A Fine Time for Breaking ThingsTrack of the day - Anna Moschovakis - "Untitled" (1'18" wav). The opening poem from I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (New York: Turtle Point, 2006). Event report for Moschovakis's reading with Matvei Yankelevich on 28 September 2006. (Somewhat scratchy-sounding) Audiofile of Moschovakis reading "Testimony of Finneus Gage" on RadioPoetique. Rebecca Wadlinger's review of the new book. More Yankelevich & Moschovakis links. The indispensable Ugly Duckling Presse. • Lipstick of Noise tracklist. XML feed. Tuesday — 3 October 2006 — permalink |
EspeciallyTrack of the day - Daniil Kharms (1905-1942), translated & read by Matvei Yankelevich - "Blue Notebook 4" (0'36" wav; mp3 here). Event report for Yankelevich's reading with Anna Moschovakis on 28 September 2006. Excerpts from the Blue Notesbook in Octopus 5. Wikipedia entry on Kharms. More Kharms in translation. Moscow Times story on Russian Absurdists. • Some Yankelevich & Moschovakis links. The indispensable Ugly Duckling Presse. • Lipstick of Noise tracklist. XML feed. Monday — 2 October 2006 — permalink |
BountyElsewhere on Third Factory: forty-six writers recommend 480 titles. Time again to max out your attention span. Thursday — 7 September 2006 — permalink |
Buzzing Faintly at the Blurred EdgeDavid Bromige - "This Second Kind of Happiness" (1'06). Bring to mind a male voice, then strip from it any coarseness, stridency, or arrogance. At the service of a complacent mind, such a voice would be merely smooth, a caricature of seductiveness. Since everything it said would be agreeable to the ear, the content of its utterances would remain undeveloped, robbed by the facility for giving pleasure of the treasures wit must work hard to unearth. But attach such a voice to one of the quickest and subtlest minds a generation has to offer, one nimble enough to negotiate the tightest of discursive corners and to profit (poetically, at least) from what's around them, and you have David Bromige, a London-born Canadian poet who lives in California (one might alternatively say a California poet educated, in part, in England and British Columbia). This track, recorded circa 1984, is all about pacing, which is to say pausing, and subtle variations of intonation. Shifts in verb tense and narrative angle prevent a single scene from coalescing, but the phrase repeated in the second and the final audias hints at a kind of consummation, a "knowing combination" in which not only bodies but facets of mind (reason, sense) are joined. Better to be thus constellated, the poem suggests, then suffer the isolation of reductive definition, which—pace audia 10—serves only to sicken. From here, you'll want to proceed to "My Poetry," a signature piece of unsurpassed (though exquisitely understated) cleverness, here imperfectly preserved (a sixteen-second drop-out mars the track at its midpoint: there must be other recordings? no?) but delightful in every other respect. More Bromige at PennSound. Recently updated Bromige page at EPC. Bromige in conversation with Doug Powell, May 2003, in Jacket 22 ("Let me say there’re no rousing assurances in my poems. Let the rich bury the rich. All I can do is destroy their language. I think the pill is wearing off. Got more?"). While there, be sure to check out Gary Sullivan's perceptive appreciation of Bromige's 1980 Figures volume My Poetry.
Tuesday — 22 August 2006 — permalink |
Tender, Phallic, KimonoedLisa Robertson - "Plentifully of reason..." (1'00"). I first heard Robertson read from The Men in February of 2003, when she closed a New Writing Series set drawn mostly from The Weather (New Star, 2001) with some pages, quite different in tone, from a work still in manuscript. I recall the reigning affect of those pages being an exhilarated, fine-edged anger, indicative of a wised-up but residually pissed-off member of the "I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused" school of advanced heterosexuality. The mood in the track I've plucked from the middle of a twenty-minute set Robertson delivered in Toronto this spring is a little different: more melancholic, more mixed-up (note the Dantean formula at 34 seconds), more aching than arch. The adjectives encircling the undifferentiated "men" betray trace elements of tenderness, fond condescension, sympathy, but nothing so unmasterable as genuine desire. So faint is their collective lure, in fact, that it arouses from the speaker nothing more than a polite "I would like to very much" (audia 21 at 36 seconds), which you needn't be a Henry James character to recognize as a seven-syllable cognate of "no." In the midst of masculine plenty, this speaker has discovered only a "nothingness" compounded of hollow intellectual display ("the mental") and smoke-scented pretense, and she finds it an ultimately declinable invitation, even if the sadness accompanying the refusal is real (in the sense that it marks a forfeited cathexis?). • Recording notes: lots of in-situ hiss; a duet with cooing infant toward the 20 second mark. Listen to the rest of Robertson's Test Reading Series performance of 24 May 2006. Entry on Lisa Robertson at Wikipedia. Robertson's week of dispatches for the Poetry Foundation website. The spring 2006 issue of Chicago Review includes a special section devoted to Robertson's work. Amusing publicity for the recent book-length dinner reading of The Men. Ron Silliman on The Men. And some thoughts on Robertson's 2004 Nomados chapbook Rousseau's Boat.
