Poetry is sound. This much is clear from a study of prosody, but equally, or more so, from the wide spectrum of sound poetry and the linguistic sounding of poetic composition as spoken word or slam. Though less overtly performative sounding, reading poetry out loud at literary events and reading series’ likewise results in live events that foreground the relational act of voicing and listening to literature. Increasingly, these live events are recorded, inviting aural engagement after the fact from the archive too. In order to map out concepts and methods for a formal analysis of the poetry reading event and series, as a point of departure, my ongoing research considers poetry primarily as linguistic sound. It does so through the interdisciplinary inclusion of theory from curatorial and sound studies, broadening both print-based understandings of what counts as literature and the ways in which that literature is studied. In particular, my research foregrounds and resuscitates the agential and often underrepresented role of the literary event organiser, programmer, host, or curator, and investigates literature as sound through mediating acts of curation and as a dynamic construct called the curatorial.1 As I am the co-author of this special issue’s introduction, I refer readers to my definition of the curatorial there. Very briefly, though, the curatorial can be understood as a conceptual, relational, and dynamic field of knowledge production and exchange – what Maria Lind calls “a function and a method, even a methodology” – that is initiated at the poetry reading through practical curation decisions.2 The distinction between skills-based curating and the conceptual drive of the curatorial is one interwoven into an infinite list of possible questions that undergird the labour of curating, including: who are the poets? what are they reading? who is the audience? where is the venue and what are the architectonics of its inner layout? how is sound mediated technologically? how does it feel to read at and attend this event?3
The speculative nature of this research informs the schematisation of four curatorial modes with which to catalogue different priorities manifested in poetry reading curation, and the resultant performances and audio archives. I call these modes framed, open, self, and deep curation. As I will continue to elucidate in this essay, the four curatorial modes offer varying ratios of shared agency and directorship between curators and performing poets over the imaginary of the literary event. Framed curation models the curator as an astute administrator who simultaneously articulates a clear mandate for the poetry reading, one into which guest poets are slotted in order to further propagate the event’s vision and goals. Open curation reverses the precision manifested in framed curation, aiming to offer a space devoid of guidelines, one which counteracts assumptions of literary merit and democratically welcomes poets into the space to design and experiment with what a poetry reading can be. Self-curation heightens the role of the poet as curator, suggestive of events organised and conceptualised by the performer themself, while deep curation posits the curator as artist who authors the poetry reading as an emergent artwork in collaboration with the performing poets. The event not only presents but becomes literature – and that literature exists at least partially as signal, as voice resonating through the vibrant relational context of the poetry reading and its curatorial structure. Encoded in the printed page, the sonic dimension of literature is channeled by the performer through the vibratory technologies of the human body and is then mediated by way of a microphone, wires, speakers, and more. This research resonates beyond embodied sounding, however, to include the social structure or network that allows performed poetry to exist in public formation. That is, the scaffolding of organisational labour, of curatorial selection, care, and collaboration, formulate a range of intricately varying structures – schematised here into the four different modes – that host and inform the sounding of poetry. The rhizome of curatorial interconnection further manifests as affect and relationality.
It is the inherent ethical nexus of relational thinking that transforms this formal project from one of mere schematisation to a vibrant ecosystem of collaboration and interdependence. However the levels of labour and intended care of the four modes might vary, they cannot exist in isolation. By default, they are formed and defined through their constant engagement with an infinite number of human and non-human relational encounters that, in turn, influence and shape them as interconnected, codependent, and reciprocal entities. The dynamic conceptual and experiential field of literary events referred to as the curatorial is thus brought into possible existence by the activation of otherwise latent relations as entered into mutual contact with the mode of a particular poetry reading. As Beatrice von Bismarck writes in a recent investigation of relationality and the curatorial, in particular, “[f]ocusing on forms of relation makes it possible to view all participants as they develop and mutually form one another, to understand the hierarchies, dependencies, privileges, and procedures […and] to question, break down, and redefine them.”4 By rendering relational dynamics more transparent, the four curatorial modes also activate an agential drive towards implicit transformation; once certain restrictions or strengths of a particular mode have been articulated, those characteristics can be reevaluated as necessity or excess. To think alongside Édouard Glissant, “[p]assivity plays no part in Relation.”5 Glissant’s conceptualisation of relationality acknowledges the constant ebb and flow of exchange, the fact that bringing different elements into contact with one another is not only unstable and unknowable, but also inherently transformative.
