About Meshworks
Meshworks is a site dedicated to documenting and preserving video and sound recordings of writing in performance. The site’s title is taken from an essay by cris cheek in Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance, and Site-Specificity: “Each poetry reading is a meshwork, a gathering, of differentially inflected components.”
Meshworks will not limit its attention to poetry in any narrow sense but will explore ways of documenting writing in performance as ideas about writing and performance and the media of performance and writing develop in ways that are not altogether possible to predict at the moment. The site will preserve video and audio recordings of more or less traditional poetry readings and performances and readings of writing in other genres at Miami University, and in a more selective fashion it will also document performances at other sites where faculty and students of Miami University have been invited to film or record. Eventually, the site will begin to explore possibilities in documenting multi-media performance as well as new options for filming, recording, and otherwise documenting a range of modes of writing in performance and writing as performance. The archive should eventually include readings of poetry, readings of fiction, tape works, live writing, and writing installations.
This text will disappear as the site is developed, to be replaced by a fuller account of the purposes and future contents of the site, which will eventually include descriptions of readings, commentary concerning writing and performance in a range of modes and genres, and commentary concerning the problems of documenting and archiving writing in and as performance.
We hope that you enjoy what’s here now as we begin this project and come back often as the site is developed and expanded. Thanks to cris cheek, jUStin!katKO, and Karen Shimizu for ideas about and work on the project and site, and to the writers filmed or recorded for permission to document their work on the site.
Keith Tuma
Professor & Chair
Department of English
Miami University