[APPLAUSE]
Hi, my name is Renee Angle.
I work here at the center, and I'll
be introducing Christine Hume.
Christine Hume is the author of three books,
most recently Shot, and two chapbooks, Lullabies--
Speculations on the First Active Sense and Ventifacts.
A bilingual selected poems is coming out
with Lux Books in Berlin later in 2012.
She directs the interdisciplinary Creative
Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.
Hume's poetry is relentless, traversing
a complex range of forms and styles on and off the page.
Her current installation here at the Poetry Center,
titled Pillowtalk (Covers)--
A Sonic Insomnia, is a compilation
of various artists covering poems from her book, Shot.
It is both a literal and dreamlike invitation
to lay down, lay way, lay up, and lay
a course for the unhearable--
the sound within the sound within the figure
of the ear, disorder in opposition.
Hume's lush surrealism, use of homophonics,
and liturgical rhythms are continually
refigured through her collaborator soundscapes.
The only clothing for the furniture
she evokes in this installation is the pillow.
It is the membrane through which we as listeners
partake in intimate conversation.
But beware.
It also muffles and suffocates.
If each of these sound artists create a bed for the voice,
as Stephen Vitiello describes of his own cover,
they also throw back the covers to a place where synesthesia
and sleep lust abound.
Eye is also ear.
Ear is also a mouth, ringing, fermenting the unabsorbed.
Listener, get under, cover up.
What Hume has created is mirabile dictu.
Please welcome Christine Hume.
[APPLAUSE]