Framed Curation
Framed curation functions as a metaphor with which to envision a certain category of literary event, invoking a history and theory of visual arts display as a mode of elevating, delimiting, and facilitating exhibition. As Brian O’Doherty states in superlative terms, “the stability of the frame is as necessary as an oxygen tank is to a diver. Its limiting security completely defines the experience within. The border as absolute limit is confirmed […] in a way that strengthens the edge.”6 While I will soon push back against the determinism of O’Doherty’s statement, it is significant that the framed artwork anchors a binary of inside/outside that emphasises the frame as scaffolding, supporting the more subjective act of viewing and interacting with the artwork itself. In their study of European visual arts framing, Paul Mitchell and Lynn Roberts nuance this inside/outside dichotomy of the frame into a series of functions that impact more than just the edge of the artwork:
[T]he protection of the painting; its display and physical attachment to the wall; the enhancement of subject and colour scheme while remaining subordinate to the picture; the definition of the picture’s perimeter and the focusing of the spectator’s attention on the subject; the provision of an area of transition between the real world and that of the picture; the creation of harmony with the surrounding interior decoration; and the isolation of the picture from a distracting background.7
While many of these functions could be relegated to the act of curating – protecting the artwork, attaching it to the wall, and so on – others point to the curatorial – defining the artwork as a visual focus, integrating its locus into the larger gallery space, and structuring the experience of how the artwork will be perceived by the viewer. The frame functions as the balancing point between curating and the curatorial, creating the material conditions for art to be experienced, interpreted, and appreciated in a more conceptual way.
In The Truth In Painting, Jacques Derrida develops the frame’s binary, suggesting that the work (ergon, in his terms) is incomplete without its frame (parergon, or that which is beside the work), that the one cannot exist without access to the other:
A parergon comes against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the work done [fait], the fact [le fait], the work, but it does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside. Neither simply outside nor simply inside. Like an accessory that one is obliged to welcome on the border, on board [au bord, à bord]. It is first of all the one (the) bo(a)rd(er).”8
With characteristic dexterity, Derrida destabilises the meaning of frame as either appendage or adornment, suggesting that the frame is not truly external to the artwork at all, does not merely surround or delimit it, does not only facilitate its material and conceptual display on a wall and in a space, but rather constitutes an integral part of it. Without the frame, the artwork is incomplete. The frame becomes an intrinsic element of the artwork, not necessarily completing it, but acting in constant relation to it so that a symbiotic interconnection of frame and artwork exists; one without the other would constitute a lack. This view of the frame becomes particularly fascinating when extrapolated beyond the obvious supporting edge of a wall-mounted artwork to three-dimensional or architectural and conceptual modes of art, leading to an endless deferral of where the edge of the frame exists. Is the frame of a building, for example, the scaffolding structuring the walls, the outer edge of the walls, or the ornamental columns adorning the building? By understanding the frame as a mobile construct which is not defined solely by a set of rigid, physical lines external to the Cartesian scope of the two-dimensional artwork, the frame becomes a malleable support system – one which might even be multiple, as in a series of interlocking frames relating to multiple agents (curators, poets, audience members) – that is indispensable for the dissemination of art, but is also difficult to pin down as a fixed set of governing rules and regulations. Phrased in terms of the picture frame, Mitchell and Roberts warn that “[v]iewers seldom ‘see’ the frame.”9 The structure of the frame is present whether the viewer is aware of it or not. Even when framing discourse is clearly articulated, it is easy, almost customary, to block it out and perceive the artwork – or by extension, the literary event – as existing independently from its apparent strictures. The frame is so embroiled with its artwork that the presence of the former can be overlooked or viewed as integral to the latter.
