TO LAKE ERIE FROM LAKE ERIE :: I WISH YOU WERE HERE

This is going to be happening in Iowa City/Cleveland at 10:30am on Saturday, October 3rd as part of the 2009 Works in Progress Festival:


(Grandparents Saluting the Sea)

PROJECT TITLE:


TO LAKE ERIE FROM LAKE ERIE or I WISH YOU WERE HERE

LOGISTICS:

I will be using two laptop computers, each equipped with SKYPE. One computer will be with me in Cleveland, OH on the shores of Lake Erie and the other will be set up to a projector at the Iowa City Public Library which will broadcast a live reading of five texts from five different poets.

PROGRAM NOTES:

The images and sounds broadcast back to Iowa City and the WiP Festival will be delivered live from the shores of Lake Erie. The texts that are being read from Lake Erie are also addressed to Lake Erie. This project considers the consequences of departure, arrival, integration and reintegration, as well as explorations of the limited and limiting definitions of “audience” and “reader” in the context of the traditional structures that persist in most reading venues today. Additionally, as a new resident of the Midwest (from the Pacific Northwest, a region that helped sustain me physically, emotionally and artistically) I wish to explore how voluntary departures and subsequent arrivals (and departures-within-arrivals; ie: Iowa City to Cleveland) feel like segmentations of awareness. Thus, the delivery of these five texts through my own body and throat is an attempt to move beyond the need to feel as though I am “comfortable” in this new place and toward an appreciation for the fact that these texts (as they are delivered) inhabit/deliver me. To this end I hope to create some semblance of symmetry around the edges of unease; here and not here, having arrived and arrived nowhere.