Friday — 18 August 2006 —permalink |
The Least SurpriseEdwin Denby - "People on Sunday" (1'17"). It's the anecdote in the couplet following the volta that attaches me to this poem: I love the "imagine that" intonation adopted by the poet (here recorded some three decades after his sonnet first appeared in the small 1948 volume In Public, In Private), and the accompanying insinuation: our speaker is used to startling folks with whatever it is that his eyes are signaling to them. Each of the three quatrains leading up to this moment has had a distinct texture. The first provides a thoroughly secular Sabbath-day census of the sportive, libidinal, zonked denizens of the New York streets Denby so loved to wryly document. The second generalizes about the season (sweltering summer) in straight-ahead rhythms that culminate in the grinning accelerando of "and people left in the kitchen are a little flighty" (many syllables in advance of its arrival, you can hear the delight Denby takes in the off-rhyme he's about to unveil). The third stanza praises our soniferous species, inviting us to "look" (interesting synesthetic feint) "at all the noises we make for one another." The formulaic rhymes spill out in fours (ay-ay-ay-ay, uh-uh-uh-uh), then modulate into a subtler set of three substantives ("the weather, the system, the picture of his brother"), until in the final line we realize (with the recurrence of the word "shake") that we've been on a visit only the ceremonial conclusion of which is not conducted "in private." • The unfazed infant recalls Lao-tzu: "I am like the child who has not yet smiled." Meeting Denby's gaze without alarm or judgment, the baby bestows that rarest of gifts: a truly neutral gaze. Audia transcript. • More Denby at PennSound. Denby on Rudy Burckhardt site. Denby's Dance Writings & Poetry reviewed in Dance Magazine. And, briefly, in the NYT. Simon Smith and Ron Padgett discuss Denby and his work, part of Karlien van den Beukel's selection of Denby materials for Jacket 21. • Lipstick tracklist. Get fed. Sunday — 16 July 2006 — permalink |
Spring FreezeJayne Cortez (with the Firespitters) - "Global Inequalities" (3'58"). Cortez forces into conjunction two frames typically segregated in socio-semantic space: in one we find the first-world elites who steer the global economy and parcel out global resources, in the other, a kind of collective subject of suffering, the global sub-proletariat referred to by Fanon as "the wretched of the earth." Compassion for the latter is sublated into contempt for the inhumanity of the former in the poet's vocal line, a concoction of indignation-held-in-check and openly pissed-off sneer that negates even as it alludes to bluesy resignation. For Cortez, causal lines connect encroaching ecological catastrophe back to the boardrooms and governmental cabinets where it is engineered (as acceptable byproduct of economically-driven policies) and administered (as "aid"). So long as the causal chain terminates with "somebody else," it seems survivable. But "je est un autre," sooner or later. Jayne Cortez homepage. About Taking the Blues Back Home (1996). Review by Nate Chinen. Cortez at MAP. Brief bio-bibliography at Poets.org. • Lipstick tracklist. Get fed. Wednesday — 12 July 2006 — permalink |
Needle's EyeAdrienne Rich - "Divisions of Labor" (1'54" with introductory remarks; 1'30" without intro here). Adorno somewhere characterizes the separation of intellectual from manual labor as the secular model for the theological concept of original sin. In this poem composed in 1988, collected in Time's Power in 1989, republished in the Monthly Review in 1999, and here performed in Buffalo in October 2000, Adrienne Rich satirizes faddish and ineffectual first-world "theory" and sacralizes the labor of third-world women, seeing in the latter's remaking of "the world / each and every morning" a more authentic form of work than that performed by the writer's hand, whether her own ("blistered" by the "sacred wax" at poem's end) or another's (the exemplarily foolish hand that practices "deconstruction" on "the prose of Malcolm X" in audia six). • I would divide the poem's thirty-seven audias into five asymmetrical groupings: the first two comprised of three audias each and progressing semantically from general ("revolutions") to particular (political magazines); a long third section in which seventeen audias parse out a single sentence with "the women" as subject and compound verbs formed of "are" plus seven participles (licking, trading, splitting, producing, fitting, teaching, watching) for predicates; the brief fourth section, which generalizes from the particulars of the preceding section (thus echoing in reverse the transition from general to particular in sections one and two); and the closing, eleven-audia section that shifts from the plural subject of sections three and four ("the women") to the singular ("a woman") and introduces the poem's narrator as subjective witness ("I have seen.... I have felt"). • Lexis: "irresolute" to modify "hot water" in audia 14; "quenched" as euphemism for death in audia 20. • Sonic patterning: audias 5-11, alliteration in /p/, also short "i" in combination with other fricatives and plosives (polishes, politics, licking, slip, plastic, splitting); the prevalence of sibilants from audia 27 to the end (especially the /sk/ to /s...k/ of "scorched" and "sacred"). • Alternative ways to "run the blend"? If "pure theory" (input 1) is a "candle" (input 2), then.... PDF of poem here. More Rich at PennSound, including "Driving Home from Robin Blaser's Reading." About Rich at MAP. More at Poets.org. Michael Klein profile and interview with Rich for Boston Phoenix in 1999. • Lipstick tracklist. Get fed.
