Winter Spring Summer

Audio Poems

Between July 2005 and April 2006, I recorded 25 different individuals – family, friends, colleagues – reading my poems and compiled those recordings into the following audio poems:

Hush
Pantoum for My Father
Stephens with a “ph”
Wheatfield Under Threatening Skies

The project was initially inspired by the French parlor game Exquisite Corpse, in which several players compose a sentence, poem, or drawing on the same piece of paper, without seeing what their cohorts have contributed. In an Exquisite Corpse, no one artist controls the ultimate product. Meaning is made from the collage of contributors.

Likewise, this recording project was about finding meaning in my poems that wasn’t, or couldn’t be, controlled by me as the poet – meaning infused by the poem’s readers and revealed in the way they interpreted the lines, held the words in their mouths, stumbled, took breaths.

This project was also about creating audio poems that were more than mere recitations. As the host of regular reading series, I’ve heard a lot of poems read aloud. Some readings make you tremble, while others leave you counting ceiling tiles or pinching your forearm to stay awake. So, when I began assembling these audio poems, I wanted to know what makes a poem a poem? Why are some poems better on the page than in the ear, and vice versa? Can a poem become more than itself? Or does it become something entirely different? This project didn’t give me any answers, but it tickled my senses. And I hope these audio poems can do the same thing for their listeners.