A Conversation
A conversation between Danny Soberano and Hannah Wu, on their collaboration, ‘I THINK OF YOU WHILE MY COFFEE COOLS’.
Listen to and read ‘I THINK OF YOU WHILE MY COFFEE COOLS’ here.
Flirting in the Google Doc
lol remember when i wrote u a poem
i remember, you read it for that poetry event on instagram live
i sat on the floor, blubbered and wailed because i was moved, despite not seeing it in the flesh moved by a tiny little phone screen
how did it go again?
i said smthn like ‘i don't say i love you i say / i pay attention’
'most days / i think i'm waking up to a phone call, / but it's really just Hannah / sending me 11 texts in a row'
i can't believe we've only known each other since november
the first time we spoke was thru email. organising ourselves for the ‘silent treatment’ event.
a v digital flirtation
i apologize that ---
our friendship since, has consisted of looping conversations and
reprimanding me about all the mistakes i have made, and all the mistakes i am about to make
either that, or planning our future wedding!
now, we're supposed to talk about process, and working on this project together.
we went for a coffee in november to begin with. i still remember my first impression of you
and... what was that?
i thought you were gonna be rly difficult work with, but i was v v v incorrect
what! why did you think i would be difficult!
ur so tall ! & you wear all black, i thought u were gonna be a too-cool-unapproachable-mean-girl
honestly… then you met me and realised that my identity formation was instead: a chaotic nerd
a hot chaotic nerd tho. hot, friendly, chaotic nerd who is very easy to work with
was just thinking about all the times we might have brushed past one another at uni, or at events, or in the city, because we would’ve been in such close proximity to each other
… all the times we might have met previously, but didn’t
well, i recall the first time we first met too. i was SO eager to impress you
you were eager to impress me at first? but now you terrorise me, by telling me you're going to the ER with no context. give me a heart attack!
drama queen trait
these are words of adoration; you had my heart <3
so in regards to ‘silence’ as the theme of the project:
silent treatment came at a time when i was rly tired of performing damage, so i wanted to write a fun crush love poem. i modelled the poem after Eduardo C. Corral's ‘To Robert Hayden’ where i feel silence is actually the true medium of the poem & the words feel like white space. does that make sense?
yeah for sure - many breaks, a lot of empty room
the way you write reminds of the way we talk to one another, one idea leaping into another, a reference that gets far away from us then loops back around into relevancy
on the music side, there is a really commonly cited reference, on the notion of ‘furniture music’: where music can simultaneously function as sound that blends into the background (passive listening, like unused furniture), that can also be brought into the foreground through use (i.e active listening, ‘activating’ furniture by sitting on it, by interacting with it). i think the idea of movement between background and foreground,
--- or, a conversation between spoken word and sound
was very evident in our piece
Hot
i had thought that making ambient music was this divine art. but then i watched you literally just download bird sounds from youtube & i was like oh. wtf. that's it?
also keep thinking about the line in your poem: ‘i don't say i love you i say / i pay attention’
and how sometimes, an expression of love is silence. bc silence can be a form of listening, of thinking—of allowing space for another person to enter
Listen to and read ‘I THINK OF YOU WHILE MY COFFEE COOLS’ here.
Danny Soberano’s poems have appeared in Mascara Literary Review, Australian Poetry, and Cordite Poetry Review, among other places. They are currently a poetry editor for Voiceworks Magazine.
Hannah Wu is a writer and musician living in Melbourne. She has written for Voiceworks, Farrago, and upcoming projects include LIMINAL, The Lifted Brow and Cordite. She is currently writing for Island Island, Bus Projects’ gallery writing program, and Seventh Gallery’s emerging writers program.
