THE WAY WE HOLD OUR HANDS
[WITH NOTHING IN THEM]︎︎︎
Video, Ambient Guitar, Voice
Text excerpt taken from All the Time, a series of lyric epistles.
Exhibited during the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Alberta.
the way we hold our hands with nothing in them is an ambient poetry collage mixing voice, video, and ambient guitar. the poems being read are excerpts from a longer work titled all the time. the text that appears on screen act as incomplete subtitles for the poems – already fragmented and laconic – being read.line breaks, the poet’s breath, and the asynchronous [dis]appearance of the text on screen cut this selection of poems apart while the long reverberations of ambient tones and the single slow continuous shot of the moon hold them together.
the way we hold our hands… uses the reverberant characteristics of both poetry and ambient music to find what Jan Zwicky calls a certain “flex” in language. at the heart of this mix is an inquiry into language’s durational potential – how do we feel words affect us and last differently in our bodies when they reverberate and delay as a time-based art?
