Antena Aire has a new beautiful chapbook out from the wonderful folks at Tripwire: a journal of poetics! It’s called “Flame through the Bridge: Notes and Transcripts from Improvised Interpreted Poem Performances, 2014-2019.” You can purchase it (and the Cartonera Collective chapbook it is paired with) or download a PDF on the Tripwire site.

From the beginning of the chapbook: “We’ve been asking ourselves and others for years: what would it look like, sound like, feel like, taste like—which histories would be uncovered, licked into visibility— if we were to listen with our tongues?”

“What we devised, through trial and error and practice and experimentation, was an improvised discomfortable text-generating experiment based on a repeating, spiraling practice of collaborative interpretation and addition, for which we invented a few key constraints to guide us. We work back and forth across Spanish and English, the two languages we each use in our daily lives. We make poems in the space between the two, and through practices we use in our everyday cross-language work. We begin with one text fragment in one language. This text fragment is immediately interpreted into the other language by the listener, using consecutive interpretation; the interpreter-improviser then adds one text fragment in that same language. After the reading and initial interpretation of each of our “found” texts, every time one of us “interprets,” we add a line or two of our own devising, for a total of (more or less) five sets of improvised “interpretations.” Our rules are that we have to take new notes on a new sheet of paper or cover our old notes every time we interpret (to avoid simply transferring notes and/or memorizing text blocks), and that we can return to the same original text if we want to include more of those lines rather than improvised lines of our own.”

And here is a video of a performance we did at UC Irvine in 2018:

2018 UC Irvine – Improvised Interpreted Poem Performance from Antena Aire on Vimeo.