Jennifer Karmin explains just what a "text-sound epic" is

Admittedly, Decider doesn’t attend many poetry readings, but when we saw one on the calendar at Avol’s Bookstore at 2:00 p.m. on July 26 that featured a “text-sound epic” titled Aaaaaaaaaaalice, our interest was definitely piqued. We tracked down the author, Jennifer Karmin, and it turns out the story behind all those A’s is more than an attention-grab, and has its roots in the strangely disparate sources of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

Karmin’s poems reflect the interactions she had with different languages while living and traveling through Asia, and she decided an Alice-like story of adventure was most fitting of her experience. “My poems are visual, and use a ‘scattered-text’ technique,” Karmin says. “The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle tells us we can’t precisely predict where an atom is, or will be. Language can be like that when you’re traveling.” The “text-sound epic” description evolved once she started reading her work aloud. She wrote the poems with many different voices in mind—sometimes even within the same poem—so she doesn’t feel completely comfortable reading them by herself. She now enlists others to help, and encourages them to use the poems as kind of a word score, allowing them the freedom to interpret however they like—singing and omitting words are A-OK.

Add it up, and it sounds like an event that won’t be stuffy or stiff-backed, and we’re always up for that. And that crazy title turns out not to be much of a mystery either—the book’s split into 11 sections, so she decided to use 11 A’s. But we also like the less technical reasoning Karmin offered: “It’s just a fun title.”

Here's a clip of Aaaaaaaaaaalice in action: