Paged, Staged, and Engaged: 
Reimaging the Poem as Interactive Performance

A cross-disciplinary group exhibition by Bradley faculty.
December 2 – December 18, 2009
in the Hartmann Gallery at Bradley University

Opening Reception: December 2, 5 – 7:00pm

Using Kevin Stein’s poem “On Being a Nielsen Family,” this collaborative project interrogates our culture’s historical privileging of the printed page as sole site of poetic performance. Instead, this collaborative project proposes a cardinal notion of poetry: that poems are events, not stories about events.

Project collaborators have thus fashioned a collage of print, audio, video that challenges cultural assumptions about how poems are created and received. In short, the project’s artist-collaborators have aimed to re-imagine traditional print forms, welcome current technological innovations, and encourage reader/listener participation in the creative act.

In the process, the poem’s literal and figurative “space” has transitioned from the historically orderly confines of the printed page to a physical realm of interactive performance. Such fooling around evokes in both poet and reader the self-sufficient joy of reshuffling the perceptual deck of cards one has been handed by previous reading.

Bradley University Galleries
Elizabeth Kauffman, Gallery Director
1400 West Bradley Ave
Peoria, IL 61625
(309) 677-2989
ekauffman@bradley.edu
art.bradley.edu/bug