Event Type
This roundtable gathers five artists whose work enacts visionary practice not as transcendence but as deep listening—to language, to the past, to archaeological time, to presences human and otherwise that dominant culture has rendered inaudible. Rather than discussing vision as abstraction, these practitioners embody five distinct frequencies of listening: Lee Ann Brown's syntactical ruptures create apertures in language itself; Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola conducts an auditory archaeology that translates material traces into sonic and visual scores; Gabrielle Octavia Rucker dissolves ego boundaries through ecstatic attunement; Alicia Wright practices ethical witnessing to restore visibility to suppressed histories; and Tanner Menard integrates contemplative embodiment with phenomenological hermeneutics. Seated together in New Orleans—a city of layered temporalities, suppressed presences, and ongoing labor of witnessing erasure—these five will read, speak, and listen from the place where poetry becomes a technology of relation: not representation, but actual attunement to what exceeds language. The roundtable itself functions as a ceremony of resonance, where the act of collective listening enacts the very relationality these artists theorize through their distinct practices.
Each artist demonstrates a different frequency of visionary listening. Brown's work attunes us to the rupture within language itself—the moment when syntax breaks and new kinship becomes possible. Hinojosa Gaxiola's auditory archaeology invites us to listen across time—to hear in archaeological shards, in old photographs, in wind's abrasion against stone, a voice that has been waiting generations to be heard. Rucker's ecstatic practice teaches us to listen with a body that has dissolved its boundaries, becoming a vessel through which numinous presences speak. Wright's occult hermeneutics teaches us to listen for what has been deliberately silenced—to hear the ghosts, the erasures, the testimonies that power tried to bury. Menard's integration of yoga and phenomenology demonstrates that listening requires sustained embodied practice—that to perceive truly, the whole organism must be retuned. These are not separate approaches but interlocking frequencies. The frictions between them—between linguistic rupture and sonic attunement, between archaeological time and ecstatic dissolution, between ethical witnessing and phenomenological rigor—generate the conditions for new listening to emerge. New Orleans itself becomes a fifth collaborator: a city that demands we listen to what colonialism, slavery, and modernization tried to silence, and to sit in the company of all those presences.
An Invitation to Audiences
This roundtable calls to those who understand that poetry is not entertainment but survival practice—to experimental poets working outside academia, to residents of New Orleans' vital reading communities (Blood Jet, Dogfish, Normie Creep, The Splice), to meditators and yoga practitioners who recognize that contemplative work transforms not just consciousness but language itself, to those who practice occult arts or work with sound and sonic materials, to anyone who has felt called to listen more deeply to what has been made inaudible. This gathering is for people who sense that vision and hearing are inseparable—that to see truly is to listen, and that collective listening is a form of healing, of reparation, of bringing what has been fractured back into wholeness. Come to experience five distinct modalities of visionary practice interlocking in real time, to feel the resonances and frictions between them, and to discover what new frequencies of listening can emerge when artists committed to relationality sit together and create conditions for presence—your presence, your listening, your capacity to be moved by what exceeds words.