The poetry buddy system project (12.20.19)

Greetings everyone.

I hope you’re all done shopping for the holidays, if that’s the sort of thing you do this time of the year, and that you’re looking forward to being among family and friends over the coming week or ten days.  Ann, Murphy and I are heading off to Charleston for several days and nights.

This has been a great year of poetry for me personally and, I hope, for each of you as well.  We’ve tried our hands at a variety of styles and subjects, read publicly in theater mode, made booklets, some of us have published books (congratulations, Doug!), and become a genuine community of voices.  One thing I hope each of you can ascertain is whether you’re writing better poetry, as that’s what W@1 is all about.

As a reminder to all, we will skip next Wednesday.  At least, I will skip next Wednesday.  And meet again on Wednesday, January 2.

Yesterday, I proposed a new project for the new year: lyrical conversations, or, if you will, “buddy writing,” or “paired poetry,” or “dyadic dactylics.”  That is, over the holidays and into the winter-spring seasons, we are pairing off in order to start poetic conversations.  I have no models for this approach to share with you other than personal experience, which itself is limited.  So this will be highly exploratory and even experimental.  Here’s the idea:

• Pair off with another W@1 writer.  See “assignments” below, but you can pair off with more than one other writer, or even form a small coterie of three.  (Margaret, Janet and June are doing this, for instance, with the idea of exploring feminist themes.)  I am going to insist on one rule, however, which is that you establish at least ONE one-to-one relationship with another writer.  So, if you do form a larger group of writers, you should still pair off into a writing dyad (like a duo but not necessarily with harmony in mind) WITH SOMEONE IN THE GROUP WHO IS NOT PART OF YOUR LARGER COTERIE.
Write or start a poem that you will share with that writing “buddy.”  This is where things become exploratory.  You can explore a theme (like feminism, nature, love, political address, death, the quotidian, etc.) or a form (sonnet, ballad, limerick, haiku, villanelle, etc.) or a mode (lyric, narrative) or a style (imagistic, bombastic, abstract, musical, noir, plein air, etc.).  Or you can start with the proverbial blank page and just see what emerges in a protracted exchange.
This last suggestion is what the project is really about: A PROTRACTED EXCHANGE.
You can alternate writing lines of a poem, though be aware that this approach might become something more like a parlor game than an exchange of lyrical ideas.
What you should refrain from doing is to critique each other’s work, unless of course you do so in a poem.  Rather, you should use each other’s work as a sounding board or launch pad for creating your own poem.

You likely still have some questions about this project, which I will try to anticipate:

Q.   I’m not really interested in doing this project.

A.   Fair enough.  If this is the case, please let me know separately and I will remove you from the queue.

Q.   Can I choose the person I want to work with?

A.   Yes, and no.  Yes, you can “fall in with” anybody whose work already piques your interest, someone with whom you believe you’re likely to engage well & imaginatively.  But this choice will be additive.  Below, I provide some pairings.  I made them absolutely by chance by writing your name on a card, then Frisbee-ing the cards across the room.  Cards that landed closest together became the pairs you see below.  Totally arbitrary (unless some hidden force guided my Frisbee tosses)!  Because we have an odd number presently in the group, some doubling up is necessary.  IF YOU OBJECT TO A PAIRING, OR TO BEING PART OF MORE THAN ONE PAIRING, LET ME KNOW AND I’LL MAKE CHANGES.

Q.   Is this to be a limited exchange of a poem and a response?

A.   No.  Think of this project as an ongoing conversation between you and your lyrical “interlocutor.”  think of it as a “correspondence in verse,” or better, a lyrical conversation.

Q.   How do I know when we’re finished?

A.   There is no end-point to this project.  What I am hoping is that this project will extend itself over the winter and into spring (even beyond, if you and your partner are into it).  The objective is exploration, so destination is accordingly de-emphasized.  We will check in on the progress of the exchange from time to time over the coming months.

Q.   Will we continue to work on other projects in the meantime?

A.   Yes.  Topics to be determined.

Do let me know if you don’t want to participate.  There will be plenty of other projects over the coming months!

-C

"Writing" concrete poetry (12.19.18)

It just goes to show, poetry beats bad weather!  Curt, Bennett, June, John, Doug and Delaney all read and recited wonderfully last night.  There was passion, clarity, projection, confidence, and, as always, high quality poetry.  I thought the second half was every bit as engaging, and was pleased to see how many in the audience stayed for the conversation.  You all gave valuable insight into what makes you tick as writers of poetry.

So, now it’s on to the end of the year and a look ahead to 2019 . . . let’s begin with next week’s project: concrete poetry.  I have some thoughts about it, of course.

The first is to ask the inevitable question, Is concrete poetry poetry?  I think of poetry in kinship with music and thus a medium of sound.  But because poetry involves language, words which bear meaning for us, this sound component becomes complicated; in fact, poetry-as-sound cannot be merely poetry as sound. If I extend the thought, there can be no such thing as the pure verbal icon, for once a word is introduced into the equation, the verbal artifact refers.  What do I mean by this?  Its words point to something—an object, an idea, a feeling, or as W. C. Williams expressed it, a thing—that inevitably lies outside the artifact itself.  The language refers you elsewhere.

But I am wandering off topic here.  Concrete poetry is not the same thing, exactly, as concreteness in or of a poem.  You are familiar with the notion of the concrete image or “concrete language” in a poem.  This kind of concreteness has to do with clarity of expression and reference.  Concrete poetry is a formal idea, just as the sonnet is a formal idea, or the rhymed couplet, or the Alexandrine line.  Concrete poetry makes the materiality of words evident in the most technical sense.  (A sidebar here: poetry qua poetry is the business of making the materiality of language evident, of lifting language out of the quotidian and into the world of artifact, of making words sensual.)  

Concrete poetry treats language with a machine-like precision; it treats words as malleable material that can be shaped: chopped up, literally bent, jammed together, misplaced in a Cubist sense, enlarged, shrunk, condensed, expanded, given a font treatment of one kind or another, and so on.  Obviously, there is a strong visual component to this, made possible by print technology and, in the past generation or two, even more possible by digital print technology.  This link takes you to three examples in Spanish.  You’ll be able to make out words, but will be less likely to “see through” them to their referents. 

“Swan” is a poem by John Hollander (d. 2013), the Yale poet and scholar.  He published Types of Shape in 1969, which contains the above concrete poem, which Hollander referred to as “graphemic” poetry.  Now you might reasonably ask the question, “Why go to so much trouble?  Why not simply write the poem more straightforwardly and let he reader imagine the image?”  And one answer to your question might be, “Why NOT go to such trouble?  Isn’t that what art is all about, going to the trouble?”  Or you might rejoin with, “Isn’t ALL poetry concrete in this way?  What is a line, after all, but a visual formal decision made by the author, a visual marker for the reader?” 

But there is a second kind of concrete poetry that bears thinking about here: soundscape poetry.  Hip-hop falls into this category.  Tom Waits’ songs often toy with being soundscape poems.  Soundscape poetry deals in . . . sound, yes . . . but also in the tactile aspect of sending and receiving a sound—how it forms on the tongue or flows from the lungs or bursts forth from the lips and then goes into an ear. What could be more concrete than the air pressure of a spoken word/syllable/phoneme vibrating the eardrum?  Try intoning this poem aloud to get a sense of concrete sound . . .

Metamorphosis of the Tea Merchant’s Son

Honk¶ clatter. Wheeze-n-cough. Click, chirp, buzz, hum. ZZZT. La-ti-DA-so-fa-la-LA. Rattle-slap-ding. Ding. Ding. Whoosh! Wint. Scrape-to-shfff. Shhhhhhhhh . . . Pank/dink/rheum. Click, dink, honk→scrape. Whoosh! Wint. Da-dum-da-dee. Da-dee-da-dum. Shhhhhhhhh . . . Pank! Fft. Fft. Hump. Hump. Tweet-few-tweet. Whomp.Whoosh! Honk. La-ti-DA-so-fa-la-LA. Rattle-slap-ding. Ding. Ding. Tweet-few-tweet. Dink/rheum. ZZZT. Ding. Ding. Shhhhhhhhh . . . Pank! Shhhhhhhhh . . . Pank! Fft. Bong-ng-ng-ng. Bong-ng-ng-ng. Bong-ng-ng-ng. ZZZT. Honk. ZZZT

---

¶ Komposition 8, 1923, Vasily Kandinsky. Oil on canvas, 140 x 201 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

For Wednesday, then.  Let’s concentrate on concrete poetry.  NOT, mind you, on concreteness in poems, but on the formal idea itself.  Make a poem that looks like something on the page, or, alternatively, make a poem that emphasizes sound above sense.  P.S.: I’ll explain the secret to “Metamorphosis of the Tea Merchant’s Son” on Wednesday.

Clark

Reading poems aloud (11.21.18)

Good Monday morning all!  What a beautiful weekend we’ve had . . . inspiring!

I wanted to share some thoughts about our project for Wednesday, which, as a reminder, is simply to read poems “with effect.”  Meaning?  What I have in mind is to try getting outside our individual voices, to hear ourselves literally, and to recite poems quite literally in a different voice or different voices.  So I guess this challenge calls for a little more explanation . . .

What is “voice”?
When we speak of voice in a poem, do we mean the “speaker”?  Do we mean “persona”?  Or do we mean the breath that forms sounds (varying air pressures) that enter the acoustic meatus, vibrate the drum, then circle the cochlea, igniting electrical impulses that send signals to the brain, which then converts the sounds to intelligence and emotion?  Ha!  I think “voice” means all these things.  And each one—speaker, persona, breath—is changeable, just like a line ending or an image in a poem; that is, voice is a choice.  When we write poems, we adopt (or try) to adopt a certain voice—the “authentic” voice we think of as our true selves, the dramatic voice, the comic voice, the “poetic” voice, the lyrical voice, and so on.

Reading vs. reciting vs. singing
When poets read aloud, that is, when we “breathe out” a poem, we adopt either a stentorian voice (what I am about to impart is Wisdom) or a kind of neutral voice.  That neutral tone is our “reading” as opposed to our declaiming or recitative voice.  Even less do we sing a poem.  And when you stop to think about it, since poems originally were songs and made to be sung (lyre is the root of lyric), it’s oddly prosaic that we merely “speak” poems.  Recitation, in opera, is an intoned speaking part.  That is, it is language or lines issued not in song but also not merely as the drone of standard speech.  It’s something in between these extremes.  And this may be what we’re after on Wednesday, a kind of operatic delivery that observes or even accentuates pauses, silences, consonantal sounds, nasals, labials and so forth that are present in a line of poetry.  Still, it’s possible to sing a poem, even one that isn’t necessarily set to an identifiable melody.  To me, the difference between singing a line of poetry and reciting it operatically is just one of degree.

Voice, sound and meaning
I believe that reading a poem aloud affects not just how it sounds but how it means.  When I read a poem silently, I use a voice, to be sure, but it is my Reader’s Voice, which as I say, is relatively neutral sonically and emotionally.  One thing I’ve learned or re-learned when working on poems for Program for Jazz is how giving voice to a poem—literally—can influence my understanding of it.  I often try different voices, rhythms, timbers, resonances, articulations when reciting or singing a poem, just to experience the different ways the content can be understood.

For Wednesday
I recommend the following for this Wednesday’s session . . .

• Go through a number of your own AND others’ poems and try reading them aloud, just to get a feeling for how they each might be “mouthed.”
• Select the ones that seem most receptive to different styles rhythmically, tonally, etc. and try different tempos with these examples.
• Choose two poems that seem to you to call for different styles of delivery aloud and spend some time with each . . . Varying tempo, pitch, intonation, “force,” articulation (even mumbling a line can be an option!); in front of a mirror, watch yourself as you recite/sing.
• If you’re especially brave or curious, try recording yourself.  You will find how much recording affects delivery, how much more conscientious you are about how you say the poem!
• Bring two poems to the session prepared to deliver them outside your normal style.  (Let’s limit them to one page, if possible, please.)

See you on Wednesday!

Just call me a rhymer (11.17.18)

Well, is it about time for some rhyme?  We’ve met for poetry for a year now, but not a word about rhyme.

Doug argues that sonnets that don’t rhyme aren’t really sonnets.  I won’t argue that point.  Many of the best sonnets in several languages—some of the best poems in several languages—are built on a strict rhyme scheme: abba abba cdc cdc is one; abab abab cde cde is another; and there is always abab cdcd eded ff, and abab bcbc cdcd ee no less!

