Heurtebise from Cocteau's OrpheeThe Lipstick of NoiseReel to reel deck

Excitement Sisters

Lee Ann Brown - Crush (5'44"). • For Valentine's Day, a 2002 studio recording of a poem first published in 1993. Bonus track: To Bed (0'27"). • Listen to lots more Brown here. And read a sampler here. • As Elaine Equi writes: "Pleasure is the subject of Lee Ann Brown's poetry. Pleasure in the craft and anti-craft of poem making. Pleasure in the vocalizing and harmonizing of voice and text—speech and writing. Giddy recombinings. Flirtatious collaborations. Irreverent anagrams.... As a woman writer myself, I am grateful to Lee Ann for the way she unabashedly connects gender to knowledge. In her poems, knowing is knowing as a woman. Knowledge is pleasure. The life of the mind is refreshingly erotic."

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

14 February 2008 — permalink


You Might As Well Know It

John Wieners - Elizabeth Taylor Is My Sister (3'15"). Recorded 6 January 1971 and later included on The World Record: Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1969-1980. • I just saw the Grey Gardens films for the first time this past weekend and was struck by how much Little Edie sounds like John Wieners, especially when she pronounces, in a conspiratorial hush, phrases like "The Marble Fawn, you know, by Nathaniel Hawthorne." • The dedication to the 1973 first edition of No More Masks (omitted in the second edition of 1993) reads: "to our sisters / in jail / underground / at war / whose lives are their poems." Where John and Elizabeth (or the Beales) might fit into that utopic interpellation, it's hard even now to say. • Wieners previously on Lipstick, The Garbos and Dietrichs.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

13 February 2008 — permalink


Double, Split

Robert Creeley - Anger (4'06"). My colleague Ben Friedlander directed my attention to this alternate take on the poem featured yesterday, recorded a decade earlier on 22 July 1965 at the Berkeley Poetry Conference. • The whole set, not yet segmented into "singles," can be heard here (scroll past the 1956 materials). • Friedlander's new edition of Creeley's Selected Poems is here.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

12 February 2008 — permalink


Convulsively Darkening

Robert Creeley - Anger (4'45"). This track, from another great resource for exploring Seventies phonotextuality, The World Record, is dated 22 October 1975. • I'm interested in hearing the poem "with" (if only metaphorically, since I know of no available soundfile) Adrienne Rich's "Phenomenology of Anger," the notable sequence from Diving into the Wreck that is conspicuously absent from the new edition of The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems, 1950-2001 (Norton, 2002). • Last May Hair hearts Flip recommended this rather different form of mash-up.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

11 February 2008 — permalink


That They Are Unfit to Live

Ted Berrigan - From a List of Delusions of the Insane (What They are Afraid Of) (1:10). Recorded 11 August 1978 for broadcast on In the American Tree, hosted by Lyn Hejinian and Kit Robinson. • More Berrigan, including a June 1981 reading from The Sonnets, here. • Previously on Lipstick of Noise, Red Shift.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

9 February 2008 — permalink


The Obviousity

Kevin Killian - Is It All Over My Face? (6'30"). Recorded at the Queering Language reading in Philadelphia on 24 March 2007 and archived at PennSound here, this track evokes spring 1978, Allen Ginsberg, Gay Sunshine magazine, and the avant-garde cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell. • Much more Killian, here.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

8 February 2008 — permalink


Drive, He Said

Allen Ginsberg - Please Master (4'40"). Still sampling from Totally Corrupt, here's Ginsberg's April 1975 performance of a poem dated May 1968 in The Fall of America. • Tom Beckett, in a brief note posted a month ago to his Slim Windows blog, writes: "Allen Ginsberg's 'Please Master' is a litany of desire which I wholly admire. Poetry needs, I think, to find itself more often at the intersection of possession and intellection." • The text. • Interesting to compare this ecstatic form of gay male masochism to the numbly depressive "feminine" form diagnosed by Adrienne Rich in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

