Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 1
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My Own Private Ontology for a Poetics of Sound: I thought you said it was sound / how does that sound? / Stephanie Gray
Keywords: Poetics; Disability; Cultural Studies
Sound Off
<1> As a poet obsessed with sound, as well as one with a hearing loss, in the past couple years I wrote two series of works that invoke sound, though one could say that I didn’t dive into them per se thinking about sound. How does that sound? Or just because I have a hearing loss, as some people sometimes infer. (Though it is partly so.) When asked to think about the origins of these works, or how they exist in the world, or how they exist at all, I started to ruminate on it and it truly felt like being pulled under the sound barrier of the deep end that you were not supposed to go into as a little kid. It was like trying to dive deep below a decibel you can hear— how to get to the bottom of how poems about how sound occurs were written? Finally it is starting to come to me and here’s the sounds of those thoughts. . .
Imagining Under – Over – Below Sound
<2> One of these series—comprised of a series of prose poems that all start with some similar wording—titled I thought you said it was sound came about in one of those ways where maybe a poet is, or any artist, really, is in between that state between waking and sleeping, the staying up to finish past the time the midnight oils are gone but still there. Its start—initially in getting it moving—in terms of process (not content, that came a bit later, just after it started—[aside: this is starting to sound like that 70s song “Right Back Where We Started From”]—actually had nothing to do with sound. What happened was that I had read an amazing interview with the writer and poet Marie Ponsot, who, when asked by the interviewer how she managed to write with every day responsibilities, especially children, Marie said “you always have 10 minutes.” I took that literally to heart and said to myself—at a time when I sensed this series percolating about sound was trying to form but wasn’t coming out—that I would write 10 minutes every day right before I went to sleep no matter what for at least two weeks. So, I thought you said it was sound came out of that. They were written and then edited, yet were created in that space. So Marie's advice got me there.
<3> Here’s an example of two of these works below. I wrote the first one and then the next one the next night, and when faced with having to start and write nonstop for 10 minutes a second time, the first thing I thought of was to riff on the previous night’s title. And then the next night I did the same. So we got: Under the sound; Above the Sound; Below the Sound; Besides the Sound; and so forth. While writing these, I was also thinking about times when I have tried to explain how my hearing worked to people or doctors and found myself saying things like “well it just sounds below the regular sound” or “it sounds like it sounds besides the main sound”. Out of context these might seem confusing, but also philosophical and poetic. It’s as if—perhaps for full range hearing people—when you turn to a static-y A.M. radio station and you hear a voice, omnipresent through the crackle but the voice is under the sound. Or perhaps, under the noise. Here’s two examples of how these poems sounded when thinking about sound, forcing myself to write for 10 minutes before I went to sleep and riffing on the same title (excerpted from chapbook published by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs):
Under the sound
<4> I thought we said under the sound we see your thought around what you thought before that classic rock song tuned down beneath its meaning so it matched up with the theory up the road down the street that they told you to think what they said foucault said what deman hid what kristeva’s always saying, so it matched up with the theory is what I said is what they said is what someone said, what if I don’t want to match up the sound below with the theory up there, when then, what and then.
Over the sound
<5> Over the sound was never what we thought it was going to be was, you know like when you were going to win some kind of ribbon at the state fair, above and beyond everyone who made fun of you disappeared above the air but it didn’t totally make sense because you were supposed to be going sky high so what it was
is,
you weren’t going above the sky but above the sound which, the other way around is totally different it was going above everyone else’s pitch and tone, something they couldn’t see but was felt deep underground so much it came up out higher than you ever thunk.
Getting Into Sound: How To? (not How-To)
<6> For awhile, I had been wanting to think about how to get “into” sound (poetically), without any cliché or irony or misinterpreted dreaminess as corniness, and it all seemed on the tip of my tongue, all the time, over many years, but how to create it, write it, how to sound it out? How to imagine and get “into” sounds? It reminded me of being a little kid when you closed your eyes and I used to try to “see” the dots in the darkness that looked like stars and wondered if I could time travel through it. I wondered how I was seeing those dots if my eyes were closed? There was this far-out-ness feeling to it. No doubt I was seeing the universe with my eyes closed—so the impossible could indeed happen:
<7> Getting into sound and colloquial phrases of sound, in both the earnest sense of the phrase and the colloquial sense—that is what I wanted to dive into and report back to the reader with. As one with a hearing loss, it took on an additional meaning as well (though obviously anyone can write about this regardless of what one’s hearing is like)—certain types of sound are harder to get into than others and certain mispronunciations create circles of understanding sound. In trying to dive into the ontology behind this series, how does this sound?
