That listening place

I’ve recently finished the poems for my first collection, holon. And while I edit the collection, and find suitable afterlives for those poems, I’m also starting to think about a new project: for now, until it coalesces, I call it ‘that listening space’.

I will use listening as both theme and methodology, and in a spatial/environmental as much as aural sense. I hold listening as a kind of spatial receptivity, and it’s this that I’ll be exploring in the new project. At the moment I’m reading Pauline Oliveros and Gaston Bachelard, but there are many thinkers, writers and artists whose work I’ll draw on, in addition to field research and lived experience (I am ‘hard of hearing’ – as if hearing were a surface, as if I am somehow calcified).

‘That listening space’ feels like a natural continuation of the themes (of bodies, solidarity, lost childhood/ancestral languages and materialisms) that I explored in holon, as well as the chance to push myself with new techniques, new forms, and new ways to research. I’m excited to start deciding the aims and scope of the project, the resources and ways of working I need to make it happen, and just what form it might take.