I’ll be streaming sound from my backyard woods for Reveil 2025! Follow my page to hear what’s happening across the globe during Reveil 2025.
I’ve composed a short sound piece for Cities and Memory’s Sonic Heritage event, which launches April 18th 2025. Take a listen when it premieres!
The world is not this world when heard through the auditory spectrum of a snake. It follows, then, that history itself might also shift if perceived outside the limits of human hearing. Naja Nostalgia is a sound work that employs field recordings, geophone recordings, analog synthesizers, and an improvised Viridu performance to recreate the experience of walking through Sri Lanka’s Galle World Heritage Site—but imagined through the auditory perspective of a cobra. With a limited hearing range of approximately 50–1000 Hz, the snake’s acoustic world offers a radically different filter for understanding space, time, and memory.
What became clear during the compositional process was the surprising resonance between the snake’s frequency spectrum and the emotional texture of human nostalgia. The emphasis on low frequencies—vibrations, sub-bass tones, speaker resonance, and analog hiss—echoed the affective registers of longing and melancholia. In this narrowed spectrum, faint auditory artifacts emerged with heightened poignancy: whispered Portuguese and Dutch fragments, brief bursts of laughter, and fleeting exchanges between tourists and snake charmers. These sonic residues surfaced as spectral memories, suspended in the soundscape like half-remembered dreams.
By deliberately using the speaker’s voice to cut the 50-1000hz frequency range, the soundscape sways been human and snake hearing and resemble an analog past—one evoking the tactile, time-worn quality of cassette tapes, LPs, and perhaps even earlier recording technologies. This sonic filtering became a metaphor for how nostalgia operates: not as a complete recollection, but as a selective and often distorted echo of what once was.
This approach to listening brought me back to the idea that tourism itself is a complicated engagement with the past. It can often be a reductive encounter in which one culture experiences another through a narrow, mediated spectrum—visually, aurally, emotionally. My improvised Viridu performance sought to engage with this complexity not only through sound, but through the act of listening itself: as both an intervention and an act of attentiveness.
Like nostalgia, the auditory world of the snake distorts, condenses, and reorients. It is a form of hearing that vibrates through the body, bypassing the ear and settling somewhere deeper. It does not seek to reconstruct a full historical narrative, but instead evokes fragments—sensorial, partial, and affectively charged.
Society for the Study of Affect 2024 Conference
I’ll be presenting my paper “Scavenging the Ecobody: Making Oddkin in Scavengers Reign.” Hope to see you there! Here’s the abstract while you wait.
Scavengers Reign (2023) is an animated eco-horror series created by Charles Huettner and Joseph Bennet that follows five stranded astronauts as they negotiate the speculative flora and fauna of the planet Vesta-1 to find a way to contact their ship, Demeter 227, and return to their home planet. While scavenging archetypes abound in film and television, scavenging is typically portrayed as a parasitic activity, a one way relationship characterized by the search for and collection of anything usable from discarded waste. However, I argue that in Scavengers Reign, scavenging is an affective and material collaborative relationship with one’s environment that employs the minor intimacies associated with the use of fine motor skills (as in hair cutting, surgery, and drawing) to extract, combine, and implement life supporting strategies. Character’s intimate interactions with holes, incisions, perforations, slits, tentacles, wires, and tongues abound on Vesta-1, suggesting that a scavenging lifestyle is not fundamentally parasitic, but sensuously and viscerally interdependent.
While some scavenging relationships in the series are reduced to use value, and often portrayed as destructive—characters extract a certain chemical to power an organic flashlight contained in a clear amoeba-like organism—a large part of scavenging is improvisational, speculative, and life giving, imagining potential values for unexpected components encountered during a picking. In effect, what the characters of Scavengers Reign largely cultivate to survive is the adaptive qualities of a sensual knowledge. Without the experience gained through the small hands-on intimacies of scavenging, which supports the praxis of this pedagogy, these characters could not survive with the new forms of life they encounter regularly on Vesta-1.
In fact, scavenging throughout the series increasingly relies on the recognition of a growing permeability between technology, human, plant, and animal life to such a degree that each survives only by embodying the process of porosity and repurposing portions of each other’s bodies. While this permeability might evoke negative body horror tropes (the exploitative, malicious, torture-porn) or lead to a generic type of rebirth or transcendence, it instead “stays with the trouble” (to evoke Donna Haraway) lingering in the complex mutations that slip between plant/human/animal. While the body horror of Scavengers Reign might be read as a speculative future of our Anthropocene—when our planet tires of humanities generally parasitic relationship to its resources and returns the treatment—I assert that it is much more productively considered through the way in which it poses scavenging as a complex mode of living and sustaining the porous relationality of “oddkin” (à la Donna Haraway). In this sense, survival on Vesta-1 unsettles current plant, human, tech, and animal boundaries in an effort to mutate new ways to live.
I’ll be streaming sound from my backyard woods for Reveil 2024! Follow my page to hear what’s happening during the global Reveil 2024 event!
Flyer courtesy of Warren C. Longmire
Flyer courtesy of Warren C. Longmire
Flyer courtesy of Warren C. Longmire
Flyer courtesy of Warren C. Longmire
Friday May 26th, 2023
The Rotunda - 4014 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA
Doors 7pm
Show 7:30 - 8:30
Book Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/627389106707
Join me and livestream your environment! I’ll be streaming the audio from the wild woods behind my house for REVEIL 2023 starting on May 6th 5:11 AM EST. You can listen to my stream and so many others around the world here or join the fun yourself here.
“REVEIL is a collective production by streamers at listening points around the earth. Starting on the morning of Saturday 6 May in South London near the Greenwich Meridian, the broadcast will pick up feeds one by one, tracking the sunrise west from microphone to microphone, following the wave of intensified sound that loops the earth every 24 hours at first light.
Streams come from a variety of locations, at a time of day when human sounds are relatively low, even in dense urban areas. This tends to open the sound field to a more diverse ecology than usual. The Reveil broadcast makes room by largely avoiding speech and music, gravitating to places where human and non human communities meet and soundworlds overlap.
Each stream brings something different to the loop.
REVEIL goes back to its starting point, giving attention to live sounds of places as first light reaches them.”
Rensselaer, NY
An excellent group of poets and a performance of excerpts from the HIST soundtrack. Hope to see you there!
I’m designing a new course for the Spring 2023 semester at Siena College. Check it out!
I’ll be leading a book discussion on William Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace at the Margaret Reaney Memorial Library. Come on down!
See you there!
Written in collaboration with Matthew Klane, HIST is a lightbright apocalyptic 19th century text-image blockbuster populated with behind-the-screen metaphysical rescues, chases, shipwrecks, love affairs, murders, hauntings, monsters, demonic possessions, and ritual offerings. Thank you Calamari Press!
I’ll be leading a short fiction workshop, “Chekhov’s Gun,” Saturday April 9th. Come write about objects, OOO, and transferring object qualities to your characters at the Sharon Springs Free Library. Drop by and craft the many facets of your fiction with us!
The Sharon Springs Free Library is chartered to serve the residents of the Town of Sharon. Its mission is to operate a circulating library and to provide technological services necessary to the educational and intellectual stimulation of the entire community. The library will also make reading areas and work stations available to both residents and visitors to the Town of Sharon.
Source:: http://shslib.blogspot.com/
I’ll be leading a short fiction workshop, “You Are a Character Too,” Saturday March 19. Come write yourself as a character into your fiction at the Sharon Springs Free Library. Drop by and craft the many facets of your literary persona with us!
The Sharon Springs Free Library is chartered to serve the residents of the Town of Sharon. Its mission is to operate a circulating library and to provide technological services necessary to the educational and intellectual stimulation of the entire community. The library will also make reading areas and work stations available to both residents and visitors to the Town of Sharon.
So much excellent conversation on the varied poetics of performance. One of the strongest points to this panel was the variety of approaches to the notion of performance. From the identity politics of C.V. crafting, through film and dance, to the politics of publishing metadata, the panel addressed the often overlooked aspects of what it means to perform a poetics. The panel consisted of Kara Pernicano, Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle, Indygo Afi Ngozi, Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, and myself. If you didn’t make it this time, hopefully I’ll see you next year!
photo courtesy of Dr. Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle
I’ll be presenting on The Poetics of Performance panel.
Chair: Kara Pernicano
Saturday Mar 12
05:00-06:15 Laurel C
“Techniques for the Oddity: Opening Combat" James Belflower, Siena College
"Beyond the Borders: Auto-Poetas in the Americas" Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle, The College of New Jersey
“Mo & Movement” Indygo Afi Ngozi , New York University
I’ve been working a new section of a longer multimedia work, titled “Techniques for the Oddity.” The section I’m presenting is titled “Opening Combat” and collages 1940s Hand to Hand training videos, spoken word, and a noise soundtrack. Here’s an excerpt. Please come by!
Over the past semester Dr. Shannon Draucker, Dr. Stacey C. Dearing, and myself were awarded a grant from Siena College for our proposal to host a speaker and workshop series that promotes and implements inclusive and accessible pedagogical practices. In particular, the Diversity in Pedagogy series focuses on creating opportunities to consider new ways to incorporate accessibility, inclusivity, and diversity into our pedagogical practices — our assignments, our syllabus language, our projects, and our grading rubrics. Our Zoom event is this Thursday, March 18th and we are excited to host Dr. Danica Savonick from SUNY Cortland.
Dr. Stacey Dearing, Dr. Shannon Draucker, and myself will be hosting the panel “Portable Strategies for the Antiracist Classroom” at the 2021 Engage for Change conference. Come listen to strategies to promote diversity in the classroom, then discuss and brainstorm new ones. Each participant will leave with some portable concrete exercises or assignments that they can use in their next class. Hope to see you there!
