gibber

by a rawlings
2012


A multidisciplinary series developed during the 2012 Queensland Poetry Residency,Gibber explores the language of ‘here’ and the language nurtured within Australia’s bioregions.

When the witness submits her estranged self to the power of listening and seeing beyond semantics, a world of signifiers explodes the dominant human language used to name and to know them. Asemic writing litters landscapes while lyric lines revert their alpha glyphs to pre-representation. Glass vials enact a moment when the urge to identify, name, possess grips the body. These vials extend beyond encoded messages in bottles to become synesthetic museums of soundscapes. Land is collected, sorted, pinned for preservation.

Gibber has appeared around the web at the following places:
Gary Barwin and I discuss ecosystems, ecosystem components, Barthes’ Pleasure of the Text, writing, reading, visual poetry, and Gibber for Jacket2.
Gibber is featured in Curating the Cosmos, an online art exhibit curated for the Association of American Geographers in 2013.
Cordite Poetry Review published “Gibberbird,” an excerpt of the project, along with the response poems written by 10 poets from Queensland.
Graham Nunn interviewed me for Cordite Poetry Review on the process of creating Gibber.
During my tenure as 2012 Queensland Poet-in-Residence, I kept a blog, which provides documentation of Gibber‘s development.
Gillian Osborne discusses Gibber in her Jacket2 commentary on emergent forms of ecopoetics.
Denise Newman and Hazel White include Gibber in their World Literaturearticle “When Language Meets an Ecosystem.”

Gibber as performance debuted at the 2012 Queensland Poetry Festival in Brisbane, Australia. The performance featured four in-person performers working structured improvisation (Chloë Callistemon, Tamara Lazaroff, Nicholas Powell, and a rawlings), Maja Jantar in improvisation via Skype, and more than twenty writers from Australia, Canada, and USA via Twitter.