Ann Pedone in Conversation with Noa Micaela Fields
December, 2025

I first stumbled upon Noa Micaela Fields work when I was flipping through an old issue of Tripwire. The poems were engaged in a high state of flirtatious play with Louis Zuokofsy’s “A.” The sheer pleasure that Fields was taking in the poems. There was something disobedient in them. Something that somehow felt carousing.

When I was able to get in touch with her, I asked if she would be willing to submit some work to Antiphony. That led to us meeting in Chicago this past October.

Ann Pedone: One of the things that I thought of when we were talking in Chicago was Anne Carson’s Gender of Sound; in which she talks about this line, this boundary that separates, defines, and ultimately guards, gatekeeps, as you called it that day, what the Greeks considered good sound from bad; sounds that were considered appropriate, and those that were deemed disorderly or monstrous; the voices of men, which were thought of as controlled and rational; and the voices of women, catamites, and eunuchs, which were described as the symptom or proof of of sexual incontinence–a kind of leaking or spilling out.

Noa Micaela Fields: I am not familiar with Anne Carson’s Gender of Sound but I appreciate this description of sound as a contested site of embodiment. Talking about sound and its ramifications on the body feels like a fecund entry-point for my book, which is very much an out-loud book, and probably an inappropriate one, too. E is an orgiastic whisper-free game of telephone, an experiment in subversive listening—mishearing on my terms as a trans poet with hearing aids. This outsider relation to speech compels me towards “altered literature” embracing language’s physical flux. My echo-deviant ears wander off-script through errant substitutions, glitchy respellings, surprise keychange leaps.

E playfully fragments and remixes the sonic material of another poet’s book: Louis Zukofsky’s “A.” He was a champion of homophonic translation, a sonic approach to translation giving priority to the music of another language, rather than its meaning. This form offers readers uncanny access to the original sounds, but also presents difficulties for sense. With a twist, I made homophonic translation into my own compositional method of mishearing, transforming from within the same linguistic context. When I appropriate Zukofsky’s method to rework the sounds of “A” into E, my goal is not fidelity but departure. So I see my remix as transposition more than transcription, veering towards New Narrative’s queerly embodied approach to literature as a space for cruising and gossip.

AP: Homophonic translation seems to me to be a way of using language of stepping outside the bounds of language itself. It’s a way of undoing, of unspooling language whereby the idea of “meaning”, this notion that words have the responsibility to signify, becomes much more complicated, much more fraught.

I’m thinking here, for example, of Zukofsky’s Catullus translations where because he begins by giving himself permission to not simply convey the literal meaning of the Catullus into English, he’s able to put down on the page what feel to me like these very almost magical lines that have echos of Latin in them-the Latin is never that far behind-and yet, the lines take us into an entirely new and different sonic kosmos that is neither Latin nor a predictable translation–at times it doesn’t even sound like English in a proper sense. Rather, his translations I think hang somewhere in the clouds between the two.

When he listened to his wife Cecilia read the Latin out loud to him, he also, I think, to use your fantastic phrase, was engaging in an act of “subversive listening.”

NMF: Homophonic translation’s emphasis on mouthfeel can be expansive insofar as it conjures language’s oral/aural qualities as mutable. There’s a slantward relation on the part of the poet or translator which can feel like overhearing or dubbing—and which points to fissures in languages’ borders, a breaking open. In the rupture is also a sense of rapture: that if language can come undone, then what else can? I follow a lineage of experimental poets like Jennifer Tamayo, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Vi Khi Nao, Julie Ezelle Patton, JJJJJerome Ellis, Solmaz Sharif, Jos Charles, Harryette Mullen, Cathy Park Hong, and M NourbeSe Philip—who relish wordplay and troubling form while also attending to the stakes of erasure or alteration.

The opening poem of my book, “Homophonic, Trans Later,” elucidates my distorted method of homophonic translation. Line by line, sounds echo and drift between the left and right columns, “from other words — form other worlds.” But it’s also contrapuntal and nonlinear in how meaning accumulates, so that while the poem self-consciously speculates on missed sounds, it also improvises in parallel play and strays by ear sense towards mishearing’s peripheral iridescence.

AP: And yet, as we discussed in Chicago, the poems in this book never veer off into what we could call total nonsense; rather in the midst of all of this mishearing, misunderstanding, glitching, misfiring, there’s always a very clear and present human voice; a real, felt human presence. And we talked that day about how that is so important.

