Aural Poetics / Convivialities

Aural Poetics/Convivialities is a weekend centering poetics and sonic practices. Montréal-based poet and editor Michael Nardone convenes the artists and writers involved in two recent works – Aural Poetics and Convivialities – to discuss their compositional practices and share audio related to the projects.

Please join us on Saturday 10th May at 7pm for an evening of readings, performances and dialogues to celebrate the launch of two recent works – Aural Poetics and Convivialities – both composed by Montréal-based poet and editor Michael Nardone. An evening of dialogue and performance, featuring Sophie Seita, including audio interventions by Dylan Robinson, Divya Victor, and Ryan C. Clarke.

The Aural Poetics/Convivialities programme will unfold over two days. On Friday 9th May, rtm.fm hosts a radio-broadcast of recordings, readings and discussion with contributors to Aural Poetics OEI #98-99, including Merlin Sheldrake, Raven Chacon, Cecilia Vicuña, Peter Morin, Sophie Seita, Carolyn Chen + Divya Victor, JJJJJerome Ellis, Lewis Freedman, Luke Nickel, and Lisa Robertson.

Aural Poetics OEI #98-99 (OEI, 2024) The domain of the aural opens, at once, on to the act of composition and on to the iterative context of a composition’s reception; it comprises embodiment(s) imbricated with an array of inscriptive practices. The works of these pages instantiate (as compositions) and contemplate (as critical texts) the differing degrees in which techniques of the body enter into dynamic relation with modes of inscription, forming a feedback loop that co-constitutes their capacities. To this degree, an aural poetics – in opposition to the vast discourse of its homonym – can evade the facile separation of an essentialized “oral” and “written,” veer away from the technological determinism and psychosocial developmental model that commentators have grafted upon this faux binary, and compel us to imagine and examine composition across artistic practices through assessing specific articulations of materials and occasion. Here, listening is manifold.

Convivialities (Talonbooks, 2025) is a collection of dialogues with contemporary writers and artists conducted over great distances and extended periods of time. These conversations focus on poetics, both the theory of poetry (its forms, histories, and critical categories) and the theory of poiesis (i.e., making). The dialogues vary. Some are chatty, others theoretical. They model how we might talk, think, and listen together, both to one another and to the sites and greater communities where we are situated. Convivialities investigates how the collected writers and artists craft their works, the contexts in which they make them, the intellectual and artistic histories that inspire their own ways of working, and the cultural issues that are at the core of their practices. And, perhaps most of all, it asks how they continue to create in a world ravaged by climate crisis, economic crisis, settler colonialism, and imperialism.

Contributors

Michael Nardone is a poet and editor based in Montréal. His recent and forthcoming works include: Convivialities (a book of dialogues), Aural Poetics (an edition on listening practices across the arts), Yellow Towel: A Score (a collaboration with Dana Michel), Border Tuner | Sintonizador Fronterizo (a monograph on Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, co-edited with Edgar Picazo Merino), the Documents on Expanded Poetics book series (co-edited with Nathan Brown), The Tranatlantic Conversation (a translation of Abigail Lang’s monograph on contemporary French and US poetry), and The Ritualites (a book of poems). Beginning in 2024, he is a writer-in-residence at the SETI Institute.

For about a decade, Sophie Seita has worked with language as a sensuous, sculptural, and sonic material, translated and moulded into live performances, performative objects, publications, sound pieces, drawings, and textiles. She teaches in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and recently held the Werner Düttmann Fellowship at Akademie der Künste (Berlin), and a research residency at Studio Voltaire. Often working collaboratively, she’s currently working on a longer term project on ecoliteracy with Youngsook Choi, and a performance ritual for and with queer ancestors and water alongside Victoria Perrie, Jehan Roberson, Naomi Woo; and most recently, with Bhanu Kapil, she improvised a score around and about the perimeter, the pericardium, performing duration and an intimate encounter with an known structure at Goethe Institute London.

Dylan Robinson is a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah First Nation) scholar and artist who seeks to prioritize Indigenous resurgence through writing, curation and interarts practice. He is the author of Hungry Listening: Resurgent Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, which received several awards including the best book for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and the Wallace Berry award for Music Theory for the Society of Music Theory. Working with the sound of Halq’emeylem language, his writing makes space for the resonance and vibrancy of shxwelméxwelh concepts. Robinson is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia.

Divya Victor is a Tamil American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of CURB, which won the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. It was also a finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award. Divya is also the author of KITH, Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays, NATURAL SUBJECTS, UNSUB, and THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH. Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, W.W. Norton’s The Seagull Reader, and boundary2. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Writing at Michigan State University, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program.

A tonal geologist from the northern rim of the Gulf of Mexico, Ryan C. Clarke notices the passage of time as both a trained coastal sedimentologist and artist-researcher as an Editor and Director of Educational Programming at dweller electronics, a group dedicated towards providing afrological counterpoint within an otherwise eurologically dominant music industry. His individual works investigate local cultural objects and their metaphysical communications with their proximal geological landscape. Knowing intimately the ways his home is at great risk of physical and social loss, he finds ways to not only document this loss quantitatively in scientific research as a trained coastal sedimentologist, but qualitatively with works that aim to articulate the vernacular knowledges his people share with the Mississippi River Delta and its distributaries. By interpreting the various articulations of Black music as a depositional record, he views the progression of technology and culture at-large as being downstream of Black innovation in dialogue with its surrounding environment under the proposition of geologizing blackness.