<8> So, for the second series I wrote about sound (though not all at once and not the same process as above)—how does that sound, I was not necessarily obsessed with getting into sound per se, but more dancing around it, getting through to an epistemological rock and roll around it—which wouldn’t be so far fetched to say since there are some classic rock songs and transistor radios that appear again and again though I wasn't consciously aware that I kept referencing them over and over. My hearing loss means I have literally memorized all the small talk phrases that never change, and I know all the “throwaway talk” that is being said. I am obsessed with these extra little phrases and how they pile up, how they can mean something in their isolation or fusing and poeticizing.
<9> Because “getting” specific phrases is harder for me in loud environments, I find I compensate by trying to “get” all the things that could repeat from conversation to conversation. This isn’t the only thing I was thinking of when I wrote this series and indeed I might not have been thinking of it and didn’t until now, stepping back. I find there is something alluring between the fact of repetition whether something is repeated due to hearing or repeated for an artistic purpose. And when it might be both, what does that mean?
<10> In this series, I often started with a riff off of a phrase that referred to sound and then see where it would take me. I sort of had this subconscious feeling of contrasting and comparing a journey through sound, along with a sidebar of poetic movement of another topic. Here’s an example, and in this case, the title’s words take on several meanings invoking sound, work, and class, all obsessions of mind. Often a clipped phrase from the newspaper or someone’s speech became a fragmented title that I jumped off from—that indeed is a bit of a process for me. The astute reader may be interested to know that the below title is a riff off of what a Pearl Jam fan said about Mr. Vedder’s voice (which is one of the best I can hear due to how low it is) and the “riffs…metal” title is taken from a NYT review on a metal band, but I digress:
your control of the lower registers is flawless,
<11> the static is enduring, the tracking is scintillating, blurring your flawless lower registers, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, suddenly all at once, a path is revealed, a window is opened, it got me from point A to point BE is all you need to know, another level of the sublime skirting through, more than the skirt that slipped through the subway grated crack, the high heels you said you’d never wear ever again after the grated teeth ate one and you went to work, snuck in, with pantyhose toes and slipped on extra shoes under your desk, we opened up the instinct, we dragged the palm key down to key of the lowest C, don’t you see, we controlled the lowest of the low, the registers felt like Mt. St. Helens times twenty but nothing moved, nothing shook, we knew it was flawless but had to do it without lava, without ash, you know the bullhorn was what would carry you through another day of this BS, BS meant to orchestrate yr flawless control of the lower registers but you’d already carried them so high, their low-ness highness would never fall down again
Somebody said the riffs sounded like metal,
<12> you know I wanted to know which one, the bridges are all made of metal out here, the diners are still chome-plated-affairs, a silver lunch box you could almost pick up and carry on your way home but instead you fit yourself inside of its dents, bulky, heavy metal, you just went for the leather jacket, you know I flung myself through that metal that was so heavy, no not mental, but metal, I flew threw(ough) the Blue Sky Diner, right through Sunnyside’s train yards, so high I saw both the trees and trains, the tops of the semi-trucks that squish through skinny streets with not metal but bricks beneath the surface, you know it was all one and the same, unironic heavy metal, you know there is such a thing, I hate to have to say it this way, you know under the bridge near Skillman High School is the best place for a heavy metal concert next to the metal Queensboro Bridge, next to the Blue Sky Diner flying in the sky, adjacent to Sky Line Auto and landing for a beer with a splash at the Fire Water Inn – you know you’re on fire, in the water, and the metal, hot, dunked into it, sizzles – yeah I know you said the riffs sounded like metal, I know exactly which ones, which dented sides the notes screeched to and fro to, over and over, a riff engaged in a tiff of metal, the most perfect sound, perfect sound of all
<13> Hence, and in something that should(?) sound like a sum, whether this artistic process makes perfect sense, I am mystified by the philosophical and epistemological that seep through rumination and poetry that involves clarification or isolation of the most mundane phrases, and then with rhythmic movement of prose poem that asks the reader to stick along for the ride through the internal beat, not stanzas all the time. Can u feel it? How does that sound? Does it sound like how I said it? Okay sounds good.
Editorial Note: This work is has been expanded and edited from an ontological text originally written for the Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs website on the occasion of the publication of Stephanie Gray's chapbook "I Thought You Said it Was Sound / How Does That Sound?" The poems featured here are also part of this chapbook. Grateful acknowledgement to Brenda Iijima. The poems “your control of the lower registers” and “somebody said the riffs sounded like metal” were initially published in the literary journals Aufgabe and Downtown Brooklyn respectively.
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