Megan Jeanne Gette
cv/bio
education
current -- PhD @ UT Austin -- Anthropology
2017 -- MFA @ U of Minnesota -- Poetry
doing
VNMR section co-editor @ SCA Fieldsights
& co-creator of Con-text-ure w/Andrés Romero
1/6 sound art + ethnography collective OS
1/2 mycotrophes art symbiosis w/ Nicole Simpkins
books
2020 – MAJORITY REEF. Inside the Castle Press.
chapbooks
2019 – ombligo/intaglio. Los Angeles: Ricochet Editions.
2016 – Poor Banished Child of Eve. H_NGM_N Books.
2015 The Walls They Left Us. Austin: Newfound Press.
writings
2020 – (forthcoming) "HAPPENING (undo, un-say)." Minor Literatures.
2020 – (forthcoming) "Summoning Green, a Leprosy of the Heart." New Sinews.
2020 – (forthcoming) “Auto-da-fe: Confession and Camouflage.” BAX: Best Experimental Writing 2020.
2019 – “Reef Necropolis.” Voces de la Luna. November v. 12 no. 1
2019 – “Ekphrasis of my Friend.” Voces de la Luna.
v. 11 no. 3.
2019 – “MIRRORWORLD.” Isle Royale National Park Artist-in-Residence work
2018 – “TOWARD A TECHNOLOGY OF SPIT.” Field Notes Series: Artists on Process. The Operating System.
2018 BRUISE (conditions). Minor Literatures.
2017 – “Auto-da-fe: Confession and Camouflage,” Black Warrior Review. Issue 44.2. Spring/Summer: (61-67). Winner of Flash Prose Contest, selected by Joyelle McSweeney.
2017 – Six poems from Majority Reef.
Cloud Rodeo. Issue 13.
2017 – 2nd place winner of Ethnographic Poetry Prize. Anthropology and Humanism Journal.
2016 – “Sun: Revelation (Cached Music),” BOAAT.
2016 – “Everglade.” Carolina Quarterly. Spring/Summer. Vol. 63.5. (162-166).
2016 (forthcoming) “Famine Fields,” Anthro/Poetics.
2016 – “Prometheus (1964).” Rooted: an Anthology of Arboreal Nonfiction. San Francisco: Outpost 19.
2015 – “Natural History,” Tupelo Quarterly.
2015 –“Apologia, or the lightning field.” otoliths
Issue thirty-seven.
2014 – “Wishlist,” Fugue. Spring. Issue 46. https://issuu.com/uidahodigital/docs/fugue_issue_46/37
2013 – “Communication Breakdown,” Eratio. Issue 17.
2013 – “Ulysses Contract,” “Absolution.” Indefinite Space.
reviews
2020 – Art and Anthropology Syllabus Archive. Co-produced with Erin Gould and Isablel M. Salovaara. Fieldsights: Society for Cultural Anthropology.
2019 – “Out of the Ordinary: Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant's The Hundreds.” Collaborative review with Cindy-Lou Holland and Nel Yang. Cultural Anthropology Visual and New Media Review.
2019 – “Introduction,” “Dance and Detachment: on Louise Mientjes’ Dust of the Zulu” Fieldsights: Society for Cultural Anthropology.
2019 – “Untuning the Politics of Perception in Unsound: Undead.” Sound Studies.
2019 – “Transgressive Circulation: Essays on Translation. By Johannes Gorannson.” E3W. UT Austin.
2018 – “I’ve got a little problem: Ren Hang.” Cultural Anthropology Visual and New Media Review.
2018 -- "The shape touch takes is the space we inhabit.” Fieldsights: Cultural Anthropology
2018 – “No Creature Loves an Empty Space: on Ginny Sims.” InReview. Minneapolis.
2018 – “Vi Khi Nao’s Molecular Agriculture (something)—Looms.” 3:AM Magazine.
2018 – “Anti-Ethnography: the Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets.” MnArtists.
2017 – “Trial of:_____/ a review of Valerie Hsuing’s EFG.” 3:AM magazine.
