All right.
Good evening.
Hi, everyone.
Hi.
I like how you have to move--
I have to move to see different parts of the room.
So this has been so exciting and amazing.
And I could ramble on about how honored
I am to be part of this two-part event with Jen, Myriam
and John, and all the people working to make it happen.
But I've prepared some thoughts on the poetic practices
of the people you're going to be hearing from tonight.
And I come from a tradition of introduction
writing where I don't read a bio,
but I really encourage you to find the bios of these writers
and artists online and also to check out
all of the many publications that are here for sale.
OK.
So I'm going to introduce Myriam Moscona,
and then I'm going to introduce Antena.
And it'll all happen at once, and then the reading
will begin.
Myriam Moscona writes in Tela de Sevoya.
"Language is a skin.
I rub my language against the other.
It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers
at the tip of my words."
Moscona, I suspect, remembers her dreams in precise detail,
then opens them up and finds dreams inside of them
to craft her inventive poetry and prose.
The hybridity of Myriam's work is
that her poetics is alive in all forms of consciousness.
The materiality of language shatters and does not
come together but revels in the possibility of reconstruction.
Or as Francine Masiello writes in an afterword to Negro
Marfil, which is on that table, "Moscona
reminds us that the height of the subjective moment,
the space in which we reach the other is fragile and tenuous.
It lasts but a second.
And after that, we are left to contend with the fragments.
Down to the most elemental sensory detail,
Moscona uses his language so that textures are never
taken for granted.
Even a watermark on a page refracts
through the lens of multidirectional colors,
shapes, sound, smells, and tastes.
Moscona writes what is acid in the cornea.
She asks and Jen Hofer translates in Negro Marfil.
Moscona's poetics is a movement in reverberation.
One dream is not a resting place of singular oddity.
It is a sight to plunge deeper into the restlessness
or, as she says, the answer returns
to the question, a circularity restrained from exception."
OK, scene change.
So Antena, which is John Pluecker and Jen Hofer,
they make words live in different languages
simultaneously to maximize connection.
So John Pluecker and Jen Hofer operate and negotiate
collaboration by doing language justice, which
is how they describe Antena, which envisions
this interconnectedness of language and action,
listening and rearticulating.
And this takes the form of translating authors
like Myriam Moscona.
And it also takes the form of interpretive services
to places like activists who are doing
"Know Your Rights" training, so it's very agile and shifting.
So there is a care to framing their translation.
And I am always learning in this way
from how they make their processes so open source.
And it encompasses interpretive work, publishing, performance.
And we'll experience a lot of that tonight.
And a lot of that is improvised, and it's
live poem-making, where there's repetition, spiraling,
interpretation, and additions.
So Antena's work is also available
in beautiful chapbooks and pamphlets.
And those are here tonight, as well as provided as an archive
online to increase the accessibility of written words.
So I encourage you to check that out online.
I heard tonight somebody say, I've been hanging out with you
or encountering you on the internet, something
like that, which is a place to find them as well.
So I just wanted to say--
quote some pieces from their manifesto
for discomfortable writing, which
sets some intentions for their practice.
And one of them is to make us strangers
in a place we thought was home, to find spaces for listening
inside strangeness.
So they're proposing discomfort is a commitment to shattering
genre, refusing false divides one
might struggle with in art versus activism,
making art versus making money.
So we can learn from Antena what decolonizing this place,
and how it can be an elemental daily practice
to refuse complacency, to allow risk, as they say.
So I feel myself wanting to transcribe
all their manifestations to embody them,
to be able to sit with their calls for language
justice and also language experimentation.
And that tonight together, we can
work with the intense aliveness of Myriam Moscona an Antena
and think about words across languages,
across perspectives, and using what's
readily available against these forms of violence
that we also see every day that wish
to suppress such shape-shifting resistances.
So please help me in welcoming these wonderful writers.
[APPLAUSE]
[INAUDIBLE] I really want you to introduce us.