7 February 2008 — permalink


You Will See

Ericka Huggins - For a Woman (1'02"). The note accompanying this track on Totally Corrupt indicates that it was "recorded outside The Republican National Convention, Miami Beach, August 21, 1972," which is interesting enough, but a quick perusal of the few available web resources on Huggins—most notably this long and thoughtful post on a blog called Bay Radical—reveals a still more complicated context for what might initially strike one as a slight and somewhat conventional poem. If I read the sequence of events correctly, the poet, active in the civil rights struggle since '63 and the Black Panthers since '68, had seen her husband and fellow activist John Huggins slain in January '69, when their daughter Mai was still an infant, and had not long after been sent to a New Haven prison, charged with Bobby Seale of ordering the torture and murder of fellow Panther Alex Rackley, a trial that ended in a hung jury in May of 1971. • For more on the "Free Bobby, Free Ericka" campaign, scroll down to page 6 of this document.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

6 February 2008 — permalink


A Seizure of Talk

Robert Duncan - Despair in Being Tedious (4'20"). Recorded at San Francisco State University on 12 December 1972. • As his introductory remarks detail, Duncan composed this strangely self-lacerating, beautifully-sounded poem in 1972 as a sort of coda to and commentary upon the poems from 1949 that had made up Caesar's Gate. In this, it makes an interesting companion to Muriel Rukeyser's own revisitation of her own work of 1949 in "The Poem as Mask," featured here two days ago. • This track is just one of the many made newly available on PennSound's expanded Duncan page.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

5 February 2008 — permalink


In the Making

Taylor Mead - I Was in a Drugstore (3'33"). Performed before a tickled audience at the New Year's Day, 1976, marathon reading at St. Mark's and released on Giorno Poetry System's Totally Corrupt album later that year. • Expect some more picks from this très seventies trove in days to come. Meanwhile, check out the profile of Giorno that just appeared in the McGill student newspaper (dutifully relayed by Ron Silliman). • Mead according to Wikipedia.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

4 February 2008 — permalink


The Fragments Join

Muriel Rukeyser - The Poem as Mask (1'08"). The opening poem of Rukeyser's 1968 volume The Speed of Darkness revisits and revises her 1949 "masque" on the Orpheus myth even as it points forward to the landmark 1973 anthology, edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass, that would adopt as its anthem (and title) the defiant line "No more masks!" • For a sampling of intelligent analyses of the poem, try here. • I hadn't realized until recently that Rukeyser made more or less the same trip to Hanoi that earned Jane Fonda the insufferable tongue lashing by Godard and Gurin in Letter to Jane (Rukeyser traveled with Denise Levertov and another Jane, Jane Hart). • The undated recording featured today is from Poetry Speaks, a worthwhile—if not terribly adventurous—collection of poetry recordings from Whitman to the (near) present. The track appears here for a limited time and for non-commercial purposes.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

3 February 2008 — permalink


Out Laut

Jeremy Adler - Alphabox (3'49"). The opening track of the German-produced anthology Lautpoesie, available in its entirety here, is dated 1974 and features the London-born poet and German professor Jeremy Adler (b. 1947 and thus around 27 years old at the time of the recording). Percussive explorations of the higher registers (tight vocal cords, small oral apertures) dominate, but coos and trills and sibilants, and even the occasional lexical item ("who" and "why"), are also to be heard. • A nice companion to Paul Dutton's later work on Mouthpieces, a track of which was discussed here in May 2006.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

2 February 2008 — permalink


Look at Him, He's Got No Tongue

Claude Royet-Journoud - Excerpt (2'19") from La Notion d'Obstacle (1978), with translation (2'00") by Keith Waldrop. • From a reading at the Ear Inn on 3 November 1984. • Waldrop's voice is slightly but noticeably skewed to the treble register, the result I'm guessing of a tape speed error. So those audibly ticking seconds that mark out Royet-Journoud's insistent intervals are less than seconds? • Launching the soundfiles with about a ten second lead on either side produces some nice interlacing of French and English. • Why all the 1970s materials? Because.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

1 February 2008 — permalink


Be Insatiable

Adrienne Rich - Section 2 of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (0'54"). Rich read the title sequence of her 1963 volume in a set recorded at Cornell in 1985. All ten sections can be heard here (8'12"). • Section two is cited by Rich in her famous essay "When We Dead Awaken," first delivered as an MLA talk in 1971 and revised for publication in 1972 and 1978. The essay concludes with this sharp assessment of the state of patriarchal poetry as the seventies commenced:

To the eye of a femininist, the work of Western male poets now writing reveals a deep, fatalistic pessimism as to the possibilities of change, whether societal or personal, along with a familiar and threadbare use of women (and nature) as redemptive on the one hand, threatening on the other; and a new tide of phallocentric sadism and overt woman-hating which matches the sexual brutality of recent films. "Political" poetry by men remains stranded amid the struggles for power among male groups; in condemning U.S. imperialism or the Chilean junta the poet can claim to speak for the oppressed while remaining, as male, part of a system of sexual oppression. The enemy is always outside the self, the struggle somewhere else. The mood of isolation, self-pity, and self-imitation that pervades "nonpolitical" poetry suggests that a profound change in masculine consciousness will have to precede any new male poetic—or other—inspiration. The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction. As women, we have our work cut out for us.

Previously here on Lipstick of Noise, Rich's Divisions of Labor.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

31 January 2008 — permalink


Speaking of 1977

Kit Robinson - Notes Toward a Phenomenology of Memory (3'26"). In both his 10 November 1999 reading at Buffalo and his UPenn reading the following day, Robinson included a meditation on "memoir" and "memory" triggered by his participation in the Grand Piano project that wouldn't begin appearing in print until fall 2006 and that has now reached its mid-point with the appearance of volume five. • The UPenn version (4'32"). • Previously here at Lipstick of Noise, Robinson's Return on Word.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

30 January 2008 — permalink


I Faded In It

William Bronk - The Ignorant Lust after Knowledge (1'18"). Recorded 13 October 1978. More Bronk on PennSound. • Bronk's phrasing resolves—just barely—the grammatical ambiguity of the title, revealing "ignorant" to be an adjective modifying "lust," rather than the noun the eye first takes it for. • Interesting to note, in his quietly nuanced cadences, a precedent of sorts for Keith Waldrop's reading voice.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

29 January 2008 — permalink


I Never Used My Mind to Write This Poem

Bernadette Mayer - from Counterhatch (3'02"). A little later in the same 1978 Naropa class from which yesterday's clip was taken, Mayer reads and talks about her poem "Counterhatch." • The poem in Google Book's version of A Bernadette Mayer Reader.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

28 January 2008 — permalink


Nothing to Sell

Bernadette Mayer - Describing her early-70s installation art project "Memory" (4'42"). From a class offered at Naropa in 1978 and documented here. • The book that emerged from this project in 1976, though long out of print, is accessible via Craig Dworkin's invaluable archival website Eclipse. • Nada Gordon's thesis on Mayer, written in 1986 when Gordon was in her early twenties, includes a chapter on Memory.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

27 January 2008 — permalink


This Is Her Gift It Goes Without Saying

Paul Dutton - No. 4 Blaze (1'24"). Dutton voices a bp Nichol translation of Robert Filliou's "No. 4 Blues" on 7 February 1979 as part of the Six Fillious extravaganza recently uploaded to PennSound. • German Wikipedia page on Filliou. See a snippet of the film Porta Filliou (1977) here.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

26 January 2008 — permalink


In the Bindery

Charles Reznikoff - "Amelia was just fourteen..." (1'25"). Reznikoff was past eighty when he recorded an hour's worth of his poetry for Susan Howe's WBAI radio program in 1975. • This brief poem, which wounds anew with each audition, is one of two that he frames this way: "Law cases, as reported in the law reports, not only include the legal decisions, but at times, the facts on which the decisions are based. Here are two based on New York law reports." The other (also from the Testimony sequence) has to do with the sinking in icy waters of a boat overcrowded with dock workers. • The poem on Google Book. More Reznikoff on PennSound.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

25 January 2008 — permalink


Specialists in Ecstasy

Robin Blaser - Love (0'26"). This brief, quiet, beautiful track was recorded in 1970 at the University of British Columbia. Blaser devoted his twenty minute set, available in its entirety here, to the poems of his book Charms (composed 1964-1968).