2017 – “A Review of Sweet Spit: Lucas de Lima’s Wet Land.” DIAGRAM.
awards / residencies / fellowships
2019 – Longlist Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards for ms Majority Reef
2019 – invited artist-in-residence. ARQUETOPIA, Urubamba Valley, Peru.
2018 – finalist, 1913 Press Poetry Prize, for ms Majority Reef
2018 – Artist-in-Residence Isle Royale National Park.
2017 – 2nd prize, Society of Humanistic Anthropology (SHA) Ethnographic Poetry Prize
2017 – Winner, Black Warrior Review Prose Prize, selected by Joyelle McSweeney.
2017 – Finalist, Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize, for ms Majority Reef
2016 – Nominee for AWP Intro Award in Poetry
2015 – Winner, Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, for chapbook The Walls They Left Us
2015 – ARQUETOPIA, Oaxaca, Mexico artist-in-residence
2015 – Winner, Marcella DeBourg Fellowship.
2013 – Novella “Two Fish,” semi-finalist for William Faulkner Wisdom Competition
happenings
2020 -- Ricochet offsite AWP reading. San Antonio. *cancelled by COVID-19
2020 -- "h2o baby: toxic genres." Collaborative presentation with ochre archivist Heidi Gustafson. Color Salons (public lecture series). UT Austin Art History Department. *cancelled by COVID-1
2020 -- Sensory Ethnography panel. AES/AELS: Borders/Bridges. UT Austin. *cancelled by COVID-19
2020 – organizer. Distribute 2020. “Echoes and Edges: Sonic Forms of Distributed Listening.” SCA/SVA.
2020 – “figuring, sensation: sensitives and toxic frontiers.” Uncommon Senses III. Concordia University, Montreal. *cancelled by COVID-19
2019 – Ordinary Schizophonia. Roundtable presentation AAA meetings.
2019 - Ordinary Schizophonia sound installation. Dynamo Arts. Vancouver.
2019 – “air, mirrorworld” Anthropology of the Image panel. AAA meetings.
2019 – “Distorted Ordinary II.” Soundscape presented at UT Austin’s NDIA conference.
2019 – “Distorted Ordinary.” Soundscape presented at Rice University’s Ethnographic Salon. Chaired by Marina Peterson and Stefan Helmreich. Sound mixed by Stavros Glitsos.
2019 – performer Gemini Ink poetry night. San Antonio.
2019 – performer and collaborative director with Baldomero Kawoq Cuma, Gonzalo Aq’ab’al Ticum, Mokchewan Guajan and Nathalia Ochoa, “Ri Q’oraläj Achin”
2019 – performer/reader. Malvern Books. Austin, TX.
2018 -- section editor. E3W. "Sympoetics/Knowing-With: Translated Poetry, Art Criticisms, Collaborations, Etc." Decolonizing the Production of Knowledge.
2018 – collaboration with printmaker Nicole Simpkins’ the ground / thinks with us
2018 – “Shattered Eyes, Prism Thinking: Polyphony and the Experimental Review” collaborative presentation with Nicole Simpkins at GRACLS Interdisciplinary Scholarship/ Intersectional Activism Conference, UT Austin
2018 – reading and artist talk Majority Reef at Isle Royale National Park
2017 – reading at Society for Humanistic Anthropology and Victor Turner Award Ceremony. American Anthropological Association, Washington DC
2017 – “Digital Weave: Translation and Tolkom.” A collaboration with Mallory Matasau, Baldomero Kawoq Cuma, Gonzalo Aq’a’bal Ticum, Mokchewan Guajan, and Ixnal Cuma. Oxlajuj Aj. Casa Herrera. Antigua, Guatemala.
2017 – “Majority Reef: Human/Nature Split & Stitching,” presented at Artyfacts conference, John Hopkins University. Chaired by Michael Taussig
2017 – reading of “Prometheus (1964)” AWP, with Waxwing, As/Us, Newfound, Washington DC
2017 – performer for Carex Series: Environmental Reading at Schaefer Prairie
2015 – 2017 – panelist for Newfound Poetry Prize
2017 – performer, Waxwing/ As/Us / Newfound reading, AWP
2017 – collaboration with poet D. Allen for series SURFACE/DEPTH/RUNAWAY/STOWAWAY
2017 – collaboration with artist D. Allen for cover design of Poor Banished Child of Eve
2014 – 2017 – performer, Mill City Reading Series
2016 – “Anthropoetry and Altars.” Collaboration with Mokchewan Guajan and Baldomero Kawoq Cuma. Oxlajuj Aj. Casa Herrera. Antigua, Guatemala.
