MICHAEL COFFEY WITH MATIAS MARIANI

I intend to take advantage of the public-spirited Free Biennial to turn inside-out the traditional processes by which a poem is produced, Rather than accessing private/personal aesthetics and vocabularies and building a personal text of one's own, I hope to take up space in a New York City park (Jackson Square, at the corner of Eighth Ave and Greenwich Avenue) and act as merely a facilitator/editor in a process that will draw on the community that happens to be in the park on a particular afternoon. I will invite whoever is there to contribute a line or phrase or any kind of text which i will then write down and later attempt to order into a sonnet (perhaps). My only goal is the engagement with strangers in an exchange that has the production of a poem as its theme, and then to write, in chalk, the final result, on the slate flagstones of the park. A Brazilian filmmaker, Matias Mariani, will be involved as well, as he in interested in capturing some of these exchanges, being most interested in what comes out of the mouth of people invited to speak poetry.



HOW TO LOCATE

Poem in the Park has been indefinitely postponed.



ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Michael Coffey is the author of two books of poems, Elemenopy (Sun & Moon Press) and 87 North (Coffee House Press, 1998) and the forthcoming CMYK (Context Books, 2003). He also collaborated with the sculptor Rebecca Smith on Between Two Things, an artist's book consisting of tape drawings by Smith and text by Coffey (Lake George Arts Project, 2001).

Matias Mariani is a poet and filmmaker from São Paulo, who is now studying film production at NYU. He is co-editor of the poetry magazine Sebastião.