Building on this understanding of the frame or parergon as a constitutive part of the artwork or ergon – and expanding from the craft of practical art framing through art history and philosophy to the theorisation of literary event curation and its sounding of poetry in performance – framed curation is a mode that articulates a series of expectations that structures the events it hosts.10 A reading series that follows a framed curatorial mode has a certain style, format, set of values and goals that work to support the uniformity (within reason) of a sequence of events, all the while featuring a diverse range of authors across a potentially prolonged period of time and placing them in relation to a certain audience. These expectations further include the material infrastructure of the event itself: how the venue is set up (a podium and microphone for the reader and rows of chairs for the audience, for example), and the format of the reading (perhaps starting with an introduction about the poet, followed by a prolonged reading by the poet, an intermission, and concluding audience applause). There are also the conceptual expectations of the event: the scope of poetry presented, the reputation of the poet, the thematic reach of the work, and so on. These expectations are sometimes articulated by the series curators, sometimes initiated by the invited poets, but are often implicitly enacted through a vast array of relational influences active in the hosting space and its context: the cultural, socio-political climate, the funding body and other available material infrastructures, the demographic of the audience, and much more. Differently phrased, a framed curatorial mode insists on astute organisation (in practical terms of venue, technology, advertising, funding, and more), and it models a clear curatorial vision and deliberated rationale for the poets and poetry presented. It might not dictate the exact work that poets should read at their events, but it does valorise certain poetics over others.
By inviting poets who exemplify those poetic preferences, the series’ selection process and framing discourse are latently suggestive of expected outcomes. Framed curation works to define what is literary, according to its terms, and to delimit the negative space of what is not, as a result. In other words, by selecting and valorising certain kinds of poetry at a sequence of individual events, other possible forms of the literary are omitted and positioned as ideologically marginal to that which the series stands for. The frame is thus, to some degree, a utopian project that exists exactly due to the constant deferral of its ideal. To return to Derrida’s understanding of the frame: “The parergon inscribes something which comes as an extra, exterior to the proper field […] but whose transcendent exteriority comes to play, abut onto, brush against, rub, press against the limit itself and intervene in the inside only to the extent that the inside is lacking.”11 The individual readings and performances by a range of different poets are also always lacking, never a perfect fit for the dictates of the series’ frame. Simultaneously, the moment that invited poets enter the series’ frame, that frame serves to shape, elevate, and become intrinsic to the presentation of the work. The framed curatorial mode aspires to delimit its literary events, but is met by an eternal lack or absence which renders the frame less than determinate.
Open Curation
Implicit framing discourse, or even the intention of framelessness itself, constructs a less rigid frame for a reading series; however, the lack embedded in the conceptualisation of the relationship between ergon and parergon, or event and structure – as discussed in relation to framed curation – creates a gap that renders that frame porous. Derrida writes, “[w]hat constitutes them as parerga is not simply their exteriority as a surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon. And this lack would be constitutive of the very unity of the ergon.”12 In other words, the parergon forms part of the ergon to the degree that it could dissolve into it and becomes so enmeshed that it no longer exists as a discrete entity. While this merging could, on the one extreme, signify a frame so strong that it has become one with the work, it could also, on the other extreme, suggest a frame that is no longer a structure at all. This radical lack of the frame – or this awareness that the frame might itself be constructing further frames as an endless deferral of structure – is one way of articulating the open curatorial mode of literary event organisation.13 While it is difficult to be completely absolved of the frame, this open mode is suspicious of it. Suspicion can also be a frame, yet open curation attempts to create a venue free of preconceived expectations, rules, regulations, value judgements, and preferred performative outcomes. It tries to offer a space without rituals – even down to collective behaviours and temporal structures such as introductory remarks, formalised applause, concluding Q&A periods, and so on. Each individual event within the structure of the larger series – even each individual poet within a single event – is free to recreate a new structure for itself, even as the overarching series frame is one that foregrounds the goal of no frame at all.
Frame transforms into field. The field represents both the material venue of the literary event, the forum for a reading to take place, and the more conceptual curatorial and relational exchange of the event. The field becomes the locus for the composition of the literary event and its literary sound in much the same way that the poem is led by the page and the breath in Charles Olson’s famous articulation of “OPEN verse,” “Projective Verse,” or “FIELD COMPOSITION.”14 As Olson writes, “[t]his is the problem which any poet who departs from closed form is specially confronted by. And it involves a whole series of new recognitions. From the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION – puts himself in the open – he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself.”15 The poem, or the poetry reading, needs to follow its own stimulus, to formulate itself according to its individual agency rather than a preconceived articulation of what a literary work or event should be. While I am not trying to posit a direct indexical relationship between Olson’s language and open curation, I do think that placing them in conceptual proximity to one another allows for relevant speculation and for an understanding of open curation as field that defers the determinate frame. This conceptual proximity also links open curation to a mid-twentieth-century ethos of experimental art, sound, and literary composition, and a historical moment self-consciously invested in rethinking and remaking traditional understandings of art and literature as measured by certain standards, expectations, and outcomes.
Placed in dialogue with Olson’s theorisation of poetic composition, the open curatorial event unfolds as improvisation, as non-systematic “energy transferred” between poets, venue, audience, and more. The curatorial field, then, functions as a loose score or perforated form. It embodies a light set of notational cues that are never established as guidelines, rules, or prerequisites, but as suggestions that poets and performers can accept, reject, transform, develop, and so on. Discussing the merits of composition by field, Olson claims that “[f]or the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work.”16 At a first glance, Olson’s statement sounds a fixed and reproducible model for performance, and by extension a return to a framed literary event, but on further consideration his concept of the poem as notation also serves as an improvisational gesture that leads exactly by offering free rein through the energy and act of making itself. Here I return to Charles Bernstein’s important understanding of any work in performance embodying a “fundamentally plural existence” through its inability to ever be repeated identically.17 A score, then, by definition, also opens itself to the varying agencies of different performers who must each infuse that score with their own mode of interpretation and be directed, but not led, through the score by the inherent energy that their individual performances call for. Here one might also think alongside Olson’s contemporary, John Cage, and his interest in an alignment of event and indeterminacy. Cage explains that “an indeterminate piece, even though it might sound like a totally determined one, is made essentially without intention, so that, in opposition to music of results, two performances of it will be different […] the whole idea of things being fixed is a notion that we no longer need.”18 The open event is one which – like a poem composed according to the energy of page, field, and a poet’s breath and volition – unfurls by way of the particular set of conditions it is placed within.
This understanding of open curation implies that the field of the reading series will always have – in abstract, not real terms – the faintest trace of notational prompts. Rather than a curatorial frame wherein poets input their sets according to pre-articulated expectations, open curation offers suggestions that expand the curatorial field towards improvisation and allow poets the freedom to radically transform the series’ score at the level of the event. The difference between a frame and a scored field would be that the former offers an expectation, while the latter formulates a suggestion. One could imagine, for example, a reading series in which the room is set up with a podium in front with rows of chairs facing it. The framed assumption would be that every reader would inhabit the podium and any poet opting otherwise would imply an unwelcome intervention in the workings of that space. In contrast, a score could embody the same space and layout, but interpret the podium as an invitation to perform, not a static booth from which to proclaim poetry; the podium can be moved, the room can be set up differently, the rules of engagement between poet and audience can be altered, and all the while still lead to a similar outcome, namely the sounding of poetry. The space offers cues (a podium) towards an outcome (a poetry reading), without dictating the exact route that leads from cause to effect. The open curatorial mode embodies a drive towards constant shapeshifting and a lack of definability that invites and enacts deliberately divergent, innovative, and experimental outcomes.