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

24 January 2008 — permalink


A Return to the Middle Ages

John Cage - Discussing Glenn Branca, indeterminacy, and other matters (18'30"). From Chicago '82: A Dip in the Lake, available in its entirety on Ubuweb. • Cage hadn't liked what he heard of Branca's "Symphony No. 2" the evening before, and returns repeatedly in his conversation with Belgian Wim Mertens to his objections to it.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

23 January 2008 — permalink


The Outer Limit of the Ego

George Oppen - From a Phrase of Simone Weil's and Some Words of Hegel's (1'20"). A phonotextual variant to the track featured here in June 2006. • No precise date for the performance is given, but it was likely recorded between 1966-1973 in San Francisco. • Im memoriam Burton Hatlen (April 9, 1936 - January 21, 2008).

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

22 January 2008 — permalink


A Bolt from the Blue

Charles Bernstein - Three or Four Things I Know about Him (2'29"). Performed at the Anthology Film Archive on 3 April 1977. Whole set here. Lots more Bernstein at PennSound. Previously on Lipstick of Noise. • This is the fifteenth and final section of the version of the poem published at the start of Content's Dream (Sun & Moon, 1986; reprint here). • From the previous section: "The move fom purely descriptive, outward directive, writing toward writing centered on its own wordness, its physicality, its haecceity (thisness) is, in its impulse, an investigation of human self-sameness, of the place of our connection: in the world, in the word, in ourselves."

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

21 January 2008 — permalink


Also I Don't Suffer

Ron Padgett - Joe Brainard's Painting "Bingo" (1'07"). Another take on the poem featured yesterday, this one recorded by Padgett on 17 June 1975 (that is, about six weeks prior to the Naropa gig) for Susan Howe's WBAI radio show in New York. • The track is one of thirty-four on the CD that ships with Daniel Kane's All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in 1960s (2003). I make it available here, for a limited time, for the sake of comparison.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

20 January 2008 — permalink


A Lesson in Linebreak

Ron Padgett - Joe Brainard's Painting "Bingo" (1'30"). From the same reading as yesterday's track by Kenward Elmslie, recorded at Naropa on 4 August 1975 and available in its entirety here. Padgett, as you may already have heard, is a newly-appointed Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets. More Padgett soundfiles are available at PennSound. Setlist and pictures from Padgett's reading this past September in the UMaine New Writing Series here.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

19 January 2008 — permalink


It's Me, All Askew

Kenward Elmslie - Time Lags (4'01"). Recorded at Naropa on 4 August 1975. Full reading, with Ron Padgett, here. • "Exhibit Y: Scrap of elastic underwear used as a bookmark in dog-eared copy of Proust. Not that it matters, but is it male or female underwear, because it is my copy of Proust, mine! mine!" • Elmslie homepage and Wikipedia page.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

18 January 2008 — permalink


The Genuine Article

Steve McCaffery - The (1'47"). Recorded 7 February 1979 at the Ear Inn. Whole set, and lots more McCaffery, here. • I especially like the quivery "v"-work starting around the 40 second mark and cresting at 1'12". • Subtitled: "A thousand and one things to do with your mouth." • Nice to have a poem not just beginning the but consisting almost entirely of it! • About the Four Horsemen Project, a contemporary take on the pioneering work McCaffery did with bpNichol, Paul Dutton, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

17 January 2008 — permalink


Tarantula Terrific

Jackson Mac Low - Excerpt (3'25") from The Black Tarantula Crossword Gatha (32'14"). Composed 25 August 1973, performed and recorded at NYU Composer's Workshop on 25 November 1973. Released as a cassette from S Press Tonbandverlag in 1975. • Lots more Mac Low on PennSound. Previously on Lipstick. • Mac Low homepage. • Silliman reviews Thing of Beauty.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

16 January 2008 — permalink


At Cape Difficulty

Susan Howe - Excerpt (3'20") from Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978). Recorded November 1978 at the Ear Inn. Whole set, which encompasses whole book, here. Howe's Wikipedia page here.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

