Parallax: Poetic Visions featuring Anne Waldman + Cedar Sigo

What does a future poetics look and feel like? The reading series ‘Parallax: Poetic Visions,’ presented by Hauser & Wirth Publishers in association with Zoe Brezsny, addresses this question by featuring poets who take risks through a wide variety of aesthetic approaches and performance styles. Their work bends genres at the crossroads of poetry, sound, and technology, operating as a tool of transformation.

Poet Ann Lauterbach says, “To write poetry in America is in itself a subversive act. One can see better from the periphery than from the center.” In this spirit, Parallax defines its central theme as truth-bearers on the threshold of a primeval, new language.

Each event in the series features two poets; some are emerging creative forces, while others have had long careers yet continue to reinvent themselves. These pairings seek to juxtapose practices so that each reader might reveal something unexpected in the other’s work. The first installation of 'Parallax: Poetic Visions' features Anne Waldman, poet legend of the East Village, and Cedar Sigo, her former student and colleague at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which Anne co-founded and where she still teaches. These two luminaries share a kinship for sonically fluid, irreverently spiritual poems; they are as playful as they are urgent in their call for relentless daily transformation. Waldman is the prophetic trickster feminist, summoning our revolt as her musical lightning flows straight into the heart of our consciousness. Her poetry will be accompanied by the improvisational saxophone playing of her nephew Devin Brahja Waldman. Sigo is a West Coast underground hero. Heir to Frank O’Hara’s elegant flare and earthy details, he adds a signature poetic mysticism. It’s a sensually stirring amalgam, alive with the alluring element of chance.

The night will also feature a musical performance by Jahiliyya Fields, the solo project of Matthew Morandi, one half of the NYC experimental/industrial group Wetware. Other current musical ventures include Inhalants, and Orders from Upstairs.