Listen Deep: A Three-Part Poetry Program by Margaret Christakos // Hajer Mirwali

I had given myself over an hour to get to the event in downtown Toronto, but I should have known when traveling from Richmond Hill on a weekday to always add an extra 30 minutes. There was a collision on the DVP causing, according to Google Maps, a seven minute delay, which slowly turned to 10 then 15 then 20 minutes. By the time I parked, got lost in University College a few times, and found the Junior Common Room, Anne Bourne’s Deep Listening Workshop was already beginning. It was the first of three events of Listen Deep, a Poetry, Sound & Multitudinous Remix presented by Margaret Christakos, University College’s current Barker Fairley Visitor. There were about 30 people sitting in a circle with one chair still available. The entire program was free and open to the public, but visitors had to RSVP to this portion as there were a limited number of spaces. Working in the tradition of Pauline Oliveros, Anne Bourne led us through a series of sound tuning meditations. A quote from Oliveros was featured on the front page of the program handout: “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear.” The key word here is 'possible,' and we would be reminded throughout the day of the impossibility of hearing everything all the time. We inhaled deeply as Anne instructed, then let out a long vowel sound with every exhalation. Each vowel sound came from a different part of our bodies, from deep in our bellies to over our heads: ahh, ooo, uhh, eee, ihh. Toward the end of the exercise, we performed a similar meditation with one hand over our chests, feeling our hearts beating, and the other hand on the back of the person to our left. I didn’t know the person beside me, but I could feel the heat of their body and the reverberations as they spoke and sounded. We were tuning into each other’s presence. Writing this after Anne’s workshop, I'm thinking about myself in my car on the way to the event and the people in the cars all around me—all of our sounds: the Khalid song I’ve been listening to nonstop, the low buzz of the heater, heavy winter tires, an occasional honk. Project your voice into the centre of the room, Anne told us, then up into the ceiling. Fill the space with your voice. The second event of the day, the Rotary Poetry Reading Happening, was held in the college’s classrooms. In fact, each event was held in a different space of University College which further contributed to the program’s multi-tentacled nature, as Margaret described. The rotary reading consisted of three rounds of readings with six poets: Oana Avasilichioaei, Canisia Lubrin, Donia Mounsef, Sachiko Murakami, Charlie Petch, and Moez Surani. Each poet gave two different readings, and since guests could only attend three readings, we each missed nine. Everything possible to hear. The poets were each accompanied by a student auditor—Erika Dickinson, Ashley Manou, Shelley Rafailov, Tahmeed Shafiq, Dahlia Vionnet, and Kristen Zimmer—who hosted the reading and collected poetry fragments to create a remix poem they would present later that evening. The students also asked us to write down fragments we heard on a “remix-ticket” that they could incorporate into their poem. It was hard to choose one fragment to hand in to the student, and I ended up gathering many of the poets’ phrases on the program handout. I attended readings by Donia, Charlie, and Moez, and rather than explain their work, I will offer my own remix poem:

I don’t think I’ve eaten a Ritz cracker since I was a kid. I'm almost certain there’s nothing essential to my happiness. But time, time. Sometimes when you were asleep I would practice saying I love you.You’d have to reproduce it with my accent.Floating and sinking. The shipwreck is a reminder of where we didn’t get to go.

The sun shining through the almost floor-to-ceiling windows made it feel like spring inside those university classrooms. And with daylight savings later that weekend, Listen Deep seemed to situate itself perfectly in the mercurial shifting between two seasons. The last event of the day was the Library Plenary Sounding Party. Margaret asked us to select a book from the stacks and we began the evening by turning to page 38 and reading aloud. I had chosen Averno by Louise Gluck and could hear snippets of what sounded like feminist theory from my friend beside me. Then there were improvised musical performances by Anne Bourne on cello and Karen Ng on clarinet, the remix poems by the student auditors, and additional readings by the guest poets. Donia performed some of her fast-paced rhyming poems from her collection Plimsoll Lines; Charlie divided the room into three and had us repeat gibberish sounds which mimicked one of their complicated migraines; Moez read a list of dates in the past 100 years during which there were no interstate conflicts, which is to say he stood silent for six minutes; Oana performed a piece using a voice-changing microphone and looper; and Sachiko brought up six women with her to perform two poems on miscarriages as a ritual of community and against loneliness. The night ended with Margaret standing on the library carrels alongside three other women, all reading and recombining the piece “Arioso” from her text Evanescence. The women’s voices and silences overlapped and Margaret asked the audience to call back any phrases we heard. Soon, the room was yelling: reservoirs, ramen, caress, uneven revenue avenues, we senesce, and at one point all chanting, “we seize we seize WE SEIZE.”Evanescence comes from the Latin word evanescere, meaning disappear or vanish. Our collective voices and energies had filled the library and dissolved into the moment of that night. But, as Margaret had quoted in her opening statement from bp nichol’s 1979 poem, “the moment is continual.” With the generous vision of Margaret Christakos and the innovative sound-focused performances and meditations by the guest poets and musicians, Listen Deep is an example of what a poetry event can be: experimental community-making that listens to the poem rather than just reads it.

Hajer Mirwali is a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Guelph and reads for The Ex-Puritan and Brick. Her poetry has appeared in Brick and she was a winner of Room Magazine‘s 2017 Short Forms Contest.