Lily Greenham’s ‘Tune in to Reality!’ has been republished in the last few weeks by Luke Roberts at Distance No Object. A big thanks to Luke and all involved - you can buy the book here. I’ll post more about Lily Greenham’s work in the future, especially in relation to the Lily Greenham Archive at Goldsmiths, where myself and other members of the Lily Greenham advisory board have been developing and preserving Greenham’s extraordinary work for future generations.
Lily Greenham was born in Vienna in 1924. She was a visual artist, writer, and composer, and a performer of concrete and sound poetry. You can listen to her here and here, and there’s a 1972 interview here.
Tune in to Reality! was her only published book of poems, appearing in an edition of c.100 copies from Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum in 1974. This new edition is transcribed from the original, and presents Greenham’s wildly inventive ‘neo-semantics’ in their full glory. 23 poems, 7 translations (into German, French, Danish, and Spanish), all of them daring you to blink first.
In her own words ‘an outsider even amongst outsiders’, Greenham’s later career involved collaborations with film-makers including Lis Rhodes, and work based in computer graphics. She died in London in 2011.
This book appears with the co-operation of the trustees of the Lily Greenham Archive (Goldsmiths Special Collections), with grateful thanks.
Read an excerpt here.(text quoted from Distance No Object)