This November, I hope to debut a new live film narration performance collabo with Flushing-based poet/filmmaker Stephanie Gray. For now, I can’t encourage folks enough to pick up her wonderful new poetry chapbook, I thought you said it was sound/how does that sound, just out for your late summer reading pleasure:
”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. I had read an amazing interview with 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 was trying to form but it just 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. For awhile, I had been wanting to think about how to get “into” sound, without any cliché or irony or misinterpreted dreaminess as corniness, and it all seemed on the tip of my tongue, 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. 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 any one can write about this regardless of what their 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?”
- Stephanie Gray
