Extracts from the Farewell performance at Kings College, London 1978. Jgjgjgjg formed at the  London Sound Poetry Festival in June 1976. Reissue of tape on Balsam Flex. 200 copies
In those days a number of British poets were producing works influenced by radical international currents in sound art, conceptual art, visual poetry and performance art. Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) was a central figure in this continuation of the ‘British Poetry Revival’, a rather loose poetry movement of the 1960s and 1970s which can be seen as an internationally oriented modernist reaction to the English traditionalist and nationalist approach of poetry of ’The Movement’ (Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin et al.) Many of the Balsam Flex cassettes brought poets connected with ‘Writers Forum’, a small publisher, workshop and writers’ network founded in 1963 by Bob Cobbing, Jeff Nuttall and John Rowan. After Cobbing’s death in 2002 ‘Writers Forum’ has been directed by poet and artist Lawrence Upton (1949), who is one of the poets of the improvisational group JGJJGJG (‘as long as you can say it that’s the name of the band’). The other two members are Cris Cheek – originally from London but currently on the staff of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio – and Clive Fencott, who lectures at Teesside University. Slowscan #37 contains extracts from the Farewell performance of the group at King’s College, London 1978.
Lawrence Upton(b. 1949) – poet, prose writer, essay writer, critic, publisher. Author of a great number of publications in literary magazines, collections, miscellanies both in Great Britain and abroad, and also of www-publications on various literary sites. Editor and publisher of a number of magazines and international anthologies, author of numerous books of poetry and prose. For many years he has been collaborating with different literary and artistic associations and perform-groups.