We Start Out, published in P-Queue (Volume 5), is a poem that uses language from a fieldwork assignment from a section of World of Sound, a course in cultural soundscape studies I taught at the University of Oklahoma from 2005-2008. Students were to take a listening walk and describe aural environments. The epigraph is from a (since-revised) essay by Marcella Durand, available in the first issue of Jonathan Skinner's journal Ecopoetics.
