We are inviting submission for April issue, 2024 (Vol. 5, No. 1). For more details, visit the section "Call for Paper" on our official website.

Josephine Dickinson (Poet) Creative Flight Journal

 



After classics at Oxford, I, Josephine Dickinsonstudied composition with Michael Finnissy and Richard Barrett. I have published four collections of poetry including Silence Fell (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) and Night Journey (Flambard, 2008), and have collaborated extensively with artists, musicians, film-makers and writers. My personal history of deafness and my trajectory — through 'normal' hearing in childhood, to sudden profound deafness at age six, then hearing-aid-assisted hearing from then until I suddenly became totally deaf in 2012, when I experienced a powerful and complex inner sound world constructed by my brain in the absence of outer auditory stimulation, and finally my experience of receiving a cochlear implant in December 2013 and the subsequent 'switch-on' and aftermath — informs my aesthetic practice in its phenomenological approaches to the sounds in the landscape. My essay on the early experience of receiving a cochlear implant was commissioned by Aeon in August 2014: https://aeon.co/essays/a-deaf-musician-and-poet-receives-a-cochlear-implant. I work in the hinterland between language and sound, sound and sign, sign and sema, and live on the edge of what is often described as 'wilderness' in the high Pennines of Cumbria. Recent works challenge narratives of meaning, boundaries between senses (eg ALPHABETULA, published in Magma 69, especially in live performance), between human constructs and nature constructs (eg Peat, published in English: Journal of the English Association, OUP) and sound and meaning.