PoemTalk

Hold your breath and gag (PoemTalk #6)

Jaap Blonk, "What the President Will Say and Do"

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

It's easy to imagine that when Tracie Morris (the performer and musical poet) and Kenny Goldsmith (father of Ubuweb, proponent of uncreative writing) joined me and Joshua Schuster as PoemTalkers there would be some noise, pure noise, and indeed there was. So why not go all the way and make our poem a sound poem: Jaap Blonk's insistently sounded performance of the phrase that is the title of a book by Madeline Gins. What the president will say and do. What, indeed?

Joshua and Kenny and I had seen and heard Blonk perform the piece in the very room where we recorded this episode of PoemTalk; Tracie and Kenny had heard him do it for the first time, at a conference in L.A. where Gins was in the audience. So we had this one covered from all sides.

"So," I asked, "what do you think is the deficiency of having only an audio recording of this?" thinking of Blonk's strained reddening face and neck toward the end of the piece: a giant of a man holding his breath and choking on words. Kenny's response to this question: "I don't think there's any deficiency, because he's such a good performer that the audio component of the performance carries the day. And if you're lucky enough to see him it's even more incredible in a different way, but I don't think anything is lost without him being there." Tracie agrees: "You listen. You just listen. There are so many great things he's doing with that piece."

So do, please, listen. Listen to us, yes, but listen especially to Blonk.

Tracie hears patriotic marching in the percussive deformation of the sound of the words (and specifically hears Sousa). Josh hear resonances with presidential politics (to which Tracie adds that she also hears chickens). That leads Josh and me to take some advantage of an apparent split in the soundy camp between the overtly political music poet (Tracie) and the pleasure-seeking all-words-are-already-political gatherer of verbal ambience (Kenny). The political/aesthetic binarism collapses rather quickly, but it's fun (and edifying) while it lasts.

whaling ballads & sea chanties

Thanks to erica kaufman who checked with Alice Notley about the line in Berrigan's "3 Pages": and if the weather plays me fair....

Alice writes: "'And if the weather plays me fair' is from a folksong. Ted had an LP of Ewan M[a]cColl, the Scottish folksinger, performing whaling ballads and sea chanties. It's from one of those."

doing not enough every day (PoemTalk #5)

A list of Bohemian pleasures. Ted Berrigan's "3 Pages" is a list poem, surely. He mentions ten things he does every day (including "read lunch poems," surely a reference to Frank O'Hara's book of that title) but the PoemTalkers - Randall Couch, Linh Dinh and special guest erica kaufman - had trouble counting them. We got to nine, and pondered.

lineage of Ginsberg's vocal warble

In response to PT #4, Tim Carmody writes: "Ginsberg's recordings of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience plays a larger role in pop music history than you might expect.

similarly addicted to Ginsberg LP

Mike Hennessey's blog, "A Crash Course in Counter-Intelligence", riffs off PoemTalk #4 helpfully:

I look forward to each new PoemTalk for the sharp insights of its panelists..., but this is the first episode that covers both a poet and a poem with which I’m intimately familiar...