Category: from the archive

environmental reflections, Field notes, from the archive, photography, poetry, sonnets

Sounds of things you cannot hear

This poem–really an exercise–was suggested by what seemed to me to be a found poem in Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods (2008).  In explaining “why the young (and the rest of us) need nature,” and what he means by “coming to our senses,” Louv recounts a game played by Janet Fout, an environmental activist, with her daughter Julia. “As they wandered through the woods, they would listen for ‘the sounds they could not hear.'” Continue reading Sounds of things you cannot hear

Unknown's avatarKarin CopeLeave a comment
Activism, Covidious-notes from isolation, environmental reflections, Field notes, from the archive, poetry

Sound Collaboration–To listen for the shapes of words

Recently someone–a student who is also a colleague– sent me a list of words that begins with the word collaboration and ends with the word crisis. The list is a request for a collaboration as well as a compilation of many of the varieties of chaos, computational and not, introduced into our lives by COVID-19–or more precisely, by our confounding, cranky, critical and community responses to COVID-19. Continue reading Sound Collaboration–To listen for the shapes of words

Unknown's avatarKarin CopeLeave a comment
from the archive, histories

Running out into the rain: Remembering Bill Readings (1960-1994)

It has been twenty-five years since my friend Bill Readings died in an iced-up airplane that plummeted to earth in an Indiana soybean field. Twenty-five years since a phone call that Halloween night cancelled dinner plans, and turned our Montreal party into mourning. Twenty-five years since the world changed. Continue reading Running out into the rain: Remembering Bill Readings (1960-1994)

Unknown's avatarKarin Cope2 Comments
from the archive, histories, poetry

Rereading or Practicing Surrealism? Method: short poems from novels

One final note. As I am finishing this text, I open my copy of Breton’s L’Amour fou, a(nother) book in his trilogy of novels dedicated to the unfolding of unexpected encounters and coincidences. A ticket falls out on which is printed the following command: “Please read carefully.” I do. Or rather, I read that line several times, since I don’t have my reading glasses with me, and what follows it is printed in type so painfully small that it devolves into wavering black squiggles, a drawing perhaps, another block of excised text. Definitely not words. Continue reading Rereading or Practicing Surrealism? Method: short poems from novels

Unknown's avatarKarin CopeLeave a comment