Tongues Assemble: Inter-mediality in Written, Spoken, and Moved Language

ing common conceptions of gesture as physically-manifested verbal equivalents, experimenting with how to take a narrow view of gesture and abstract it. “tongues assemble” followed this with a desire to return to the specificity of physical gestures while expanding its scope, using gesture not just as a reference to a verbal equivalent, but as a reference to other texts moved, spoken, and written. This desire to simultaneously gesture in two directions towards the idea of gesture integrated the improvisation that accompanied the reading of Frank O’Hara’s “Poem.” Robert Pinsky writes that “poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art. The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing” (Pinsky: 8). The experience of conducting a close reading of “Poem” enabled me to locate the compositional and structural components that contributed to my bodily reading of this poem, as well as the communicative aspects of O’Hara’s writing that created so much movement within the lines of the poem as well as between the poem, its readers, and author: “he makes the sentence perform like the body of a great dancer, as the syntax – the words in their