Approximately a month ago, around the end of September, I flew to Bergen, Norway, in order to perform at the Audiatur Festival—a multilingual extravaganza for the avant-garde, at which many celebrated performers of both phonically-based poetry and constraint-based poetry attended, including the likes of Tomomi Adachi (from Japan), Caroline Bergvall (from Britain), Leevi Lehto (from Finland), and Jacques Roubaud (from France).
Organizers of the event have now made available, online, many of the audiovisual recordings from the event….
Scandinavia has recently taken an elevated interest in both the American avant-garde and the Canadian avant-garde, and many schools of Nordic poetry, including Nýhil (from Iceland), Ny Poesi (from Norway), and OEI (from Sweden) have all made concerted campaigns to establish cooperative interaction with experimental writers from all around the world. All of these northern coteries have produced unbelievable publications, including anthologies of global poetry as thick as any telephone directory.
Ny Poesi has sponsored this biennial festival on three occasions, and the organizers have always done their best to ensure that their jetlagged poets get to enjoy exorbitant drink (probably because the organizers know that they have jampacked our schedules with so rich a cornucopia of lectures and readings that none of us can find any time to sleep).
Readers who might wish to hear some of the highlights from the event can check out recordings by the following poets:
1. Tomomi Adachi
2. Caroline Bergvall
3. Leevi Lehto
4. Jacques Roubaud
More than twenty videos, showing excerpts from the event have also been posted online—and other recordings of both lectures and readings can be found here.
I might also suggest to viewers that, if they wish, they can check out the video of me reciting “The Aria of the Three-Horned Enemy” from the avant-garde opera entitled The Princess of the Stars by R. Murray Schafer. I might also refer listeners to the lengthier recording of me performing sound-poems during the finale of the festival.
