sentences for listening

Prologue

 

How may we listen through the nature and structure of language; of sentences? What kind of listening is fostered with, and asks for articulation in the form of sentences? What listens back at one through/with/by sentences? What forms of listening are excluded due to the nature of sentences, and yet, ghostly, surrounds the situation of sentences?

 

The title is sentences for listening, but what is the difference between sentences for rather than of listening?

this sentence is for those who listen

 

 

 

this sentence is looking for the ideal listener

 

 

 

this sentence suspects you are only half-listening

 

 

 

this sentence doesn’t trust your attention span

 

 

 

this sentence wonders what it sounds like in your head

 

 

 

this sentence hopes it is never spoken

 

 

 

this sentence is embarrassed by its own voice

 

 

 

this sentence feels underheard

 

 

 

this sentence needs you to slow down to be heard

 

 

 

this sentence has something urgent to say, but hesitates

 

 

 

this sentence wishes it was being read to a lover

 

 

 

this sentence longs to be read out loud slowly and clearly

 

 

 

this sentence pretends to be an instruction for a sound piece

 

 

 

ideally, this sentence is listened to and not read

 

 

 

this sentence is done speaking

 

 

 

this sentence listens to your reading of it

 

 

 

this sentence is waiting for you to listen back

 

 

 

this sentence trains your listening

 

 

 

this sentence wonders if it is being misheard

 

 

 

this sentence was written due to a lack of listening

 

 

 

this sentence listens better than you do

 

 

 

this sentence listens at a frequency beyond human perception

 

 

 

this sentence is listening out for the next sentence

 

 

 

this sentence is unlistenable

 

 

 

this sentence is tired of repeating itself

 

 

 

this sentence only speaks in echoes 

(this sentence only speaks in echoes)

 

 

 

this sentence wishes to be a soft whispering

 

 

 

this sentence is mute

 

 

 

this sentence only makes sense if you sing it

 

 

 

this sentence is failing as sound

 

 

 

this sentence is incomplete until read aloud and listen to by an audience

 

 

 

this sentence is a score for silence

 

 

 

this sentence is a pause from speaking

 

 

 

 

this sentence pays attention to the silence between its words

 

 

 

 

this sentence feels neglected in a world of noise

 

 

 

this sentence failed making the politicians listen

 

 

 

this sentence is tired of being read without being listened to

 

 

 

this sentence is a performative listening situation

 

 

 

this sentence safeguards an unspeakable truth

 

 

 

ðɪs ˈsɛntəns ɪz fəʊˈnɛtɪk 

(this sentence is phonetic)

 

 

 

this sentence forgives your lack of listening

 

 

 

Epilogue

 

Language, in all its arrangement and rhythm, carries the capacity not just to express but also to hold and to attune. When given enough time and space, the placement of words within a sentence, the  absence or presence of particular phrases, a specific rhythm within the page or within the reader, as well as the unfolding of thoughts and memories all become different invitations to read and listen differently.

 

Each sentence may be treated as an event, a small choreography of thought and sound. Some are shy, others declarative, but all hold the potential to tune us into more subtle frequencies. The structure of a sentence can slow us down. Its phrasing can nudge us into awareness. Its voice, however quiet or strange, can reach toward another without demanding to be answered. 

 

Sentences, when treated not as vehicles of information but as sonic, poetic, and performative gestures, can soften the dominance of speech and instead ask for presence, for attention, for curiosity and emergence. A poetic playfulness with language reveals how listening is not passive reception, but a reciprocal act shaped by subtlety and space. While some spoken words hurt when listened to, make us numb and are wielded as a weapon, others create space for healing and becoming. Some sentences are for listening. Cares about its listeners.

 

When language leans into ambiguity, repetition, silence, or sound, it creates a porous membrane through which listening becomes activated. It asks not only what a sentence might mean, but what it does and could do, what it touches in the reader, how it shapes the space around it. A sentence that resists immediate understanding, that listens back or leans toward silence, disrupts the usual patterns of consumption, and encourages a deeper, slower engagement. In such moments, reading becomes an embodied form of listening.

 

The sentences included in this publication are not declarations but gestures—curious, hesitant, and at times unresolved. They seek the kind of attention that does not rush to respond. They attempt to attune to silence, to mishearing, to the acoustics of the inner voice, to the potential of language rather than its limitations. And in doing so, they strive to remind us that listening can be cultivated not only through sound, but through the very structure and play of language itself.

Colophon

 

sentences for listening is a direct appropriation of Cia Rinne’s publication sentences, published 2019 with Forlaget Gestus, Copenhagen, which broadly and playfully activates the nature, structure and performativity of sentences. Just like Cia Rinne, these sentences are also furthermore inspired and prompted by the writing of Gertrude Stein in the chapters Sentences and Paragraphs and Sentences, in: How to Write (Dover Publications, New York 1975 (1931). 

 

Thank you Cia Rinne for your encouragement and guidance of this publication and for your love of language.