VEXATIONS: A Debut Immersive Performance of the Book Length Poem

"I am reading this book-length poem for the third time in order to keep thinking about a poem that keeps thinking. So deft it feels almost offhand, Vexations captures how the mind chews over ordinary details and observations, enlarging them with imagination and anxiety. Inspired by Eric Satie's piano piece of the same name in which the same short melody is repeated hundreds of times, Vexations feels like a long walk with a friend you don't get to see nearly enough."

—The Guardian (Daniel Handler)

Join us for this SPECIAL, ONE-TIME-ONLY debut of the COMPLETE performance of VEXATIONS by Annelyse Gelman, the book length poem as it was always intended to be. A mother and daughter journey together through a strange speculative world—an immersive performance of Annelyse Gelman's award-winning, book-length poem combining text, music, images, and field recordings.

Experimental musician extraordinaire Zach Layton returns to the Flow Chart space to perform from Ashbery’s personal piano for this performance.

Vexations (Phoenix Poets, University of Chicago Press), winner of the 2022 James Laughlin Award and long listed for the National Book Award in Poetry, is a text score and book-length poem—a surreal, glitchy meditation on empathy, ecology, and precarity. Throughout winds a narrative about a mother and daughter as they move through a world of social and economic collapse. Vexations is titled and structured after Erik Satie’s composition of the same name, a piece that requires patience, endurance, and concentration. This is ambient poetry, drawing on the aesthetic qualities of drone music and sampling voices and sounds to create a lush literary backdrop filled with pulsing psychedelic detail.

Don't miss this never before seen FULL performance!

This event will also be livestreamed through WGXC ("radio for open ears") on the WGXC Flow Chart Foundation livestream page.

’s most recent book, Vexations (University of Chicago Press, 2023), won the 2022 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Gelman is also the author of the poetry collection Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone (Write Bloody, 2014), and the experimental pop EP About Repulsion (Fonograf Editions, 2019), as well as the artist’s book POOL (Neck Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, BOMB Magazine, the PEN Poetry Series, The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Gelman also founded and directs Midst, an app and digital publishing platform focused on capturing, saving, and sharing the writing process. Each poem published in Midst includes an interactive timeline showing readers exactly how each published poem was written and edited—blank page to final draft. Midst is in active development, with the ultimate goal of becoming a free and highly accessible public resource. The project has commissioned emerging and acclaimed contemporary poets, including Forrest Gander, Franny Choi, Daniel Borzutzky, Mónica de la Torre, Xandria Phillips, and Dan Beachy-Quick. Read Midst at midst.press/read. Gelman’s language-based, trans-disciplinary projects are frequently ekphrastic and collaborative, using consumer-grade technologies and available materials to explore intimacy, vulnerability, and interdependence. Beyond publishing, her expanded poetics practice has resulted in a duet with Tavares Strachan's neon sculpture at the Blanton Museum of Art, a reading with Deborah Butterfield's sculptures at the Manetti Shrem Museum, and a performance for José Parlá's Amistad America mural (Austin, TX), and many other projects. She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Deutsch-Amerikanische Fulbright-Kommission, New Zealand Pacific Studio, Fondation Jan Michalski, Fondation Thalie, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers.

is a guitarist, composer, curator, teacher and visual artist based in New York. He has composed orchestral music for the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn and has performed and exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, the Kitchen, MoMa/PS1, ISSUE Project Room, Roulette, EMPAC, Eyebeam, International Computer Music Festival, Experimental Intermedia, Performa, Exit Art, Sculpture Center, Transmediale Berlin, SCOPE Art Foundation, Audio Art Festival Krakow and many other venues in New York and worldwide. He has worked with a diverse range of artists and musicians including Vito Acconci, Bradley Eros, Bobby Previte, Henry Fraser, Ben Vida, Tony Conrad, Victoria Keddie, Tristan Perich, Elliott Sharp, Joshua White, David Grubbs, Loren Connors, Luke Dubois, Peggy Ahwesh, Bradford Reed, Alex Waterman, and many more. Zach is also founder of the experimental music series, "Darmstadt: Classics of the Avant Garde" (co-curated with Nick Hallett), former co-curator of the MoMa/PS1 WarmUp music series and former curator of Issue Project Room.

Zach has received grants from the Fulbright Foundation, Turbulence.org, NYFA, Experimental Television Center, Danish Council for Visual Arts, Jerome Foundation, Signal Culture, Wave Farm and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant to artists award in the Music/Sound category. Zach is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College MFA program, and PhD at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute. He has taught at NYU, the New School, Bard High School Early College, Bloomfield College, and is currently Assistant Professor of Music Production at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

More on VEXATIONS

Longlisted for the National Book Award

"Extraordinary. . . in this apocolyptic dream-vision of a poem, Gelman confronts head-on the question of what seperates poetry from uses of language, particularly the dystopian vernacular of corporate newspeak, pseudo-therapeutic jargon, PR hype, and the dolorous cant of bourgeois self-talk. . . Surreal, often nightmarish, flecked with grim humor, Vexations is a litany of bizarre images and turns of phrase, head-spinning nonsequiters, and flights of syntactical fantasy."

—New York Review of Books

"Gelman's Vexations moves in organized disjunction through a winding narrative that insists and compels."

—Harriet Books Poetry Blog

"...Vexations is a brilliant new book-length poem composed of 220 sestetsthat subtly resist their form and function start to finish like well-oiled wheels. . . Along with its marevlous and tonal range, versatile use of language and imagination, what drives this work forward is its marvelous plot. . . Vexations is nothing less than an astonishing, polytonal romp that vividly sustains and attempts to redeem our ecologically battered and high tech world."

—Los Angeles Review of Books

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