The Stories in a Sound: Sonic Cues for Visionary Landscapes

When you listen to hear
they say
what did you see?
—John Taggart, “The Drum Thing”

Sometime during the winter of 1996 or 1997, while I was living in a studio apartment in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a package arrived in the mail containing a cassette of a 1987 reading by Nathaniel Mackey and John Taggart that I had ordered from the San Francisco State Poetry Archive. In a time before the seemingly endless audio riches of PennSound, during the days of dialup, this object took on a glowing, magical quality, like some relic from another dimension where the voices on the tape casually acknowledged that sound could also be a site, and that vision might emit from tonality.

I knew Mackey’s work somewhat, having recently read his first book of poems, Eroding Witness, and immersing myself in his epistolary novel, Bedouin Hornbook. What excited me most about Bedouin Hornbook was the way it created visionary landscapes out of the collisions and infusions of abstract sound, both via the model of experimental music and through a microscopic attention to phonemic play in the writing itself. One technique that recurs in the book is an imagistic, conjured conversation between instruments that grants an animism and autonomy to the sounds themselves. The reader follows a relatively short patch in the life of N., a multi-instrumentalist, through a series of ordeals and revelations, but within that timeline another kind of time unfolds inside the passages describing the performances themselves.

After a somewhat sketchy series of events leading N. to a club where he was half-kidnapped, half-invited to play music with an otherworldly band, he describes his destination’s multiplicity in striking terms:

One moment it seemed I was in an intimate nightclub, the next a domed arena with a seating capacity of thousands. One moment it seemed I was in a cramped garage (the sort of place Ornette’s band used to practice in during those early days in Watts), the next a huge, drafty warehouse in Long Beach or San Pedro or some place like that. One moment it seemed I was in a cathedral, the next a storefront church.

The logic of this abrupt oscillation between locations was only previously familiar to me from dreams, and I loved how Mackey pushed this place from the simultaneous realms of sleep into my waking, listening imagination.

During that time I was technologically advanced enough to own a cassette player that would automatically flip sides and loop a tape indefinitely, and I left it on for most hours of most days for at least several weeks, including some times when I wasn’t home, walking in and out of the room at different times, hearing fragments and catching glimpses, finding different angles into the sound-world of Mackey’s work. One of those days I remember very clearly turning a corner and hearing these words: “Disregarding the equestrian character of the band’s obsession with bittersweet sevenths, the flute insisted on referring to them as birds. ‘Dear Birds,’ I heard it say, my head cocked at an angle.” Something opened up for me immediately, another way of hearing and another way of seeing, a small blip of synesthesia that suggested a larger portal into what one could do to a brain with just a piece of writing.

The title of my first book, The To Sound, is a nod to that gesture of moving toward a transformative signal while feeling dislocated, internally rearranged by the pressures and possibilities of meaning and music. A substantial portion of the book is comprised of an epistolary exchange that alternates between “Dear Birds” and “Dearest Sister” and I owe a more-than-obvious debt to Mackey’s voice for tearing open poetic reality for me in the way that his work so often does for his listeners and readers. I also owe a great deal to his openness and generosity for publishing an early piece of that work in his magazine Hambone. I submitted as an ardent reader of the magazine but also as a way of indirectly testing whether these poems were treading too close to his territory. So, I was especially elated to receive an acceptance that ended “Yours, N.” which is the sign-off the narrator in the novel uses at the end of several passages. I felt welcomed into an ongoing loop, an uncanny Möbius strip. I mention this not because my book was some earthshaking accomplishment, (it is one book of small press poetry among countless others), but because I am fascinated by the ongoing generative and regenerative possibilities of immersing oneself in poetic lineages transmitted via recording.

This brings me to the other side of the cassette, to the work of a poet I didn’t know at the time but whose writing has become equally important to me over the years, John Taggart. Thirty-one seconds into this recording he opens his poem “The Drum Thing” (an allusion to this piece by John Coltrane with the lines: “When you listen to hear/they say/what did you see?” These lines have always struck me as a set of perceptual instructions and a granting of permission to move more fluidly between the senses, both as a person and as a poet. They function within the specific context of Taggart’s poem, but the voice on the tape also seemed to be speaking to me, to tell me about another, more visionary way of seeing by engaging in a deeper listening practice.

I listened to this cassette during the day but also at night, waking up to notice some new nuance or picking up on a subtlety in the cadences. I’m sure these voices must have infused my dreams. I went about my waking time working at a deli with echoes of these phrases cycling through my head. Taggart’s lines occasionally struck me as succinct statements of poetics or as provocations to explore an unexpected approach. At one point, in the poem “Not Quite Parallel Lines” he writes/says, in a voice that seems like it might be quoting an unnamed musician: “I like to write something that people can’t hum.” I love the way this line suggests pushing back against habit and distraction. It always feels very direct and also infused with emotion, maybe with a history of refusing to please the whims of an audience as well as a desire to hold onto the integrity of a work of art to allow it to unfold according to its own sensibility. I don’t see it as scorn for the listener/reader so much as an insistence on a sort of structural freedom that casts off readymade expectations of melody and reassuring patterning. It is an invitation to follow a work where it most urgently needs to go.

When PennSound began accepting materials to digitize for its endlessly expanding, utopian archive of recordings, this cassette was one of the first ones that I wanted to send their way to make it available to fellow poet-listeners. It currently exists unobtrusively inside the extensive author pages of both writers. However, whenever I visit the site to see if anything unfamiliar has been added, those links stand out to me as another iteration of a portal that opened a new way of seeing through another way of hearing. If you haven’t listened to these recordings, it is worth any time you might put into them. I recommend spending at least a few weeks of your life inside the mise en abyme of stories within these sounds.

Link to Mackey: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Mackey/Mackey-Nathaniel_San-Francisco-State_1987.mp3

Link to Taggart: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Taggart/Taggart-John_San-Francisco-State_1987.mp3