Monday — 10 July 2006 — permalink |
Noxious BeamsJackson Mac Low - "Feeling Down, Clementi Felt Imposed Upon from Every Direction" (3'36"). The debilitating effects of political heteronomy are here registered at the level of the named individual (Lat. clemens: mild, merciful), who, hemmed in, experiences a myriad of deleterious contradictions. Mac Low constructs the scenario incrementally, beginning with a single-sentence strophe and adding a sentence per strophe up to the seventh and concluding one (audia transcript here). While submitting himself to a number of constraints (source texts from Charles Hartshorne, Gertrude Stein, Lewis Carroll, and Gerard Manley Hopkins diastically selected; the epigraph as "seed text"; the predetermined sentence-to-strophe ratio), the poet, in contrast with the poem's protagonist, is afforded a certain margin of autonomy: "Words were modified, added, deleted, etc., as needed. Everything was tampered with." • Listening to the audiotext, the strophic divisions are perhaps less audible than the lexical repetitions, which lend a sestina-like impression to the poem while in fact following a much more erratic pattern. • Also interesting are the seven interrogative utterances among the poem's twenty-eight sentences (two in the third strophe, one each in the fifth and sixth, three in the seventh). These implicate the narrating voice in the action of the poem (the questions can sometimes be embedded in the character's perspective, but often not), while also calling attention to the role of the messages' recipients (us as listeners/readers). • Favorite line: "Possibly, she supposed, someone of limited understanding had mistaken an ironic remark for a revelation." • On a personal note, I feel fortunate to have heard Mac Low read three times in the months before his death in December 2004 at the age of 78: once with Anne Tardos here in Orono in late April, then in early May at the Bowery Poetry Club reading with David Perry from which this track is taken, and again at the NPF Poetry of the 1940s conference here at UMaine in the summer, where he performed some of his earliest works, including the incredible "HUNGER STrikE whAt doeS lifemean" from 1938. The pleasure of hearing his voice now mixes with the sadness of knowing he's no longer here to tamper with textuality and lodge his perpetual objection to stupid surplus suffering. Another take, recorded in Cambridge, June 2004 (note the magnificent roar of "shut up" just after the poem's beginning). PDF of poem via Chax Press. Eoagh Nº 2, In Remembrance of Jackson Mac Low. More Mac Low at PennSound. Mac Low page created and maintained by Anne Tardos. Author page at EPC. Bio-bibliography (to 1995) by Al Filreis. Karl Young's review of the essential 1993 CD Open Secrets. Publisher's note for Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces 1955-2002.
