&NOW 2018

Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan, "Off the Page: Collaborations in Visual and Sonic Poetry"

Writer/designer/performer Warren Lehrer and poet/actor/audio artist Judith Sloan present and perform excerpts from works of visual and sonic poetry. Projects include: a multimedia symphony for a new America; poetry in (hundreds of) vacant storefront windows; an interactive poem (for a new art+literary app) that takes the reader inside the mind of a stroke victim; a poetry-theater piece with recorded sounds and live musicians about trauma, recovered memories and teaching immigrant and incarcerated youth; animations linked to a memoir in short poems; and documentary radio poems from a project about the most diverse locality in the U.S. The husband and wife co-directors of EarSay discuss working together, alone, and with other collaborators, and their compulsion to present poetry and other text-based projects on and OFF the page. They will also talk about their relationship to communities, especially their home borough of Queens, NY, and the process of presenting their work back into the community—in public venues and media other than books (as much as they adore books). Sloan will perform an excerpt from Yo Miss! a prose poem-theater piece using midi-controllers and an original musical score. Lehrer will share his approach to capturing the shape of thought, giving form to the interior underpinnings of a poem, conjuring experience, and creating participatory reads through typography, and more recently kinetic typography.

Analeah Loschiavo Rosen and S. Yarberry, “Marginal Transmission”
Metaphor diminishes the autonomy of each image. We propose a writing praxis wherein images accrue to create affect and every occurrence on the page is recognized as reality. For instance, instead of assuming other worlds are metaphors for alternate realities let’s assume other worlds exist simultaneous to ours. Accessing these worlds depends on practices of deep-listening and altering our tactics of communication. It is said that we are in dialogue before we are in language, i.e. we experience our world through sensory input, only later “translating” it into recognizable-word-patterns. Therefore, we propose a praxis that gives adequate time and space to this marginal preverbal state, because it is herein that gateways to adjacent dimensions might be found.  In our presentation, we will share our research findings. Having taken extensive audio recordings of high-density areas in the greater St. Louis area and translated these “ambient” noises into English, we have revealed their true poetics. From this process we believe that other planes of existence can be entered, allowing us to glean new poetic forms and even new languages. In our presentation, we will play some of these field recordings and offer simultaneous translation and invite audience to cooperatively translate a field recording in real-time, which we will transcribe for our further study. Additionally, all audience members will receive a newsprint poster of instructions for replicating this process in their own dimension(s).  For this project we are indebted to the works of Renee Gladman’s “Ravicka”, Lenore Malen’s “The New Society for Universal Harmony”, and Eames Demetrios’ “Kcymaerxthaere” project.