WEDNESDAY 16 APRIL 2025 | 7PM | £5 ADV

For Listen Club #23 Will Montgomery will explore the rich history of text-sound interaction in radical C20 and C21 soundworks, with a particular focus on poetic constellations of text and on the cross-talk between score and poem. He will address the emergence of the text score in the work of John Cage and New School alumnae associated with Fluxus in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the confluence of post-Cagean performance, scores and poetry in the work of the Wandelweiser collective in the late 2000s and early 2010s; field recording as a facet of composition; the erosion of the performer/ audience distinction in some realisations of text scores; the long-running collaboration between US poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs; walking and scores; and recent work by Matana Roberts, Moor Mother and Redell Olsen.

Will Montgomery is a Reader in contemporary poetry and poetics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Short Form American Poetry: The Modernist Tradition (Edinburgh, 2020) and The Poetry of Susan Howe: History, Theology, Authority (Palgrave, 2010). He co-edited (with Robert Hampson) Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet (Liverpool UP, 2010) and (with Stephen Benson) Writing the Field Recording: Sound, Word, Environment (Edinburgh, 2018). He has published many articles on contemporary poetry. He has a long-standing involvement, as critic and practitioner, in contemporary experimental music and field recording. In recent years, he has worked with Emmanuelle Waeckerlé and numerous collaborators on the Walking in Air project.