Madison McCartha
Seen on these playlists
An Evening at Berl's
Selections from poets who participated in the reading at Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop on July 20th, 2017. Organized by Jean Yoon, the evening featured performances by Madison McCartha, Yanyi, Jean, and La Llorona. Readers: https://twitter.com/madisonmccartha https://twitter.com/yanyi___ https://twitter.com/zenpartymix https://twitter.com/nataliemolina
View playlistFREAKOPHONE WORLD
FREAKOPHONE WORLD performs as a series of occult recordings, hauntings, and invocations that reimagine Black diasporic life in an increasingly imperiled and globalized society — but don't ask me what a freakophone 'is' or 'means'; this question doesn't interest. If you read the title as an aural play on francophone world, don't think for a minute that the voices in this poem 'speak for' that world, or from any 'world' you know — even though you do, in fact, know it. I’m not interested in self-representation; I’m not interested in narrative; I’m just interested in the materials and in the process — in Howardena Pindell ripping up her canvas, to sew it back shut. Don't ask me about my intended audience. If I could tell you that the poem began with a feeling, that I and the other Black folks (loves) in my life didn't share a common language for talking about Blackness, or that the poem was a way to imagine that shared language; who would that project? All I can tell you is that language itself had to break for the world of the poem to become possible, and that the book started to take on an aura similar to what Minna Zhou described in an album review of Egyptian Lover — "[an] old-school electrofunk—that '80s 808-driven, Parliament- and Kraftwerk-inspired, breakbeats-referencing, futuristic-yet-analog pastiche" — FREAKOPHONE WORLD became, in other words, a book that doubly spits with voices from the past and voices from the future.
–MADISON MCCARTHA
“Madison McCartha has the unique talent of converting each word they use into a spectral, zygotic megaphone (our many voices rising like resin) that amplifies the rare science, rare medium of their biotic rumination. Madison's embryonic, post-watercolored art laced with the lexical, zany treatment of rectum, reticulum, septum (also ambergris, needle, ‘alloyed genitals’), and sole chromaflock are all rawboned almonds in a posthuman us waiting to be reborn into the hemline, oceanbrine, concupiscent, demon-fecund, lanky distance which they call FREAKOPHONE." –VI KHI NAO
View playlist