Howl babble flow

Here are a few seconds of babble flow from "Howl" (from the 1959 Big Table recording).

the page is like a score

PennSound's Maggie O'Sullivan page includes a recording of a discussion with Penn students in Charles Bernstein's "studio 111" seminar. Michael Nardone has transcribed the session now and here is a portion:

PENN STUDENT:
Thank you for your close reading, Ms. O’Sullivan. I was wondering if you could describe the relationship between performing your work and writing it.

O’SULLIVAN:
Well, it depends on, every situation is different. Performing it is another opportunity to re-engage with the text at different levels, and another opportunity to negotiate the text on the page.

As you’ve probably heard, I often find my work is quite difficult for me to read from the page. Writing it, I hear the sounds often in my ear. But having to perform it, all the difficulties emerge. There’s lots of disconnectiveness and disjunctiveness that is kind of working against how I sort of, how sometimes it seems it may be read.

PENN STUDENT:
Would you consider, sort of, maybe, performing it to be more body intensive than, I guess, writing it.

O’SULLIVAN:
Well, writing is a body-intensive activity, totally. Absolutely, totally. The whole body is engaged in the act of writing. Whether it’s on the computer, with using a pen in the hands. The breath is involved in all activities. But with the performing, there are others that you have to connect with, and the place of performing also figures on it.

PENN STUDENT:
A number of your poems integrate different languages, musical notes, pictures, and streaks, and they push the possibilities of poetic forms on the page. I was wondering whether this is supposed to conflict with the words, compliment them, or maybe even both.

O’SULLIVAN:
The words working as part of all this kind of radical shifting—

PENN STUDENT:
Right. Other forms on the page that would not be considered part of the traditional poetic form.

O’SULLIVAN:
Well, it’s all material on the page. The page is like a score. Like a place for painting, or drawing, or word making, whatever. I am seeking to extend the range of poetic, what is traditionally regarded as poetic material.

edit event

The newest event in the EDIT series, created by Danny Snelson for the Writers House, will feature Adachi Tomomi and Tianna Kennedy on February 18. EDIT is a roving events series pairing innovative performances with focused critical responses toward an exploration of editorial strategies in contemporary writing and the arts. For more, listen to this announcement. In the photo: Tiana Kennedy.

nothing [was] being done with sound

Marjorie Perloff speaking at a panel discussion in 2000: "[M]y main objection to a lot of the poetry being written today is that nothing is being done with sound and the visual. And even in Stephen [Burt]’s talk just now I didn’t hear him say one word about sound. To me, the sound of a poem is at least as important as the semantics; so is the visual. Both are aspects of poetry, and I had a terrible experience just the other day when we were judging Mellon fellowships, doctoral fellowships, for the West Coast region in San Francisco. We talked to a young man who had done very well; his whole honors thesis was on Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion.’ He went on about gender, he talked about masculinity and femininity, and how Shelley wanted to be a mother. But when I asked about the sound structure of the poem, he said ‘what?’ I asked, ‘what’s it written in? Is it written in terza rima?’ and he drew a complete blank. I really did find that quite shocking. Obviously Shelley had a reason for writing the poem as he did, as any poet does, and I think inattention to sound structure has produced the kind of flaccid free verse that a lot of poets use today; it’s not really poetry at all. It’s not that I don’t think it’s good poetry; I don’t think it’s poetry."

[from Jacket issue 12, 2000.]

event & sound in poetry

I just received a copy of English Studies in Canada volume 33, issue 4. (It's dated December 2007 and so I assume it's been delayed.) This is a special issue edited by Louis Cabri and Peter Quartermain, with a "digital sound editor" - namely PennSound's own Mike Hennessey. The issue is titled "On Discreteness: Event and Sound in Poetry." The table of contents is tantalizing, including: Bob Perelman on listening to WCW's "The Sea-Elephant," Brook Houglum on Kenneth Rexroth and radio reading, Brian Reed on Gertrude Stein speaking, Sarah Parry on the "LP era" in poetry, and Geoffrey Hlibchuk on the relationship between shortwave number stations and 20th-century poetry. Can't wait to read this stuff! And listen: comes with a CD of recordings edited by Hennessey.

sound at an impasse

The forthcoming spring '09 issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal collects articles written about Stevens and the sound of poetry. I have a piece here, based on a talk I gave at MLA a few Decembers ago. The papers and other contributions have been expertly edited by Natalie Gerber.

anti-existentialist existentialism

Brion Gysin is that he is and that's all there is to it. LINK

songbag

LINK

cover without a record

A new publication, Cover without a Record, was created by students and faculty who were part of a second-time experimental seminar co-sponsored by the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) here at Penn.

Cover without a Record works with--plays off, as it were--the fall 2006 Christian Marclay exhibit at the ICA. In Marclay's work, the artworks are based on the idea of and artifacts of sound, LPs, album covers, the shape of records, the material of cassette tape, etc. The students, many of them writers, and their teacher, our pal Kenny Goldsmith, created a catalogue-length response in this publication that transfers or extracts sound and/or sound-based art into language of some kind.

So in Cover without a Record, whose cover is white yet somewhat faintly embossed with concentric ridges in the shape and size of a 45 rpm single, includes the following, among others:

[] a piece of writing that consists of descriptions of sounds in twenty-seven books extracted from their sources;

[] sounds from various books extracted from their sources and rendered into concentric circles of text, mimicking a 45 rpm record -- thus a series of concrete poems;

[] the titles of every track from The White Album removed from their corresponding song lyrics;

[] a piece called Mobius Thunderclaps which is described by its creator, Steve McLaughlin, as follows: "When cut out, twisted, and joined at the ends, the shapes on the following pages form small Mobius strips. Each bears a looped version of one of James Joyce's thunderclaps: ten 100-letter words scattered through the novel Finnegan's Wake."

[] sound effects extracted from a series of comic books, placed on top of musical staves;

[] gunshot scenes from various films, transcribed and collaged into a unified screenplay;

and more.

The whole work can be found at writing.upenn.edu/ica/2008/.

Here is certainly the place (one of several) to thank the dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, Rebecca Bushnell, and Penn's provost, Ron Daniels, for providing grants to enable this innovative year-long seminar to happen.

riffing on Afro-Shakespearean

At the recent gathering on conceptual poetry in Tucson, Tracie Morris performed a piece based on a single sentence she heard spoken in a stentorian, didactic-pedagogical "Afro-Shakespearean voice" - "It all started when we were brought here as slaves from Africa." She creates a sound poem of the line in her unique way of singing-uttering. You can watch a video of the whole reading at which this piece is the final performance. Better yet, listen to the audio-only mp3 I created from the video, which is now linked to Tracie Morris's PennSound page.

new PoemTalk now available

We've released PoemTalk #6, featuring Kenny Goldsmith, Tracie Morris and Joshua Schuster talking with me about Jaap Blonk's performance of a titular line from Madeline Gins. For more, go to the PoemTalk blog.

leads us into a communal space

Cecilia Vicuña at the Writers House on April 15. Cecilia was our first "Writers without Borders" featured visitor. She chanted and recited for 40 minutes (and 8 seconds)--and that recording is now available on her PennSound page. The Writers House web calendar entry introduces her as follows: "Cecilia Vicuña, acclaimed Chilean poet, filmmaker and performance artist weaves time, space and sound to evoke ancient sensory memories. Through playful improvisations, stories and chants she leads her audience into a communal space where poetry unfolds. In her work indigenous word-play interfaces the contemporary realities of ecological disaster. Cecilia Vicuña is the author of sixteen poetry books published in Europe, Latin America and the US. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been an exile since the Pinochet coup in the early 1970s, and since 1980 has resided in New York, spending several months a year in Latin America. Currently she is co-editing the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, forthcoming 2008."

John Carroll took some great photographs of this event.

sound in Stevens redux

The Wallace Stevens relevant to contemporary poets (and here I am going to take extreme examples from among writers never thought of as deriving from the Stevensean aesthetic) such as Kenneth Goldsmith or Tan Lin, both of whom often operate in ambient language — words arranged as to be analogous to sound already in the environment—is the Stevens who strives at times to “undo the traditional work of polyphonic harmony” and makes “moves toward a monotony, a dead unison.” This is the little-appreciated Stevens who responds with beautiful uncreativity to Wittgenstein’s assertion that “A tune is a kind of tautology, . . . complete in itself.” The Stevens whose words are sometimes a “semiotically dirty, mumbled smattering over the possibility of” a vowel, such as “O.”

Ah, but the phrases quoted in the previous two sentences were not from Goldsmith or Lin, but from an essay by, of all poets, John Hollander. One of the keenest early pieces on sound in Stevens was indeed authored by Hollander, a writer of sonorous, formally lyric lines, very nearly an anti-modernist (although Joyce was his earliest influence), generally associated with traditional poetics — a poet not at all in the Pound-Williams-objectivist nexus. (Hollander is often said by mainstream critics to be writing in the Stevensean tradition, but it is the supposed Auden side of that mode. ) Many young scholars of modern and contemporary poetry were trying to resist the “Whose Era Is it? – Stevens or Pound” dichotomy even before Marjorie Perloff stated the case for this key literary-historical binarism thus in 1982. Taking up Hollander’s cause seemed to cede the languagy ground to Pound and made sound-in-Stevens criticism unfashionable at best, irrelevant at worst. In 1981, as my handwritten notes on a photocopy of “The Sound of the Music of Music and Sound” indicate, before even reading it closely I filed away the Hollander piece and conducted my own research and writing on Stevens (for a book that made a political reading of a politically unconscious modernist) without the benefit of its insights. Yet there it was, critically incorrect, yet a large and fundamental—and super-obvious—claim: “The whole of ‘The Whole of Harmonium’ [Stevens’ term for his overall poetic project, the continuous poetic] is a musical trope.” I once published a 13-page interpretation of “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz” and “Mozart, 1935,” describing a counter-politics against the lyric made in verse using music as a trope, without consulting this essay. That a critic like Hollander works as a poet at the Frostean end of the spectrum of Stevensean phrasing (and sense of nature) kept me from hearing the fitness of the critic’s sense that sounds apparently external to the poet, such as be-thouing Romantic bird, were “asserting their own exemplariness” through words as auralities. Missing the musical forest for the literary-political trees, lured down a single path formed by straight and narrow rather than crisscrossed aesthetic taxonomies, hearing talk of sound but seeing metrical traditionalism, I overlooked the clear assertion that “Frost and Stevens would make very different things of th[e] observation” offered by George Santayana that “To hear is almost to understand."

PennSound in Scandinavia

Paal Bjelke Andersen this past summer organized a poetry/poetics festival associated with nypoesi. Paal wanted to feature various projects in digital poetry, sound poetry and digital archiving - and asked that PennSound be represented in the catalogue or proceedings. I wrote a piece which was translated into Norwegian. Here you can get a sense of the contributors. In January the nypoesi people will put up a sound archive of Scandinavian poets reading their work, using PennSound as a model. Eventually both sound files and many of the essays will be published and presented in a book/CD set. Here is a link to the essay in English.

nature poem for a nasty day

When the weather starts to get a bit nasty, and just going out for a stroll in nature seems the last thing I'd want to do, I make "Let's Go Out" as recited by Jaap Blonk my poem of the day. Oh, let's go out, let's go out. Let's go out into nature, nature, nature, the natural word along with natural language, the most natural language there is....

Jaap Blonk read at the Writers House on November 11, 2004, and this performance was stunningly good. Woke me up, completely, to the sound of words as sounds.

So, dear reader, it's my poem of the day: so start it off with a good listen, please, to "Let's Go Out".

[] Jaap Blonk's reading: LINK
[] brief bio on Blonk: LINK
[] Blonk's web site: LINK

Wallace Stevens, for or against the sound of poetry?

Not quite a year ago I gave a short paper on sound in Wallace Stevens, at a session that was part of the cluster of sessions on the conference-wide theme, "the sound of poetry," at the Modern Language Association's huge annual gathering. I opened with this simple assertion:

If Stevens contended that “There is a sense in sounds beyond their meaning”; if he argued that poetry “makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration”; and if he insisted that “[a]bove everything else, poetry is words…[and] words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds” – then why hasn’t the critical response to Stevens put sound at the center of the discussion? Here are six reasons: (1) fear of a mannerist reputation; (2) guilt by association with the non-innovative; (3) Hi Simons; (4) Stevens’ dull-seeming poetry readings; (5) a lagging interest among critics in sound technology; (6) a certain deafness in the project of disclosing Stevens’s politics.

I've been writing a little more about this topic, and have said my piece, more or less, on what might seem the least interesting and most obscure and intramural of the 6 reasons: Hi Simons. So here's more on Hi.

