The University of Arizona Poetry Center's third international symposium, Poetry Off the Page, promises to be "more visceral than conceptual" and will gather poets for whom the stage and all of its demands, such as voice, projection, sound effects, lighting, body movement, acting, props, and image, all help create new breadth for the poetic voice.

The symposium, which will take place from May 18 to May 20, 2012, will present the work of more than twenty writers, artists, thinkers, and performers who press into new territories in theater, song, film and video, dance, recitation, digital arts, sculpture, book arts and more. Many will be performing original never-seen-before work for the Poetry Center.

The Black Took Collective, for example, will deliver a multi-media performance called "Betraying Blackness," which will use written and aural language, sound, video, and images to explore "a black unconscious." The collective will enact poetries of inquiry that engage (and challenge) the psyche's making of racial consciousness by conceptualizing unconsciousness.

Visual and sound poet Dan Waber will lead a workshop investigating the macro and a micro view of contemporary poetic production. For the Macro, Waber will borrow the form of PechaKucha, a fast-spreading presentation format that borrows its name from the Japanese word for "chit-chat," to discuss "60 different ways of making poetry off the page today." The micro portion of Waber's workshop will investigate specific artistic and literary works that are difficult to pidgeon-hole as either textual or visual.

UA Creative Writing faculty member Ander Monson will teach a "Guerilla Writing" workshop that will address the question, "Why do our poems have to be so self-contained?" Monson, who is edits the online literary journal DIAGRAM, will "invite and compel" participants to "interact with the architecture of the web, essentially a labyrinth."

While most of the symposium events take place at the Poetry Center, located at 1508 East Helen Street (at the corner of Helen and Vine), two events will take place in downtown Tucson venues. Individual tickets are for sale for these events. At Poets Theater at The Rogue Theatre (300 E. University Blvd, Suite 150) poet and performer Brent Cunningham will present three short plays: "The Event," "Time's Machinery," and "The Gunfight." These plays feature non-professional actors, frequently pulling them out of the audience. SONIC LENS will present a multimedia experience of sound and visual art installation by Christine Hume, video essays by Claudia Rankine, and and improvisatory oral performance and walk-through gallery talk by Cecilia Vicuña.

This is just a small sampling of the peformances, panels, workshops, and exhibits that make up Poetry Off the Page. For much more information, visit poetry.arizona.edu/symposia/poetry-page.