the Carlton Club, Whalley Range
11/07/2026
Manchester Experimental Poetry and Arts Festival curated by James Davies
The Manchester Experimental Poetry and Arts Festival makes its return to The Carlton Club on Saturday 11 July 2026, filling both the venue and its gardens with a full day of live performances, sound art and writing from noon onwards. A wide range of local and visiting artists take over indoor and outdoor spaces, offering something new at every turn through poetry readings, improvised music and visual installations.
"Sudden pandemonium to begin with...... Recurring occasionally as we attempt to attune ourselves to the swirling flows of our inner and outer surroundings... Until we feel or sound indistinguishable from what is there."
What is left if we aren’t the world is a text score for voices and instruments commissioned by and premiered at the Amsterdam Wandelweiser festival in October 2022. The score is an invitation to address through sound such questions as: How can we keep this chaotic world at bay?
This work is performed for the first time with poets: an invitation to respond collectively to the title of the piece: what is left is we are not the world, with their own words and voice. A provoking question asked by Timothy Morton. His answer is ‘Intimacy’ with all entities that coexist with us, big and small. My answer is, we are what is left in this pandemonium. The question is wow can we react to such inner and outer chaos?
Throughout the day they were given a small card with one of 3 instructions that they may or may not follow while responding with their words during the performance: to be what is there, to begin pandemonium, or recurring pandemonium.
This performance is one of the launch events of the What is left if we aren’t the world CD of live recordings from London, Amsterdam, Thessaloniki and Dusseldorf. (Wandelweiser editions, DE, May 20206).
Pandemonium for most of the poets involved, consisted in mischievous actions rather than vocal outbursts and/or verbal improvisation, such as taking down the stage and canopy protecting us from the fierce sun: leaving the audience quite baffled at what was going on.
Composer, improviser, artist Henry McPherson decided to take the recording equipment to the other side of the park then offer it to the audience, only returning it for the last few minutes of this 30 mins performance. Hence the short recording.
But we hear the possibility of what it would mean to be together, truly, glimpsed, briefly: a fraction of a second, a sliver of a sound. “ David Grundy (CD notes)
All text scores are available from Edition Wandelweiser