by Miriam Atkin
Verbatim Text Sound Expo returns to the Catskills this fall, in its sixth year of gathering people of all stripes to listen to poetry and experimental sound and supporting the small presses and record labels that keep those scenes alive at the margins. For the second year in a row, Verbatim will land at Sugar Maples Center for Creative Arts in Maplecrest. The festival will take place on Friday, October 2 and Saturday, October 3, transforming the campus into a rural outpost for language, sound, and the printed page.
Verbatim began in the first year of the pandemic to bring Hudson Valley and Catskills-based poetry presses and record labels together in an outdoor space to trade books and tapes and experience each other’s work in real time. From that improvised first installment, it has grown into an annual festival that combines a growing market for small‑run books, tapes, and records with a full day of live performance across disciplines: poetry, sound art, improvised music, and hybrid text‑sound experiments. Participating presses and labels curate the lineup themselves, inviting the artists they publish to share new work and explore the boundaries of performance, genre, and discipline.
Verbatim is committed to the kinds of literature and music that rarely find a home at mainstream bookstores or streaming platforms; because the forms are too unruly or the production channels too small-scale, without publicity budgets or institutional cachet. From the outset, the organizers of Verbatim stated that vendors would not be charged for table space, which sets Verbatim apart from most book and record fairs, where tabling fees can easily climb into the hundreds and effectively lock out smaller DIY projects. Admission is free, on the belief that access to underground art, and the Avant Garde is for everyone to participate in.
After bouncing between venues in its early years, including Station Bar in Woodstock, Opus 40 in Saugerties, the site of pioneering American sculptor artist Harvey Fite’s magnificent bluestone sculpture covering 6.5 acres, Verbatim has settled into Sugar Maples Center For Creative Arts in Maplecrest, which has proven to be the perfect environment for the festival’s mix of sociality and deep listening.
The Sugar Maples Center for Creative Arts campus offers an expansive, meadow-like outdoor space known as Thyme Field. Flanked by Thomas Cole, Windham High Peak, Black Dome and Blackhead mountains for the book, tape, and record market, the site also includes a historic chapel known as Speakers Space for music and poetry. On‑site lodging and local food vendors make the space feel like a temporary village, with participants and audience members sharing conversation, soaking in performances, and walking the pastoral grounds over the course of an early autumn weekend.
Over the years, the festival has drawn more than 30 presses and labels from the greater Hudson Valley, Catskills, Capital Region, Western Massachusetts, and Western New York, all working in some relation to experimental poetry and sound. Past editions have included micro presses devoted to radically local poetry, historic small publishers cataloguing key moments in avant garde literature, and long‑running cassette labels that treat the tape as both archive and object. These vendors don’t just sell their wares; they also act as curators, assembling performance lineups that reflect their own catalogs and affinities.
This year’s full roster of presses, labels, and performers will be announced later in the season, with multiple returning vendors — Infrequent Seams, Spiral Editions, Notice Recordings, and Siglio Press, to name a few — as well as a strong contingent of new ones. The festival includes an all‑day market threaded with live sets, from solo voice or electronics to small ensembles, interspersed with readings that treat the text as a score for sound. Expect a mix of long‑time Hudson Valley stalwarts and new projects emerging from nearby cities and towns, all converging for a weekend in the beautiful hamlet of Maplecrest, New York.
Updated information on vendors, performers, and schedule can be found at verbatimtextsoundexpo.com. Mark your calendar for a fall weekend when the Catskills become a brief, resonant commons for books, tapes, records, and the kind of live art that inhabits that provocative space between risk and transcendence.
Verbatim Text Sound Expo VI takes place Friday, October 2 from 6:00 to 10:00 pm and Saturday October 3 from 12:00 to 10:00 pm at Sugar Maples Center for Creative Arts, 35 Big Hollow Road, Maplecrest, NY. On‑site lodging is available through Catskill Mountain Foundation.
Miriam Atkin is a poet, critic, and curator based in the Catskills who organizes Verbatim: Text Sound Expo, a festival event dedicated to the intersection of sound, language, and small-press publishing. Along with her work in experimental poetics and on-air radio, she co-founded the publishing collective Pinsapo, an art and publishing collective composed of international artists across disciplines and has worked as an Editor and Grant Writer at Litmus Press since 2018.
