You Can Ask

Catherine Wagner – Song (1’03”). Recorded in October 2006 during the Contemporary Women’s Experimental Poetry festival in Cambridge, England. Video clip of same text, performed by Wagner in July 2005 at the SoundEye Festival in Cork, Ireland. Macular Hole at SPD. Wagner on Goodreads. More soundfiles on Meshworks.• “I love writing songs, I wish it happened more. I get a tune in my head and I make up words to it. I didn’t sing the songs at readings for a long time and now I do; Lee Ann Brown, who sings poems, gave me courage to do it; she asked me after a reading why I hadn’t sung the poem ‘This Land Is Your Land’ and I didn’t know, so I started singing it. I often find a rhythm when I am writing and then write to that rhythm; that’s the same process, except that there isn’t a tune. It’s like finding a hall or hole to go down; then the shape of the space I’m going down informs what I write down and I am a little bit released because the tunnel or whatever it is, ribcage, does the guiding for awhile” (from Wagner’s June 2007 interview with Zoe Ward on BookSlut).