“I Was Made to Make A Sound”: on Rachel Zucker’s multimedia “SoundMachine”

By Hannah Ho

You are sitting in a subway car on your way to work. This early, people are either clutching coffees with blank stares or are resting, eyes closed, sinking into themselves for just a little longer before having to face the day. Virtually everyone has headphones. Some absently nod along to music; you hear the muffled beat of the person next to you and, frowning, turn up your own podcast. Once above ground, you are greeted by the street’s cacophony of honks and sirens, brakes, and rumbling bus engines. A passing cyclist blasts rap from a speaker strapped to his backpack. You increase the volume another notch. Work: phones ringing, clattering keyboards, the ding of a microwave. On your way home, more sirens. The clamor of happy hour more fervent by the minute. You fall asleep to Netflix or maybe a guided meditation, depending on your mood.

Steeped in this constant wash of sound, your brain consciously and subconsciously filters what information to register, distinguishing important signals from background noise, deciding what constitutes pleasurable or discordant. Sound can give you privacy, a wall of protection behind which to hide; headphones connote a message of “respectfully, don’t approach me.” At the same time, sound may also be a source of irritation: the upstairs neighbor who parties at all hours of day and night, the screaming baby, the overly chatty coworker who can’t take a hint. Amidst the chaos, you try to make meaning from it all. What constitutes as listening? As not listening? Are they, paradoxically, the same thing? 

New York native Rachel Zucker explores this question in her multimedia, cross-genre project, “SoundMachine.” Published in September 2019 by Wave Books, the project consists of a two-hundred-and-fifty page book of original poems alongside a release of several audio recordings, extant on Bandcamp—listen here. The poems’ lengths often extend into the territory of essay, their subject matter foraying into confession and memoir. Zucker writes with painstaking attention about both her personal life—marriage, love, death, motherhood—and her career as both poet and professor. She engages with a mode of storytelling that draws upon oral tradition, weaving together a multitude of different voices and writing from different pronouns. Sometimes she occupies the first person, sometimes the third, distancing herself from the poems while still exploring highly personal, confessional writing. Who are you talking to? The human voice carries, she whispers on the page in the final poem, “Residency.” The voice carries the weight of grief, anger, guilt; it carries tenderness and reassurance. It is a meaningless sound among other sounds, and perhaps the only way we can make sense of, and ascribe meaning to, existence. 

This isn’t Zucker’s first audio project. She hosts the podcast “Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People),” wherein she has recently interviewed such luminaries as Ilya Kaminsky, Dorothea Lasky, Kaveh Akbar, Richard Siken, Sharon Olds, and CA Conrad. Unlike her podcast, though, “SoundMachine” “attempts to create a sound space that accommodates the written word, the timbre of the human voice and the expressive possibilities of inarticulate sound.” The project’s Kickstarter was successfully funded in January of 2019, and while several aforementioned recordings are available for free streaming, more installments are released monthly to project backers. Ten episodes total are in the works, as Zucker continues to work simultaneously on her podcast, on writing a lecture series called “The Poetics of Wrongness,” and teaching creative writing at New York University. 

“Song of the Dark Room” is the first poem in the collection. The recording opens with sonorous violins, leading listeners into a sonic space: heartbeats, slowed, and Zucker’s voice, gentle, inquiring. A heater ticks and shudders. A blizzard beats against the windows of the dark room. And Zucker, sometimes “I,” sometimes “she,” sometimes “Mother,” sometimes “Wife,” narrates her frustrations: insomnia, her young sons, making time to write. Warm guitar strums introduce interludes of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Ma and Pa and girls, a parallel family caught in a parallel blizzard. She lists sound after sound, phone beeps and zings, white noise played inside rooms to drown out other noise. A dial tone buzzes. She calls another writer friend, asking for advice on how to balance motherhood with “muse time.” The advice shoots back in an automated telephone-voice: “When you find yourself wondering (again) if you have Cheerios, stop. Set your mind to the task.” 

