Spoken Word

‍ Words are doing something all the time, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, but there is a code to be cracked in almost every utterance, from casual observations to arguments, from movie dialogue to love letters: something not being said overtly is being said through word choices and slips and evasions. Noticing that gap between what someone, on one level or another, wants you to hear and what the words are actually doing, is a catalyst of poems. Asking “What does that really mean?” turns that gap on its head and lets you build an utterance that uses the gap as a tool, a kind of linguistic pry bar, to open up deeper levels of meaning, at least for a while, until the commonplace of everyday speech reasserts control.
These are attempts to do that, to pry open the gate.

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