David McCooey is a prize-winning poet and critic. He is also a sound artist and musician. Outside broadcast, his album of ‘poetry soundtracks’ (original poetry, music, and sound design), was released as a digital download in 2013. Work from that album appeared in the ‘Poems, Places, and Soundscapes’ international exhibition of digitally produced sound and poetry in the Cube Gallery in England in 2014. His poetry soundtracks have been broadcast on Radio National (including ‘The Music Show’ and ‘Poetica’ programmes), 3RRR, and elsewhere, and they have been published in CD editions of Going down swinging, and online in Axon and Cordite. His print collections of poetry include Blister Pack (2005), which won the Mary Gilmore Award, and was shortlisted for four other major awards, and Outside (2011), which was shortlisted for a Queensland Literary Award and was a Finalist of the Melbourne Prize for Literature’s ‘Best Writing Award’ in 2012. David is the Deputy General Editor of the prizewinning Macquarie PEN anthology of Australian literature (2009), and his essays and reviews on Australian poetry and life writing have been widely published nationally and internationally. He is Personal Chair at Deakin University in Geelong, where he lives.

'This Voice'

The poetry of knowing and not knowing

This essay is concerned with how poetry—reading it, writing it, and adapting it—relies on a dialectic between knowing and not knowing, a flickering movement between understanding and ignorance that is central to the production of poetry and its effects. To illustrate this, I discuss my poem, ‘This Voice’, and its subsequent adaptation into what I call a ‘poetry soundtrack’, a form of digital audio poetry employing poetry, music, and sound design. The essay illustrates the centrality of the knowing/not-knowing dialectic to poetry by considering the following with regard to my works: the thematics of nescience; the liminal and virtual space of interpretation and play (the latter as theorised by D.W. Winnicott); ‘nocturnal poetics’; and sampling (both sonic and lexical).