PROPAGATION

by Laura Elrick

PROPAGATION’s minimalist scoring belies an obsession with the gestural repleteness of discourse, with what poet and linguist Henri Meschonnic called the embodied aptitude of language (“a poem is an activity, not a product”). One central activity of this poem is listening, to language public and private, living and mediated, and to texts we read silently or aloud to one another. A series, the poems in PROPAGATION also test audible vectors by sifting and colliding, graphing and distilling. What emerges is both residue and metamorphosis: a materialist sensing of the complex ecosystems of language and experience.

Laura Elrick is the author of PROPAGATION (Kenning Editions ,2012), FANTASIES IN PERMEABLE STRUCTURES (Factory School, 2005), and SKINCERITY (Krupskaya, 2003). Her psychogeographically-inspired research and performance works include the oppositional cartography Blocks Away (2010), the video-poem Stalk (2008), and a sound work, 5 Audio Pieces for Doubled Voice (2005). Her work also appears in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, VIZ. INTER-ARTS EVENT: A TRANS- GENRE ANTHOLOGY, and ECO LANGUAGE READER. She currently teaches poetry and poetics at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY