2003 Merriam Award Ceremony
In her reading at the 2003 H.G. Merriam Award Ceremony, Goedicke explains "for all the words we use to try to explain the world as it appears to us, there is always something more, something beyond. Yet that beyond, that unknown is what that known sometimes depends on." If words define "the world as it appears to us," then one must look to the silences to find the "beyond" to which Goedicke refers. In her reading of the poem, one hears the pauses signalled by the visual gaps in the poem. As Goedicke states in her introduction to the poem "without those little pauses between syllables and words, what we say to each other would very probably sound like a long uninterupted blurt of noise." The relationship between sounds and silences that Goedicke describes echos her lecture titled "Sounds and Silences," in which she emphasizes the interdependence between sound and silence. In this lecture she associates sound with life and silence with death. If this poem is an examination of silences and that which is "beyond," then the subject of death fits in nicely with the concept of the "beyond" as an unknown.
Goedicke introducing and reading "This Music Has Holes in It"