Friday — 7 July 2006 — permalink |
To Illuminize or To Abominate ItRosmarie Waldrop - "Shorter American Memory of the Declaration of Independence" (2'18" with introduction; 0'59" w/o intro here). Happy accidents abound in Waldrop's oulipian redaction of the nation's inaugural utterance. Like she says in the outro, the original "shines through," as befits a now perished republic. More Waldrop at PennSound. Author page at EPC. Brief bio and online works at Duration. W. Martin reviews Reluctant Gravities. Hank Lazer reviews Lavish Absence. Entry on "S + 7" at OuLiPo. The Declaration of Independence at the National Archives. Wikipedia entry on hara-kiri. Tuesday — 4 July 2006 — permalink |
The ObviousGeorge Oppen - "From a Phrase of Simone Weil's and Some Words of Hegel's" (0'58"). Oppen had just turned 71 when this recording was made in April of 1979 in Brooklyn. He doubles up on the opening fricative of the word "phrase" in the title, but otherwise his unmistakable voice—the sonic equivalent of an craggy geological formation through which a forceful breeze stirs—delivers this syntactically tricky twenty-line poem, the first in his short 1972 book Seascape: Needle's Eye, without hesitation or hitch. The opening words situate value (jewel, treasure) in a hermetic space of depth and enclosure, but the "no" at audia four renders this cognitive model inoperative and henceforth the poem will credit only those phenomena that are obvious [Lat. ob via, in the way]: the sandspit, the beak, the tune, the flame, the breaking wave ("belly-lovely"). The sonic patterning in audias four and five clusters around the liquid phoneme /l/, first heard at the end of "jewel" before rising to redundancy (sonic and semantic) in the sequence "liquid ... living life's liquid." In audia six the emphasis shifts to /th/: "THis eTHer THis oTHer THis element" ("ether" is likely one of the "words of Hegel's" Oppen had in mind). In audia eleven, the poet pronounces "fire of straws" as a surprising near rhyme to the word "obvious." The diphthong /aI/ in "fire" recurs in "hide" (end of audia eleven), then becomes dominant in "desire...eyes...pride...life" (thirteen), followed by the key line, structured around /m/ and then /l/: "and foreMost of the storM's Multitude Moves the wave beLLy-LoveLy." Truth, if it is, says Oppen, is just beyond "the outer / limit of the ego," a movement across a surface, a wave on the open water, a tune on the wind. Visible, audible, along the way. More Oppen at PennSound. Author page at EPC. Oppen at Modern American Poetry. Wikipedia entry. For an intelligent discussion of "From a phrase...," see Peter Nicholls's "Modernising Modernism: From Pound to Oppen" (for the hasty reader: circa footnote 60 and following). Wednesday — 28 June 2006 — permalink |
EvaporatedFanny Howe - "Basic Science" (0'59"). This one has me a bit tongue-tied (a good sign). I'm captured by the first line, with its joke-like set up, and surprised by the second. Is it sweet, this post-mortem possessiveness? A memento mori "I thee wed"? Or just creepy: ownership dogging one even after death? However you resolve it (probably, given the pace at which the voicing unfolds, you don't), the vow shakes the corpses from their litters and sends them to scavenging "at the surface of the earth," first just impoverished, then indentured to "the living with names and fortunes." Though soulless, their expropriated fecundity keeps "creation going," a death's-hand caress at the back of every animated thing (another to file under: "Am I that?"). • The poem consists mainly of monosyllabic words (82%), so the polysyllables stand out: cadaver (4 times), evaporated, maculate [Lat. macula, spot], fertility, creation, properties, animate. From the fifth axia forward, much of the major lexis crystallizes around the approximant /l/, which figures in 19 of the 133 syllables in the latter 36 seconds of the poem: souls, love, litters, let, living, maculate, denials, daily, sold, fertility, living, lovers, lover, lover, still, love, well, like, cold (ten of these are initial occurrences, three medial, six terminal). If this phonemic redundancy tickles the ear almost subliminally, the foregrounded variation of the syntactical pattern from axia two ("cadaver / you're my cadaver") in axia eleven ("lover, I'm you're lover") lends a shivering coherence to the whole. More Howe at PennSound. Bio at Poets.org. Her Selected Poems. Fall 2005 interview with Leonard Schwartz. Michelle Detorie's review of The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life. Tuesday — 20 June 2006 — permalink |
