Listening in, reaching out

Abstract

Listening in, reaching out Michaela Coplen Lynley Edmeades. Listening In. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2019. 96 pp. A$27.50. ISBN: 9781988531786 I am taking up space in the British Library. My belongings exceed their bounds—I can tell from sideways glances that my desk-mates do not approve. But I need the extra room; I am reading Listening In today. I am Googling for references, noting each favorite phrase, referring back to Lynley Edmeades's first collection and her critical prose. At first, I do not notice that I am inside one of the poems: "The Bee Elle," Edmeades's soundscape portrait of the British Library. Here the essential weirdness of an academic workspace is on display—this bell jar under which silence has different textures. Edmeades's speaker is tapping me on the shoulder, drawing my attention to the faces around the room, each of us "hooked up to various elsewheres/as if our bodies don't matter" (24). She is pointing out the humor here: the embarrassment of embodiment, where a shuffle or an elbow bump might rupture the scholarly air. It is a piece that encapsulates the phenomenological tension that moves through this collection—a play between mind and matter that reflects the act of listening itself. Listening In is the second collection from the New Zealand poet Lynley Edmeades. The title is drawn from a piece in her debut, As the Verb Tenses—a collection motivated by an interest in linguistic (de)construction, where "doingness" (17) bridges detached abstraction and embodied feeling. These obsessions continue throughout Listening In, where Edmeades's attention to pacing, control, and "The Order of Things" (14) is keenly honed. Readers are Edmeades's "over-hearers, their little coves of ears … listening in" (As the Verb Tenses, 20). The collection evokes the parallels between acts of reading and listening, where objective stimulus (e.g., sound waves, words on a page) is filtered through a subjective process of "meaning-making." One "un-translation" early in the collection instructs readers to "clean their ears," warning that the "(g)listener will be forced to inspect every sownd carefully" (46). Through jolting punctuation and formal manipulation, Edmeades interrupts the rhythms of everyday language—an auditory defamiliarization that alerts us to our subconscious expectations by subverting them. Despite only occasional engagement with received forms, the collection is united by formal qualities. There is an abiding sense of anaphora; Edmeades constructs "a sculpture/with moving pieces" (78) by [End Page 303] establishing fixed patterns and variously unfixing them. In a three-part ekphrastic sequence ("Loveliness Extreme," "Extreme Loveliness," "Extremely Love"), Edmeades plays on pottery, fragments, and translation—she shapes and breaks a form, then kaleidoscopes the pieces. In "Remainder," a repeated structure becomes the scaffolding across six stanzas, but the Mad Lib–style substitution of key phrases heightens absurdity at every turn. It is a formal approach that suggests possibility but also limits—the form lapses in the final stanza, with the words "something something something" (40) standing in as an empty container. It is these intentional imperfections that ground Edmeades's avant-garde in a human element. In true postmodern fashion, the poems happily show their seams—as when a strictly rhymed sonnet gives way in the turn of "Like a Vase": I'd like to stay in bed, be solublewhen the days are floppywith possible,have nothing on the confidence of rain.Instead, my plans leak and my measuresare inaccurate, like a vase. (29) The slant between "soluble" and "possible" embodies the experience of "listening in" on Edmeades's work; as the form begins to slip, it is the artifice of poem-building itself that comes into focus. The poem draws attention to its faltering as the reader notices, creating a simultaneity—a tube through which Edmeades whispers the last lines of this "ars poetica" directly to the reader. Edmeades's use of "found" texts similarly collapses and elides timelines. From a phonetic translation of a speech by New Zealand Prime Minister John Key ("Speetch") to a quantification of US President Donald Trump's inaugural address ("Again America Great Make") to a collage of quotes from UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ("Ask...