How, on and within the ocean floor, do words and their remains swirl about and unsettle?

Imani Elizabeth Jackson is a poet and artist from Chicago. She is the author of two chapbooks, saltsitting (2020) and Context for arboreal exchanges (2023), and her first book, Flag, is forthcoming from Futurepoem, for which she received the press’s 2020 Other Futures Award.

Artist Reflection

This suite includes one slightly broken contrapuntal—which I think of as a set of sounding lines dropped and braided in the Atlantic—and four views of the ocean floor. 

Over the past few years I have been working in several ways with the word hydrography, which literally breaks down to “water-writing” and which I sometimes attempt quite literally. Hydrography is also a scientific field of surveying bodies of water. An associated word is sound, which etymologically splits its root and meaning to intimate both one’s ears/hearing and particular bodies of water/their measurement. I’ve been particularly interested in the act of depth sounding, or measuring the ocean’s depths. As I understand it, these measurements were historically taken by weighting a heavy line and casting it into the sea. One would then mark the length of the rope as it settled to the ocean floor. That process has changed as technology has developed, and is now done mostly with sonar and called echo sounding. I love this: sounds determining sounds.

As with much of my writing, I am interested here in enacting an immersive environment and testing the limits of a given voice within the context of that space. How does that space consolidate and break apart the words I place within it? How, on and within the ocean floor, do words and their remains swirl about and unsettle?