Blank WallCharles Bernstein - "Solidarity Is the Name We Give to What We Cannot Hold" (5'56" with intro in French by Jacques Darras; 4'54" w/o intro here). "My sense is that we are characterized insofar as we let ourselves be characterized, that one can resist characterization by becoming conscious of its techniques and its inevitability. We live in a world which communicates through characterization, but we can resist its reification, its finalization, by understanding it as a provisional thing that exists in time for a particular use. Insofar as that use is agreed upon—perceived and acknowledged—in the communication, there may be no problem with characterization. But if it's thought to come from above or it hits you from behind and you don't know that it's happening, it mystifies your conception of your personality. It creates the sense that persons are these objects that exist discretely and outside of time" (Bernstein, "Characterization," from a talk at 80 Langton Street in San Francisco, January 1983). • Continuing our "am I that?" thread, label proliferation as defense against any one label durably affixing itself. One hundred and thirty-three occurrences of the noun "poet," each with at least one adjective (and often more) preceding it. Plausible (mis)recognitions of a single writer, but also a relief map of the microgenres & identifying localizations (identitopes?) "characteristic" of avant-garde practices, past and present, ici et ailleurs. Transcript of audias here. More Bernstein at PennSound. • Bernstein author page at EPC. His blog. PennSound manifesto. • Lipstick xml feed. Tracklist to date. Wednesday — 14 June 2006 — permalink |
Your Sabbatical Is BurningLydia Davis - "A Position at the University" (3'40" with intro; 1'08" w/o intro here). The quandary into which the narrator of this very short story momentarily falls, then gamely reasons herself out of, has to do with the lack of "fit" between the image conjured by the file-cabinet gray title phrase (repeated seven times in seventy seconds) and her entrenched self-conception. Am I that? Only that? Really that? she asks, as a stranger's gaze falls upon her, visiting annihilation upon everything about her that does not conform to the role she is assumed to fill, the role she does—obviously to the other even if startlingly to herself—in fact fill. Whether her recourse to negativity, her utopic (or at any rate socially impossible) plea for "complete description," is warranted (after all, every individual has a right to non-identity vis-à-vis his or her subject position) or partakes of self-delusion (after all, that right is frequently abused: pace liberalism) can only be decided in situ, and Davis's narration carefully pares away any evidence thereof. The brevity of the manifest text evokes a latent text left largely in shadow: the narrator knows "truths" about herself that would, she says, strike an observer as "incompatible" with her "position," but those truths, and the "sort of person" they might show her to be, remain obstinately undisclosed. • In the PennSound clip, Davis appends an anecdote that replicates the structure of the story while supplying a different set of contextual cues (Christmas, a recording of the Messiah, a judgmental friend's phone call). What the ad-lib lacks is the compulsion to repeat signaled by the hendecasyllabic refrain, so puzzling, so weirdly depleting, so susceptible to minute variations in inflection in the voiced text. Transcript of audias. More Davis at PennSound. Lydia Davis week at McSweeney's. Webpage devoted to Davis. Albany Times Union story on Davis's MacArthur grant. Paul Lafarge on "the pleasures of Lydia Davis's precise Proust." • Today's heading courtesy New Pornographers/Destroyers. • Lipstick xml feed. Tracklist to date. Monday — 12 June 2006 — permalink |
S F U R N X T CJulie Patton - "Alphabet Soup" (4'15"). Letter names, sung and spoken, in English and French, with acronyms and abbreviations fair game, are the compositional elements of this lovely, live-recorded piece by brilliant and elusive performance artist (by which I mean maker of things and situations) Julie Patton. The mic bangs about a bit as she settles it into a holder while singing the title (and ominous subtitle) and warming up her voice on alternating first and second person pronouns, then we're off. The first minute or so is a paean to a "you" whose attributes, surpassingly delicious, are spelled out in desirous detail. Assorted Greeks arrive circa 1'45" and stay a while (Odysseus on the Aegean Sea [a g n c], Eurydice, Eleusinian deities). Responding to the babble of an infant in the audience Patton improvises the phrase "itty bitty bee-ee" at 2'05" before resuming her score (the object as I remember it: an artist's book, heavy cards bound by thread along the top margin, a multiplicity of inks and typefaces, at which Patton glances only now and again). Around the three minute mark the address to the second person shifts from amorous praise to invective and insult ("u r m t...m t s m t v") and the tempo quickens as strings of abbreviations unspool across dialects and discourses (medical-pharmaceutical, juridical-penal), leaving dis-ease as final word and abiding affect. • As was perhaps fitting. Inaudible in this track, the circumstance: nine days after 9/11, flights and airports barely back in operation, a certain rent in the symbolic fabric that Patton decides to perform in (cancelling would have "made sense"), and does, without suture, without "9/11 poem," taking event as silent interlocutor, addressee of noise and voice, a "plus one" added to the actual audience headcount. As response: hesitancy, testing, dissonance. And scintillations of beauty (spelled: b / u / t). More Patton at PennSound. Patton in conversation with Drew Gardner in spring/summer 2001. From Cinepoesia, a collaboration with Euphrosyne Bloom. And check out Impulsive! on Verve (on the last track of which Patton performs a poem by John Coltrane in a new composition by his son Ravi Coltrane). • Lipstick xml feed. Tracklist to date. Friday — 9 June 2006 — permalink |
