Megan Fernandes: Flow
Part
of ROUGH TRANSLATION – Language Arts between Exclusion and Solidarity: LAB 2_Performing Politics
Sprachkunst
Series of readings and performances (in English), presented by the department of Sprachkunst and the
department of Transkulturelle Studien – Which language do I speak – in a hierarchy of languages? How to translate politics
into poetry?
In this lecture, we discuss the philosophies and techniques
of ‘flow’ in poetry as respiratory, sermonic, and ecstatic through a variety of historical and critical contexts including
Islamic mysticism, the Black Arts movement, contemporary hip hop, the New York School, and Pacific Islander poetry.
Participants
will discuss and experiment with prompts that focus on pace, breathwork, vocal delivery, voltas, syllabic accentuation, pause,
enjambment, etc. In addition, we will discuss what are the political aspects of ‘flow’ in our contemporary culture.
Who
has access to breath and who doesn’t? How is our flow of consciousness shaped by our digital lives? What kind do certain obsessive
patterns of thought tell us about how our own flow is constructed? What does it mean to ‘go with the flow’ and maybe more
importantly, what does it mean to move against it?
Megan Fernandes is a writer living in NYC. She was born in Canada
and raised in the Philadelphia area. Her family are East African Goans.
Her critical-poetic project, entitled
The Poetics of Suspense, is an ongoing series of environmental cinépoems about suspense in different aquatic sites off the
coast of mainland Sicily and the Aeolian Islands. Using the influential methods of sensory ethnography filmmaking, her project
particularly explores how suspense is temporally anchored in a liminal space better represented through the aesthetics of
being underwater.
Her most recent book of poetry, Good Boys, was a finalist for the Kundiman Book Prize, the Saturnalia
Book Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was published with Tin House Books in February 2020. Her next book of poetry, I
Do Everything I’m Told, will be published by Tin House in summer 2023.
Hala Alyan writes about Good Boys: ‘These are
poems of haunting and hunting, of bodies that are remade into different cities, of family and its legacy, of immigration and
what it takes from us.The collection traverses time and place, meditating on the way love shatters and recreates us all, particularly
when it intersects with being othered. Fernandes writes compellingly of the dislocation that comes with migration.’
About Rough Translation:
Which language do I speak – in a hierarchy of languages? How to translate
politics into poetry? And what is happening during the transformation? How to perform it, as a poem? How can an artistic use
of language oppose propaganda, fake news, disinformation? Can it do that at all? And can we translate poetry into political
praxis?
As part of ROUGH TRANSLATION, we would like to address these questions in a series of readings and performances
in Vienna.
