Forensic Listening: NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, and the Contemporary Long Poem

Abstract

This essay argues that NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Caroline Bergvall’s Drift—two complex, multipart long poems written, performed, and published in the last decade—can be read as poetic essays on the topic of precarity. They function as essays because they set out to test generally accepted forms of cognition; they are poetic because they do so through a structuration and destructuration of sound fundamental to poetry and especially salient in the long poem. The technique they use is a rich, dense, and sustained attentiveness to sound that might be called forensic listening.