Breathless I Observe
More from Brossard's Segue reading of 5 May 2001 at PennSound. Online version of the poem in a translation (differing from Brossard's own) by Robert Majzels and Erin Mouré. Brossard author page at EPC. Marcella Durand's interview with Brossard for Double Change 2. Announcement of Brossard's most recent award, the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize. • Lipstick xml feed. Tracklist to date. Wednesday — 7 June 2006 — permalink |
I Judge JudgeGertrude Stein - "If I Told Him: A Completed Portait of Picasso" (3'24"). Beginning in 1910 with "Ada," her lovingly-drawn narrative of Alice B. Toklas's early life, Stein practiced linguistic "portraiture" at virtually every stage of her long and hyperproductive career. The second of her Picasso portraits dates to 1923 (though the recording was made a decade later), a period when by her own account Stein had grown intoxicated with the sonic properties of her lexical and phrasal combinations: "I found that I created a melody of words that filled me with a melody that gradually made me do portraits easily by feeling the melody of any one. And this then began to bother me because perhaps I was getting drunk with melody and I do not like to be drunk I like to be sober and so I began again" ("Portraits and Repetition"). Her vocal performance on this scratchy track, which hinges on the faultless production of minute phonetic differences, numerous and complex tempo changes, and outré rhythmic signatures only Thelonious Monk (said to have taken up piano at the age of six in 1923) could touch, bespeaks a blood-alchohol level in the negative numbers even if the damped semantics leave the auditor reeling a little (think how Pablo must have felt). Online text established by Stein scholar Ulla Dydo. More Stein on PennSound. Stein author page at EPC. More at MAPS. Some Stein resources curated by Michael Powers. • Lipstick xml feed. Tracklist to date. Monday — 5 June 2005 — permalink |
A Lovely Sight and TemporaryFrank O'Hara - "Ode to Joy" (2'25"). This is the sexier, sweatier, altogether desublimated alternative to Schiller's famous poem, an ode to interminable jouissance, to infinite and inexhaustible lust as the abolition of want and indeed of mortality itself ("No more dying"), an anthem for those who "acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter / over insatiable sexual appetite" as their flag. The form of the poem is strict but inconspicuous: three sections of thirteen expansive lines each, with identical four-syllable codas closing the first and last. The initial, third, sixth, and eleventh lines of each strophe carry past the line break, creating verse paragraphs of considerable momentum and internal complexity, hallmarks of O'Hara's brilliant work in the ode form at the end of 1950s. The typical line consists of fifteen syllables or more and takes up to four seconds to read aloud; each strophe runs to between forty-five and fifty seconds. O'Hara's voicing* is flat relative to the sexually surcharged content but it rides the complex syntax with faultless subtlety, for example in the parallel constructions of strophe two: "and there'll be no more music but the ears in lips and no more wit but tongues in ears and no more drums but ears to thighs." Recorded in September 1963, this segment continues with O'Hara's reading of "To Hell With It," a bonus track ("another filthy page of poetry") to take with you into the weekend.... (*I can't shake the impression that the recording is several rpms, or fps, too fast. Can anyone confirm?) More O'Hara on Ubuweb. O'Hara's author page at EPC. A "Frank O'Hara Exhibit" at Modern American Poetry. • An xml version of this page is here (scroll to bottom and click xml to subscribe to feed). A cumulative track listing is here. Friday — 2 June 2006 — permalink |
The World's Furious SongTed Berrigan - "Red Shift" (3'01"). I first heard this incredible track when poet and editor Peter Gizzi was working on the cd that shipped with the first, and as it happened only, issue of the Exact Change Yearbook, published by Naomi Yang and Damon Krukowski in 1995. Berrigan recorded the poem at Naropa in late July of 1982, a little less than a year before his death on Independence Day 1983, and the performance unfolds as an intense self-elegizing aria with twelve or thirteen discrete parts. It starts hesitantly in the present (a bitter, windy February night in one-tree-to-a-block New York City) before drifting back to a "now" that is "twenty years ago almost," the moment of the poet's introduction to a world that simultaneously impressed and daunted him, the world inhabited by Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and eventually himself and his