How to Become a Hum: An Elongated Note on Drone

Recently, after finishing a poetry workshop, a few of my students followed my last minute recommendation to go see Dylan Carlson, from the drone metal band Earth, play solo at a small venue in Denver. It felt like the perfect way to end a wonderfully intense few days spent looking at and listening closely to our own work, often in extremely granular ways. Afterwards, none of us could quite put into words what had happened, but we all seemed to share the impression that being enveloped by a cascade of endlessly radiating waves of sound belonged to the same sensory universe as poetry. Rather than mapping these genres as overlapping entirely, I like to think of poetry and drone music as weird, unwieldy correspondents exerting invisible gravities on one another’s orbits.  

What is especially generative about using contemporary drone music as a model for reading and writing poetry is that it tends to loosen the impulse to decode for discrete symbolic meaning in favor of allowing a more holistic, cumulative effect to unfold. In my experience, rather than flattening out or becoming monotonous, (the pejorative way the word “drone” is often used in popular speech), drone can finely retune awareness and lead to striking transformations. Often, this arrives in the form of stretching the listener’s attention from clock time into a more mystic, mythic experience of duration. The impulse toward drone tethers presence to impermanence. It allows the listener to participate deeply in each gesture as it arises as well as attending to the subtle qualities of sounds fading away.

In this interview on Erik Davis’s aptly named podcast, Expanding Mind, music scholar Owen Coggins, author of Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal, characterized the way that drone metal music listeners often describe the paradoxical feeling of being very much present while also mentally travelling through visionary landscapes: “The experience makes you super in your body, in the here-and-now, but it also evokes these kinds of spaces marked by extremes of otherness.” This openness toward absorbing the full complexity of a work by a slow, reiterative engagement over time is my favorite way of hearing poetry. Or, as the French poet Henri Michaux once wrote: “In everything that is repeated, something exhausts itself and something else ripens.”

In my previous post, “The Stories in a Sound: Sonic Cues for Visionary Landscapes,” I mentioned the synesthesia-like effect of sounds evoking deeply imaginative spaces after repeatedly listening to some recordings of Nathaniel Mackey and John Taggart. By looping a recording as a listening strategy, the transformative potentials of drone lying dormant in the work may float to the surface of awareness. This practice reminds me of what I love most about poetry. Poetry resists achieving an over-simplified meaning via a single, instantaneous approach. Instead, a poem might be considered a place for readers and listeners to explore and to more fully inhabit paradox, complexity, and contradiction within their own perceptional network. That is not to suggest that a poem should only exist locked away in the private impressions of the reader, but that there is something valuable in at least temporarily holding a poem, a line, or a phoneme, inside the senses within the body for a while before returning it to the larger world. 

As an example of how these elements might practically function in a poem, Juliana Spahr’s “Poem Written after September 11, 2001,” from her book This Connection of Everyone With Lungs, makes use of hypnotic repetitions, extensions, and permutations as a way of mapping and critiquing the logic of war while it unfolds. In this context, the dystopian meaning of “drone” as a disembodied weapon of war is certainly relevant on the level of content. However, I find other, more positive resonances with drone as well. In her comments on the poem she says:

At the time I was taking this course in Ericksonian Hypnosis, which is supposed to induce bodily change […] mundane things or more profound changes in consciousness. I was thinking about how metaphor actually changes your body. If poems needed to change our bodies how would they change? What kind of changes would you want from it?  

What I find exciting about this piece, particularly as it relates to qualities that I have been thinking about, is that it emphasizes an activist sensibility rather than the mindless passivity that the word “drone” tends to imply in everyday usage.

Drone music can also be a capacious, generous model for editing one’s own work or when providing feedback to others. I find that it is too easy to drift into the habit of reading drafts of poems with a pen in hand, waiting for some perceived imperfection to rear its head to the eye or ear, rather than reading thoroughly, holistically, and repeatedly. One of the most common ways of responding to poems is to instinctively prune for immediate intensity and local focus. While that often serves the poem at the level of the word or line, it can also stunt its overall growth. Rather than always initially looking for some small detail to remove so that we can point to a poem’s supposed improvement, it can be valuable to first look for sounds, images, and patterns that might be expanded, elongated, or echoed. So, as a result of spending lots of time listening to long, wavering tones in the works of artists such as SUNN O))), Eleh, Eliane Radigue, Folke Rabe, Sarah Davachi, and Yoshi Wada, I have been following the impulse to revise outward and to provide feedback that tends more toward expansion rather than contraction. 

Admittedly, there is an adjustment that needs to happen around the perceiver’s expectations when engaging with drone music and poetry that modulates over an extended period of time. But being able to notice the feeling of that shift from one way of sensing into another way of sensing can be deeply moving and highly engrossing. I think about this as gradually transforming from a “waiting for” mentality toward a “being with” mentality. It is one way to hum next to other oscillating bodies.