2016 – reading of “Natural History” during AAA conference, Bell Museum of Natural History, Minneapolis.
2016 – THE WALLS THEY LEFT US book launch, reading and discussion, Biblioteca Publica, Antigua Guatemala.
2016 – performer, Fierce Lament: Ecopoetry & Performance Reading Series, organized by Paula Cisewski
2015 – guest lecture “The Book A House: Lit/Life” Multicultural Literature, UMN
2015 – guest lecture “The Writer as Dictator” Multicultural Literature, UMN
2015 – performer and creative director, New Age Art Salon collaborative performance series, organized by Fidelis Odozi
2015 – collaboration with artist D. Allen for cover design of The Walls They Left Us
2010 – Debate on ecological conservation strategies and agrarian rights. MSUM Student Academic Conference.
2009 – “Artefacts: A Site for Poetic Inquiry,” Berlin, Germany, 3rd International Design Principles and Practice Conference. Presented with Prof. Steven Wischer
2008 – poem “mechanical advantage: falling not far from the tree” served as catalyst for semester-long, collaborative Architecture/Art sculpture installation, North Dakota State University
poem
brines
In Majority Reef, there are 8 SURFACES. Eight surfaces can form an octahedron, which looks like two triangular prisms put together at their bases, which forms the interior of a sphere, such as a globe. Within each section is a syntax of “recursive loops of longing” or an “infinite palimpsest of pain or desire,” a variety of 8 tones—or perhaps a doubling of the 4 humors—that loop in a style I am calling Weeping Lemon Meringue, or echo-poetics, the ant-I- narcissus. Narcissus looks at himself in the water, a mirror, a mechanics of implosion such as a volcano-cum-coral reef. The first section, titled SAY THAT TO MY WIGS/bleaching, suggests the globe can also wear a face, and thus a wig. A wig can be bleached, like a coral reef, and, as it were, the majority of beings with faces, though they do not necessarily desire it. The act of bleaching is one of erasure, in some cases, or stress from carbon emissions, in another. Bleach can also make clothing and kitchen floors crisp or clean, or chemical. To bleach is also a performance a version of beauty, or an act of killing. Majority Reef is a failure to perform beauty that instead treats, or perhaps makes a fetish of oblivion, dissolution, disfigurement, absence, wounding, hot pink polypropylene and exile in its desire to engage with figures such as Surrounded Islands, 1960s land/performance artists, living pen pals, some dead and deep creatures, Garbage and God.
"Vör Götte’s semi-burial poems are profuse and female and hyperhypnotic and hydra-reverberate effusively with all embalmed dead heretics or “dissonant bells” and are not designed to be pinned down by an “urge to inhabit.” Through its un - extravagant and uncanny fervor, Götte takes us through a deciduous journey into the anthropological “benthic beatitude” of her writing narrative, a meta-language accretion that urges insatiable appetites for everything even things such as “chemical satin that lines a casket” and self-turned-fiction. As a pilgrim of her work, she expects us not to be fragile nor frayed and when we do self-abnegate, to consider her words as high priestesses, “preparing for mass,” a patriarchal mass for those weaponized by love, for sanctuary lamps, tears, rainwater, or for those who are in dire needs of grieving or burial. Even enclaved by Götte’s poetic splendor, we view her work as a “brutal arrhythmic montage”, dare to slice us into two and even “rob the substance” of us, us readers, to bestow us our freedom. Freedom from negative space. Freedom from opposites. Freedom from figments. From “matter, amber, memory.” And, even bellybutton."
