But you know, for me, poetry is not only about this way of breaking out of the expected. The expected use of language… to reconfigure it, refresh it, to highlight the things we usually ignore, which are the sounds, to listen in a different way. But poetry is also related to poiesis: generative creativity. I feel like there’s a way in which art and science is very much about poiesis. It’s about tapping into the generative powers of the world. And I think that sometimes, but not always, you know, the form of poiesis that social sciences have taken, is more like the destruction. It’s critique and identifying things and their problematic. And that’s important. But we miss this other part of possibility, which I think art and science have. It is the possibility of creating. And, you know, I think the important thing for me is, and this is part of the larger claim that forests think, is to say that poiesis is not just something we project onto the world, the world itself is poetic, “poiesic” or has this kind of creative potential. And what we need to do is to learn to listen for it. So “listening”, sound here becomes important.
– From the conversation with Eduardo Kohn on sound, vibration and listening. 2022