"Do you read me?": Kaie Kellough, the Words and Music Show, and a Self-Curated Series Within a Series

Abstract

The literary event (poetry reading and reading series) as form—and the sociocultural context that allows the idea of the literary event to function—initiates relevant dialogue with discourses from the visual arts when curatorial theory and vocabulary from museum, gallery, and exhibition spaces are applied to it. By listening to the literary event as a curatorial construct, my research makes explicit collaborative structures, and hierarchies of agency, inherent to the public sharing of literature in performance and the necessarily “relational aesthetics”—to apply Nicolas Bourriaud’s term—that ensues. Relational art is typically defined as that which takes “as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social content, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (14). The sociability inherent to the relational points to human exchanges during the duration of a work of art or the performance of a literary event. To extend this mode of thinking, my research places the public presentation of oral poetry, its interpersonal dynamics, and its investment in curatorial labour in further relation to the structures and non-human influences—what Beatrice von Bismarck calls the “close, inseparable entanglement of human and non-human actors” (81)—that “do you read me?”: Kaie Kellough, the Words and Music Show, and a Self-Curated Series Within a Series