Colocative display is the technique of sonically articulating the screen area of audiovisual media by dynamically placing and animating the associated sounds in spatial localization to their visual cues. Two such systems have been designed to date, the author's Pixelphonics system and the Allosphere facility at University of California at Santa Barbara. While both technologies are prototypes, and thus lacking in a rich historical tradition that might inform what film theorist David Bordwell has called historical poetics, Bordwell's concept of analytical and theoretical poetics can be fruitfully brought to bear to elucidate the general principles for making colocative audiovisual media and applications. The poetics, or "principles of making" colocative media are situated within a discussion of the empirical dimensions of auditory localization, cognition and attentional resources, general audiovisual practices, acoustics and phenomenology. A new concept, that of the soundscene, is introduced to hone in on the particular design affordances of colocative displays. This inquiry blends second and third wave HCI approaches in its hybridization of humanist media theories with cognitivist-attentional usability perspectives.