Craft Intensive: Acoustic Poetics: Sonic Transmission & Contours( Advanced Section)
What happens when sound itself becomes the substance of a poem, not what the voice says, but what it does? In Kimberly Alidio's Traceable Relations and N.H. In Pritchard's The Matrix, language is pushed toward its edges: toward noise, toward texture, toward the contours of breath, signal, and interference.
In this advanced craft workshop, we'll read Alidio's 'Room Noise' and 'Voice Noise' alongside two poems from Pritchard's The Matrix to examine how sound operates as a structural and conceptual force in poetry. We'll ask how a poem can be shaped by sonic contour rather than syntax, and what it means to treat voice, its grain, its static, its transmission, as form itself.
Craft elements explored will include:
Sonic contour as poetic architecture: how sound shapes the movement and meaning of a text
Noise as signal: interference, static, and the productive limits of legibility
The voice as material: grain, texture, and what exceeds semantic meaning
Visual and spatial arrangement as sonic score: the page as a field of sound
Transmission and reception: the poem as signal sent across distance and distortion
We'll read and listen closely to excerpts from both texts, analyze how each writer enacts these ideas through radically different but resonant approaches, and break down key craft strategies before moving into guided writing time to generate new work (poetry, hybrid, or prose).
We'll then critique one writer's submitted piece. This work will be shared with participants in advance for pre-reading.
Excerpts of Traceable Relations and The Matrix will be provided and read during the workshop.
Guided by: Marissa Ayala
Marissa Ayala is an Austin-based writer, researcher, and artist. She is the recipient of the 2026 In Cahoots writing residency, the 2025 Puffin Foundation environmental artist advocacy grant, and held a 2025 residency at Chulitna Lodge in Lake Clark, Alaska. She is the founder of the East Austin Writing Project, a 2026 recipient of the City of Austin Elevate grant. Marissa's work appears in Poets & Writers magazine, Fugue, TELEPHONE, Pen + Brush, and more.
She earned a BA at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, an MFA in Fiction at The New School, and a Master of Science at Hunter College.
East Austin Writing Project - a literary arts community offering Poetry Club, Craft Intensives, Critique writing groups, and Subculture Lit book club in Austin, TX.
This project is supported in part by the Elevate Grant of Austin Arts, Culture, Music, and Entertainment.
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Austin, TX, East Austin, Arts & Culture, Literary Arts, Poetry, Poetry Workshop, Creative Writing, Craft Intensive, Lyric Experimentation, Hybrid Forms, Theory-Based Writing