news | Sunday May 18, 2025

Convivialities Has Arrived!

Hot off the press! Convivialities: Dialogues on Poetics by writer-in-residence at the SETI Institute Michael Nardone is here! Curious how are the great arts practitioners of our time thinking about the world? About creating? Michael Nardone investigates!

Convivialities is a collection of dialogues with contemporary writers and artists. Dana Michel, Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes, Shanzhai Lyric, Cecily Nicholson, Raven Chacon, Divya Victor, Carlos Soto Román, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Gail Scott, Kevin Davies, The Culture and Technology Discussion and Working Group, and Ryan C. Clarke. The dialogues vary. Some are chatty, others theoretical. They model how we might talk, think, and listen together.

An excerpt from Nardone’s introduction: “I first took up this word – convivial – to describe a condition of textuality. I was intrigued by the ways that poets, since the 1960s in particular, experimented with composing poems in an iterative way that traversed different contexts of publication and that materialized across different media. A poem, for example, might exist as a text in a mimeographed journal, as an act of speech at a site of protest, as a reel-to-reel audio recording, as a hand-scrawled text with illustration, as a score for performance by one or several performers, as a site-specific sculptural work, or as a video installation in an arts space. Convivial, in my mind, intoned the sociality of a poem in its traversal through various instantiations and publics. The word also spoke to a sense of interdisciplinarity at the core of making such a poetry: that the poem exists at the nexus of many cultural forms and enters into dialogue with compositional practices beyond the frame of literature, that it could be informed by and interact with these other modes of creating, organizing, articulating.”

Order your copy of Convivialities here.