Multi-award winning American poet, Nancy Esposito discusses the lead up to her collaborations with Liam Donovan, a PhD Candidate, Queen Mary, University of London, for Silent Cacophony and the difficulty at one point to overcome a simple misunderstanding. My duet with Liam Donovan in Silent Cacophony was a kind of objective correlative (thank you, Eliot) of silent cacophony. We never met; we didn’t hear one another’s voice via Skype. The day before the event we sent endless e-mails to one another. Liam had written a program that would allow me to type my poem into my computer and have it appear on a screen in the slow motion of a re-imagined 1930s German typewriter plunking out the letters. The problem: I couldn’t open my Dropbox; I couldn’t access the program. So Liam wrote another (as though anybody could do it), a simpler one I’m assuming although, from my perspective, whatever he does is magic. For a half-hour I looked at the simple instructions on the screen. I moved the arrow around with my mouse. I couldn’t get a cursor on the page. He and I exchanged about fifteen e-mails until I mentioned the word, cursor. Now I’m not a total stone when it comes to computers, but I wanted, I expected that cursor mark. The breakthrough: there wouldn’t be a cursor. And what I was seeing, such as spaces after I pressed enter, weren’t coming through on the German typewriter. We rehearsed numerous times the night before and the day of. Finally the performance—which, for me, was an ad infinitum retyping of the same poem—in a sense was no different from the rehearsals. And from what I’ve heard, it was well-received by the audience. But to the point, the objective correlative: until I spoke the word, cursor, or lack thereof, we were misunderstanding one another without recognizing our flawed communication; we were in conflict—our own silent cacophony.