Self-Curation
Whereas the framed and open curatorial modes run on an axis of power distribution and degrees of shared agency between a distinct series curator and invited poet/s for a particular event (as materialised in the parergon and ergon), the self and deep curatorial modes consider the roles of curator and poet and how they might relate, how they might exist in relationship, and even overlap, towards one another. The self-curatorial mode works to break down the rift between curating and the curatorial, and to fuse roles generally enacted by multiple persons into that of an individual agent. As such, self-curation can manifest in three main ways. First, both the individual event and the series as a whole are envisioned by the poet themself. That is, the poet embodies the roles of both curator and performer. They take control of the performance of their work not only by curating the organisational dimensions of a self-defined series of poetry readings situated across time and place, but also the curatorial nuances of how and in which conditions they want their work to be performed. Practically, this might look like a poet touring with a particular book out of a desire to share a similar set of their work before different audiences in geographically diverse places. Another poet might have an ongoing project that requires both an event-based approach and a durational return to the stage in a sequence of progressing or changing versions of a performance. Second, self-curation can manifest in a more condensed fashion when the same poet recurs as an invited reader at fairly consistent intervals within the structure of a larger series. Even though the series, then, has its own distinct curator, through their recurrent presence, the poet can weave a curatorial strand of their own work within the larger reading series. This implies a layering of a sub-series within the dominant series and a refraction of the primary series frame into a subsidiary primary frame of separate events. For this articulation to ring true, the poet as curator of a series within a series must ideally display an awareness of their development of a personal thread in distinction and relation to the overarching reading series. Third and most pragmatically, self-curation applies at the level of the single event or even the single poetry set. In existential terms, one might ask for a definition of the smallest unit of a poet’s curatorial agency in relation to the formation of their literary performance. While a more robust articulation of self-curation should imply an intentional drive to construct a sequence of events, both in terms of the curation and the curatorial field, the creative and critical labour that goes into designing a single set for a poetry reading likewise functions as a minimalist gesture of self-curation.
Deep Curation
Deep curation heightens the curator’s role in relation to that of invited poets specifically, but also to that of the audience, while questioning assumptions of who gets to shape the poetry reading, why, and what the implications of those choices are.19 It centers the act of literary curation as a generative process, production, and performance of literature, rather than a secondary mode of mediating and promoting the dissemination of literature. As Beatrice von Bismarck writes about the range of curatorial roles and their development in the visual arts, “[t]he spectrum stretches from administration, organisation, and communication on the one hand, and an activity that is equal to the creation of art in terms of status and possibilities.”20 To paraphrase Claire Bishop, the traditional notion of the curator as intermediary, caretaker, and administrator is exploded and replaced with the more mature understanding that the curator themself is an artist and author too, sharing agency and responsibility within the larger process and performance of the literary event. For Bishop, the exhibition or the literary event, by extension, is understood as a gestalt, “a total argument.”21 The curator thus transcends any traditional role division that places them secondary to the artist or author. Instead, the curator is the contributor who holds and formulates the holistic vision for the event as a whole, not eclipsing the author’s position as creator, but definitively redefining curating as an additional layer of making. As far as possible, all aspects of curating, including both logistical and creative decisions, are rendered conscious rather than rote. By deliberating upon the specific requirements of a particular event in this way, that event becomes individualised and self-defined, functioning not as symbolic of an artwork, but as an artwork itself.
In the deep curatorial work that I have done with some of the most exciting contemporary, North American poets (including Oana Avasilichioaei, Liz Howard, Kaie Kellough, and Kama La Mackerel, among others), this mode can range widely in method. Yet in generic terms, it does not attempt to move beyond the fairly minimalist gesture of the poetry reading, while offering a more exploratory approach to test the boundaries of what the poetry reading can do. As such, it also has no fixed definition, but is always pressing against earlier versions of itself and developing iteratively. Deep curation can maintain a light hand that foregrounds a deliberate act of reading and some sonic improvisation over more ostentatious possibilities. In addition, it can become more collaborative, developing to incorporate adjacent performance practices and to render the traditional stance of the poet reading from a podium at a microphone more urgent through gesture, movement, staging, costume, lightning, and further additions. In its more directive iteration, the curator – in lieu of the poets themselves – chooses which poems will be performed and in which order, aiming to formulate aesthetic cohesion and a thematic, dialogic continuity between works. In a more robust development of the project, the curator consensually collaborates with the poets to excerpt and rearrange parts of their poems into a new performance script. Together curator and poets use invited poets’ writing as the raw material from which to shape a whole other citational, collaged text that, in turn, leads to an interwoven, vocal rendition. In Nicolas Bourriaud’s terms, the deep curatorial mode falls into the category of postproduction; its “artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others or available cultural products. […] Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer.”22 The curator creates with found materials; however, what is formed with those materials is novel to the extent that authorship at the level of the event becomes shared between curator and poets.
