I took a Librivox recording of Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall,” which is a very introspective stream-of-consciousness narrative of sorts (which at least one of you have had to read recently with me in ENGL 644) and started playing around with it to try to make a found poem out of it. Inspired by the fact that the original story has amazing dazzling lines amidst the only thing I’ve ever read by Woolf that bored me (possibly in part because it was so inward-facing and wandering) and also by rereading her letter to Vita Sackville-West, it starts, or perhaps the title is, In Such Queer Places. There’s a place or two I didn’t get the overlap quite right — I seem to have accidentally deleted one of the clips around :17, and there’s a clipped half-syllable or two in places where I probably should have faded and paused. I also couldn’t quite get the automatic leveling to work out, although it sounds better the worse your headphones are, I think.

I first wanted to do this with a remix of the Gawain-poet’s Pearl, but I couldn’t quite decide what pronouns to use to make a love poem out of a 21st-c. male volunteer’s reading of a 19th-c. unmarried female professor’s translation of a 14th-c. male poet. (And the pronouns mattered because, well, maybe it was originally going to be a queer elegy entirely to yank the posthumous chain of my favorite medieval sometimes-homophobic poet.)