Son[i]a #247
María Salgado

Charles Bernstein is a poet, essayist, editor, and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Together with Bruce Andrews, he edited the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which gave its name to a movement of more than a hundred poets interested in the radical exploration of writing that flourished in the late 1970s and the 1980s on both the east and west coasts of the United States. In this podcast, we hear Charles Bernstein think aloud about the performativity of poetry and the multiplicity of voice, elaborating on questions such as the sound of writing, presence and absence, orality, aurality and a/orality. Along the way, Bernstein recounts his first textual experience and acknowledges the influence of Artaud, Bob Wilson and the Living Theatre in shaping him as a poet. We also revisit the early discussions of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E constellation, their policy of exchanging poems and essays by setting up horizontal cultural mechanisms, and a collaborative effort to reread poets from past decades in order to write an alternative, non-hegemonic history of American poetry.

In this podcast we talk to with writer and researcher Andrea Valdés about pure writing, about heterodoxy, and about spatial optimism. We open up the metaphor of soft tools, and the semantic resonance of organs—be they tongues or genitals—trapped by the technological rudiments of machines. We discuss the use of tape recorders, orality and writing, and the research of Rivolta Femminile self-awareness groups, which tried to find a space for a different kind of speech in a private, female-only environment. The conversation was recorded at Hangar in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, as one of the first moves towards a line research that Andrea had continued to work on to this day.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist and writer Clàudia Pagès that we were unable to include the first time around. We talk about living and writing in different languages, about the fragile balance between precision and artefacts, about Spanglish, and about standing up for Spanishisms. We also look into shared readings as a strategy for thinking together.

The work of artist Clàudia Pagés unfolds and contracts in many forms. Words, the body, and movement circulate in multiple directions through her processes, forging a tangled linguistic web of micro-narratives that involve critically listening to the immediate environment, and recording it through persistent writing. In this podcast, we open Clàudia Pagés’s box of tricks and tools. Repetition, 'zoom-ins', physical and metaphorical shifts, and translation emerge as some of her main strategies, while singing, composing, and dancing come together as desire and a pure space of experimentation and possibility.

Roberto Jacoby opens up his poetry books and talks about writing, inspiration, plundering and dematerialisation; about blacks and whites, sofa-beds, politics and activism.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with val flores that we were unable to include the first time around.

Luz Pichel is a poet. Her writing comes out of all those places and even others that she did not physically visit but reached through curiosity, imagination, and empathy. The tension between major and minor languages, the liberating potential of a non-stabilised and nob-folklorising use of dialect and the crack of invention opened up by memory and childhood, are some of the paths that her poetry explores. 

Fefa Vila Nuñez is a queer feminist ‘artivist’, sociologist, mother, essayist, teacher, and many other things. Fefa was one of the founders of the lesbian collective LSD (1993-1998), which was, together with La Radical Gai, one of the touchstones of queer artivism in Spain in the 1990s. Through their political-artistic actions, LSD and La Radi defended new ways of understanding the body, sex, life, death, desire, friendship, family and work relationships, and political action. In this podcast, Fefa Vila reflects aloud on queerness as a state of radical estrangement, which is constantly being redefined. She also talks about the need to experience other forms of sociability, about other affective-relational models and about motherhood.

We shared some mates with val flores as we chatted about queer pedagogy, writing, and microactivism. We touched on teaching practice as political practice, on queer dissidence as a means to activate deheterosexualisng know-how, and on the need to inhabit and write our identities in new ways that break down gender, race, and class boundaries.