MachineMachine /stream

Holly Pester is a performance poet currently working on a project with the Barry Museum in Manchester. I, raven, the is about the relationship between words and sound, and the title itself inevitably brings to mind Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in which the refrain “Never More” reads increasingly, as the poem progresses, as less like words and more like sounds.

Pester’s poem attempts to capture the “shape of words” and as she reads, her mouth contorts into shapes. The result is a series of sounds from everyday life that seem disconnected from the actual meaning of the words. “The sound is a square” is a constant refrain, and Pester duly shapes her mouth like a square, producing a churned-up sound. Words rhyming or related in sound to square (such as war) are similarly chewed over and mangled. Pester says of the poem’s protagonist that he “is concerned with the physical world ”, while the sounds of the physical world invade the piece, with growls and pips emerging from Pester’s mouth th