My proposal for all of us, readers of this collection, is that accountability to our material and spiritual lives is difficult to sustain, and, therefore, a vernacular avant-garde.

Kimberly Alidio (she/they) is a poet, essayist, historian, and teacher. Recent publications include a critical poetics essay in e-flux journal; “The Girls and a Joke”: 1080 Press Newsletter #144; ROOM TONE: Belladonna* Chaplet #297; and Teeter, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. She is the author of three additional books, and a fifth is forthcoming in Fall 2025. She teaches essay writing, critical pedagogy, and postcolonial history for various programs at Bard College, and serves as a mentor for The Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship. She lives on  Munsee-Mohican and Lenape lands along the Mahicannituck River, otherwise known as New York’s Hudson Valley, and supports collective resistance, collective refusal, and collective flourishing to dismantle settler colonialism everywhere.

Artist Reflection

The two poems in this collection are excerpts from a long poem, “Ambient Mom,” which appears in my fourth full-length book, Teeter. Teeter is an autohistoriography of felt time that arises from subversive hearing practices and the emotional prosody of a mother tongue one does not understand but activates in another poetic language. Comprised of three long poems, Teeter knows experimental forms can be as intimate as mothering; knows we can understand languages we do not speak. Teeter tries to open up processing and procedures to get to a minimalist, reduced place but somehow ends up in a maximalist, messy place. A focus on technique invites the rise of a shape and form organic to chaos and excess. 

The poems included here quote or paraphrase personal correspondence with Sarita Echavez See, John Melillo, and Kyle Dacuyan; and a poem by Fred Moten. An earlier version of “in a plain ponytail” appears in Apogee. The poems perform a homophonic transcription of Pangasinan language featured in Christopher Gozum’s film, Anacbanua, and YouTube vlogs by Vilmarey Chan Vengua, TVMO Channel, and Monica Sandra Ronda. The two poems were composed with my sound collage, “You can actually say something (2011-2018),” uploaded to Soundcloud; my video poem, “pangasinan chora,” uploaded to Vimeo; and my collection of spectrogram video screen captures, Ambient Mom, on Tumblr.  

In a workshop on writing with ambient sound and field recordings I led for The Poetry Project, I proposed that a poem is an assemblage—screwed, welded, nailed pieces of sonic, voiced, textual, visual, graphic, and referential materials of spatialized utterance. Listening is composition as potential: what’s being composed in your listening, and what “poem” can be composed nearby? A poetic voice may be a kind of synthesizer of languages and emotional prosodies. My proposal for all of us, readers of this collection, is that accountability to our material and spiritual lives is difficult to sustain, and, therefore, a vernacular avant-garde.