Join us for You Have My Word, a three-night engagement on liminal languages, on 9/7, 9/8, 9/9 at The Poetry Project. We will feature a series of happenings that involve languages that don’t quite properly exist: lovers’ codes, hypertrophied dialects, asemic writing, the bad and the wrong and the asignifying sound, and semantic sense melting down into somatic sensuality.

A collection of artists who will create an improvisatory weave of chaos linguistics: visual symbols, bodily signs, Black dialectical speech, diaphanous Mandarin phonics, breathless and broken syntax, machine-learning, star-listening, tongues made of film strips and so on. Alternative histories of language will bubble up rejoicing from the world beneath the world. The stage that separates audience from performer will be joyfully razed.

For You, we lean into the language ecologies of the other. We examine the matrices of I and non-I, each voicing the other, that manifest community from communicative gestures. “You” is as much a call & a plea as it is an avowal of the betweenspace of relation, and how we always swim there.

Nicholas Hauck
In this workshop, we will ask through action: What kinds of asemic experiences can come out of writing sounds within established poetic structures? How do we unlisten to a language we know? How do we listen for sounds and rhythms in languages we don’t know?

Tamara Santibañez
Imagine a brick as part of a wall, imagine a brick being thrown into the air – starting from this everyday object and its seemingly contradictory symbolic meanings, Tamara will lead us through an ethnopoetic translation of oral histories conducted at the intersection of tattooing and the prison system.

Endangered Language Alliance
Speaking for the Endangered Language Alliance, director Ross Perlin will introduce the Languages of New York Map, the first cartographic effort to make space for Indigenous, minority, and primarily oral languages in an urban context.

This event series is curated by moguLUOBO, a duo consisting of Chang Yuchen, who restlessly chases an imaginary LUOBO (萝卜 carrot) in front of her and Fan Wu, who idealistically appreciates mogu (蘑菇 mushroom) that grows in all directions. moguLUOBO is also an experiment where Fan’s deteriorating Mandarin and Yuchen’s underdeveloped English meet, delight in, and console each other.

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This is tentatively planned as a live indoor event at St. Mark's Church. To keep our community safe, The Poetry Project implements the following at all live events: limiting the number of attendees; requiring proof of vaccination be shown at the door upon arrival; and requiring and providing face masks, as well as hand sanitizer stations. Before each event, we will also be conducting rapid tests for all performers, introducers, and hosts. Attendees are required to register in advance, and contact information is collected at the point of registration in the event that we need to support any public health efforts around contact tracing. We are committed to the safety of our performers, audience, and event staff, and will be fully prepared to update any of these plans and protocols as circumstances continue to evolve. We are grateful to attendees for helping us maintain safety within our present public health context, and look forward to holding meaningful shared listening space together.

Please arrive prepared to show proof of vaccination and a photo ID at the door. Proof of vaccination may be in the form of your vaccination card (or a picture of your card), the NYC Covid Safe app, or the Excelsior app. If, for medical reasons, you have not been vaccinated, you may instead bring documentation of a negative PCR test taken within the last 72 hours.

We also encourage all event attendees to take a rapid test the day of the event before heading to the church. Here’s a map of testing sites throughout the city. Thank you for helping us keep our wonderful community safe!

This in-person event will also be livestreamed via The Poetry Project's YouTube. Livestream captions will be available via a streamtext link or the CC button on YouTube's player.

Open CART captioning is scheduled for most in-person events.