Hi Simons, the first to ask Stevens in any sort of systematic way about the sound of words, was an amateur critic. He was unconfident and awed, critically a plodding workaholic, star-struck around Stevens’ replies, and aware of his own tendency to believe utterly whatever Stevens said. As he told a close friend of Stevens, who in turn told Stevens: “I work so slowly that I am constantly embarrassed about it . . . . I often doubt that I possess that ability to carry water on both shoulders which Mr. Stevens cultivated so successfully . . . twenty-five years ago” (unpublished letter from Hi Simons to Arthur Powell). Simons was an independent critic whose daily life was consumed by his work as a publisher of medical textbooks in Chicago. He seems to have deliberately misled Stevens by continuing to imply for several years that he was preparing a bibliography even well beyond the point of posing merely bibliographical questions; their earliest exchanges, beginning in 1938, were all about tracking Stevens’ old appearances in periodicals, but soon letters arrived from Chicago requesting line-by-line close readings. A number of them asked directly or indirectly about the meaning of the sounds words make—for Simons ever the most difficult aspect of the verse to follow. Stevens’ replies show that he was aware of Simons’ awe, and his letters—saying for instance that the meaning of “The Comedian as the Letter C” was in the sound of the letter C—were sometimes toneless yet overstated, sometimes oddly ironic, and occasionally just shy of toying with the rookie close reader; alternatively, they were literalistic in the extreme. Once Stevens began to hear (first from others, then, confessionally, from Simons himself) that Simons hoped to write a huge critical biography—“an affair . . . larger than Horton’s work on Crane, something like Foster Damon’s on Amy Lowell” (unpub. letter from Duncan to Stevens), a prospect horrifying to Stevens, who hated the idea of biographical readings—the poets’ answers to the critic’s request for detailed response seemed ironically to bear out, rather than to contradict, his principle against authorial explanations, as he described this tenet to Simons directly: “I made up my mind not to explain things, because most people have so little appreciation of poetry that once a poem has been explained it has been destroyed.” Or, more bluntly when the critic’s questions were about a poem whose form turns on the limits of words as sounds, “A paraphrase like this is a sort of murder.”

Here the homicide victim was “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” The question Simons posed about unreality in canto XVIII might well have led Stevens to discuss how the sound of the “Sea of Ex” negates the negation of intelligible language in the poem. The canto is a dream of the sort that defies the term “dream” (“to call it a dream” is the best we can do). And the rest is repetition, words crossing the senses (the guitarist’s “long strumming on certain nights / Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand”) such that the thing, the idea of the thing in the phrase “things are they are,” is lost in the ringing of repeated, modulated phrasing: “A dream no longer a dream, a thing, / Of things as they are, as the blue guitar” etc. Thus “Ex” marks a poetic spot beyond sounded sense-making, a place toward which the poem’s language drifts. Yet, especially if we’ve read Simons’ letter (now housed at the Huntington Library), we can sense in Stevens’ reply to Simons that he knew he needed first to help his correspondent make basic sense of the exclusive visual scene, so that the “sense of irreality often in the presence of morning light on cliffs when they rise from the sea” engages image by analogy as a didactic tool. Impressionism here is an analogy to irreality, not a theme of the poem, nor its aesthetic ideology or mode. The canto uses the sound of words to stipulate irreality too, yet the brief explanation, published in Letters without, of course, the incoming letter from Simons, nor the context of the imbalanced power relationship, seems definitive. There are at least a dozen similar readings. The same confusion, for instance, seems to derive from Stevens’ answers to Simons’ queries about the Arabian in the room in canto III of the “It Must Be Abstract” section of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. In the margin of Simons’ incoming letter, next to the question as posed, Stevens wrote in pencil: “The Arabian in the room & the unscrawled fores (the vagueness – undecipherable) – is the moonlight” (letter to Simons). He was hardly avoiding the centrality of the “chant” and of the “damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how” here; rather, he was literally responding to what he thought Simons needed to get along section by section in the epic.

The Stevens community seems to have been thrown off the scent of sound by this exchange for at least two decades, even before Holly Stevens’s edition of letters was published in 1966 – for stories of the poet’s explications for Simons were told in detail by Holly Stevens and Samuel French Morse, among others. Sound got off to a bad critical start, beginning with the way in which the aural excesses of “The Comedian as the Letter C” were read and taught based on a contextless understanding of Stevens’ relationship with the man who first received the seemingly definitive answer to questions about the importance of the sound of the letter C.

that eminently human technology, language

The Sackner Archive (of Miami) and UbuWeb. Two treasures in the world of concrete, sound, and visual poetries. They've come together now, as Matthew Abess has curated an anthology of sound recordings from Ruth and Marvin Sackner's collection and Kenny Goldsmith at Ubu has made digital space for them and added the list to Ubu's site. It's all semi-rare to rare, great and strange stuff. Have a listen.