But a rhyme scheme isn’t much of an adequate definition of the figure.  What is rhyme?  Repetition, for one (obvious) thing.  And pattern, as in the sonnet examples above.  Rhyme is sound—vowels and consonants, diphthongs too.  Rhyme is like to like. 

A rhyme works by contrast, by asserting difference.  And difference, in this sense, works only if there is a basis for or an expectation of similarity.  For a rhyme to work, difference within similarity must pertain, somewhere, somehow. Two or more words must be the same in one key aspect, but different in others:  Bow / now; bow / bough. 

I think what I’m trying to get around to is this: rhyme is various.  Here are some examples of the many kinds of rhyme you can deploy in a poem:

Exact or perfect rhyme: Now / cow / how / wow

Close or near rhyme: Now / brow / chow / prow / plow

Off rhyme: Now / know / new / nigh

The above are variations of “whole” or “masculine” or “simple” rhyme.[1]  The term “simple” just means a rhyming structure consisting of a single syllable or phoneme.  You might ask, Why is the pairing now / now not a rhyme?  The answer is that now / now is mere repetition or duplication.  Now / cow is rhyme because a change has been inserted orthographically: a c for an n. 

You can see in the other two kinds of simple rhyme a veering away from the exact: much remains in each grouping that is similar—the terminal ow’s, for instance—but difference becomes more and more evident. New vowels are introduced, and initial consonants are inserted; but the rhyme pattern remains monosyllabic.  Also note in the third example a purely visual differentiation in the “k” of know, and the “gh” of nigh.  In the latter case, the rhyme is auditory though not typographical: “gh” is pronounced similarly to “ow.”

But what about more complex rhyme patterns, the multisyllabic, or “feminine” forms?  Here are examples:

Exact rhyme: insight / inflight; unkind / unwind; interleave / interweave

Close rhyme: oral / aural / aureole; inferior / interior; instance / insistence

Off rhyme: energetic / panegyric; industry / ancestry;  oral / aerial

You can see in the above the progressions away from exactness to likeness toward mere resemblance.  If you look closer, you’ll also note other aspects of rhyme that don’t get much attention.  Look, for example, at the similarities of stressed and unstressed syllables in some of the pairs, where the stressed parts occur at the same position within the words and occur with similar force and duration.  Or again, look at the insertion of “sis” in the middle of instance, which both preserves and violates the rhyme at the same time!

Here’s an interesting definition or description of rhyme: Rhyme is not only possible in a language, but inevitable, because “the number of sounds available for any language is limited and its many words must be combinations and permutations of its few sounds.”[2]

Some questions to think about as you work on a rhyming poem for next Wednesday . . .

• Why DON’T we rhyme exclusively today, as poets once did?  In other words, why isn’t rhyme a requirement today?
• Why do so many poets apologize and make excuses for rhyme in their poems?
• Why isn’t rhyme coupled more often with “numbers,” that is, with regular meter and rhythm?
• Why is rhyme so often associated with light verse and other forms a non-serious poetry?  In fact, why is it so hard to use rhyme in dramatic or “heightened” poetry?
• Why is rhyme now considered inauthentic?

Of course, one answer to all these questions is that you can take rhyme too far.  The British (and certain slavish American poetasters) used to rhyme “again” with “pain.”  I lived and worked in the UK for four years; never heard any native do that!  Not even a poet.  Another might be that we no longer think of poetry as separate from ordinary speech and breath (thank you, William Carlos Williams).  Authentic poetry—that is, an authentic voice in a poem—speaks ordinary, maybe even extraordinary, but not pretty.

Following are some examples of poems using different kinds of rhyme.

Horticulture

On Her First Semester

at the University of Georgia – Athens

Auden (W. H.)

Once made a strong case

That universities not pardon

Graduates who don’t learn to garden.

Diplomas and plaudits

Should be as subject to audits

By horticulturists

As by multiculturalists,

Or so he believed.

Now, some are relieved

That today’s formal schooling

Requires no such fooling

Around.

That is, the capped-and-gowned

Set learn a curricula

Of nothing so particular

As gardening

Which, though it prevents the hardening

Of the soul and mind

And encourages our kind

To make an alloy

Of work and joy,

Is meticulous and slow,

A too deliberate way to know.

But consider, you

Are a kind of garden, too,

Where careful tilling

Can produce, if not thrilling

Results,

Then at least a mulch

Of humanity I’m

Convinced is sublime.