There are, of course, detractors to this understanding of the curator as artist. Anton Vidokle, for example, suggests that “[t]he necessity of going ‘beyond […]’ should not become a justification for the work of curators to supersede the work of artists, nor a reinforcement of authorial claims that render artists and artworks merely actors and props for illustrating curatorial concepts.”23 This is a fair critique. In relation to deep curation, a critic might be concerned that the poet is being ousted in favour of the curator, that agency is being transferred from the ergon to the parergon, to return to Derrida’s thinking. Deep curation does question and even alter the traditional power dynamic between curator and poet, but it does so to recognise and multiply the undecidability of the frame. It insists that the notion of a fixed border is delusional, and then dwells in that space of indeterminacy as one of ethical relations overtly expressed in the collaborative, curatorial artwork. In practice, deep curation puts more effort into the presentation of the poet’s public appearance, of shaping a literary event with deliberate care and generosity. Vidokle’s disapproval thus unwittingly underscores the important ethical implications of deep curation, and its delicate and consensual renegotiation of authority in the shaping of the literary event. This should ideally be the case with all modes of literary curation, but is emphasised with deep curation due to the heightened responsibility of the curator’s active role that overlaps and collaborates with the poet and their work. As Jean-Paul Martinon suggests in Curating as Ethics, each curator needs to define and articulate their personal code of conduct for their practice and in relation to their collaborators.24 Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro writes with even more insistence that the “only mandate and principle the curator has, which he shouldn’t betray, is that of fidelity and respect towards the other. Curatorial ethics therefore comes from an ethical experience of the subject, which is that of responsibility.”25 He continues to explain that curatorship should, by default, be an ethical profession due to its Latin etymology, curare, meaning to take care of. The curator must communicate, discuss, listen, and exchange information about curatorial methodology with the poets and all other participants.
Deep curation is not a recipe, however; it is an aspirational mode that aims to sound literature according to aesthetic and ethical goals individualised for each event. These goals centre on sociability, collaboration, and artmaking beyond the representation and promotion of published texts, as well as amplifying curatorial responsibility, care, and attention. All of these goals can further be synthesised with the descriptor deep. A depth model of literary curation moves beyond the sheen of what is experienced in performance, in this case, a poetry reading; it allows for transparency and accountability in relation to a wide range of labour practices and curatorial decisions, and for the process of event-making to be as important as the public-facing product. Although I continue to trouble the notion of depth as existing purely in relation to surface, I start from this more traditional premise of a methodology that moves beyond the obvious, ordinary, or default ways of doing and experiencing. I am often asked whether deep curation is inspired by Pauline Oliveros’ practice of deep listening. Although I was not consciously influenced by this practice when I started conceptualising this curatorial mode, a retroactive study of her work does show some significant touchpoints. In her “Foreword” to the book Deep Listening, for example, Oliveros describes her own disillusionment with the classical music scene, noticing “that many musicians were not listening to what they were performing. There was good hand-eye coordination in reading music, but […t]here was disconnection from the environment that included the audience as the music was played.”26 She continues to recount how observing a sense of relational disengagement between the mechanical structures of performance and musical technique, and the creative act of sharing music, prompted her to develop her exercises in sounding through aural connection and collective listening awareness. While the deep curation work that I have personally contributed to does not overtly try to be a practice of consciousness-raising or meditation in the manner of deep listening – nor has it included the audience members so dynamically as participants yet – it stems from a similar disaffection with the lack of attention I observe in much of literary curatorial work.
