P O E T IC V I S I O N
Poems Meet Visual Art, Science, and Film, Janée Baugher, Kanika Agrawal, Jess Mc Kinney, Federico Federici, hosted and curated by Jake Schneider, «SAND» Editor in Chief, 25/04, 20:00-21:30, Berlin.
SLIDES DOWNLOAD: Poetic Vision
The authors interested in playing around with the suggested prompt and have their work published on a forthcoming issue of Die Leere Mitte, may submit it at leeremittemag [AT] gmail [DOT] com!
The series kicks off with a webinar featuring four guest poets with varied vantage points: a practicing expert on art-influenced writing, an MIT-trained biologist whose poems read between the lines of genetics papers, an Irish poet who responds to anime and mantis shrimp, and a conceptual artist whose asemic poems are themselves visual artworks. In a 10–15 minute presentation, each guest will offer “a glimpse through their glasses,” share their poetic perspective, and introduce a writing prompt for the audience to try at home. After the artistic eye-openers, the live audience will have a chance to ask questions.
Presenters
Janée Baugher is the author of The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction, a comprehensive guidebook for engaging with art in words, as well as two poetry collections, Coördinates of Yes and The Body’s Physics. Her recent art/flash exchange with Qrcky was featured in the light ekphrastic. She is also the columnist at The Ekphrastic Review.
Kanika Agrawal’s work-in-progress Okazaki Fragments, excerpted in SAND 19, adapts language and images from a series of scientific papers on discontinuous strand synthesis during DNA replication. This research was led by the Japanese molecular biologists Okazaki and Okazaki. Okazaki Fragments (re)constructs Okazaki and Okazaki’s experiences by reading their lives into (or out of) their scientific papers. Kanika studied biology many years ago as an undergraduate at MIT, and she has been thinking and writing about Okazaki fragments and various other cellular molecules and processes ever since.
Jess Mc Kinney is a poet from Inishowen Donegal who recently completed her MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, where she was awarded the Irish Chair of Poetry Student Award 2020. Her poem “Deluge” in the current SAND 22 rewatches the classic anime film Spirited Away, lip-syncs Leonard Cohen, and exposes the startling sweep of its own poetic vision. Another poem of hers in The Moth looks through the technicolor eyes of swifts and mantis shrimp. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Abridged, The Open Ear, Channel Magazine, and The Poetry Jukebox. She was awarded an artist bursary from Donegal County Council to complete her debut poetry pamphlet.
Federico Federici is a conceptual artist and physicist who approaches poetry as a visual medium. Four asemic poems from his Concrete Disassembled Poems series, created by typewriter and pen, were featured in SAND 18. Among many other projects, he is the author of Transcripts from demagnetized tapes, Vol. 1 and A private notebook of winds, and will discuss both books during the webinar.
Hosted and curated by Jake Schneider, SAND Editor in Chief