Thus in Athens, be fertile

With the myrtle,

So to speak.

It’s as good as learning Greek.

A Place Named Nome

(Poem to May Sarton on Anne’s Birthday, August 8, 1995)

Poems, some say, must rhyme,

But as for me, well, not all the time,

Which is to say, assertively, I’m

A person, a poet, a puttering enzyme

Of the type who frequently seem

To be lost, lazily, as in a dream

Upon a gurgling, wordful stream

Whose wordy wavelets gleam

Brightly, like liquid flame.

It’s not important, always, to frame

Your thoughts, or make them sound the same

At the end of each line, and no shame

Either, if you make room

Occasionally for the half-rhyme

Which, in poetry, is the rim

Of expectation, where to roam

Too long and too far from home

Leads to strange places with strange names like Nome,

Alaska, which to any worldly genome

Like you, like me, are poem, sweet poem.

“Clear Water in a Brilliant Bowl”

The Draycott, you know, is all that’s left of today.

Cadogan Gardens is pedestrianless.

In London all is surveilled, all surveilling.

The hotel staff slip farther and farther away.

From the earpiece: “I don’t feel so safe.”

Outside, a sycamore offers a lurker shade.

Through an open window someone’s shouting

Something ugly.  Things begin to chafe.

Your voice, lodged in my ear, feels the ocean

Away it is.  I couldn’t possibly help you, nor you me,

Not from here.  Here, where I see on a table

Clear water in a brilliant bowl — a notion

Somebody had an hour ago but forgot

To fulfill with flower heads from some pot.

Rondeau Saint Martin

We were so furious

when we heard the curious

news about Saint

Martin & his glorious

old paint,

we issued a joint

communiqué, a point-by-point

rebuttal of the serious

plot to anoint

a horse, of all creatures, in that delirious

rite.  It does worry us,

the shirt off his back.  It’s injurious,

anent:

the weariness

of the world. It’s never spent.

---

[1] I am going to set aside the obviously gendered implication here, except to say that men have defined the terms of poetry, as they have so much else in civilization.  There are workarounds: whole rhyme, for instance, or mono-syllabic rhyme.

[2] Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1974.

Aesthetic distance (10.24.18)

Ce n’est-pas une pipe . . .  

Last session, I brought up a new term, "aesthetic distance."  If by now you have searched the net for anything on this idea, you likely have come to the Wikipedia entry.  To the extent that a work of art of any kind is referential or representational, it establishes a “fictional reality” that we connect with when we experience it.  This fictional reality tends to override our sense of what we’re actually doing (e.g., engaging with an artifact).

We can put this into theater terms, namely the “fourth wall” of a stage or movie screen.  There is a kind of “fourth wall” in a poem that we can think of as its “meaning” or the outside world to which a poem refers.  Sometimes, we skim over the fact that we are reading a poem—highly ordered language, verbal iconography—because we are caught up in what the poem’s words point to.  We often do the same thing when looking at a painting.  We see the images: trees or the reclining nude or the field of wheat or the face.  We “look past” the paints and pigments, the brush strokes, the compositional field, the frame, the canvas or paper, and so on.  We see a painting of a pipe and see . . . a pipe.  We are in the “fictional reality” created there.

Indeed, writers and readers of poetry—and I am willing to bet that almost every one of us involved in W@1--approach a poem as something other than a verbal artifact or construct.  We interpret it.  We read its meaning.  The words are not really “there” for us.

Let’s say you write in longhand a heartfelt, passionate, beautiful letter to your best friend.  Let’s say you then type it out on your laptop.  Then let’s say you randomly put in a return after every few words or phrases to create the effect of lines.  Have you written a poem or a letter to your best friend?

Does this question imply a false dichotomy?

Let’s say you next fuss with which words begin and end the lines, and capitalize the first letter of the first word of each line.  Have you now made a more poetic poem?

Let’s go farther and say that you deliberately mess with syntax, then throw in a wide empty space, begin a line half-way across the page, then eliminate punctuation (or throw it in wherever).  Let’s say you substitute a dash where a word might be expected, or insert two dashes in a row.  You are now in company with Emily Dickinson and E.E. Cummings.

Have you written a letter or a poem?  Maybe both!  One thing you have done, to be sure, is to adjust the aesthetic distance your reader will experience to what you have written: I am reading about my friend’s day at the beach . . . or . . . I am reading art.

