Our on-going collaboration of poem and sound, of which you have one moment here recorded, seemed to have happened by accident just after we moved to Pennsylvania from Denver. A happy surprise born as I sat on the couch in our new apartment, reading and re-reading sections of Iteration Nets softly out loud to get the sound right while across the room at his computer Peter worked and reworked loops of music into song. A gift born of not having money for a proper sound studio and work done in a too-small space, my voice his music synced, and what sang was collaboration. However, given that my sonnet project began by tuning the ear to sound (the first section of the book, represented here by sonnet 2.1, is based on a process of homophonic translation) and slicing into the heavy layers of this country’s eastern air meeting my western-longing memory, I should not have been surprised when the fabric of my project grew into collaboration with a sound artist who is also my husband who works, too, with the inextricably layered daily thinking that composes our arts and our lives. Along with obsessive working—and reworking—of our forms under one roof, our processes mirror. Of particular relevance to this recorded sample—one moment of my book and his CD brought to the fore—is the act of extraction: extracting lines of other texts to weave via homophones into sonnet 2.1, extracting samples of music to weave and to alter. Extracting syllables and sliding them into other words, rounds of sound given the texture of the moment and of memory, of a particular quality of the Denver air we breathed together before moving together east, of a particular week of deceptive warmth, the substance of 2.2. And of course, the extraction implicit in the erasure of 2.3, the taking away and the leaving out, the leaving home. The taking away and the leaving out of a sound recording, leaving you this, us, repeating our series of moments in time.