In Fall 2020 I designed a course exploring poetic form, “Linguistic Architecture | The Histories of Poetic Form.” The final assignment was to write a portion of a radio show for broadcast. I’m excited to let you know that it’s on the air. Here’s the announcement. Come listen!
Are you someone who wants to know more about the diversity of contemporary poetic form? Then join us at WVCR 88.3 fm for our show, In Form, hosted by Dr. James Belflower and featuring students from Siena College’s Linguistic Architecture 259 “The Histories of Poetic Form.” In Form gives you insider access to conversations on poetic formal histories, the visible and invisible architectures of poetry, and the ways in which poetic form uniquely operates on our attention leading to fresh encounters with language and communication. Join us for In Form Thursdays at 10pm on WVCR 88.3 “The Saint.”
Over the past semester Dr. Shannon Draucker, Dr. Stacey C. Dearing, and myself were awarded a grant from Siena College for our proposal to host a speaker and workshop series that promotes and implements inclusive and accessible pedagogical practices. In particular, the Diversity in Pedagogy series focuses on creating opportunities to consider new ways to incorporate accessibility, inclusivity, and diversity into our pedagogical practices — our assignments, our syllabus language, our projects, and our grading rubrics. Our second Zoom event is this Thursday, March 18th and we are excited to host Eric Keenaghan from SUNY Albay.
See more of Eric’s work:
Flyer courtesy of Dr. Stacey Dearing
Over the past semester Dr. Shannon Draucker, Dr. Stacey C. Dearing, and myself were awarded a grant from Siena College for our proposal to host a speaker and workshop series that promotes and implements inclusive and accessible pedagogical practices. In particular, the Diversity in Pedagogy series focuses on creating opportunities to consider new ways to incorporate accessibility, inclusivity, and diversity into our pedagogical practices — our assignments, our syllabus language, our projects, and our grading rubrics. Our second Zoom event is this Thursday, February 25th and we are excited to host Michael Leong from Cal Arts.
Flyer courtesy of Dr Stacy C. Dearing
See more of Michael’s work
Over the past semester Dr. Shannon Draucker, Dr. Stacey C. Dearing, and myself were awarded a grant from Siena College for our proposal to host a speaker and workshop series that promotes and implements inclusive and accessible pedagogical practices. In particular, the Diversity in Pedagogy series focuses on creating opportunities to consider new ways to incorporate accessibility, inclusivity, and diversity into our pedagogical practices — our assignments, our syllabus language, our projects, and our grading rubrics. Our first Zoom event is this Friday and we are excited to host Travis Chi Wing Lau from Kenyon College.
Flyer courtesy of Dr Stacy C. Dearing
See more of Travis’ work here.
I’ll be chairing, “‘Tempi All Exempt Except Tempest’: Ronald Johnson’s Restless Ecologies,” at the American Literature Association Conference May 27th-30th 2021. We have a great lineup of scholars and papers. Hope to see you at the panel!
Ronald Johnson (1935-1998) was an exceptionally wide-ranging and restlessly experimental writer across a variety of genres, forms, and media. In part, what steered his restlessness and experimentation was a career-long attempt to manifest a visionary-scientific cosmic vision of humanity at the dawn of the Anthropocene. Although his epic ARK (1996), which critic Stephanie Burt has called “the most spiritual, the most celebratory, and maybe the most fun” of American modernist long poems, explicitly situates human creativity as one of many ambiguous processes ordered by natural forces, Johnson’s late poetry, in addition to his diverse career choices, reconceptualizes his ecological concerns, articulating human creativity through processes not only naturally ordered, but intertwined in social and personal reconfigurations. The influence of these overlapping ecologies on his work is nowhere more apparent than in his late projects, such as his concrete elegy for victims of the AIDS epidemic, Blocks to be Arranged in a Pyramid (In Memoriam AIDS) (1996), and the shadows these losses cast over his posthumous collection The Shrubberies (2001). Likewise, his experiences as a child of the Midwest transplanted to the Bay Area, where energetic cityscapes, and newfound social and sexual formations and freedoms, reveal Johnson to be conflicted by a need to respond to current events critically, by adapting genres, forms, media, and career choices previously rendered moot by their reliance on discourses of natural creation and ahistorical spiritualism. The papers in this panel aim to spotlight how Johnson’s works consistently recreate the boundaries of the personal, political, and material to challenge readers to consider the potential in forming and living more restless relationships between ecologies: social, subjective, and environmental.
On February 27, William Lessard will host with the featured readers Shira Dentz, Adam Tedesco, and James Belflower.
I’m looking forward to reading with excellent poets Shira and Adam! I’ll be premiering a new sound poetry piece titled Idiopathic for voice and electronics. Hope to see you there.
On February 13 @ 8 pm, William Lessard will host the open-mic with featured readers Ruth Danon and James Belflower.
I’m excited to read with Ruth. I’ll be performing some excerpts from With Walden for text and improvised video. Hope to see you there!