“Is writing the punishment or reward?” She wonders several lines later, as minutes pass by, each articulated in a list all their own. Her insomnia provides a constant battleground throughout the poem, punctuated with moments of exasperation (more than one instance of a cheek-slap) but also provides space for listening. The over twenty-minute recording invites listeners to single out small things that would normally escape notice, “the dark which is not really dark & the quiet which is not quiet.” A rocking chair creaks against a wood floor, back and forth, lurching and swaying. Every return of the strings, a soothing series of descending notes, acts as a gradual lullaby. The poem reminds its audience that listening requires silence and silence is full of sound—a perfect invocation to begin this book that is so much more than written words on a page. 

The titular poem, which does not yet have an audio recording, examines—not without degrees of humor and self-awareness—the relationship of listening and not listening. When Zucker asks her son, affectionately termed “manchild,” not to do something, and he looks at her and continues to do that thing, he is in one sense not listening to her. In another sense, though, he has heard her. When Zucker reads her poem to a friend over the phone, she asks if the friend can hear her over the roar of traffic. Another friend tells her the poem is too long, and she responds by making it longer. This playful back-and-forth exemplifies Beneveniste’s “reciprocal polarity of language,” a theory that consciousness of self is only possible if experienced in contrast. There is no “I” without a “you” to address. In this case, the “you” might be any number of Zucker’s friends, her “manchild” or “babymanchild,” or “The Husband,” or the online listserv which nebulously demands that she listen to the voices of its other members while demanding that she stay silent. In the last poem of the collection, “Residency,” readers are yet another “you” she calls to: “You? Yeah you. There is no writing without writing to. Therefore you. Audience, I’m sorry to drag you into this but you’re always awake, that’s the best thing about you.” Readers need not be acquainted with every person Zucker mentions (or doesn’t mention, as in poems like “Confessional” where many names and other proper nouns are taken out, replaced by empty underscores). This self-conscious move asks several questions: how personal is too personal? Whom might I offend by naming in a poem? Her editor suggests that she remove most names, to which she responds, “I wonder if naming is a kind of love?” And in the following poem, the same anxiety returns: “‘Did Alice Notley worry?’ I wonder. ‘Did Frank O’Hara?’” Unlike the sociable O’Hara, Zucker feels isolated and without a coterie of her own. Nevertheless, she is ultimately unafraid to name that which may be hurtful to others, and even hurtful to herself. Shame, she argues, is a crucial part of confession, as is guilt, which she wrestles with regarding the death of her late mother. 

Another recorded piece from “SoundMachine,” “The Moon is in Her Caul Tonight,” features a sample of Allen Ginsberg playing his harmonium during a famous 1968 interview with William F. Buckley. Poetry in its written form transcends human lifetimes, but here Zucker pushes at the frontier of auditory possibilities. As Ginsberg chants the Hindu mantra “Hare Hare Hare Krishna,” Zucker adds her voice to his – an exciting demonstration of past and present knit together, dead poet and living poet in conversation with each other. Meanwhile, music producer TK Broderick creates a beautiful ambient soundscape to accompany the poem. As Zucker addresses Ginsberg, addresses the moon, cries out to the spirit of her dead mother, the poem becomes a prayer, lifted upwards by Broderick’s tones which are hushed and reverent. The atmosphere perfectly captures the wooded winter night from which Zucker writes, steps out of a cabin, footsteps crunching in the snow. 

“In the End,” a poem which somewhat ironically falls in the middle of the book, contains a microcosm of “SoundMachine”: “I was made to make a sound.” Zucker fearlessly expresses her fears, greets her frustrations from a place of patient listening and not-listening. Her decision to tackle the binary of written versus spoken word is an invitation: she asks reader-listeners to join her both on the page and on a metaphorical stage, linking elements of moment-by-moment performance with the solitary, contemplative time one would spend with a book. A poem is a sound machine. Go tune in to hers. 

Hannah Ho is a senior at NYU, pursuing an English major with a focus in creative writing. Her passions include poetry (Keats, O’Hara, Rilke, Kaminsky), cooking, and music. Find her on weekends at the Met writing ekphrases or out in search of mountains to hike.