James Bunzli is represented in the archive by Hearing Test, published in the first installment. The surviving poem transforms an audiology exam into a meditation on sound, memory, pressure, intimacy, and the body’s effort to locate what it hears. Spondees, double glass, reflected faces, a tympanogram, an oboe, rain, gravel, doors, cars, a sleeping mother, and a child searching the sky for a plane all become parts of one extended act of listening.
Hearing Test
The title begins in clinical language. A hearing test is designed to measure thresholds, recognition, pressure, and response. Bunzli brings that controlled procedure into poetry, where every sound acquires emotional and mnemonic associations beyond the test itself.
The exam creates a small theater of attention. The speaker listens, repeats words, watches the audiologist through glass, raises hands in response, and waits for instructions. Measurement becomes an intimate encounter.
Spondees and language
The audiologist speaks a list of spondees, bringing a technical term from hearing assessment into contact with prosody. Spondees also belong to the vocabulary of poetic meter, where two stressed syllables create a heavy rhythmic unit.
This overlap gives the poem a formal richness. Readers exploring poetic forms can hear how test words become both clinical stimuli and rhythmic objects. Language is measured for audibility while retaining cadence and emotional residue.
Glass and reflection
Double glass separates speaker and audiologist, yet reflection causes their faces to overlap. The image makes listening visual. Distance and intimacy occupy the same surface as the speaker leans toward sound and sees one face inside another.
This reflective doubling gives the poem affinities with experimental poetry, where perception can be layered across several senses. Hearing is never isolated from sight, memory, touch, or the awareness of another body nearby.
Pressure and touch
The tympanogram introduces pressure as a measurable physical event. The poem connects that pressure with a hand on the shoulder, the warning of a loud sound, tears, thickening time, mud, rain, and imagined future loss. Clinical sensation opens into a larger emotional field.
Touch becomes especially important because it crosses the uncertainty of sound. A hand can confirm presence directly. The poem repeatedly returns to bodily contact when hearing becomes difficult or unreliable.
Music and direction
The speaker can hear an oboe rise in Dvořák and move emotionally with it, yet struggles to locate where sounds originate. This distinction between hearing a sound and placing it in space gives the poem one of its deepest tensions.
Readers interested in modern poetry can follow how Bunzli turns sensory difficulty into spatial uncertainty. A door, car, gravel driveway, airplane, or distant figure acquires importance through the question of where sound belongs.
Memory as test
Near the end, the poem describes the hearing test as a test of memory from one second to the next. Repeated phrases must be held briefly, recognized, and answered. The procedure therefore measures more than acoustic perception inside the poem’s imaginative world.
Memory also enters through a mother, farewell phrases, directions, and a remembered difference in someone’s voice. Sound becomes a carrier of relationship and loss.
Reading James Bunzli
Hearing Test turns a clinical examination into a complex lyric of listening. Glass, pressure, spondees, music, touch, rain, machinery, and memory all gather around the question of how a person hears and locates another presence.
Within contemporary poetry, James Bunzli’s archived contribution offers a vivid example of specialized vocabulary becoming intimate literary material. The poem makes listening physical, spatial, and emotional, showing how sound can connect the body to memory even as certainty about its source begins to weaken.