Event Type
What happens when a poem moves beyond the page to become a tactile object in three dimensions? Following M.C. Richards’s notion that “the skin seems to be the best listener, as it prickles and thrills,” this panel will discuss the creative and critical potentials of working at the intersection of language and tactile experience. How, for example, can we render the divergences of the disabled body in the somatic textbody of 3D poems? What assumptions about poetry might “touchy” poem objects reveal and upset? Tactile poems blur the boundary between creator and spectator, reader and participant. This roundtable of poets and book artists will emphasize process, performance, and interactivity as essential areas of aesthetic inquiry and theory. We will aim to provide practical discussions of craft elements—the process of moving from concept to prototype to 3D object—as well as reflections on what it means to center touch, an underrepresented area of poetic production, in our creative practices.
