Lily Greenham
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Tune in to Reality!

In 1974 Writers Forum in London published a stab-stapled edition of Greenham’s poems titled Tune in to Reality!, issued as Writers Forum ‘Fours’ Number Seven. A special edition was also printed in a run of 50 copies for Galerie Lydia Megert in Bern later in the same year. A number of poems collected in Tune in to Reality! are reproduced in translation, and stem from Greenham’s approach to working with ‘key-words’ to extract multiple meanings and interpretations. Presented alongside the special edition, are a series of manuscripts of pieces included within its pages, in different iterations of French, Spanish and English. At this point Greenham primarily wrote in English, embracing its inherent semantic slippage. As she puts it, ‘the fact that I write in English has [the] following explanation: the uncomplicated construction of the language, its elementarity and the multifarious-significance of many words fascinate me. From my point of view it is nearly unavoidable to develop a certain humour employing the English language.’

Lily Greenham, Internationale Sprachexperimente Der 50/60er Jahre / Tendentious Neo-Semantics 1970 In English, LP, 1970, Edition Hoffmann, Frankfurt, liner notes insert.