Welcome, welcome ✨


This is a webpage (which links to other webpages) which I will be using to document my research throughout the Fulbright year here in Coimbra, Portugal.

As a starting point, here are some quotations that I used in my grant proposal:  

        In his essay, “Concrete Poetry in Portugal Experimentalism and Intermediality,” Rui
        Torres describes the value of experimental poetry, which “helps to reform the social
        conscious through regenerative capacities of the signification of the text.” Torres’ essay
        is concerned with the history of Portuguese experimental poetry, or PO.EX, and the
        social relevance of its linguistic innovations.

        Scholar Edwar de Alencar Castelo Branco strikes a similar chord in his essay about
        PO.EX stating that “every revolutionary praxis requires a new semantic field.”


For a number of years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about language—its many forms and possibilities—and politics and society and “art” and activism and the ways these things work both nationally in the United States as well as globally. I’ll be drawing on prior thoughts, studies, and ideas as I explore the movement in Portuguese Experiment Poetry (PO.EX) from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

In addition to creating an online index of my research here, I will also be using this space to consider the broader question of how language theory might be made more accessible. I hold the belief that it can be taught, written about, and studied in more grounded and practical ways. So far, I think that poet-theorists like Ana Hatherly are teaching me exactly that.

More is on the way here soon...

<3 Mer