Hole in Space (OMG!, 2009)
“The poet’s body as a public communication sculpture.” —Alli Warren
In November 1980 Sherrie Rabinowitz + Kit Galloway’s Hole in Space appeared, without announcement, in two locations: Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, and The Broadway department store in Century City in Los Angeles, pre-internet, “the mother of all video chats”. “Suddenly head-to-toe, life-sized, television images of the people on the opposite coast appeared. They could now see, hear, and speak with each other as if encountering each other on the same sidewalk.”
In November 2008, at the Poetry Project in New York, I improvised a talk and invited the New York audience—albeit obliquely— to “speak to” my Bay Area audience on the other side. This chapbook is a transcript of that talk, along with its mirror image, delivered two months to the day later, in San Francisco.
You can listen to the SF version of the talk here.
You can read the Hole in Space chapbook here.
You can learn more about Kit Galloway + Sherrie Rabinowitz’s Hole in Space here and here.
You can read my answers to Thom Donovan’s questions about the New York performance here.
You can send me a message here.
Suzanne Stein | Hole in Space | OMG! | 2009
“You went to the conference speculating on the expanded field of writing, and I went to work.” The truth is, some of us have to go to work, but Suzanne Stein’s little chapbook, produced by Brandon Brown’s ingenious OMG! press, punches a hole in space and into the formulation. You might call this a conceptual piece of writing, certainly it winds up with a eerie J B Priestley hole in time, for Stein takes us to a November 2008 event at the Poetry Project in New York, where she is delivering a talk in cold Manhattan, while in southern California fires are burning down whole coastal regions. The talk apes ordinary human speech, but it has an aspect of prophecy to it, Edgar Cayce the Sleeping prophet, for Stein announces that in four months time she will repeat every word of the talk a Manhattan tech is now recording, in an art gallery space in San Francisco. The second half of the book gives us the text of her San Francisco talk, and for those of us who were there at Canessa Park, the book presents an eerie souvenir of one occasion when the past completely predicated the present. We all know there are scripts we are doomed to repeat, but Hole in Space makes it all come real, the tangle at the end of the mind. And yes, that was the gallery space in which young Filip Marinovich and I shared one stolen moment of brief encounter.
—Kevin Killian