“Sound is the Passage: After Octavio Paz”
Lia Uribe (2020)
(Sound engineer: Fernando Valencia, Fayetteville, AR
Production assistant: Talvin Southern, Fayetteville, AR)

“Sun was everywhere. In the air there was a scent of green, hot growth, thirsty. Not a tree, not a leaf stirred. A few clouds rested heavily, anchored in a blue, waveless gulf… The sound of water is worth more than all the poets’ words.”

Schmidt, Michael, translator. “Robert Frost: Visit to a Poet.” On Poets and Others, by Octavio Paz, Arcade Publishing, 2014, pp. 13–19.

In 1945, Mexican poet Octavio Paz published a recount of his visit with American poet Robert Frost in the Argentine literary journal “Sur.”

His line “El sonido del agua vale más que todas las palabras del poeta” (the sound of water is worth more than all the poets’ words) informs my piece. It is a communal work, a conversation between all, your emotions and her memories, their images and your thoughts, my smells, textures, dreams, ideas. All collaborators are the water and the poets, the elm, the clouds and the sky. And sound is the passage to our worlds.