Teeter

Kimberly Alidio’s Teeter is steeped in noise—its origins and manipulations—from the “high-low, woah-woah, slow-fast / eh-ah-eh-ahehah, taktaktak mix of percussion,” to “layers of looped vocalizing with / machine,” to “more footsteps/ semi-ASMR, room ambience, bird sound.” Alidio samples lines from Jacques Derrida and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in a poem titled “Cuts and clips of vocals into a rhythmic scat”; elsewhere she mixes Cha with feminist noise duo Las Sucias. Extensive endnotes reflect expansive listening, from YouTube and SoundCloud to a broad range of sound poets, including John Milton, Gertrude Stein, and Susan Howe.

Through mixing, collaging, and looping, these poems become vehicles for both embodiment and investigation of the subject: sound—as music, as language, as simultaneously instinctive and cultural-political. Alidio also brings into the noise poets who interrogate our uses of language—Lyn Hejinian, Kenneth Goldsmith, Gloria Anzaldúa—as well as critical theorists and scholars of biology, linguistics, music. These poems are conversational, but with a beat, and an analogue feel, down to the font.

In the long poem “Ambient Mom,” Alidio pulls language to the surface, mining origins of language in the body and addressing postcolonial displacement through typographical expression. The “language of my mother,” Pangasinan, emerges in a visual poem using the word for a newborn’s cry, uhá, to shape a crying mouth, followed by

materiality, maternality, inherence
when rhythm, sonority, ambient sound

          is what your mother shares
          with you while you are
          part of her body

inherence not inheritance

Alidio adds a brief matrilineal family tree and a graphic highlighting anlong, the Pangasinan word for poetry; both inherence and making are key to this project.

In the final section, “Histories,” the speaker posits, in response to the question “what sustains experimental thinking over time”:

[a]ny career projection or retrospective could go into the art of being a being in these broken times, & what I might say is that just being a being rather than putting your beingness to work in the guise of a set of questions or aesthetics or cultural capital, is experiment itself.

This book is not just a collection of noise, but a move toward reframing what exactly experimental poetry is “over time,” both collectively and individually.