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 My Word, we dive into the intimate territory of language: communitarian or personal dialects, private grammars of defiant playfulness, mantra, lullaby, babbling and murmur. The speech of dreams and sleep rise to the surface: a semiotically rich snoring. Vernacular syllabics surround the cochlea.

Jerriod Avant
Driven by an obsession for the sonic qualities of language, Jerriod will share poems that privilege the sonics of African-American Vernacular English, Black dialectal speech and the myriad inheritances brought forth by it, including but not restricted to grief/loss, fugitivity, dispossession and love.

Ami Xherro
The secret acquired through eavesdropping on the sleeper’s dream
Repetitions, hypnovisions, sleeps, snores
[All night, all night and what is it on a postcard]

Ali Van
Giving metabolic concert a quiet attention and universal stride — how does time transmute experience; can we myth a clear path toward an aggregate eye, sublime for safekeeping in spirit with gravitas?

& a special guest TBA…

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.