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 Noa Fields and the poet and performer JJJJJerome Ellis. 

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. 

Noa Micaela Fields is an echodeviant* in search of the hypervivid in her one and only captionless life. She is the author of E, forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Experience her words in Anomaly, Action Spectacle, Tripwire, Zoeglossia, Tyger Quarterly, Jacket2, Poem of the Day, Sixty Inches From Center, and a micro-chapbook from Ghost City Press. She lives in Chicago, where she loves to host poetry readings, make zines, and go out dancing.

JJJJJerome Ellis is a stuttering, Afro-Caribbean composer, poet, and performer. His works are invitations to healing, transcendence, communion, and deep listening. Through an interdisciplinary practice that focuses on oral storytelling, improvisation, and the interrelations between speech, silence, disability, and religion, he’s collaborated with choreographers, rappers, playwrights, booksellers, typographers, podcasters, toddlers, and filmmakers. Mr. Ellis’ work has been presented or developed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, and WKCR. He is a writer in residence at Lincoln Center Theater. Born in Connecticut to a Jamaican mother and a Grenadian father, he was raised in Virginia Beach, VA.