– Vi Khi Nao
“As is usual, I don’t know how to conclude or how you do. As I said above, corpses. There is life in this, but you see it as recuperated only in the burial shroud. You feel its eyes on all you do or might do or be. ‘Survival depends on lies.’ ‘What passes for truth’? Survival. Bare life. I keep trying to write utopia back into your stories, but you keep translating the word into American. Is there a life that is not merely surviving? What will it look like? Do we have to carry it off everywhere to live it at all ourselves? What about us? Isn’t the wreckage the Angel of History (which is us) sees piling up us as well, that we become complicit in the storm blowing from paradise when we, in what few agentive moments we are offered to make something whole, instead cry out to the infinite and submit ourselves to cyclical destruction? ‘One single catastrophe.’” —c
ethnographic experiences
Anthropologists of sound and acoustic ecologists have considered the problem of “schizophonia” - the technological separation of a sound from its source - through the rubrics of noise pollution and the cultural appropriation of sound recordings. Adding to this conversation and in the spirit of recent American Anthropology Association multimodal panels, this collaborative project considers the contemporary digital terrain of field recording through the speculative tools of multimedia artists. Central to the discussion will be a collaborative sound installation between anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and artists. Ordinary Schizophonia foregrounds moments of breakdown, interference, and environmental noise, as well as the speculative malleability and potential of schizophonic auditory reproduction. The multi-channel audio installation seeks to expand ordinary, everyday attunements to ecological fragilities.
Weaving together text, digital and modular tape manipulations, the sounds of plant rubbings, the collaborations and conversations of participant Jay Hammond and Sun Ra Arkestra member Ken Moshesh, the avian weeazings of engines in transforming urban environments, the droning of power generators, and other sonic instances of ecological fragility, the installation will bring these questions to a speculative engagement with field recordings from Gulu, Uganda; New Orleans; New York City; Austin; Durham; Guatemala and Vancouver. If separating a sound from its source is, at times, an environmental threat, and at other times, an enabling condition of alternative sonic modalities, this installation and roundtable discussion will seek to better understand the kinds of environments that are possible through creative, collaborative engagements with field recordings.
"air, mirrorworld" (a film in progress)
Or: rub the plant for its sound. Or: click the wind-image of a cotton field at 100 angles, to ask what it conjures. Or: make a diorama of a book, to see it in miniature, to compare the miniature with its voluminous psychological referent. These projects illustrate a kind of alter-optics, a practice of remediation that does not simply conceive the project’s potential or any “right” form, but its manifold, multisensory, multifacted possibilities: a Lernean hydra, a virus, some seeds of an invasive species spread out across a field. Following Kathleen Stewart, this field is a site for composition, wherein its elements might be described not in a 1:1 ratio, to serve a model of its representation, but as actants and subjects in their own right (Bennet 2010; Barad 2010), free radicals, emergent phenoms, rogue forces. In "air, mirrorworld" I call this site the sensorial topography of the imaginary, which could include the object of discussion (my film) and its performance and consumption by a participating audience in real time.
As a “mood-improver;” history of aquarium keeping; curio-cabinet, museums, zoos; objecthood; Fish-bowl thinking biome, speculative creation of potential habitats for humans; sci-fi; monsters; eros; aes/ethic “beyond the face”; facilitated fantasy, imaginary; affective relationships to water: water as media; as mirror; as a space of transition between land bodies, as a life-giving element that, in unendurable quantities, can also take life away; water as solvent; purifier; polluted; like light? like “a minor anthropology would make small multiplicities proliferate, not the narcissism of small differences but the anti-narcissism of continuous variations”; glass? atmospheric; water as a site for figuration and event; water as obstacle; water as threat; moral measurement; weapon; feminine; a body of water; pools for reflection; stain; for dyeing; what changes form with temperature; what requires gills, bioluminescence; appears as glass; mimetic behavior of glass; refraction and reflection; what makes texture; paper; irrigates; waterborne illness; germs; innocence/innocuousness; shame; body of water; weeping; sweating; taking a cold shower; laundering; baptism; sewage; light; water as surface; water as depth; water as double or nothing; fish out of water; like oil and water; water as site of transformation and repellent; beauty is skin deep; appearance and crystallization; presence & past; blood in the water; metamorphosed monster; hold water; sieve or container; curvature & isometric embedding; dilution into texture/textile; seeking v. overlooking holes/lacunae/depths; as necropolis; color; corrosion of metal; rust; stained glass; blood/iron; Mourning and Melancholia; plantas tinteros; indigo