audio practice

In audio practice III

Pre-Web network(s)

misc. poetry publications on cassette, ca. early 1990s

My previous entry should have acknowledged We Press as one among many independent and often disconnected DIY publishers of fringe literary audio. Over time, some of us got to know each other from afar, making contact through common friends via the mail or perhaps by chance at a performance. The pre-Web era, for those working in the no-commercial-potential realms, involved relying on grassroots, word of mouth micro networking to make productions known to a wider audience.

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

Topsy-Turvy:
videos + conversations + reviews
linked here.

Touch, love, then explain (PoemTalk #176)

John Ashbery, 'Some Trees'

PoemTalk

John Ashbery, photo by Walter Silver © Photography Collection, The New York Public Library

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Al Filreis brought together Abdulhamit Arvas, Dagmawi Woubshet, and Carlos Decena to talk about one of John Ashbery’s very early poems. “Some Trees,” preceded only by “The Painter” among verse written when Ashbery was an undergraduate at Harvard that the poet chose to keep and publish later, was written during the evening of November 16, 1948. Ashbery was just twnety-one years old. PennSound’s Ashbery page includes several recordings of him reciting this poem.

September 27, 2022

Spelling the amulet, the shape, the poem

CA Conrad's 'Amanda Paradise' and Jewish ritual bowls

Robert Eric Shoemaker

SATOR square — Sator square carved into a painted section of wall plaster, 2nd century CE, Roman, Corinium Museum, Cirencester.

Magic, bottom line, involves intention and effect. Maybe in that order. “The intentional use of language or of gesture for a desired effect” is a pretty basic definition of communication, too, but maybe I mean that communication is magic. As the contentious Crowley quote gives us in this commentary’s introductory text, magic is aligned with the practice (science or art) of causing an effect aligned with intention. Communication is a default action of humans, if we believe Chomsky, so we might as well imagine, for now, that magic is a practice of intention to create effect; in this case, the practice of language. Crafting poetry is a language practice, and the poem is one location where we may see language magic performed.

By performance, I mean the action of language or of ritual. Language is abstract, necessarily, and really becomes effective when used in speech or in writing. Externalized, language as speech or writing becomes an act. Writing must happen or there is no text.