Artist’s Statement

My Glossolalia project stems directly from my book, F7, from which almost all of my published poetry derives. F7 involved using Microsoft Word's spellcheck function, in a variety of ways, to make poems. After I spent a while turning texts into other texts, the obvious next step was to turn texts into sounds. I conceptualized Glossolalia as a space where I could continue the ricochets I so enjoyed creating in F7 indefinitely, by moving material from medium to medium. The earliest stage of the project (which is represented here) was Black Sail, an album of “electro-poetics” where I designed sound environments for works by poets—often friends, or at least acquaintances—that I admired. I created these pieces using field recordings, live instrumentation, and digital editing software. Many of these tracks then became soundtracks for videos, which could themselves be remixed, or projected behind different kinds of live performance, or even fed back (as texts) into the F7 process. By now, Glossolalia has abandoned any ready definition, and expanded to include all kinds of music and video unrelated to poetics—which is to say it’s working, continually transforming and channeling energy. But the Black Sail tracks I still regard as the project's heart. I'm really grateful to the poets who entrusted their words and voices to me; finding ways to make the recorded poems sound the way they sound in my head was a truly pleasurable challenge.