own (unnamed in the poem) friends of the second generation New York School. When the cigarette reverie breaks, the poet catalogs everything that, at age 43, remains "up in the air" for him, everything swirling and burning "now more than ever before," including "love / children / hundreds of them / money / marriage, ethics / a politics of grace" (lineation follows audia transcript not print version). His point is that "nothing [is] wrapped up / nothing buried," and from that pair of nothings forward the poem is governed by negations, first in the triptych of portraits offered between 1'15" and 2'05" ("not that / practically a boy...," "not that pretty girl...," "not that painter...."), then in the brusque beating back of an insipid pop song that threatens him with mawkish solace, then in the tremulous and angry passages in which death's imminence (its immanence too) is palpable even in denial. The emotion that has been audibly rising since the question "when will I die" was posed at 2'14" explodes in the fourteen-second passage beginning "I am only pronouns / and I am / all of them," the heaving emphases landing as often on function words (all, this) as on verbs like the "change" in "I came into your life to change it." The final ten seconds of the poem are among its most poetic, in terms of diction, and complex, in terms of action: the poet's death is figured as a stealing away softly into the air (recalling the lines about O'Hara's death earlier), a disappearing act that leaves behind, like a last work, that empty "costume" (clothes, body) through which the wind, "the world's furious song," flows. • "Air" is the key lexical-conceptual element of the poem (we hear it four times in the first eighteen seconds of the poem, twice by itself, twice bundled with other syllables, the penultimate in "February," the first in "arabesque"), but it's the vowel sound in "lot," "nothing," "song," and especially "softly" that channels the choked-back sob that is the affective core of the performance. More Berrigan at PennSound. Still more Berrigan soundfiles at Ubuweb. Berrigan's author page at EPC. The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan from University of California Press. And John Palattella's excellent review of same for The Nation back in January. Berrigan on Poets.org. Site notes: An xml version of this page is here (scroll to bottom and click xml to subscribe to feed). A cumulative track listing is here. Wednesday — 31 May 2006 — permalink |
Memorial DayJoe Brainard - "Tuesday, February 18th, 1971" (1'16"). Naïveté is a rhetorical stance every bit as complex as irony, perhaps even more so, since it requires a great deal of "knowing" to forbear its display. This recording of Joe Brainard reading into ("before" seems too abstract a word) an audibly receptive audience at the Poetry Project is gone before you know it, just like the day toward the end of the poet's twenty-ninth year it diaristically records. The scale is modest, the voice not shy exactly, but smilingly reluctant, aerated, we might say, by the many intraphrasal hesitations (marked as ' in my transcript). And the word "perhaps," offered twenty-four seconds into the track, is a small act of generosity, allowing the listener to recognize what the speaker (supposedly) doesn't and to enjoy a gentle laugh at his expense. The passage on mimesis, iconicity, and aesthetic value (47"-55") doesn't sound at all as pretentious as those three top-heavy words do, and the embrace of ephemerality, of existential transiency, in the final line, though completely in accord with Brainard's entire practice as artist and writer, is still a surprising reversal of the usual lyrical lament at time's unrecapturable passage. • On memorial day, then, I want to remember Joe Brainard, and with him everyone AIDS took from our company. It's naïve to think the dead are not deaf. Still we say: "you, every one of you, are missed." More Brainard at PennSound. A page devoted to his life and art. Ron Padgett's I Remember Joe Brainard at PW. Register of Brainard papers at the Archive for New Poetry, with biographical note. The catalog Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, by exhibit curator Constance Lewallen. Arthur Lazere's brief review of the show. Brainard feature in Jacket 16 (scroll down). Monday — 29 May 2006 — permalink |
I'll Get Along Without You Very WellErnst Jandl - "What You Can Do Without Vowels" (2'01"). Six consonantal phonemes serve as a kind of overture for this demonstration (with inconsistencies) of the title phrase (the Austrian poet's pronunciation of the word "vowels" is itself worth the listen). After the title, it's sublexical all the way to the final English-language expletive, a mad, totally-perfect medley of hissing fricatives, percussive plosives, dental taps, kissing noises, growls and meows, with Uli Scherer's steady klavier-pounding for a bass line. Hold on for a few seconds after the performance ends to hear the nostalgic sound of a tone arm lifting. More from Jandl's vom vom zum zum (recorded and released 1988) at Ubuweb::Sound. About Jandl (German). About Jandl (English). About Reft & Light, Jandl poems translated into American by many hands. A tribute site (in many languages). Friday — 25 May 2006 — permalink |
