No Perch is a reading series placing writers into spaces where we have not seen poetry before. Our attempts to pick venues seemingly hostile to our readers are always inevitably discovered to have been ideal interstices. The paucity of our imagination to locate venues more antipathetic to our readers’ writing haunts us as an outstanding dare we continually fail to satisfy. Addition can change what we know into what we don’t. We document the products of these summations for posterity, but warn posterity that these records distort what they catalog.
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a perch is a roundish piece of wood for clasping, for talons. it may also be a fish, in which case it is not stationary. Either way No Perch is doing ••• without •••
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No Perch Mofo!
Figure 1: Venn diagram explicating No Perch. Note: the intersection of the two perches (e.g. a perch that happens to be plucked from a stream by an eagle) points to an error of our definitions of “perch,” an error in our understanding of the ideas of “perch,” or both.
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Intersections of ideas and of difference provide an opportunity to discover how our understanding fails. Take the sexiness of black holes as example: they represent a way to explore the intersection between relativity and quantum mechanics. Neither field seems entirely adequate for the idea of a black hole, and a new conceptual leap (whether it is labeled superstrings or quantum gravity or what-have-you) is required. To quote Reading Rainbow’s Levar Burton, don’t take our word for it. The lacuna demands innovation and attention from those who would continually inhabit it. The surrealists’ juxtaposition allowed a space to question why certain things might be found together, but also allowed a further question, must it be this way? The only interesting binary is the binary that points to its own inadequacy and so all binaries are interesting. The placement of poets into unexpected locations is interesting for both how it changes poets and how it changes spaces. What was previously transparent becomes opaque: context is ripe for experimentation.
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