about words
I like the audition of words. Even more when they approach the written, causing a reverberation in me. Reading them silently, without moving my body, I perceive them first as typographical constructions, an up and down of smaller and bigger signs in groups, rows, lines. I am a slow reader, trying to peel off the outer shape in order to adapt to the inner. The sound of the words gets me closer to their meaning. It creates a cloudy ambience but at the same time locates a meaning by recalling an experience of an event from my past.
While reading I generate the sound of a voice in my head, usually it happens to be my own voice's sound. Then it gets difficult because my voice makes everything the same. I try to find out what kind of voice the text itself has; not by drawing on a voice which I heard before but through inventing an author speaking in his very own timbre. The tone is less produced by the being but more by the idea of the text.
I favour poems and short texts because they are often worked out very precisely. There is much time spent with the single words and their particular, individual sounds, which often falls behind in prose since the reader's attention goes to the arch above the bundles of words, sentences, paragraphs. It seems to me as with poetry, words are dropping out of an invisible mouth. I can see and hear them falling and striking on the ground; that means I experience them more in time. Delayed, as in slow motion, I can watch them and dwell.