Event Type
This is a collective performance by an ensemble which has grown organically out of community reading and listening practices we have done in NYC in a small monthly reading group. Together we performed Lucia Hinojosa Gaxiola’s poem Decompositions from her book the Telaraña Circuit (Tender Buttons Press, 2023) which features performative visual text and spacing that suggest staccato and multivocal work. We are interested in how performance opens a text for readers, listeners and authors and can also produce new work. We will explore and unfold the sonic elements of poems playing with percussion, handpan, voice, and keyboards including piano or electronic keyboard and typewriter. Lee Ann Brown will offer two short poems written the last time she was at the NOLA Poetry Festival New Orleans which documents a group poet trip down to the Bayou Bienvenue viewing platform. This poem plays with bringing the occasional happenings of a day into form, documenting poets in community and in collaboration. We end up at the viewing platform where we can see birds and wildlife as well as witness an area which was flooded during Hurricane Katrina and has been rebuilt. Angela Carr will offer two parts of a new poem: Foothold and Threshold that explore the places memory lives in the land and in the body, and the contingent energies of pleasure and survival. Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola will present “Archaeological Radio: Gravities of Memory,” a multilayered performance exploring ideas of gravity, ritual, archives, sound and memory. This is part of a series of interdisciplinary works that inspired her book The Telaraña Circuit, which focuses on her aunt’s archeological investigation from 1974. This poetry reading and performance will integrate her research into a sonic ritual including long drone experiments with synths and keyboards, field recordings, poetry readings, sonic archives and textural experiments. The listening experience of this could be translated into a symbolic level by using the gravity and presence of the rocks as historical and ecological depth and the drone as an elongation of presence, care and acknowledgement of both her aunt, women archaeologists in Mexico, and the people of San Martín Huamelulpan. E.J. McAdams will offer a poem created for a performance with Edwin Torres called “Soon Is Now” which can be read horizontally and vertically. He can play, or we can perform riffing of his film “Out of Paradise,” a poem from my latest collection LAST, that takes spoken language from those who escaped and fought the fire in Paradise, CA. Sarah Riggs will select a poem from her new book Lines where language breaks down, goes into incoherency and finds its way back again, to reflect artistic energy during fascism and ecocide. Influenced by Bernadette Mayer’s Memory and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. The group can enact the assemblage and fracture also of Riggs’ visual poem in five versions as the book Chain of Minuscule Decisions in the Form of a Feeling, mapping the experience of the mind and the eyes and vocalizations, punctuated by the sounds and motions of the typewriter, handpan, and voice. Together this group will perform, interact and create a unique performance which grows out of synergies and connections from their conversations, readings, exchanges and enactments over time.