Overview

An immersive literary salon and participatory installation exploring the emotional, sensory, and psychological worlds.

Featuring: Avery “Prose” Brand, Koffee Dark’N Sweet, and Azizi Jasper

Curated by: Brittini Ward

Before the Poem is an immersive literary salon and participatory installation exploring the emotional, sensory, and psychological worlds that exist before a poem is ever spoken aloud.

Blending poetry, sound, installation, visual fragments, literary curation, found objects, audience interaction, and reflective practice, the experience invites participants to move through three distinct poetic environments inspired by three original commissioned poems.

Rather than immediately hearing the poems in full, audiences first encounter fragments, atmospheres, textures, prompts, whispers, books, projected text, and immersive sensory elements connected to the emotional interior of each poem.

Audience members will wear silent disco headphones while wandering through the installation environments, allowing them to move individually and quietly through each poetic world while listening to ambient soundscapes designed to deepen immersion and reflection.

The poems themselves remain partially hidden until later in the evening when the featured poets gather to perform the works live in full for the audience.

Before the Poem reimagines the literary salon as an embodied, interdisciplinary experience that invites audiences to encounter poetry through atmosphere, sensation, memory, and contemplation before language fully arrives.