Description:

Please join the English department & the Poetry & Poetics cluster, as part of the UNSETTLING SOUND event series, for a Performance-In-Conversation with the poet Kevin Holden and music ensemble a•pe•ri•od•ic.

This year, our event series is "Unsettling Sound." Unsettling Sound foregrounds the entanglement between poetics and sound to explore the integral, esoteric, and, occasionally, uncomfortable manner in which sound contributes to and develops expressive meaning. Defining sound as vibrational and only sometimes including audio, we track the vibrations and resonances between text-based and non-text-based arts. Unsettling Sound asks: What is the sound of poetry? What makes poetry sound? What are the new and vanguard interventions in the dark matter between language and sonority? Shepherding together inquiries into text, music, translation, embodiment, performance, and materialities, Unsettling Sound stewards the development of poetic practices in sounding and listening, critically and creatively, in both orthodox and unorthodox ways. 

Kevin Holden is a poet, critic, and translator. He is currently a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is the author of seven books and chapbooks of poetry, including PINK NOISE (Nightboat Books), SOLAR, which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and won the Fence Modern Poets Prize, and BIRCH, which won the Ahsahta Press Award. His translations of poetry from French, German, and Russian have also been published, and his translation of Jean Daive’s THE FIGURE OUTWARD (L'ÉNONCIATEUR DES EXTRÊMES) is recently out from Black Square Editions. He studied at Harvard (AB), Cambridge (MPhil), Iowa (MFA), and Yale (PhD). At the Writers' Workshop he was an Iowa Arts Fellow and then taught as a Provost Postgraduate Fellow. His dissertation in comparative literature at Yale concerns nonparaphrasable meaning in poetry and its relation to alterity, considering the work of several poets and philosophers of a number of European and American languages writing mostly in the 19th and 20th Centuries. He works also on ontology, modern art, and queer theory. He has taught at Bard, Brown, and Harvard and is currently the Writer-in-Residence of Kirkland House at Harvard. He is also an activist and cares a great deal about trees.

Founded in 2010, a•pe•ri•od•ic is a Chicago-based ensemble specializing in notated, acoustic, experimental music. a•pe•ri•od•ic‘s repertoire explores the indeterminacy of various musical elements including instrumentation, structure, pitch, and/or duration. Drawn to works of sparseness, contemplation, and quietude, this "daring group" (Chicago Reader) has a history of interpreting distinctive pieces using a collaborative rehearsal process, deriving meaning and intention from oblique prose scores with great sensitivity. 

Founded and directed by Nomi Epstein, the ensemble has commissioned, premiered, and recorded works by composers such as Michael Pisaro, Catherine Lamb, Eva-Maria Houben, Jürg Frey, Christian Wolff, and Pauline Oliveros. a•pe•ri•od•ic released its debut album, more or less, featuring the music of Jürg Frey, in 2014, and its second album, for a•pe•ri•od•ic in 2019, both under New Focus Recordings. a•pe•ri•od•ic has received funding from the Swiss Arts Council, the Earle Brown Foundation, the Goethe Institute, and the Foundation of Contemporary Arts.