Hermes, the Blacker ArtAmiri Baraka - "Black Dada Nihilismus (DJ Spooky Mix)." Nothing competes with Baraka's powerful and well-seasoned voice in this minimally-adorned studio mix arranged by Paul D. Miller some three decades after the poem first appeared in the pages of The Dead Lecturer. The dj's principal decision is announced first thing, then drops out for twenty seconds as Baraka establishes his presence with the title and first three stanzas of the poem. The key sonic figure reappears as the second major segment of the poem commences ("The protestant love") and repeats at thirteen second intervals thereafter, accompanied in its decaying cycle by quiet but nimbly-played bass, drum, and cymbal passages. Baraka keeps close to his original lineation, poised between Black Mountain and the soon-to-be-born Black Arts Movement, and he works with special intensity through the "why"-lines following "Plastique, we / do not have..." (circa 1'40"). The fantasy of violence following the fourth invocation of "black dada nihilismus" (circa 2'15") curtly proposes rape and murder for abstract white personages, then turns to more intimate adversaries in one of the most sustained syntactical runs of the poem: "choke my friends / in their bedrooms with their drinks spilling / and restless for tilting hips or dark liver / lips sucking splinters from the master's thigh." The poem packs four more turns into the final minute or so: the disjointed "scream / and chant" passage (at 2'30"), the recollection of what an unnamed "you" told the speaker about a white western culture organized around the trinity of "money, God, power" and committed to genocidal cruelty (at 2'48"), the ranging dedicatory passage (beginning "for tambo" at 3'00"), and the concluding prayer, tucked within an open parenthesis that never closes, to the "lost god damballah," a notional counterforce to the unleashed negativity of the poem's titular specter. The final, echoing, occurrence of the horn figure loops us back to the beginning, lending a sense of unity to this jagged, contradictory, energetic, and enigmatic testament to the process whereby LeRoi Jones became Amiri Baraka. An online approximation of the poem as it appeared in The Dead Lecturer (New York: Grove, 1964) at Chickenbones. About Offbeat: A Red Hot Sound Trip, the 1996 disk on which this track first appeared. More Baraka on PennSound. The poet's homepage. Modern American Poetry page, including M.L. Rosenthal writing in 1973 on "Black Dada Nihilismus." Poets.org on Baraka. Pic of DJ Spooky in concert with Baraka, April 2002. For readers of The Wire, the May 2006 "Invisible Jukebox" with William Parker includes a conversation about this track. Wednesday — 24 May 2006 — permalink |
Virtuous and ChasteBernadette Mayer - "Catullus 42." Mayer's 1989 performance bristles with attitude, as a translation of Catullus's invective poem should, but she forgoes stagey anger (the ostensible tone of the poem) in favor of a kind of cocky, wry, delivery that makes a string of insults sound seductive and gives a sororophobic/sororophilic twist to the original. The slurred "c'mere" at the start, the counterintuitive phrasal rhythms that tug gently against the syntax without outright disrupting it, the plaintive tone that creeps into the second round of verbal assault, and the suppressed laugh that finally escapes in the closing line, all back up the boast Mayer makes at the outset: "This is probably the only time you'll ever hear a real translation of this poem." Latin text and two translations on Perseus. More Mayer at PennSound. Her author page at EPC. Brief bio at Poets.org. Monday — 22 May 2006 — permalink |
That Was Before NumbersRae Armantrout - "Next Life" (0'39"). Armantrout's vocal attack is as jagged and darting as Berssenbrugge's is hushed and tranquil. Her vowels scale into the jangling upper frequencies, while her consonants are sharply articulated and sometimes throaty. The short first audia terminates in an emphatically-voiced conjunction, setting the measure for the twenty-four to follow. The poem segments, semantically and syntactically, after the fifth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and twenty-second audias, with the meta-statement ("that was before numbers") serving as a sliver-like hinge at the midpoint. It seems obvious to love the lines "Don't be a commodity / be a concept," but I do. And the brilliantly-handled diminuendo of the closing syllables too. More Armantrout on PennSound, including her 10 May 2006 reading for Charles Bernstein's Close Listening program on WPS1. Her author page at EPC. Ron Silliman's remarks on her Belladonna chapbook "Fetch." Friday — 19 May 2006— permalink |
The Lipstick of Noise is a product of the Third Factory • Inspired by the music blogs • And by Paul Blackburn's reel-to-reel deck. Intending to make good use of PENNSound and other sources of digital audio files of poetry • Comments welcome.
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Nicole Brossard - "