From how Imani introduced herself, her innate passion for language was clear. Poet, writer, performer, and curator Imani Mason Jordan creates for the heard voice. She refers to her voice as her instrument but not in the way that singers do, she is a vocal artist focusing on the sensical and nonsensical ways in which the human voice can be used an interpreted. 

Imani’s view of poetry was very interesting to me, she referred to the text as a score, describing the inherent song that lies within written text. Concrete poetry and abstract displays of text are of interest to Imani, and their effect on how the text is spoken.

Within the lecture, Imani said “Dissonance is intentional or it isn’t”, I’ve been contemplating what she meant by this since, as she works with the voice and rarely with other sonic elements herself (other sonic elements of her work typically come from collaboration).  What is the difference between intentional and unintentional dissonance? Oxford Dictionary defines dissonance as “Lack of harmony among musical notes” or “Lack of agreement or harmony between two things”, could this make her statement a commentary on a natural/ accidental lack of harmony among the natural/ untrained human voice? A lack of agreement between two things could suggest that works such as her slash poetry take serious topics into a playful form of practice.

Imani noted that she feels that performed and heard language is often watched/ observed/ percieved – the way in which you hold yourself when speaking aloud is read and received by those listening, the way in which you use your voice, even the perception/ connotations of your accent add an additional meaning to the words themself.

Tread/Mill is one of Imani’s latest works (in progress), an endurance performance based on Fredrick Rzewski’s “Coming Together”. The piece is an exploration of the invention of the treadmill used as a punishment in prisons used on people such as Oscar Wilde. “Coming Together” is an interesting poem as it has been recreated countless times all with different voices – the message varies between these interpretations and different meaning can be derived by the audience.

Imani writes three pages of stream-of-consciousness daily. Artist daily practices are something I have been exploring recently, I’m interested in finding out how individuals practices benefit from a daily practice which resonates with them, Imani said that a lot of her public works originate from this practice, such as the slash poems previously mentioned.

The work of Nikki Geovani has been inspiring me over the last few months, her work relates to this area of the sound world due to who she is what she makes and how she makes it. Similarly to Imani Mason Jordan Nikki Geovani writes and performs text but collaborates with musicians for sonic accompaniments to the spoken word. 

Imani talked about the effect of time, age, and life experience of the cadence of the voice – i think in Nikki Geovani’s album ‘the way I feel’ this is true, particularly in her poems discussing her experience of life as a black woman especially in retrospect to her youth. 

Influences include; James Baldwin, Abbey Linkin, Dionne Brand