Welcome back for Zoeglossia’s Poem of the Week series curated this month by Noa/h Fields.
May 17, 2021
Audio
Echolalia
After “A”-19
By Noa/h Fields
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Echolalia
After “A”-19
By Noa/h Fields
What follows is a fragment from E, a project that takes Louis Zukofsky’s “A” as its departure point. Zukofsky was a proponent of homophonic translation, which re-renders the sounds but not the meanings of a source poem, usually in another language. My own interest in homophonic translation, as a poet who depends on hearing aids, is in its formal play on mishearing’s potentiality. A queercrip aesthetic informs my process: my erring ears and the ambiguous uncertainties they disentangle are crucial to my ways of unknowing and rehearing the world. Transposed up a fifth, E sings “A” in a new key–of estrogen, ecstasy, entanglement, epidemic, etc. My formal intervention is intended to queer the original work, to expand its sonic lexicon to transcribe the early months of hormone transition amidst quarantine during the COVID-19 global pandemic.
Echolalia
after “A”-19
In other sounds
E wants a mother
anchor I hear
bad. Trachea,
trace—translate
his. Chase
meaning’s
severed half-
lives for cantos.
Mine pine
after dorsal
fins, drafts
drown in
throat. I’m
pssst tense
subjunctive
unfolding
spine, need
-ling form’s
forlorn sobriety,
constraints.
E taunts bow
fingered dawn
lightly butchers
an author
botches cadence
mutters inviolet.
A white trans disabled person reads poetry outside in the park. They are sitting, legs crossed, in a black and white polka dotted skirt on a brick ledge, gesticulating with white-gloved hands. They have blue hair and hearing aids, and are also wearing a red velvet jacket, a rose necklace, and bright neon sneakers. Picture credit: Sara Zalek.
Noa/h Fields is a Chicago-based poet. Their chapbook WITH was published by Ghost City Press. You can find their writing in Anomaly, Tripwire (forthcoming), Elderly Mag, PUBLIC, Electronic Beats, Filthy Dreams, Quarantine Times (featured in the MCA Chicago), and Sixty Inches. They have performed/spoken at SomoS Art House Berlin, Wesleyan University, School of the Art Institute Chicago, M LeBlanc Gallery, Access Living, PostScript, DFBRL8R, Women & Children First, and Space Oddities. They are a recipient of a 3Arts grant for the disability justice musical Always Greener. They work at the Poetry Foundation.