[working title]: a performance
Maverick Studios, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont.
April 30, 2024
Run time: approx. 4 minutes, 25 seconds
This improvised, movement-based performance explores the arduous, often frustrating process of drafting, punctuated by those rare & typically private moments of ecstasy when a discovery is made. Otherwise a very disembodied, intellectual process, in this stage of drafting the writer is engaging with the physicality of language on the page, and also exploring the shape of the book. Not unlike a good lover, the poet must listen for what the book is timidly asking & (sometimes gently, sometimes more roughly) dutifully tend to the book’s idiosyncratic desires & needs. This performance allows the viewer to witness an intimate process that they wouldn’t otherwise be privy to—the sensual and sometimes tense interaction between the body of work and the body of the poet.
& [erased]
Living Arts, Tulsa, OK
March 3, 2019
Every poem has a different existence on the page than it does in the ear, especially these, which I performed as "sound translations" at Living Arts for the OK Avant-garde Festival, and which later appeared in The Capilano Review.
& [redacted]
The Refinery Roof Top, Tulsa, OK
August 2, 2018
& [redacted] is an excerpt from Translating Wulf, a performance-based translation of the ancient Old English poem known as “Wulf ond Eadwacer.” This experimental micro play weaves together fragments of the original Anglo-Saxon text, scholarly notes on the poem, and structured silence to introduce audiences to the haunting mysteries of the original poem.
.jpg)