Wax Poetic

Fonograf Editions brings poets to vinyl.

To read Eileen Myles in print is, of course, to read a poet who’s very much alive, whose aliveness seems to jump off the page. And yet to hear Myles reading their poems on vinyl—the static and silence between poems, between lines, their voice quickly swallowed by the studio walls—is a ghostly, lonely experience, like reading a trunk of old letters from the recently deceased. An ethereal dissonance lingers between the intimacy of the material and the distance of its creator.

“The name for it is really great: acousmatic sound,” Myles told me. “The notion of sound taken away from the signifier, which was a new thing when we first started making sound recordings. I think we forget how radical it is to have human speech taken away from the human body.”

We were discussing a collection of their poems, new and old, released last May by the vinyl-only poetry press —a nod, Myles said, to a musical tradition of bootleg recordings. In true iconoclastic fashion,