On Wednesday 11th November 2020, seventeen participants from across the UK and beyond came together for the first session in the Five Bodies critical-creative workshop series, a collaboration between the Critical Poetics Research Group at NTU and Nottingham Contemporary.
The workshop was led by poet and lecturer Nisha Ramayya and centred on the subject of ‘listening’, with Nisha encouraging the participants to enquire ‘how we think through sounds and listen through writing.’ The discussion centred on texts including Jackie Wang’s ‘Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect’ (2017), Patrick Farmer’s ‘Azimuth, the Ecology of an Ear’ (2019), and Nathaniel Mackey’s ‘Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol’ (1987). This was followed by a writing exercise which took the form of a virtual soundwalk through Alice Coltrane, Ellen Fullman’s The Long String Instrument, and a deep-sea cabled observatory in Monterey Bay.
Thank you to all who were involved in this workshop and especially to Nisha for creating a space for us to listen. For more information on this workshop series and the accompanying readings hosted by Nottingham Contemporary please follow the link: http://www.criticalpoetics.co.uk/five-bodies-critical-poetics-workshops-full-programme/.