Essays and other things
Sleeping Through (Smith | Doorstop)
My first poetry pamphlet - part of a series of four poetry pamphlets selected by Carol Ann Duffy and edited by Peter Sansom. Published in May 2019
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True Receivers: Rilke and the Contemporary Poetics of Listening
This is the catchy title of my PhD thesis - in which I explore the following amongst other things:
Why John Cage is not the authority on what you will hear when you go into an anechoic chamber.
A chapter about the Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke's reaction to recorded sound - with a title that is better than the chapter itself - 'Death and the Gramophone'. Includes a bit where Rilke imagines putting a phonograph needle over the surface of a skull to see what sounds it might produce.
Why poets who are interested in listening have often been Scottish.
And why an interest in sound and listening, in our age, is inextricably linked with our embarrassment at the environmental degradation of the planet.
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I often go back to Kathleen Jamie's poetry - I was lucky enough to be taught by her at the University of St Andrews. Her thoughts on listening - that you might 'listen' for a poem (an alternative to the notion that to write poetry you need to 'find your voice') set me off on my doctoral thesis.
I wrote about how listening figures in Jamie's own poetry in an essay included in Kathleen Jamie: Essays and poems on her work ed. Falconer (EUP) 2015, called 'A Poetics of Listening'. Jamie McKendrick, Fiona Sampson, Leontia Flynn, Robert Crawford and Peter Mckay are some of the other contributors.
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My essay 'The Art of Listening' was included in Making Sense: for an effective aesthetics ed.Collins, Rush (Peter Lang) 2011.
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It came out of a conference where the great French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy was supposed to be the guest of honour, but wasn't well enough to attend. It was still a very good conference - even though I didn't get to hear Nancy say things like this:
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'There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being.'
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