Paolo Javier and David Mason, Fel Santos: I of Newtown, 2018. Multimedia installation (Super 8 film, digital video with sound, and 7-channel audio), durations variable. Courtesy of the artists. Installed at the LeFrak City branch of the Queens Library.
Paolo Javier and David Mason, Fel Santos: I of Newtown, 2018. Multimedia installation (Super 8 film, digital video with sound, and 7-channel audio), durations variable. Courtesy of the artists. Installed at the LeFrak City branch of the Queens Library.
Paolo Javier and David Mason, Fel Santos: I of Newtown, 2018. Multimedia installation (Super 8 film, digital video with sound, and 7-channel audio), durations variable. Courtesy of the artists. Installed at the LeFrak City branch of the Queens Library.
Paolo Javier and David Mason, Fel Santos: I of Newtown, 2018. Multimedia installation (Super 8 film, digital video with sound, and 7-channel audio), durations variable. Courtesy of the artists. Installed at the LeFrak City branch of the Queens Library.
Paolo Javier and David Mason, Fel Santos: I of Newtown, 2018. Multimedia installation (Super 8 film, digital video with sound, and 7-channel audio), durations variable. Courtesy of the artists. Installed at the LeFrak City branch of the Queens Library.
Paolo Javier and David Mason, Fel Santos: I of Newtown, 2018. Multimedia installation (Super 8 film, digital video with sound, and 7-channel audio), durations variable. Courtesy of the artists. Installed at the LeFrak City branch of the Queens Library.
Paolo Javier
My collaboration with Listening Center is borne of our shared interest in hauntology, which Fel Santos' poetry certainly examples. The poet will continue to serve as our Muse and subject throughout our participation in QI 2018. David Mason (aka Listening Center) and I will present the next phase of our project that engages with the history and innovation of global sound poetry launched six years ago, when I published my study of the work of Woodside poet Fel Santos in the journal EarWaveEvent. More specifically, we hope to expand our predominantly text-sound collaboration into more corporeal form: a new video & sound work installation in the LeFrak Branch of Queens Library in Corona. Fel Santos, with whom I share similar immigrant Filipino roots, is a sound poet whose work draws from his maternal side's private language as well as his own lifelong experiences with the occult.
Tell us why you are interested in Fel, aside from shared heritage. What is your own poetry like? What do you learn from and share with Fel? Tell us why you are interested in Fel, aside from shared heritage. What is your own poetry like? What do you learn from and share with Fel?
In addition to our Filipinx American roots, Santos is an experimental sound poet whose writings and performances draw from "gigil"—a private language combining Filipinx motherese and baby talk which I and countless other Flips grew up with. As I explain in my initial study of his work: "Gigil is a Filipino term for the trembling or gritting of teeth in response to a situation that overwhelms one's self-control. My Tagalog dictionary offers two definitions: 'to tremble or thrill from some irrepressible emotion,' and 'gritting of the teeth because of suppressed anger' (English 530)."

Santos' gigil-based poems are also inspired by Soviet Futurism's linguistic experiments in sound symbolism and language creation, particularly Vellimir Khlebnikov's Zaum (beyonsense), a poetic language of indeterminacy. The hallmarks of Santos' work—its theatricality; its experiments with linguistic hybridity and poly-vocality; its material interest in nonsense, babble, and neologisms; and phonetic notation—extend beyond mere fanboy appreciation for Dada and onto a delirious engagement with European and North American 20th and 21st century sound poetry history.

Similarly, the spirit of questing, innovation, and hybridization across genres and cultural boundaries runs throughout my work—a postcolonial echolalia sounded within the margins, from inside the hyphen's generative and po(e)tential space. Or: English is/as an occupation, the Immigrant Dream is/as a fevered language moment/imminent.
What about locating the work at LeFrak? What about locating the work at LeFrak?
We hope to conduct workshops and host happenings for an intergenerational audience from the community and friends of the library. This will realize one of our project's primary innovations: the idea to mount a very public work made from an intensely private language that is neither imagined nor constructed, but alive and heretofore uncovered. We also look forward to showcasing the potential intimacy in sound poetry, a language art often dismissed as too conceptual and esoteric, to new and diverse audiences. In addition to our sound & video installation, David and I plan to resume our project's latter, performative phase by involving patrons of the LeFrak library in a live program at Queens Museum.
Paolo Javier (b. 1974, Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines) earned an MAT (2014) and an MFA (2005) from Bard College. Javier was a recipient of grants and fellowships from the Queens Council on the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts (2010). He was a featured artist in MoMA PS1's Greater NY Show (2015). He is the author of the poetry collections Court of the Dragon (Nightboat Books 2015), The Feeling Is Actual (Marsh Hawk Press 2011), and 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books 2006). He was a recipient of the Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award (2005) for his first collection, the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada Books 2004). Javier was a writer-in-residence at the Millay Colony (2010), the ACA Galleries (2010), and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2007/8). He was a recipient of poetry commissions from Socrates Sculpture Center (2017) and the Brooklyn Rail (2014). With Listening Center (David Mason), Javier has published two albums of sound recordings, including Maybe the Sweet Honey Pours (Temporary Tapes 2018), and My Aspiring Villain (PennSound 2015). His comics poetry collaborations have been shown at the Five Years Galleries (with Alex Tarampi 2012) and the ACA Galleries (with Ernest Concepcion 2010). Javier is the former Queens Poet Laureate (2010-2014), and curated the multidisciplinary events ETERNiDAY: Queens Poet Lore Festival (Queens Museum, 2014) and Bookstalls (Museum of the Moving Image, 2012). With Emmy Catedral, Javier edits and publishes 2nd Ave Poetry, a micro-press devoted to innovative language art and magick. He lives in Sunnyside, Queens.
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