As far as our week’s project is concerned, “aesthetic distance” is that capacity we have for contemplating any object—a sunset, a mushroom cloud, a pear, one’s face in the mirror, a dance, a melody, an aroma, a severed hand, a murder, a birth, a howl, a painting, a gait—for itself, in and of itself.  We can contemplate from near at hand or from far away.  Either works, so long as we strive to capture the thing’s thingness.

For this project, then, I recommend the following process:

Step 1: select a simple object.[1] 

Step 2: study the object, writing down what you see, hear, feel, smell, or taste.  Consider such things as color, shape, volume, relationship to its surroundings, light and shadow, and so on.

Step 3: shape any details you have noted into a description; for example, describe the object top to bottom, surface to depth, larger feature to smaller, brighter color to duller color.  Let the object determine how you proceed.

Step 4: condense what you develop in Step 3, create lines and any new word order that you feel captures the “essence” or the thingness of the object.

And here are some examples either of a treatment of an object as an aesthetic thing, a thing of beauty in itself, and of poems that similarly insist on reminding you that they are artifacts of language themselves rather than rhythmical essays or letters to the world.

Study of Two Pears 

                            ─Wallace Stevens

I

Opusculum paedagogum.[2]

The pears are not viols,

nudes or bottles.

They resemble nothing else.

II

They are yellow forms

Composed of curves

Bulging toward the base.

They are touched red.

III

They are not flat surfaces

Having curved outlines.

They are round

tapering toward the top.

IV

In the way they are modelled

There are bits of blue.

A hard dry leaf hangs

From the stem.

V

The yellow glistens.

It glistens with various yellows,

Citrons, oranges and greens

Flowering over the skin.

VI

The shadows of the pears

Are blobs on the green cloth.

The pears are not seen

As the observer wills.

The Wild Anemone

                           ─James Laughlin

I’ll call it the daring

flower its softness its

pallor so little suggesting

the strength with which

it fights the wind its 

petals so delicate it

seems a touch would wither

them yet they’ll outlast a

three-day storm and will 

outlast I think (and now

I speak to her) the tempests

that a foolish heart invents

to plague itself    because

it hardly dares to love

the wild anemone

the daring flower.

The Lark

               ─Mary Oliver

And I have seen,

at dawn,

the lark

spin out of the long grass

and into the pink air—

its wings,

which are neither wide

nor overstrong,

fluttering—

the pectorals

ploughing and flashing

for nothing but altitude—

and the song

bursting

all the while

from the red throat.

And then he descends,

and is sorry.

His little head hangs,

and he pants for breath

for a few moments

among the hoops of the grass,

which are crisp and dry,

where most of his living is done—

and then something summons him again

and up he goes,

his shoulders working,

his whole body almost collapsing and floating

to the edges of the world.

We are reconciled, I think,

to too much.

Better to be a bird, like this one—

an ornament of the eternal.

As he came down once, to the nest of the grass,

“Squander the day, but save the soul,”

I heard him say.

The Pot of Flowers

                                ─William Carlos Williams

Pink confused with white

flowers and flowers reversed

take and spill the shaded flame

darting it back

into the lamp’s horn

petals aslant darkened with mauve

red where in whorls

petal lays its glow upon petal

round flamegreen throats

petals radiant with transpiercing light

contending

                  above

the leaves

reaching up their modest green

from the pot’s rim

and there, wholly dark, the pot

gray with rough moss.

What Is a Poem?

                              ─Ruth Stone

Such slight changes in air pressure,

tongue and palate,

and the differences in teeth.

Transparent words.

Why do I want to say ochre,

or what is green-yellow?

The sisters of those leaves on the ground

still lisp on the branches.

Why do I want to imitate them?

Having come this far

with a handful of alphabet,

I am forced,

with these few blocks,

to invent the universe. 

---

[1] I would avoid anything that already has content, like a painting or some iconic image. If you can treat a painting as a painted object and without becoming distracted by its content, then go for it.

[2] Opusculum means “a little work” and paedagogum means “slave (accompanying small children).”  My Latin is worse than rudimentary, so I have no idea about this opening line, other than that it creates aesthetic distance pretty effectively.  For me, the line is pure sound.