Listen and read

Step into an infinite world of stories

  • Listen and read as much as you want
  • Over 400 000+ titles
  • Bestsellers in 10+ Indian languages
  • Exclusive titles + Storytel Originals
  • Easy to cancel anytime
Subscribe now
Details page - Device banner - 894x1036
Cover for Birmingham Jazz Incarnation: or, Playing the Changes

Birmingham Jazz Incarnation: or, Playing the Changes

Series

1 of 9

Language
English
Format
Category

Lyric Poetry & Drama

A man walks into a Birmingham bookshop, buys a volume of poetry, and steps out into the road, where a jazz musician seems momentarily to bring the whole city together. In the second poem in Playing the Changes, the same thing happens, only half the words are redacted. Then the experience is retold as a Petrarchan sonnet; a children's skipping rhyme; an Acknowledgements page; a pastiche of Tristram Shandy... Drawing on the traditions of jazz improvisation and Oulipo, a literary movement where writing arises from extreme formal restriction, Playing the Changes sees Simon Turner decomposing and recomposing one of his own poems in a variety of forms and styles. The result is a hymn to the pleasures of music, reading, writing, and city life, humming with a joyous experimental energy. In Turner's linguistic hall of mirrors, the English language is always at serious, delirious play.

© 2017 The Emma Press (Ebook): 9781910139851

Release date

Ebook: 28 September 2017

Others also enjoyed ...