In putting this magazine together, we've struggled as a group to define (and agree on) what "counts" as "sound poetry", or a "tone poem" or "sound art" or even "experimental"--what does text and sound equal? textsound is hosting a reading series in Ann Arbor this fall, and we came up with a set of guidelines that we wanted our performers/readers to think about and create around:

...interested in the fields and intersections of poetry, sound poetry/ art, and performance, [textsound] asks its artists to consider the following: the breaking down of language into its parts; how language accumulates to create meaning, sense, and non-sense; the pleasure and pain of repetition (a la Edwin Torres or Gertrude Stein); beats in words and music (Viki or Laurie Anderson); recycling of materials (like radio collages from People Like Us or Kenny Goldsmith); and stories in which part of the event is sonic (radio plays by Samuel Beckett or Rodrigo Toscano)...

We've come a long way as a group in starting to define this magazine and the kind of art that it pursues. Part of this magazine's work for us at each and every meeting has been to define (perhaps in more concrete and personal ways than enlightening works like Steve McAffery's Survey of Sound Poetry, or Gerald Bruns The Material of Poetry have done), for ourselves and in our own words, what the wingspan of this genre covers and how this will show up in our magazine. And it seems we all have totally different ideas on the matter. To this end, each of us has set a goal of "reporting back" to you, to try and put into words what we hear, how we understand it to be sound art, and from where we as individuals have come to sound. In short, we hope to give you, the listener, another way into the creative work in the issues and into what we're thinking. In issue three, we hope to include a mission that reflects and engages the (dis)content of our conversations as co-editors.

I celebrate the coming of fall and the harvest. For some reason, I never, ever tire of a new season's onset. We are excited about the creation of another issue of textsound and we duly celebrate the creative spirit that is found in these works. It may be cheesy, but great art, as well as another autumn, hits me the same way; I never think it can happen, again that something would come about, seemingly out of nowhere, and still surprise and inspire me--that there continues to be newness and creation better than I could think up on my own. It is humbling and it makes me want to get to work.

 

-from Anya Cobler's editor's note