IN GRADUATE SCHOOL, I drafted a poem that I never finished, discarded most of it except for the lines, “a pond at night / quiet as a melted record.” Those lines haven’t found a home inside of a poem, but I can’t forget them either. They reemerge in my mind, hovering without context, asking for some place to appear.

A few months ago, I received a copy of Fonograf’s Live in Seattle, which includes excerpts of Alice Notley reading from her collection Certain Magical Acts and answering questions from the reading’s hosts, John Marshall, Christine Deavel, and Rebecca Hoogs. But before I listened to it, I held the record in my hand, and the image of a quiet, still pond resurfaced again. Holding the record gave me the same thrill as holding a new book, but one I’d be listening to rather than reading. The small, handheld pond of the record would bring Notley’s poems to me in her voice as it emerged from the spinning text. And the usual distractions of a reading would not be present—nothing to look at, no analysis of the poem’s form on the page, of the writer’s appearance, of the self-consciousness of being in attendance. There’d just be the sound of the words, arriving as if out of some void. It was like finally being able to walk into that pond—the slick, blank surface with a voice inside of it had begun to appear. What I loved about listening to the recording is that the excerpts of the poems were distilled to a purely auditory experience. When Notley asks, “Who wants to see us anyway?” the poem is speaking to us about itself, reclaiming its integrity as an aural experience.

“It’s like saying the poem loves what makes it possible for it to exist, a nod to motherhood, to sound, to words as bodies.”

The more I listened to her read, the more the listening became the experience of the poem. Soundbites felt personal and public at the same time, because I was listening to a public reading in the privacy of my apartment. As she reads the words “our machines excite us,” I heard the poem praising the machine of its form: syntax, line break, meter, et cetera—or even the speaker as machine delivering the poem—as well as her direct reference to the quotidian experience of the machines we use throughout the day. And, of course, whatever machine you use to listen to a recording. It’s like saying the poem loves what makes it possible for it to exist, a nod to motherhood, to sound, to words as bodies, or, as Notley says, “I think of poetry as reality…words are not words.”

I wondered, at times, about the strategy of including excerpts instead of the entire poem, of intersecting parts of the reading with Notley’s answers to questions, of why it felt like I was eavesdropping on the poem’s thoughts about itself. Do the fragmented files mimic a movie trailer? An Instagram story? A Vine? A Snap? What’s the effect of hearing only parts of a whole, and how does that intersect with the integrity of a complete work? The off and on again experience of hearing poetry, her answers to the host’s question, then more poetry, never to completion, intensifies the experience of hearing rather than reading. The silence before and after a track worked like brackets, off-setting the poem in the way a long quote is indented within a text. It felt like a small platform for the recorded lines to perform. In short, Fonograf achieved a celebration of Notley’s poetry while creating a unique experience of her poems as heard objects. While I won’t give up entirely the experience of reading poems on a page, hearing them on the record felt like a meditative encounter with poems asking, “Why do we want to find each other again,” and in that yearning, if even for a moment, we experience again the new beginning that creativity demands.

Patrick Haas has written children’s books in Korea, poems for literary journals, and eLearnings for McGraw-Hill. After freelancing for too long, he became an Instructional Designer for an IT project in California.