Oliveros suggests that “[d]eep has to do with complexity and boundaries, or edges beyond ordinary or habitual understanding [… This] means that one is connected to the whole of the environment and beyond.”27 The word deep here animates a more holistic understanding of the literary event and its formation; a poetry reading is no longer the misleadingly simple act of reading poetry within an arbitrary structure (whether framed or open), but rather includes the awareness that reading poetry helps to shape the structure of the reading series by being an active and engaged participant in its formation. This binary of depth and surface has been rejected provocatively by Toril Moi who suggests in Revolution of the Ordinary – a study that reconsiders the humanities’ disciplinary method of reading towards a literary critical product – that depth is always present, but not always observed. In terms of scholarly literary analysis, she argues that it is not the text that has hidden depths that need to be explored by the critic, but rather the critic who has to display elements of themself through the perspective and subjectivity from which they read. It is the critics “who decide to unmask or not to unmask. Whether [they] write literary criticism to critique or to admire, to investigate or to explore, is up to [them]. The politics of literary criticism does not lie in the method […] It lies in the critic.”28 While Moi’s thinking has to be expanded from the reading and writing of texts to the making of literary events, this understanding of depth as presence that needs to be rendered intentional is useful in defining deep curation at both a subjective and structural level. That is, by emphasising the curator’s agency in relation to the making of literary events, deep curation underscores the subjectivity behind the articulation of the event, similar to Moi who considers the importance of the scholar in the interpretation of literary texts. Nothing that was previously hidden has been unearthed in the making of the literary event, but the curator’s agency, attention, noticing, selecting, and directing of the literary event makes that event possible in the first place. As the word deep begins to transcend its meaning in relation to the word curation, it is significant to consider Carolina Rito’s understanding of the curatorial as being inherently superficial or not deep. She writes:
The curatorial refuses knowing ‘in-depth’: instead, it is errant. ‘In-depth,’ here means gaining access to the core of the subject matter in order to obtain its true value, and suggests both a primordial reading and an impartial approach. […] Surface is the plane of the curatorial – a plane that: enables movement across disciplines; allows seemingly unrelated subjects to meet along their lines of flight; is driven by intellectual and conceptual disquiet; recognises intuition and contingent encounters and finds new ways of engaging with urgent and current issues and their fugitive acts.29
If “[s]urface is the plane of the curatorial” then deep curation holds a contradiction that makes for a generative practice of constant, urgent making and remaking of itself as a coherent but mobile form. Rito sees surface engagement to be a positive renegotiation of relationality. Whereas depth implies fixity and rigour for her, surface opens up towards connection and possibility. To a degree, then, her surface and my articulation of deep align. Their apparent opposing definitions hinge on arbitrary semantic markers that celebrate exploration beyond strict disciplinary boundaries, while simultaneously retaining an ethical investigation of the affordances, or even consequences, of that same critical roaming. In a sense, then, this entire mode might also be called surface curation – a practice of making apparent the relational symbiosis of poets reading in dialogue with one another. Similar to Moi’s understanding of depth always being present at the surface anyway, the symbolic depth of deep curation becomes a meta level of its own surface. The interplay of surface and depth – might one even say parergon and ergon? – becomes illustrative of the dynamism of this curatorial mode, a constant oscillation between an activation of what is present and the urge towards an ongoing critical questioning and deepening investigation of what is being read, performed, experienced, attended to, listened to, related to, and more. Now the curatorial making of a poetry reading becomes less about binaries between curator and poet, or divisions between different roles, and more about their conflation and collaboration as co-existent and co-dependent participants. Curatorial research, and the making of deep curation poetry readings, never takes place in isolation and can never be claimed as the work of a single author – even as authorship remains a dominant thread weaving rhizomatically through the contextual space and history of literary events, the raw poetic material used to create the event, and the act of making and performing that event live and in the archive. As a practice that subsumes the dynamic and generative, the communal and collaborative, deep curation, by definition, hinges on a complex network of exchange and emergence.
