words on words, and words

It's summertime! I had the chance to make a visit to the library last week, where I picked up a stack of poem-filled books. I've been reading these any chance I get, mostly in impulsive spurts, here and there throughout the day. I feel good getting back to this.

A few days ago, I was speaking with my cousin (and dear friend), Luke, about poetry. He began to recite some of the lines from a poem of his, which is in the works. I had read some of his poetry in the past, but this little impromtu reading made me realize that there was a fundamental difference in our approaches to writing, and in our obsessions regarding the poetic use of words. He is, to a great extent, interested in the object as allegory, whereas I'm initially interested in the object as object. And when I say the object as object, I mean that I'm interested in the beauty of a poem's proportions, of the air it creates, of the purposeful arrangement of word sounds, and of the pieces of the poem that pleasantly kick expectations sideways. I really enjoy being spun left and right by juxtapositions that, likely, would never have occurred to me. So, when I set out to write poem, this is my initial priority. Then, once I've gathered a colorset, I begin to construct a secondary layer that is allegory and personal/public reference.

I'll likely expound on these things later, but for now I thought I'd share a short poem I wrote 2 summers ago, while studying music in England. I had wanted to write a smallish poem that used simple rhyme and meter. The purpose of this simplicity was to parallel the simplicity with which a person can, nowadays, turn their sensitivity to the sounds around them, collect these sounds digitally, and artfully process (or not)/arrange them as something resembling 'music'. The words I used in this poem are descriptions of things that produce interesting sounds, and words which electroacoustic composers come across often as they knead sound in the digital domain.


Found Sound

xylophone bars
crack and splay
distorted and blowing
in a wash of grains

stochastic schemes
loop-erased
random walks
and Markov chains

cello strings
snap and scrape
scattered and bursting
in heaves of delay

2 x 4's
crepitate
peeling and splitting
away from the weight

aluminum poles
crimped from straight
twisted and bent
into figures of eight

FFT's
sample rates
Gaussian curves
and resynthesis gates

Liverpool 2007