Kai Fierle-Hedrick and Rachel Zolf will be in residence as part of VerySmallKitchen’s DEPARTMENT OF MICRO-POETICS at the AC Institute in New York City, on Sep 17th, 24th and October 1st.

Kai and Rachel describe their project as follows: 

Rachel Zolf and Kai Fierle-Hedrick will collaborate – via an on-site/off-site residency at the AC Institute – to write a sequence of poems responding to the exhibition EXCHANGE VALUE. Fierle-Hedrick will write on-site at the gallery, and at the end of each session will forward an ekphrastic poem to Zolf. 

Responding via The Tolerance Project – a collaborative MFA in Creative Writing rooted in an online archive of “poetic DNA” traces donated by 86 writers, artists and thinkers – Zolf will identify a set of search terms in Fierle-Hedrick’s poem and use these to generate a new response from within The Tolerance Project’s archive. 

Zolf’s poetic permutation will then serve as the starting point for Fierle-Hedrick’s next session in the gallery, and so on. The residency explores a variety of exchanges – ekphrastic, dialogic, technological – in addition to embodying some of the challenges and creative loopholes of distance collaboration.

Kai has also contributed an installation to the DEPARTMENT OF MICRO-POETICS based on Exercise 1-11, a series of texts that first appeared in Signals magazine here. The texts are prefaced by a quote by Paulo Freire – “ the child has, at the very least, the right to prove the craziness of his or her idea” – and offer documentation, proposition, and provocation of where experimental poetics and radical pedagogy (hopefully) meet.

Find out more about her work here. 

Rachel Zolf unfolds the process of The Tolerance Project as follows: 

Eighty-six writers, artists and thinkers have donated their poetic traces to The Tolerance Project, a collaborative MFA in Creative Writing. Each piece of poetic DNA in The Tolerance Project Archive has been assigned its own barcode. Each poem written for the MFA will employ traces from the donated traces. The MFA poems are restricted to The Tolerance Project Archive for their content.

MFA poems written for class will be posted on this blog. Poetic DNA barcodes for the traces used in each poem appear at the end of each MFA poem post. Click on the barcodes to reveal the donor identities and poetic DNA traces.

This collaboration includes you. The online public is welcome to use the comments field to give constructive feedback on The Tolerance Project poems. You are also very welcome to browse The Tolerance Project Archive and create your own MFA poems. Post them on the Archive site and if we like them, we may even bring them to class for feedback.

Based on cumulative feedback received within and without the institution, the MFA poems will be scrupulously revised toward the creation of The Writing Thesis.

As of September 13th the classes most recent project is: POEM 34- Homphobic poseur buffoon + narcissistic geometrical zip = nurture whose text is as follows: 

The concept of geometrical tolerancing is complex

Buffoon of the Play house will die a ridiculous Death

She looked across the street and the tears fspell down (all the narcissus planted in rows)

I empathize deeply with the state-sponosored [sic] homophobia of the US government

We don’t follow the support and nurture model of learning – it’s more swill and swear

The feature toleranced is indicated by a leader line media berea arrowhead scenic allegoric Pandora minoan midday convulsion auk earthmover klein paper tug

Like a horrible cocktail party full of insufferable poseurs intent on name-dropping while grilling you on trivial gibberish

A geometrical tolerance is applied to a feature when there is a requirement to control its variation of form or position

Along the way it gradually jettisoned all feeling and emotion, until it arrived at an austere and impersonal form of so-called artistic purity or truth

Gear wheels, zips, bearings, pressure tubing, kitchen utensils and blow mouldings, and clothing fabrics

My grandmother’s hands zipping open pale skin in a metal bowel

To check out the full barcodes and DNA of this poem click the images above or go here. See more about Rachel’s work here, and an interview with Joel Bettridge in JACKET here. 

Details of Jill Magi’s SMALL TALK SMALL BOOKS residency are here.  Details of projects by Paolo Javier and Vincent Katz to follow. Matt Dalby will perform in the DEPARTMENT OF MICRO POETICS on Thursday 14th October 6-8pm.