Deepening Self in the Open Frame
The project of relational schematisation presented in this essay is limited to only one aspect of a larger theoretical project on literary curating, linking poetry, the curatorial, sound, and listening. Further nuances regarding the relational potency of the poetry reading in curatorial terms form part of an in-progress monograph, a manuscript that also applies the four modes of curation to archives of literary sound and embodies deep curation as mode in an experimental series of poetry events with the same name. This essay offers a glimpse into this work with foundational language and a new lens through which to interpret literary sound. It invites both scholars and practitioners to inhabit, test out, and contribute to this critical direction of study because the indexical rigidity of this research requires the flourish of application and the affect of collective thinking. In practice, the four modes overlap, merge, and lose their artificial separations in favour of the juicy messiness of both curatorial labour and literary performance. It is entirely possible to self-curate a framed, open, or deep event, while deep curation could follow a framed or open approach. Framed and open curation are also not necessarily mutually exclusive, as openness can manifest as its own frame. Research is malleable. As Irit Rogoff writes about the expansion of humanities research and the inclusion of practice-based methodologies, “[k]nowing is performing the event of knowledge, expositing its efforts and not just its results.”30 The false fixity of schematisation unravels through the inherent instability of knowing anything from the subjective position of a scholar, especially when the object of research is as dynamic, changeable, and processual as the literary event. As such, I frame this essay with the openness of its own project and persist in deepening its purview with continued investigation, even as this research, in the same breath, receives, defers, and resists the diagrammatic.
Language choice is significant here with a word like “programmer” evoking the rules of coding, for example, in distinction to “host” that relates more closely to the political ethics of Derridean hospitality. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2001). ↩
Maria Lind, Performing the Curatorial: Within and Beyond Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 12. ↩
Irit Rogoff and Beatrice von Bismarck, “Curating/Curatorial,” in Cultures of the Curatorial, ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff and Thomas Weski (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 21-37. ↩
Beatrice von Bismarck, The Curatorial Condition (London: Sternberg Press, 2022), 15. ↩
Édouard Gissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974), 137. ↩
Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 18-19. ↩
Paul Mitchell and Lynn Roberts, A History of European Picture Frames (London: P. Mitchell Ltd., 1996), 8. ↩
Jacques Derrida, The Truth In Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 54. ↩
Mitchell and Roberts, A History of European Picture Frames, 9. ↩
Here one might also consider Derrida’s concept of limitography: “what abuts onto limits but also what feeds, is fed, is cared for, raised, and trained, what is cultivated on the edges of a limit.” In this sense, the frame itself becomes a fertile or relational space where curatorial transformation can take place. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 29. ↩
Derrida, The Truth In Painting, 56. ↩
Derrida, The Truth In Painting, 59. ↩
Or Derrida’s limitography has expanded to the point of taking over both the inside and the outside of the frame. ↩
Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” in Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen, Benjamin Friedlander and Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 239-249. ↩
Olson, “Projective Verse,” 240. ↩
Olson, “Projective Verse,” 245. ↩
Charles Bernstein, Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9. ↩
Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 10. ↩
Deep curation is here discussed as one of the four curatorial modes; however, it is also the proper name for a series of experimental literary events that I have continued to curate at intervals since 2018. ↩
Beatrice Von Bismarck, “In the Space of the Curatorial: Art, Training, and Negotiation,” in Crosskick: European Art Academies Hosted by German Kunstvereine, A Format Linking Art Education and Curatorial Practice, ed. Leonie Baumann and Carina Herring (Berlin: Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Kunstvereine, 2009), 42. ↩
Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 200. ↩
Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005), 13. ↩
Anton Vidokle, “Art without Artists?,” in Cultures of the Curatorial, ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 216-226. ↩
Jean-Paul Martinon, Curating as Ethics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). ↩
Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, “The Curator’s Demands: Towards and Ethics of Commitment,” Manifesta Journal: Journal of Contemporary Curatorship, no. 12 (2010-2011): 7. ↩
Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (New York: iUniverse Inc., 2005), xvii. ↩
Oliveros, Deep Listening, xxiii. ↩
Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 19. ↩
Carolina Rito, “What is the Curatorial Doing?,” in Institution as Praxis: New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research, ed. Carolina Rito and Bill Balaskas (Nottingham: Sternberg Press, 2020), 51. ↩
Irit Rogoff, “Becoming Research,” in The Curatorial In Parallax (Seoul: What Museums Do, 2018), 48. ↩
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Issue images produced by the media installation All We'd Ever Need Is One Another (2018) by Adam Basanta.