I would say the same about Zukosfsky’s “A”--that he manages to somehow always be there in the midst of this kind of ragbag of sound and material taken from other sources and then condensed, reworked, into something that he makes his own-that his voice holds it all together as a kind of organizing force, maybe as a container. This past April I saw Wayne Koestenbaum read from his new book “Stubble Archipelago" in LA and at one point during the conversation that followed the reading he talked about this image that comes up in one of the lines, “language glove”, and how in a sense, for him, the poem just that, a kind of glove, which of course made me think of a condom, maybe he had been thinking the same thing.

NMF: Perhaps I should clarify that the “sense” that compels and guides my poetry is a felt sense, rooted in intuition, self-questioning, and relation. This instinctual sense is layered in contradiction, mystery, and unreliable narration. I risk being misunderstood. The very rituals which help me make sense of my body are proclaimed nonsense, “gender ideology” or “terrorism,” with material consequences for my livelihood.

The presence you point to is important as a counter to the illogic of rationalism, which is senselessly violent in service of empire and capitalism, dehumanizing and displacing trans, disabled, homeless, migratory, black, and indigenous people. As if we are unworthy of love and belonging. We do not need to explain, make sense of, or justify our existences to deserve basic care and protection. 

There is a spiritual and prophetic prescience to transness, which makes room for forms of knowledge that aren’t immediately evident on the surface of the body. What a miracle that I could, by mishearing my body’s forced interpellations, nevertheless recognize myself unseen, and run towards the possibility of myself on E (estrogen).  I am endlessly grateful for my T4T relationships and the access intimacy I experience with other disabled comrades. Day by day we witness and affirm each others’ pain, anger, grief, sensuality, joy, creativity, and resilience.

AP: When I saw you perform some of these poems in New York, one of the things that struck me most was how completely central musicality is to your work. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you think about the relationship between your poetry and music-making.

NMF: For that pre-launch performance in November at Segue Foundation’s reading series (curated by my publisher Nightboat Books at Artists Space), I wanted to prepare something special. I collaborated with two Chicago djs, girly*** (Jared Brown) and relaxxX (Warren Walters), on a dance mix to honor my relationship to underground nightlife as an embodied and communal practice, a form of DIY world-making rooted in the black queer midwestern legacy of house and techno. Dance floors have pushed me towards self-experimentation, which carries over to my poetry and the felt sense of rhythm on the page. So bringing dance music back into my performance felt intuitive.

Our starting place for producing the mix was sampling an archival recording of Zukofsky reading I found on PennSound. That clip was from “A”-23, which I mishear in one of the last poems in my book, “Louise Zukofsky Lost Her Hearing Aid at the Rave.” I didn’t read that specific poem, which posthumously reimagines Zukofsky as a trans woman, an alter-ego for my own misadventures. But there was a similar séance-play at work in my performance, and it was through music that I conjured Zukofsky’s feminine spirit for our ghostly ritual. I danced and conversed with her, inviting her to accompany me briefly on this earthly realm as I swallowed my estrogen pill.

AP: Lastly, I remember during our Chicago conversation, you described the process that you employed in writing E. I’m wondering if you could take us into that process a bit.

NMF: I found a trashed copy of Zukofsky’s “A” with the cover half-torn off in the dollar bin at a Chicago bookstore in quarantine. I picked it up with the intention of altering it. Initially I thought this would take the form of erasure, but I surprised myself by writing annotations in the margins instead, loose sonic riffs inspired by Zukofsky’s homophonic translations. I wrote the first drafts of the poems that became E in immediate reply to “A” as I read passages out loud to myself, stretching the phonemes between my mouth and ear. I followed after whatever memory or image came to mind and harmonized in a parallel key. As I revisited successive drafts over years of rewriting, I re-heard my own voice anew. At this point I was no longer looking back to the original source material, and I gave myself permission to dig deeper into these echoes of echoes. Let the poems grow into themselves.

Above all else, I trust in the process of transformation over time. My book embraces transition as form, as I learned to lean into the risk and vulnerability of submitting to change. In its live rewiring of language, mishearing is a practice of rewriting. So too is gender transition. I wanted my book to preserve timestamps of my iterative becomings, so it became a palimpsest, reshaping found material until its melodies were recognizably only my own.