Three more practitioners respond to SLANT’s second event, Forms in Flux.
Carlos Soto Román
A Free Response to Alison Grace Koehler’s “Confessional Shards”
A Free Response to Nathan Walker’s “Clench”
PJ Stanley
On the screen in front of me is another screen. It is a machine of noise, flashing alternately red and green in strange patterns like the interface of some alien craft. Sound bubbles its way through noise gates and buffers, morphing and stretching through some hidden algorithmic logic. There are words in there, somewhere, buried in layers of process and decay that turn meaning into a texture that could be music.
And in the corner of the screen there is a human.
The human wrestles with the noise-machine, pulling and pushing at the wall of sound to re-encode it with purpose. Are they the god within the machine? Or are they a translator, probing and parsing the noise-music to excavate the meaning of those buried words?
In our weird Zoom existence, we are all figures in the corner of a screen. Our meaning-machines loop and process. Our bodies morph to fit the shape of the nightmare. And I’m tied in a knot of broken poems, trapped in a cycle of endless, faceless emails, scattered like shards of acetate that could be rain in an imagined Paris. And for a moment, it sounds like music.
Xavier Velastin
Karen Sandhu is a poet and artist. Her poems are forthcoming in Women’s Visual Poetry Anthology (Timglaset Editions, 2021), and previously published in the following magazines and anthologies: Magma (2020), Writing Utopia (Hesterglock Press, 2020), Nemeses (HVTN Press, 2019) and Para-text (2019).
Carlos Soto Román, poet & translator. Author of 11 (Municipal Prize 2018), Common Sense (Make Now Books) and Nature of Objects (Pamenar Press). He lives and works in Santiago, Chile.
PJ Stanley is a performance maker from Portsmouth. Recently, he’s made a clown show about oceans, a rock concert with 7 year olds, and a role-playing game about being dead. He frequently collaborates with Emma Clark under the name emma+pj.
All photos of artists and their work are by Suzi Corker.
