cris cheek
Profile
cris cheek, self-described "poet-pedagogue, writer-critic, book artist-publisher, new media practitioner and interdisciplinary performer," earned his PhD at Lancaster (UK), and has been involved in the creative literary and artistic activities since 1975.
cheek works in various spheres of the contemporary art, incorporating a wide range of media-strategies and technologies into his projects. For many years he has developed the ideas of live-art, spontaneous literary performance and "chaotic declamation" on his own and as member of various musical and poetic groups including jgjgjgjg (in collab. with P.C. Fencott, L. Upton), CoAccident, Garam Masala, Slant (in collab. with Ph. Jeck, S. Jones).
cheek is the author of a number of poetry editions and books, among them are the following: a present (Bluff Books, 1980), mud (Spanner/Open Field, 1984), Cloud Eyes (Microbrigade Ed., 1991), skin upon skin (CD, Sound & Language, 1996), stranger (Sound & Language, 1996), Songs from Navigation (book+CD, Reality Street, 1998) and others. His works have been published in various international magazines, literary miscellanies and anthologies, including West Coast Line (Vancouver), Open Letter (Toronto), Kontexts (Amsterdam), Boxkite (Sydney), Reality Studios (London), Poetics Journal (San Francisco),TheL=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (University of Indiana), Floating Capital (Connecticut), Documents (Glasgow), as well as MC, CD and CD-R formats in Crayon (NY), Widemouth (Baltimore), Little Magazine (Albany), and Balsam Flex (London).
Representing poly-functional projects, cheek pays special attention to the strategies of live-writing with simultaneous video transmission. Recent productions include the following: the church, the school, the beer (Norwich School of Art and Design, CB-radio, 1998-99), Tongues Undone (in collab. with S. Jones, M. Sercombe, World Wide Video Festival, 1998), matter unaccounted for (3rd Cork Conference of Poetry and Performance Art, 1999), and Retrospective Screen (Dartington Arts Gallery, 2000).
His critical articles include "On Bob Cobbing," (British Electronic Poetry Centre, 2004); "Giving Tongue," published in Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally, (Wesleyan University Press, 2003); "Sky Tails: An Encryption of Dispersal," published in Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth, (The Gig, 2003); and "Implicit," Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance and Site Specificity, (The Cherry On the Top Press, 2002).
cheek is an inveterate collaborative writer whose more recent work includes Critical Path with The Three Little Heretics and an ongoing body of interdisciplinary practice (since 1998) with Kirsten Lavers as TNWK (http://www.thingsnotworthkeeping.com/)