On behalf of the Cultural Research and Practice Lab, Dalia Davoudi and Shayla Lawz invite you to a talk and performance by David M. de León on Montuno: Poetics, Improvisation, and Liveness.
Date: Wednesday, February 11, 2026 | Time: 5PM |
This talk is open to the public. A reception will follow.
Montuno: Poetics, Improvisation, and Liveness
Where does the poem end and breath begin? While other arts—theater, song, dance—are intimately connected to their sense of liveness, poetry is often thought about as being precise and stable, crafted so intricately that any change would only make it worse. The completed poem is thought to have “found its form”; it no longer changes; it is dead—which is true of so-called “page poetry” but also of much of performance in the age of short-form video. But when art moves between the strict page and the living air, what must it shed, and what can it gain? How does it become new, changed, alive? And how must we change our reading and listening practices to honor the work, especially the work done by Black and Latine poets, that straddles the line between text, sound, and performance?
This is a hybrid critical/creative presentation that will try to both think around and enact a poetics that blurs the boundaries between script, improvisation, and form. We will think alongside the work of poets like M. NourbeSe Philip, Douglas Kearney, Samiya Bashir, Tracie Morris, Tyehimba Jess, and Shayla Lawz. We will think about the legacy of the blues poem tradition and also my own work on the improvisational call-and-response montuno of salsa, bomba, and plena. Can we think of the poem not as something dead and in the past, but living and acting in the present? Could we think of improvisation, not precision, as the soul of poetry—improvisation crystalized into form?
Please click here to register for the event.
Location: Alumni Reading Room, Pratt Institute Library (Brooklyn Campus)
David M. de León is a Puerto Rican writer, academic, and performer. Their first academic book, Epic Black, is on contemporary book-length Black poetry and is forthcoming from Duke University Press. David’s poetry and prose appears in places like Best of the Net, AGNI, The Yale Review, The Volta, Fence Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Ate Mais: Until More, the anthology of Latinx futurisms. Their poetry manuscripts have been shortlisted for awards at Button Poetry, the Letras Latinas Andrés Montoya prize, PANK, Pleiades, and Tupelo Press. They have a Ph.D. from Yale University and were a senior editor at The Yale Review. They currently teach at Hunter College CUNY, where they went to undergrad. In their spare time they play guitar and video games.
CRP Lab centers work within the fields of Cultural Studies, including Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Media Studies. Our programming aims to generate cross-disciplinary conversations among artists and researchers, highlighting work at the intersection of creative and scholarly practice.
Check out our webpage for more information about CRP Lab.