“Know how to now it’s that you’re learning the segments
That aren’t sentences at all and converse with each other” *
Readings, sounds and performances on the poetics of measure
14–15 September 2023
“The hurricane does not roar in pentameters”
–– Edward Kamau Brathwaite
Paul Celan once described poetic language being “concerned with precision: [...] it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible.”(1) Moved by this definition, this gathering will explore past, present and future possibilities of poetic measure from a variety of disciplines and critical perspectives, amongst others, poetry, philosophy, poetics, typography, sound, and performance.
In a present where measure is becoming synonymous with counting, bordering, and quantification, guests will speak about, play, and perform metrics that unsettles canonical forms of written and spoken language, along with their cultural, historical, and political repercussions. While looking back at (and beyond) ‘tradition’, participants will re-trace unavowed approaches to metre, as well as sketch new possibilites.
With: Alice Notley, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Paul Abbott, Phil Baber, Snejanka Mihaylova, Will Holder, Chloe Chignell, Nicola Masciandaro, and Angela Xu
| THURSDAY 14 SEPTEMBER | |
| [time slots including q&a] | |
| 14:00 | Introduction Andrea di Serego Alighieri |
| 14:45 | Phil Baber |
| 15:45 | Chloe Chignell |
| 16:45 | – break – |
| 17:00 | Will Holder |
| 18:00 | Alice Notley |
| 19:00 | – drinks –– |
| FRIDAY 15 SEPTEMBER | |
| [time slots including q&a] | |
| 14:00 | Introduction Andrea di Serego Alighieri |
| 14:45 | Nicola Masciandaro |
| 15:45 | Angela Xu |
| 16:30 | – break – |
| 16:45 | Snejanka Mihaylova |
| 17:45 | Paul Abbott |
| 18:45 | Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro |
| – drinks –– | |
Andrea di Serego Alighieri
Andrea (Verona, 1988) works on projects where a focus on writing, language and translation – and the politics thereof – is of central concern. He is the co-editor of “Resistance” (uh books), the publication of a previously unreleased poem by American poet Lyn Hejinian; and translator of Simone Forti’s L’orso allo specchio (Kunstverein Publishing & Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milano). Recently he co-edited and authored, with Nicola Masciandaro, Glossator 11 Translation/Commentary: on Cristina Campo (Open Humanities Press, NY), and FR DAVID “Take, eat”, with Will Holder. He is lecturer in writing and typography, thesis tutor and researcher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp; from October 2023, he’ll be a PhD candidate in Medieval & Modern Languages at the University of Oxford.
Alice Notley
Paris-based Alice Notley is the author of more than 20 books of poetry including The Descent of Alette (1996) and Mysteries of Small Houses (Penguin, 1998). She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. In the spring of 2001 she received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelly Memorial Award. She edited and wrote a new introduction to her late husband Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets (Penguin, 2000). Born in Bisbee, Arizona, Notley grew up in Needles, California. After leading a peripatetic life during the late 60s and early 70s, she settled in New York, where, for 16 years, she was an important force in the eclectic second generation of the so-called New York school of poetry.
Paul Abbott
Paul plays with the drum kit, synthetic sounds, performance and writing. Recent and ongoing collaborations: XT with Seymour Wright; XT+Anne Gillis; FR DAVID *very good with Will Holder; RP Boo Trio with XT; The Creaking Breeze Ensemble with Nathaniel Mackey, Ute Kanngießer, Evie Ward, Seymour Wright and Billy Steiger; yPLO with Micheal Speers and performances with Cara Tolmie. He has performed internationally at Cafe OTO, Talbot Rice Gallery, Whitstable Biennale, Whitechapel Gallery, Raven Row, Tate Modern, Counterflows, Next Festival, KW Institute Berlin, Serralves Porto, Empty Gallery HK. He is a researcher at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp, with the project “We grow music! Ecologies of attention, discrepancy and multiplicity – real and imaginary –in embodied music performance”.
paulabbott.net
Phil Baber
Phil (1987) is a typographer, editor, and writer. Since 2016 he has taught writing in the Graphic Design Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and from 2020 to 2021 he taught in the MA Approaching Language, a temporary master’s programme at the Sandberg Instituut. As a writer and researcher he works mainly on prosody in contemporary and historical poetry and on the social and material histories of radical publishing. He is the cofounder, with Snejanka Mihaylova, of The Last Books, a publishing house for experimental writing, and is also the editor of The Yellow Papers, a pamphlet series for contemporary poetics. He cocurates Don’t Pay Your Rent, a reading series held at Rietlanden Women’s Office in Amsterdam. In 2012 he was awarded the Walter Tiemann Prize for book design and has been a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart.
Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro
Mayra is a writer. She is the editor of Dream of Europe: selected seminars and interviews: 1984-1992 (Kenning Editions, 2020), a collection of unpublished seminars and interviews by Audre Lorde across Western Europe and Germany. She is a former Research Fellow at The John F. Kennedy Institute of Northamerican Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin (2018) and recipient of the Anne Waldman Fellowship at Naropa University (2019). Castro has collaborated extensively with de Appel, presenting the keynote address and curatorial seminar Ocean Blue (2022). Most recently, she has united with Divided Publishing in the publication of In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love by abolitionist scholar, Joy James (2022). Her writing and contributions appear in Social Text Journal, Changes Review, The Poetry Project, and South As a State of Mind, among others.
Will Holder
Will publishes work both orally and in print – with consideration for the role of scores and notation may have on the body as (speaking, social) document. Together with Alex Waterman, he co-edited Yes But Is It Edible? The music of Robert Ashley for two or more voices (New Documents) and is editor, since 2007, of F.R.DAVID, a journal concerned with the role of reading & writing in the arts, co-published by uh books and KW, Berlin.
Snejanka Mihaylova
Snejanka is a writer and artist. Among her books Theatre of Thought (2011), published with Critique and Humanism; Practical Training in Thinking (2012), edited and designed by Phil Baber and published with The Last Books; Acoustic Thought (2015), commissioned and published by If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution and The Last Books. Invested in the field of experimental pedagogy, she curated programs for Documenta 14, the Sandberg Institute (Master of Voice) and just concluded a commissioned educational curriculum titled On Tradition Future Ancestors (2020-2023) created together with Rory Pilgrim for IICD and Dutch Art Institute, where she is still involved as a tutor. Her works have been performed in several locations in Europe and the US. Currently, she teaches history of logic at the University of Sofia, her hometown, where she lives with her dog. Together with long term collaborator and friend Phil Baber, she is co-founder of the imprint The Last Books.
Nicola Masciandaro
Nicola is professor at the English department at CUNY, Brooklyn College, NYC. He is a writer and theorist in the spheres of medieval literature and mysticism. Some principal themes of his work are: individuation, sorrow, decapitation, commentary, metal, alpinism, love, anagogy, and paradise. His essays have appeared in a variety of journals (Qui Parle, Cyclops, Collapse et al.) and his recent books include Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory (Mimesis, 2015) and SACER (Schism, 2017) ans On the Darkness of the Will (Mimesis, 2018). He is founder and editor of Glossator, a journal on the theory and practice of commentary, published by Open Humanities Press. Recently, he’s been working on a new book project titled Adding Up to One: On the Seriality of Everything.
Chloe Chignell
Chloe is an artist working across text, chore- ography and publishing. She graduated from the research cycle at P.A.R.T.S (BE, 2018) and went on to the post-master research program at A.pass (BE, 2020). She has a Bachelor in Dance from Victorian College of the Arts, (AU, 2013) and studied a writing and resi- dency program at DOCH (SE, 2017). Since 2019 Chloe co-runs rile* a bookshop and project space for publication and performance with Sven Dehens. Her most recent work Poems and Other Emergencies premiered at Batard Festival Brussels 2020 and has been presented at Saal Biennale (Tallinn, 2021), Moving Words Festival (NO, 2021), QL2 (AU, 2022) and at KAAP (Bruges, 2022) and Littérature etc. (Paris 2022). She presented forever in both directions for the Venice Biennale’s Biennale of Dance (2017). She published her first book The Complete Text Would Be Insufferable with uhbooks edited by Will Holder (2020). She teaches the Masters of Choreography Students at ISAC.
Angela Xu
Angela graduated with a Master in Graphic Design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp (2023). Her practices ranges across design, writing, drawing and performance. Her graduation project consisted in a collection of ‘rediscovered’ fragments of text that explored the discordant relationships between second-generation Chinese migrants in Italy and their presumed “mother tongue”.
* Alice Notley, Poem of Leading, from The Speak Angel Series, 2023
(1) Paul Celan, Collected Prose, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop, The Sheep Meadow Press (NY), 1985, 16.
Image: Amelia Rosselli’s typescript of Diary in Three Tongues (1956)
This session of readings is organised by Andrea di Serego Alighieri as the result of his two-year research project at the Academy.