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Poetry turns to sound in a unique sound installation this month at the Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery at Canadian Mennonite University. That poetry, first published by Sarah Ens in 2022 in her award-winning collection Flyway, gains new life in the sound design of Jami Reimer, who Winnipeg audiences interacted with at her bio-acoustic opera Soft tongues at the 2025 Cluster New Music & Integrated Arts Festival.
Similar to Soft tongues, a bio-acoustic opera using the sounds of South American frogs, Here You Are Singing employs the sounds of birds to explore themes of migration and home amongst immigrants of all species.
“I was thinking about flight and I was thinking about homemaking and migration,” said Ens in an interview on Morning Light. “But, I was also trying to work through how I came to call this particular place home and how this landscape has changed over time and how the tallgrass prairie is important refuge both for birds, but also for my grandmother who came as a refuge after World War 2.”
“There was so much sound in the work and sound in the poetry itself,” says Reimer of Ens’ poetry, “but also opportunities for polyphony that were coming to life for me as a reader. As a field recordist and musician, I was curious how the work could live in another kind of spatial way.”
Reimer and Ens undertook that exploration together, spending time at the Herdsman House artists residency in the Mennonite heritage village of Neubergthal, about an hour south of Winnipeg, over the course of three different seasons. There, they not only recorded the sounds of various birds, but also recorded interviews with various women who shared the experience of Ens’ grandmother.
“There were so many moments where we would find that even though we’re coming from different disciplines, we had a similar impulse as the way that maybe we can juxtapose things or the timing or the rhythm,” Ens recalls, “and, for me, getting to really just think about how these words are living in sound and off the page, it opened up different doors into the work.”
As those different doors opened through the interviews and contemplating the migrations of birds, Reimer and Ens dealt with the underlying griefs and traumas that come with immigration experiences. “It’s been emotionally intense sometimes to spend so much time editing it,” admits Reimer. “There’s a section in the poetry where we’re hearing a section from Sarah’s poem juxtaposed with a firsthand account of watching the bombing of Dresden. Every time I’m editing it, there’s something in my stomach that is sort of paused.”
“There’s a gravity to these sonic moments, and then as we compose, we want to treat those with a lot of care.”
“I think that the really important [part] to the work and to our process was our friendship,” adds Ens. “When we would go to these residences, we would spend the first day just talking, talking through our own lives, what’s going on right now, catching up, but also working through some of these questions that we have, intense feelings that we have about our families, about Mennonites, about our heritage... and I think that that was a really important place that allowed the collaboration to happen and allowed us to trust each other and a lot of joy and connection even when we’re working with really difficult subject matter.
Here You Are Singing opens on June 13 at the Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery at Canadian Mennonite University with a talkback with the artists happening at 7 p.m. The exhibit runs until the end of June. For hours and more information, visit the MHC Gallery’s website.
