The ghosts of poets’ voices walk the yard

I’ve long been a fan of Halsey Burgund, a sound artist and musician who works with the human voice in both compositions and place-based installations. So I’ve been excited to work with Halsey these last few weeks, in conjunction with the Woodberry Poetry Room, to develop a locative experience on poetry for Harvard’s upcoming LitFest. The resulting project, re~verse (for iOS devices), is a portal to a participatory, location-based sound installation in which fragments of recorded poetry from Harvard’s collections—the voices of renowned poets—crowd together at the gates of Harvard Yard. Like tourists, students, and the many passers-by who make up the migrant denizens of campus, they cluster at the gates before dispersing, chorusing with music and one another across stanzas and centuries. From gate to gate, they combine with the voices of users of the app, who are invited to contribute to a growing, unfolding work of art with responses, recitations, and reveries.

The app assembles more than a thousand pieces of audio, samples taken from the extraordinary audio archive of poetry readings gathered in the Woodberry collection (see the map below, which shows Halsey’s placement of audio files for the project, and gives a sense of the magnitude of the media in play). And yet Halsey’s app allows this density of archival sound to reach listeners intimately and evocatively, as voices whispering quietly, pacing alongside, inviting them to venture their own reflections.

While re~verse is available globally from the App Store, it ties its sound media ineluctably to site—in this case, to the gates of the Yard—so to experience it fully, you’ll need to install the app on your iOS device, plug in your headphones, and wander Harvard’s Cambridge campus. This is a poetic encounter with place.

This Tuesday night, you can join us in Barker Center’s Thompson Room for the opening celebration of re~verse. During this event, those dynamic and vital voices will fill the Thompson Room in Barker Center as participants immerse themselves in, contribute to, and stand among a growing, unfolding work (or working) of art. We’ll invite participants to install the app or borrow a device to wander across Quincy Street, where the books stand open and the gates unbarred, to chorus with poets.

Get re~verse (for iOS)