15 January 2008 — permalink


That It Was Mortal

Ed Dorn - Response to the question "are there any parallels that you see between the Naropa Institute and Black Mountain College?" (14'25"). Recorded 3 June 1977 at Naropa. • The clip opens with some smitten questioning about to the poet's sign ("you want to know too much"), then shifts to Dorn's initially reluctant, but ultimately multilayered and revealing answer to an interesting question. • In conclusion: "One of the greatest things about Black Mountain that people don't ordinarily dwell on is the fact that... Its great uniqueness, and the greatness of its example, seems to me to lie in the fact that it was mortal—a very rare quality in an institution. Q: It was what? A: Mortal. It died...it experienced death." • Recognize the voice of the initial questioner? If so, drop me a line.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

14 January 2008 — permalink


To Work Out Tenderness

Ted Greenwald - Friends (2'08"). Recorded at St. Mark's 27 April 1977 and included on Big Ego (Giorno Poetry Systems, 1985). • The history encrypted in gossip, the phone here held to a future ear. • More recent Greenwald on PennSound.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

13 January 2008 — permalink


A Full Tank

Kathleen Fraser - Coincidental (3'31"). A 1999 performance, at the Kelly Writers House, of a poem written circa the "gasoline crisis" of 1973. • More Fraser on PennSound. The Wikipedia page is a stub, but the links aren't bad, esp. this one. • Bonus track: Stephen Rodefer and Alan Bernheimer bantering about "ethyl" in 1979.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

12 January 2008 — permalink


No Sentence Ever Ends

Clark Coolidge - The Passenger (2'06"). From another 1979 set, this one recorded (not all that well) at the Ear Inn in New York City. All twenty-three tracks here. Best title: Thronging sunk. Also recommended: Losing My Place ("about," if one can say that of a Coolidge poem, film spectatorship), In Positions is the Matter (0'31") and At the Poem (0'51"). • Coolidge on Wikipedia.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

11 January 2008 — permalink


How Even a Loser Sometimes Can Win

Lorenzo Thomas - Al Green's Broken Heart (4'45"). Continuing the seventies theme of the past several days, a track from Thomas's reading on a double bill with Kathy Acker at the St. Mark's Poetry Project on 11 November 1978. Full reading here. Aldon Nielsen on Thomas here. The EPC page here, and Wikipedia here. • A shortened live version of the tune on YouTube (the three seconds around 1'02" are especially interesting).

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

10 January 2008 — permalink


The Northeast Odds

Bernadette Mayer - 1979 (6'15"). Concluding track of the radio appearance Mayer made on Susan Howe's WBAI show in April 1979. Whole show here. Other shows here. Lots more Mayer on PennSound.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

9 January 2008 — permalink


Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure

Henri Chopin - L'energie du sommeil (5'05"). • It listens well looped and low, but give it at least one loud, full attention go, for the sake of the dynamics and structure. • Semi-random cultural cross-reference: the secreted emphysemic wheeze of Argento's Suspiria, a dozen years after this 1965 track. • Tom Orange provides a quick list of Chopin-related links at Heuriskein. • A Chopin track noted here last December. Sad to see this sound factory shuttered.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

8 January 2008 — permalink


The Known Decline

Stephen Rodefer - Sometimes I Forget (1'06"), b/w The Heavenly Bodies that Go By (1'26"). And a remark on personalities. From In the American Tree broadcast of 2 February 1979, devoted mostly to the Villon translations and The Bell Clerk's Tears Keep Flowing.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

7 January 2008 — permalink


Hail Them and Watch Out

Charles Olson - The Lordly and Isolate Satyrs (8'38"). Recorded 16 August 1963 at the Vancouver Conference. • Rachel Blau DuPlessis: "This poem is a collection point for any number of key materials of 1950s counter-cultural maleness: pure phallic imagery, carefully affirmed and carefully managed claims of androgyny, the supplement of femininity without its inferiorizing taint, affirmative heterosexuality, homosocial cohorts without homosexuality, male display and hypermasculinity, marked gender asymmetry or the enforcement of male-female difference, conflicts between actual social power and a sense of powerlessness, even an off-handed, mainly casual misogyny." Whole essay here. • Olson's letter to Robin Blaser, May 1958. From Quicks & Strings (1995). • More Olson soundfiles on PennSound. The text, illicitly blogged.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

6 January 2008 — permalink


To Show I'm Not Mad

John Ashbery - Thoughts of a Young Girl (0'46"). Recorded 29 February 1988 at the Folger Library in D.C. • More Ashbery on PennSound.

