A Sonogrammar
A sonogrammar is a mythic technology and the name for the object it makes. It is both method of listening for auditory system in a work and it is the figuration of findings: rhythmic pattern, correspondence, dissonance.
The poems in this collection conduct a systematic sonogrammar on Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914), reading this exquisite and perplexing modernist text as meaningful first and foremost at the level of sound. The collection de-forms and re-articulates the sound of writing to learn what Stein still teaches about the interdepending work of intonation, punctuation and grammar in the creation of rhythm.
Because rhythm interlaces a writer with a locality – materially, at the level of wave and vibration – A Sonogrammar is also testament to the way poetry can work (as light and colour work) to construct a timespace. It is an ode to Stein’s capacity to undiscipline sentences, building syntactic room inside them for divergence and differentiation.
Kay L. Are is an Australian multimodal writer and artist, raised as a settler on Dharug land in the Blue Mountains and now living on Wurundjeri land in exurban Narrm. She has taught Creative Writing and Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Melbourne, where she now researches and advises on feminist, relational and art-based education. Her poems, chapbooks and visual work have appeared in print, online and exhibition spaces including Cordite Poetry Review, Southerly, Island, Meanjin, HEAT, ctrl+v, Stilts, Meniscus, Double Dialogues, Telephone, Lab14 and various book collections, but A Sonogrammar is her first full-length collection. It was Highly Commended in the Puncher and Wattman First Book of Poetry Prize (2020).
