This week, I finished a draft book chapter on a (phono)poetics of the human microphone, the people-powered method of sound amplification and multivocalic mode of collective composition, communication and intervention utilized at Occupy protests. The chapter is largely a study of form and praxis combined with a historical sketch: I contextualize the emergence of the human microphone as a form at Occupy protests and locate specific moments of formal variation in its practice during the specific period of September 17 to November 18, 2011. In this sketch, I focus on five distinct modes: 1.) The specific context in which the human microphone as a form and method emerged; 2.) the human microphone’s tuning as a people-powered technology to relay communications; 3.) its use as an interventionist form, one focused not only on the relay of communications within the human microphone, but also on the intervention and interruption of messages outside the human microphone; 4.) the human microphone as a form in which collective bodies can speak to the violence and brutality of state-sponsored forces; and finally, 5.) the human microphone as a device to frame silence with new semantic affect.

In bringing to a forefront concepts of public and collective composition, multivocalic improvisation and political action, I read the human microphone as a mode of tactical composition extensively imagined and theorized in language poetics and performance writing. I focus first on Charles Bernstein’s concept of “poetry as dissent, including formal dissent; poetry that makes sounds possible to be heard that are not otherwise articulated.” Then, I pick up on Lyn Hejinian’s concept of a transitive poetry, where a poem functions not as “an isolated autonomous rarefied aesthetic object,” but, instead moves toward a production in which “aesthetic discovery is congruent with social discovery” and “new ways of thinking (new relationships among the components of thought) make new ways of being possible.” With these guiding concepts in mind, I look to Caroline Bergvall, who asks: “What is the process of live performance in its relation to writing. Is it writing’s role, in that context, to function as a guiding background, as the blueprint of a live piece?” And finally, to David Buuck, who questions: “How might the performance writing form of ‘action’ expand beyond the recognizable activist performance model (scripts for street theater, etc.) and/or the much more militant and confrontational modes of direct action which are generally discussed in terms of efficacy (symbolic &/or material) rather than ‘as performance’ (as if the latter threatens to turn the political into the ‘merely’ aesthetic)?”