Using Kevin Stein’s poem “On Being a Nielsen Family,” this collaborative project interrogates our culture’s historical privileging of the printed page as sole site of poetic performance. Five hundred years of printerly convention have led to our unthinkingly accepting the materiality of the page as the only means for poets to offer and for readers to receive a poem. That convention deludes us into regarding poems as static entities. We expect, if not demand, poems presented in standardized, linear fashion marching handcuffed from left to right across the page.
Instead, this collaborative project proposes a cardinal notion of poetry: that poems are events, not stories about events.
What this means for poetry is as simple as it is profound. In sum, reading or hearing a poem offers an essentially interactive experience. This experience poses an infinitely fresh encounter enriched by the creative interplay of author, poem, and reader. Because no poem exists wholly in a vacuum, divorced from culture and community, this bristling interchange enables poems to reward multiple rereadings, each experience as unique as that particular electric moment of encounter.
All poems are performative, verbal artifacts enacted in space and time. Poetry’s mystery lies not only in recreating this performance within readers but also in welcoming the readerly act as itself performative.
Project collaborators have thus fashioned a collage of print, audio, video that challenges cultural assumptions about how poems are created and received. Artists George Brown, Jim Ferolo, Scott Cavanah, Robert Rowe, Chad Udell and Gary Will, and will be completing a variety of traditional and interactive works that explore the nature of written poetry and alternative artistic forms.
In short, the project’s artist-collaborators have aimed to reimagine traditional print forms, welcome current technological innovations, and encourage reader/listener participation in the creative act.
In the process, the poem’s literal and figurative “space” has transitioned from the historically orderly confines of the printed page to a physical realm of interactive performance. Such fooling around evokes in both poet and reader the self-sufficient joy of reshuffling the perceptual deck of cards one has been handed by previous reading.
Look for links and future summaries on the artists’ works.
