Synaesthesia: Tuning in to Carol Watts and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

Synaesthesia, whether physical experience or a literary device that foregrounds the interconnectedness of the senses, is a starting point for discussion of the Chinese-American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Carol Watts from the UK. The interplay between hearing, listening, sight and touch in their work becomes a means of challenging traditional forms of subjectivity and exploring the ecological dimensions of their poems. Forms of reciprocal and receptive listening are discussed in relation to Berssenbrugge's Buddhist sensibility and Watts's charting of relations between the auditory and the visual. For Watts and Berssenbrugge, music is a means of imagining but also testing and investigating perception of the other-than-human world from a necessarily human auditory perspective.