Tracklist here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

5 January 2008 — permalink


Ratatatat

Anne Tardos - Stripsody (6'38"); comp. Cathy Berberian, 1966; perf. May 2007 at Music at the Construction Company, New York. • Lots more Tardos on PennSound. Berberian's webpage and Wikipedia entry. A more emphatic approach to the piece by Karina Oganjan on YouTube.

XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

4 January 2008 — permalink


Attention Span 2007

Forty-six contributors discuss some five hundred titles—mostly poetry, but also film, music, art, and other things as well—in this year's installment of Attention Span, Third Factory's annual survey of what some of today's most percipient writers and critics are thinking and talking about. A directory of individual contributions can be found here. And a list of the most frequently cited titles and authors here. The most mentioned presses and publishers are listed here. The content for this installment—the fifth consecutive since 2003—is being mirrored, a bit at a time, in blog format here.

XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

26 November 2007 — permalink


Organized Violence

Nathan Austin has some interesting things to say about the Spicer recordings recently added to PennSound (which I haven't had a chance to listen to yet). Austin's remarks on the subtleties involved in voicing the lines "No / one listens to poetry" jibe nicely with Reuven Tsur's observations in "The Performance of Enjambments, Perceived Effects, and Experimental Manipulations." Following Jakobson, Tsur speaks of "verse instances" (more or less the printed manifestation of the text) and "delivery instances" (the sounded manifestation). A "successful" performance of enjambment, in his view, is arrived at through recourse to conflicting cues:

By listening to two delivery instances of this verse instance, we may prefer one to the other according to whether it does or does not suggest continuity and discontinuity at the same time. We can also establish the phonetic correlates that make these suggestions. The present approach assumes that continuity and discontinuity can be suggested at one and the same time by using conflicting phonetic cues, thus committing 'organized violence' against speech processing. This cannot be done by merely looking at the graphic output of the computer, only by listening to the sound output.

XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb.

26 June 2007 — permalink


The Embrace of Hers

Mark McMorris - A Poem for the Love of Women (7'45"). • Online version of the text via In Posse Review. • Snipped from a two-part soundfile of McMorris's 11 June 2002 reading with Hoa Nguyen and Michael Palmer, archived at the munificent (if not always easy to navigate) Naropa Poetics Audio Archive and used in accordance with this Creative Commons license. • The same poem, performed more briskly and preserved less cleanly, from a 28 February 2001 reading at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. • And here's a sonic detail of that lovely stretch, midway through the Naropa performance, where the audience makes its pleasure known. • Sibyl(s).

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24 June 2007 — permalink


Who Decided That Poetry Sounded Like This?

Jessica Smith roughs out some categories of performance style and forms of audience feedback over at Looktouch. A nice companion piece to Jim Behrle's enumeration of ways a mind can wander at a reading, here.

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23 June 2007 — permalink


Pheasant-Feathered

Piero Heliczer - fuga xiii (1'33"). A linguist friend more skilled at sniffing out instances of crypto-Sitwellianism than I, upon hearing the phrase "pleasantly pheasant feathered" (line 9 of Heliczer's printed text), thought immediately of the "Old Sir Faulk" foxtrot in Edith Sitwell's collaboration with William Walton, Façade. Here's a clip that juxtaposes the two passages (the reciter of the Sitwell is Pamela Hunter), and here's the Sitwell slowed down about ten percent. • Tom Raworth's version of the 1960 recording by his Italian-born friend is less muted than the one on PennSound and comes with a little background information as well. • Eric Baus hd some interesting things to say about this recording back in May. • Interesting that Heliczer gives the book title as "You Coul(d) Hear the Snow Melting and Dripping into the Deers Mouth," which I prefer to the printed version, where the gerunds are "dripping and falling." • Lots more by and about Heliczer at Ubuweb.

Wave form of a phrase by poet Piero Heliczer

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22 June 2007 — permalink