Croaking of a Naturalist

Croaking of a Naturalist is a sound poem inspired by Seamus Heaney's "Death of a Naturalist", examining the ways in which the human and poetic voice can intertwine. Unusually for a poet, I have an auditory processing disorder (which is an extension of being on the autism spectrum), and thus have difficulty understanding the spoken word, particularly poetry and other literature that is read aloud, though my hearing itself is fine. During poetry readings I often just take in the sounds themselves, without understanding what the words mean. I am particularly fascinated by the sound of poets reading this own (or others') poems, and by the sonic possibilities of removing the actual language/words from a poem....what happens when we concentrate solely on the sound. 

Accordingly, I directly utilized a recording of a poet reading their work in order to create a sound poem. Using audio software, I spliced individual sounds out of a recording of Seamus Heaney reading his famous poem, "Death of a Naturalist" (a poem that I deeply admire for its incredible use of sound), then used these recorded sounds to create a sonic blueprint of an actual bullfrog's song. I referred to a  youtube video of bullfrogs (Lang Elliott, Music of Nature) in order to mimic the rhythm and style of their calls, and layered the background sounds from that video against my recorded sounds from Seamus Heaney's reading. Thus, I have recreated a bullfrog out of Heaney's voice as he reads a poem about his own encounter with these animals.

I found it challenging, and yet also quite enjoyable, to play with the sounds and rhythms in order to best mimic the bullfrog: selecting aurally appropriate and contextually meaningful words/sounds to extract from Heaney's poem, then deciding how to combine these sounds together, and finally working to match the energy and timing of actual bullfrog recordings in order to ensure my sound poem was realistic, while also capturing the essence of the original poem. Out of the original poem I used the words "spawn", "specks", "mud", "bellied", "frogs", "home", "clotted", "slobber", "sod", and the poem's final words, "clutch it", which I also used for my ending.  I have titled my sound poem, "Croaking of a Naturalist", a bit of a play on words from the original title (a slang term for death is "to croak"). 

(Images: Photo of Bullfrog by Ozge Karabal/Photo of Seamus Heaney by PBS Newshour)