Curious about the sonic possibilities of poetry and the poetic possibilities of sound? Iris Colomb, who is teaching her Online course Sonic Language / Poetic Noise Masterclass with us this Summer, talks us through her top 5 ways writers can use sound in their poetry.

Listen to strangers. Listen to yourself.

Notice the expressive qualities of the voices around you and how they add to the words being said. Write something that relies on breath, volume, tone or rhythm.

Image credit: @badun

Pick a phrase you often hear.

Say it out loud. Repeat it until it makes no sense. Keep going until a new form of sense emerges. Keep going still.

Image credit: @joanjo65

Every day is full of sounds.

Notice the sounds you feel something for. Acknowledge them. Take them seriously. Think about what they mean to you. Write about them, collect them, recreate and connect them.

Image credit: @sevgiilale

Eavesdrop on multiple conversations at once.

Find links between them, notice how they overlap, how it’s all happening, all at once. Write. Record. Practice talking over yourself.

Image credit: @mauromora

Listen to music, notice how the instruments talk to each other.

Use a book as your instrument. Join the conversation. Record. Listen. Try again. Do this as often as you can.

Image credit: @mlapergolaphoto

If you’d like to learn more and explore the wondrous worlds in which poetry and sound collide, Iris is running her Online course Sonic Language / Poetic Noise Masterclass with us this Summer, starting on Thursday 7 May. To find out more & to secure your place, please click here.

Iris Colomb is always searching for new ways of making, performing and experiencing poetry. Her practice involves building connections between visual and verbal forms of text through projects involving performance, sound, objects, improvisation, chance, multilingual writing, and experimental translation. A selection of her visual, sonic and performative works was recently exhibited as part of her first solo show ‘Try! Try! Try! Again!’ at the Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library.

Iris has given individual, collaborative, interactive, and durational performances online as well as in the UK, France, Germany, Norway, Austria, Romania, and Chile; at Intrications Poeìtiques Transnationales (Paris), the Bucharest International Poetry Festival, the international transmedial poetic festival räume für notizen (“room for notes”, Vienna), and the Southbank Centre’s Poetry International Festival, among others. 

She is one half of text-sound duo [something’s happening] with musician Daryl Worthington. She also plays in improvising trios Small Print Drama (with Douglas Benford and Tom Ward) and TheThreeFeet (with John Bisset and Andrew Ciccone), as well as being a member of  London Improvisors Orchestra. Recent sound-text releases include ‘A map has always been an attempt’ (Strategic Tape Reserve, 2025) and Buzz (CD, Flaming Pines, 2025), both with [something’s happening] and ‘BLAST is correct’ with TheThreeFeet (CD, 2:13 Music, 2026).

Her first full-length poetry collection, Nothing Intensifies, was published by Pamenar Press earlier this year. She has alos published five poetry pamphlets, including Just Promise You Won’t Write (Gang Press, 2019), Ridiculous Unlikely Attempt (Hesterglock Press, 2023) and Where Do You Begin in This (Ma Bibliothèque, 2024). Her poems have also appeared in several UK magazines and anthologies, as well as French, Austrian, Hungarian, Spanish, German, Brazilian, Chilean and US publications.