We send our heartiest congratulations to Finnish sound poet Cia Rinne, who was awarded the 2019 Prix Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou by Fondazione Bonotto last month. The prize, for "non-book literature," was previously won by Caroline Bergvall and Fia Backström.
Writing up the accompanying festival, Extra! for the Best American Poetry blog, Tracy Danison observes that "Rinne has linguistic feet in Sweden, Finland and Germany, as well as in her translingual poetry, which, she told me, was suggested by ordinary conversation in the multilingual household where she grew up. Just as Nina Santes' work reverberates with energies inherited from happenings, Rinne's work winds around and binds together concepts exemplified by sound-tech poet pioneers such as Laurie Anderson and traditional, page-visual-Ogden-Nash-book-of -practical-cats-style poetry formats."
Our Cia Rinne author page is anchored by a 2014 Close Listening program hosted by PennSound co-director Charles Bernstein in which she reads recent work and discusses her creative processes. From the same year, we have Rinne's participation in the Convergence on Poetics panel "INTERVAL: LANGUAGE + PRESENCE" alongside Aeron Bergman, Alejandra Salinas, and Lisa Radon. We have a trio of reading videos from 2013: two collective performances with Berlin Sound Poets Quoi Tête in Ausland and Altes Finanzamt, and a Berlin reading as part of "a night of text / sound / video" #3. Next there's 2012's Nonstop Action Poetry at Kiasma Theatre, Helsinki, Finland (with Leevi Lehto and Tomomi Adachi) and "notes for soloists" for the Quiet Cue Intermedia and Cooperation in Berlin as well as a performance of "sounds for soloists" with sound design by Sebastian Eskildsen from the same year. To round things out, we have another performance of the same piece (also with sound design by Eskildsen) from 2011 and a reading with Charles Bernstein and Caroline Bergvall at Gyldendal, Copenhagen from the same year. You can listen to all of these recordings by clicking here.
