Cris Cheek

cris cheek (intentionally uncapitalized) is a British poet, artist, interdisciplinary performer and professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Born in London in 1955, he lived and worked in that capital until the early 1990s. One early influence was working alongside Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society printshop and the Writers Forum group of poets who met with regularity on the premises in Earls Court. In 1981 he was a co-founder of Chisenhale Dance Space and for much of that decade he worked alongside musicians from the London Musicians Collective, choreographers and live artists to make interdisciplinary works. Between 1994-2005 he was based in the most easterly English town of Lowestoft, before emigrating to the United States. His musical collaborations include Slant (a trio with Philip Jeck and Sianed Jones). A large body of interdisciplinary performance writing was produced in collaboration with Kirsten Lavers under the author function Things Not Worth Keeping. He taught on the Performance Writing course (1995-2002) at Dartington College of Arts where he was a Research Fellow in interdisciplinary text (2000-2002). He lives on the plateau of the southwest Ohio River Valley, with his son. He is now the chair of the creative writing department at Miami University in Oxford.

Bibliography

cheek's creative works include:

• 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)
• the church, the school, the beer (Critical Documents, 2007)
• part: short life housing (The Gig, 2009)

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

• West Coast Line (Vancouver)
• Open Letter (Toronto)
• Kontexts (Amsterdam)
• Boxkite (Sydney)
• Reality Studios (London)
• Poetics Journal (San Francisco)
• The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Indiana University)
• Conductors of Chaos (London)
• Floating Capital (Connecticut)
• Documents (Glasgow)

MC, CD and CD-R

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

Critical articles

• "Reading and Writing: the Sites of Performance (http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/vol_3_no_3/bergvall/cheek-reading-writing.html)
• 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)
• Implicit, Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance and Site Specificity (The Cherry On the Top Press, 2002)

External links

• Entry at the British Electronic Poetry Centre
• TNWK
• Radio Taxi

Further reading

• Robert Hampson, "cris cheek in manhatton" http://www.pores.bbk.ac.uk/1/Robert%20Hampson,%20'cris%20cheek%20in%20manhattan'.htm
• Peter Barry, Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (2006)
• Andy Brown, Binary Myths: Conversations with Contemporary Poets (1998)
• cris cheek, "From a Performant" in The Fly on the Page (The Gig, 2004)
• cris cheek, "Giving Tongue" in Romana Huk, Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally (2003)
• Andrew Duncan, The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (2003)
• William R. Howe, "Punk as Poetry: cris cheek and his offset press collaborations"
• http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/groups/radioradio/04_cris-cheek_Radio-Radio_NY_2003.mp3