press, 1991

MC, CD and CD-R

Crayon (NY), Widemouth (Baltimore)
Little Magazine (Albany)
Balsam Flex (London)

Critical articles

Bob Cobbing’s Performances: of Production and Circulation. Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 2012. Canterbury: Gylphi, 2012. Volume 4. Number 2
Reading and Writing: the Sites of Performance. (http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/vol_3_no_3/bergvall/cheek-reading-writing.html)
Giving Tongue. Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003
Sky Tails: An Encryption of Dispersal. published in Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth, Toronto: The Gig, 2003
Implicit. Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance and Site Specificity Sheffield: The Cherry On the Top Press, 2002