Back in 2019 I wrote about my hopes for a new poetry project, which I called “that listening space” for the time being. I now call it CYMA, for ease, and as the project evolves. I thought I’d share an update on where scoping the project has taken me to date, and my plans for the next stages of researching and writing CYMA.
CYMA (swell, wave, curve, unfurling of young cabbage leaf) will be a poetic exploration of spatial sound in different media: the body, urban space, and the ecology of a richly historied coastal saltmarsh. The project is inspired by and will take the forms of the sonosphere – bubbles, fields, and waves of all kinds – investigating environmental sound as a way of knowing and voicing, and how listening remains possible when hearing is frustrated or silence pervades. The project will build on my abiding interests in bodies, ecology and systems, and challenges me to find ways to privilege the aural over the dominant visual in my writing and thinking.
This pandemic year has been both helpful and unhelpful to my process. Reduced traffic noise has made my urban listening more possible and pleasant; at the same time, I have been unable to get to my primary research site for months at a time. I’ve discovered the works of so many artists, those living and those who have gone before, engaging with listening in their work; it’s been impossible to meet fellow writers and researchers as usual. This feels particularly important for this project, which was begun in 2018 after a conversation with my friend Robbie about the work of Pauline Oliveros, and I’m really missing being surrounded by creativity and sharing ideas and processes with others.
That said, I have been able to attend online events that I wouldn’t usually have been able to get to, which has been fantastic. I’ve also taken solace in reading and writing more than ever before, returning to old favourites and reading genres that I wouldn’t usually choose. Reading about the fields of sound art, field recording and composition has been eye-opening. I’ve realised that it’s no mean feat to learn about a whole new discipline. Like everyone else, I’ve had no choice but to immerse myself in a sense of strangeness and disquiet. At least this feeling is exactly what first made me want to write about sound, space, my particularly eerie site and its military and surveillance history.
In terms of output, I’m generating a lot of notes as I scope out the project. When I begin the writing proper, this project will be very challenging and a real chance to step up my practice and skill. I will have to develop new methods and rhythms of researching, and to return to old ways that I haven’t exercised in a while. I will look at history, ecology, geology and physics, and use site specific writing, listening practices, field recordings and imagination to generate material.
I might also instigate a parallel practice of writing “letters to S” – a cipher standing for sine waves/ sound/ site/ signal/ space/ spirit. In these letters I will write to my subject about my process, research findings, as well as the “noise” of everyday life, and then “post” each letter into a sealed box. The letters will form a secret diary of the project that is secret even from myself, once I’ve forgotten what I’ve written in them. At the end of the project these signals will be received and incorporated into the final output(s) in some way.
Flo Reynolds 