Philip Terry asked a number of contemporary writers to take a story from Ovid as their starting point and to set their imaginations free. The results are varied, startling, scary, sexy, endlessly illuminating and suggestive, often changing the shape of the modern short story itself. Contributors include Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, M.J. Fitzgerald, Paul Griffiths, Sunit Namjoshi, Joyce Carol Oates, Michele Roberts, Marina Warner, Paul West and others.

Ovid Metamorphosed

Literature & Fiction

Terry, Philip

Contemporary

Vintage Books

Poetry. Philip Terry was born in Belfast in 1962 and has been working with Oulipian and related writing practices for over twenty years. His lipogrammatic novel The Book of Bachelors (1999), was highly praised by the Oulipo: "Enormous rigour, great virtuosity--but that's the least of it." Currently he is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Essex, where he teaches a graduate course on the poetics of constraint. His work has been published in Panurge, PN Review, Oasis, North American Review, and Onedit, and his books include the celebrated anthology of short stories Ovid Metamorphosed (2000)and Fables of Aesop (2006). His translation of Raymond Queneau's last book of poems, Elementary Morality, is forthcoming from Carcanet. OULIPOEMS is his first book of poetry. "The title of Philip Terry's brilliant book pays explicit homage to theOulipo; but while he uses many of the group's methods, he invariably goes his own way with them, making poems that are full of an original sense of wit and wonder. He has taken the notion that poetry can emerge from arbitrary procedures and transformed it into a sumptuous variety of explosively novel delights"--Harry Mathews.

Oulipoems

Poetry

Ahadada Books

Poetry. Harry Matthews writes: "The title of Philip Terry's brilliant book pays explicit homage to the Oulipo; but while he uses many of the group's methods, he invariably goes his own way with them, making poems that are full of an original sense of wit and wonder. He has taken the notion that poetry can emerge from arbitrary procedures and transformed it into a sumptuous variety of explosively novel delights."

Oulipoems 2

The poetic form used in these pages is one invented by Raymond Queneau in his 1975 book Morale élémentaire; it has come to be called the “quennet”, after its inventor, as it has one more line than a sonnet. The three sequences which make up this collection experiment with psychogeographical quennets inspired by walking around the Essex estuary and the Berlin Wall Trail, with the final sequence retracing the steps of W.G. Sebald through Suffolk.

Quennets

Carcanet Press Ltd.

<div>Dictator recreates Gilgamesh using the 1,500-word vocabulary of Globish, put together by Jean-Paul Nerrière. Globish is a business language, appropriate to translate cuneiform which emerged from the need to record business transactions. Nerrière considered it the world dialect of the third millenium; likewise Akkadian, the language of Gilgamesh, was the lingua franca of communications in the Near East. This link between script, language and business is there in the substance of the poem. An underpinning theme involving trade, here trade in hard wood and access to forests for building materials, links the poem to recent wars in and around Iraq, where the contemporary commodity is oil. This in turn links the poem to related issues such as migration and the refugee crisis. Working with refugees in Palermo in 2017, Terry was involved with putting on a puppet version of Gilgamesh where the children related viscerally to the story, particularly the boat scenes.</div>

Dictator

A sequel to Dante' s Inferno (Carcanet, 2014), where Dante was relocated to the University of Essex, here the action shifts from Dante' s island of Purgatory to Mersea Island in Essex. Dante' s Virgil is replaced with Ted Berrigan as guide, as the poet and Berrigan climb a mountain made out of Flexible Rock Substitute (FRS). Dante' s artists are replaced with contemporary artists and artists-in-residence on the Essex Alp, including Grayson Perry, Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst. Hirst, an example of pride, is encountered not carrying a rock on his back, as in Dante, but carrying a washing-machine, a Siemens Avantgarde, which runs through its spin-cycle on his back as he carries it. Other characters encountered on the way include Christopher Marlowe, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, John Paul Getty, Hilary Clinton, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, Martin McGuinness, Ezra Pound and Ciaran Carson. On the final terrace, the poet, accompanied by Berrigan and Ginsberg, passes through a wall of flames to reach Dante' s Paradise, here modelled on the Eden Project, where the poet meets his Beatrice, Marina Warner. The poem comes to a climax with an interview with Marina Warner in the LRB Tent, followed by a gig from the Pogues, for which Shane McGowan has been brought up from Hell on an Arts Council " Exceptional Talent" scheme.

Dante's Purgatorio

Inspired by the flotsam of contemporary culture, journalism, and spam emails, this collection of poetry transforms Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence into a celebration of the possibilities of language unleashed. Shakespeare’s themes of fading beauty, posterity, immortality, and death find their modern-day responses in celebrity gossip, consumer products, vampirism, and the credit crunch. Dynamic and anarchic, this exploration sheds light on Shakespeare and the contemporary world in a disturbing yet entertaining manner.

Shakespeare's Sonnets

Following his irreverent, inspired Oulipean reworking of Shakespeare’s sonnets, in his new book Philip Terry takes on Dante’s Inferno, shifting the action from the 12th to the 20th and 21st centuries, and relocating it to the modern “walled city” of the University of Essex. Dante’s Phlegethon becomes the river Colne; his popes are replaced by vice-chancellors and ministers for education; the warring Guelfs and Ghibellines are reimagined as the sectarians of Belfast, Terry’s home city. Meanwhile, the guiding figure of Virgil takes on new form as Ted Berrigan, one-time Essex writer-in-residence and a poet who had himself imagined the underworld. In reimagining an Inferno for our times, Terry stays paradoxically true to the spirit of Dante’s original text.

Dante's Inferno

Taking as its starting point marginal images in the Bayeux Tapestry, which have been left largely unexplained by historians, Terry retells the story of the Norman Conquest from the point of view of the tapestry's English embroiderers. Combining magic realism and Oulipian techniques, this is a tour de force of narrative and language. Philip Terry was born in Belfast, and is currently Director of Creative Writing at the University of Essex.

Tapestry

Reality Street Editions

This short novel is based on the story of Edith Bone, a writer falsely accused of spying and imprisoned in solitary confinement in Hungary in the early 1950s. She keeps herself sane by inventing numerous techniques, from reciting lists of writers in alphabetical order, to playing games using the languages she knows, to going on imaginary walks. It is written under a modified form of the Oulipian "prisoner's constraint", in which letters with descenders (g, j, p, q, y) may not be used.

Bone

Literary

Grand Iota

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