A vocabulary of sounds for Amiri Baraka

Andrew Demirjian participated in ModPo during the fall of 2013.  “As I was reading the poems and watching/listening to the videos,” he wrote me recently, "I was working on two pieces as a creative response to the course.” One of those pieces is entitled “Amiri Baraka A-Z.” It is an alphabetical vocabulary for Baraka, consisting of word-length clips drawn from PennSound’s Baraka recordings, each embedded under a letter of the alphabet. Click on a letter — or touch a letter on the iPad — and Baraka’s voice performs single words beginning with that letter. Once you start the web-installation poem, it will continue; you can stay with a letter, or move around and spell out your own performative vocabulary. The project has been wonderfully coded to work well with an iPad, and I recommend that experience as more aligned with the spirit of the work than the desktop or laptop experience (where of course one cannot touch the letters to create the sound poem).  For more about Andrew Demirjian, go here.