Sophie Seita - Drawing a Line in Poetry and Performance: Paper, Pencil, Metaphor

Sophie Seita’s lecture-performance will address how metaphors of drawing, modes of visual analysis, questions of representation, and an interest in lines, shapes, and colour enter her writing, and how both the materiality of paper and a visual language can be made manifest in performance. It will also consider drawing as a powerful poetic imaginary and as an embodied choreographic practice.

Sophie Seita is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, researcher, and translator. Her performances, lecture-performances, and videos which visualise, embody, or translate text via poetic dialogue, sculpture, costume, installation, and choreography, have been presented at Art Night London, SAAS Fee Summer Institute of Art (Berlin), Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge), the Royal Academy, Bold Tendencies (London), the Arnolfini (Bristol), La MaMa Galleria (NYC), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Parasol Unit (London), Company Gallery (NYC), Neue Töne Festival (Stuttgart), Tactic Gallery (Cork, Ireland), and elsewhere. A commitment to collaboration and queer-feminist politics underpins all her work and she recently co-founded the feminist performance collective GORGONIA. She’s the author of the poetry books Meat (Little Red Leaves, 2015), Fantasias in Counting (BlazeVOX, 2014), and the artist book 12 Steps (Wide Range, 2012); the translator of Uljana Wolf’s Subsisters: Selected Poems (Belladonna*, 2017); and the editor of a facsimile reprint of The Blind Man (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017; named one of the Best Art Books of 2017 in The New York Times). Other writing, translations, and interviews have been featured in Best American Experimental Writing 2018, The White Review, Bomb, Lana Turner, The LRB, the TLS, and 3:AM.

As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, she’s currently finishing her critical book Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital, which is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in late 2019. Recent scholarly work includes an essay on contemporary post-digital publishing in Chicago Review, an essay on multilingual poetry and poetics in Reading Experimental Writing (forthcoming from Edinburgh UP), and a co-written google document conversation on little magazines (with Danny Snelson) in Hotel. She has received fellowships and awards from Cambridge, Yale, Princeton, Buffalo, Columbia, PEN America, Queen Mary University of London, NYU, DAAD, and Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, among others, in recognition of her creative and critical work.