In his liner notes, Matt Abess writes (in part):

The work presented here comprises a portion of the Sackner's tremendous compendium of sonic works. The range of geographic origins runs the circumference of the globe. The time span is nearly a century. It witnesses histories: of poetry, literature, music, visual art, technology, politics, religion, theoretical contentions and practical abstention. It indicates and permits divergent lines of flight. It is an ensemble of dramatic personalities and the social narratives that they informed. It chronicles and enacts the persistent deformation and reformation of the flow of language, intending the same towards the order of things in the world.

It is the story of a charming pair - Ruth and Marvin Sackner - whose permissive attitude invites us to navigate the wordy, worldy present; to co-operatively investigate that eminently human technology, language. The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry is a tactile space of verbal, vocal and visual collision. As each deflection inflects, so collisions coalesce: the Archive makes spaces where the interface of body and language might take place on planes patterned by our movement across them. The works here evidence the enormous range of possible iterations. Ruth and Marvin Sackner invite us to join in the play.

As a Penn guy, I'm especially proud of this. The Sackners are both alumni, Matt is our student and close affiliate of Writers House and CPCW, and Kenny teaches "Uncreative Writing" and his CPCW/ICA seminar here.

the rest is noise

I recommend J. Henry Chunko's October 6th John Cage wrap-up, which begins with his apt admiration for Cage's 1977 performance of Empty Words. He calls it "this jaw droppingly incredible recording." (He's pointing to this.) And then he just enthuses across other links and references. Along the way he mentions my Cage stuff in English 88.

The new book, The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross, was reviewed yesterday by the Chicago music journalist Marc Geelhoed on his "Deceptively Simple" blog. Lots of John Cage there too.

...and a note about teaching this stuff

If it's true, as Bob Cobbing put it in 1969, that "Sound poetry dances, tastes, has shape," then those of us who have been teaching poetry-as-printed (poetry on the page, unsounded poetry, what have you...) would presumably have to add at least these three dimensions to the realms of approach in the classroom. Which is perhaps too elaborate a way of saying that to have been prepared to teach words on a page, no matter how complex, is not to be prepared to help present a language as a kind of dance, as something to be tasted, as something that has a physical shape.

Cobbing again: "Leonardo da Vinci asked the poet to give him something he might see and touch and not just something he could hear. Sound poetry seems a to me to be achieving this aim."* Same problem here, I'd suggest. See and even hear we can do, with work. But touch? That's difficult. (And although seeing a printed poem - really seeing it as a thing, in William Carlos Williams's sense ("Poems aren't beautiful statements. They're things!") - is something we think we do in a close reading when often it is not what we're really doing.)

All this strikes me as relatively easy to talk about - I mean presenting the problem does not require hard work at the writing of it - but really doing it seems quite daunting.

* www.ubu.com/papers/cobbing.html

to write is to score

I've been thinking about how we can learn to understand poetry and poetics through sound, as distinct from - or in addition to - the text versions of the poem. Not a new topic, but I want to keep myself to basics. I want to start again in thinking about this. Build the story a piece (or measure) at a time.

The first thing I observe, again thinking in the simplest way about all this, is that the English word for writing is unlike the word in most other European languages; most derive their word for "write" from the Latin "scrib" root (scribere). We in English have "scribe," of course, which came over from secular Latin scriba meaning the keeper of accounts or secretary. And "script," etc. But "write" derives from a Germanic root writanen meaning tear, scratch at, but also to outline, to draw, to design, to sketch. See the German "reissen." Or, in other words, to score.

Writing as scoring.**

When we write language on a page, is it just alphabetical? It is that perhaps secondarily and more recently. But primarily it was and could still be artisanal: make marks on a surface to indicate a design by indentation or to indicate the way sounds are to be said altogether.

Our word for writing - for whatever reason - has come to us with a visual sense and an aural sense.

It doesn't surprise me that so many concrete poets are also interested in sound. Both are alternatives to the meaning-driven tradition of writing.

** Score as a noun (printed piece of music) is a late entry, coming in around 1700. But the verb score to indicate setting out how sounds should be sung or played is older. Of course the verb meaning to cut with incisions or notches is older, first in evidence around 1400.