Kristin Prevallet and Taylor Brady
Segue Series @ BPC, 12.2.06, NYC

Taylor Brady

Brady read from Occupational Treatment

Treatment as in film treatment -- the sections he read from were like a multiple camera shoot hovering at the permanent circumference of a string of settings, issues, questions. Some of the freedom of voicing here I might associate with say, Will Alexander, but minus the mystic intonation, and with very different selections of material, repetitions and social contexts invoked. Brady focuses on the details and architecture of an environment and the mental space of a reading practice and a question of memory was continually superimposed on it. He follows unusual logic riffs and more often than not gets them off the ground. The overall fictional/poetic space could vary its comfortably between effects one could liken to Goddard, Leslie Scalapino and Dave Burrell by turns. Thought-provoking smart writing.

There's a strong gnomic impulse operating below the surface and it occasionally bubbles over: "he was haptic as money," "misunderstanding is a signal fire," "understanding is stupid, let's bleed"

This writing invites you to root around in it's materials, even as a listener.

Like a sequence of reshuffled visual-sestinas with images stretched out and repeating.

Repeated terms: money, face, eyes, porn, love, hand -- these build into a kind of harmonic / thematic fabric.

"Now the territory is a hole in us"

"water is stupid"

deliberately, patiently crafted environment / fiction / mediation / essay / poem

Looking forward to reading through the whole book now.


Kristin Prevallet

Compelling well-paced opening sequence involving cybernetics and surveillance.

"What can be separated from my immediate fear"

This series voiced almost like the notes of a FBI agent against a poet.

"Something is written by one person that is crossed out by another"

Moving beyond the image to the intensions behind it

dramatic fssssst sound between stanzas

"annoying as anti-everything"

"remember when we hadn't yet been told to return to normal?"

Prevallet closed with a hilarious film/poem of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner which dated from her Buffalo college days and stared Taylor Brady.

Prevallet in introducing the film: "Romanticism was a rhetorical gesture there"

Brady deadpanning: "I fear you, Ancient Mariner!"

Addressing an interpretation of materials, and in a fairly straight-forward way, the question of what the hell does this poem have to do with me living as a student in Buffalo NY right now. More an attenuated poetic gesture than a movie exactly, certainly an interesting engagement with the question of activation of text / history and setting. I always like it when poets change up their presentation and take some risks.