Ashbery's silences sampled

'It reads a kind of ecopoetics back into the poet’s auditory performance.'

Al Filreis

In the spring of 2012, Christian Hawkey was invited to participate in a festival celebrating John Ashbery at the New School (called How to Continue: Ashbery Across the Arts). Each participant — poets, dancers, filmmakers — was invited to engage his or her work using a variety of media and disciplines, and Hawkey chose to explore his audio archives, or rather, the various recordings of John Ashbery that Pennsound has compiled over the years, beginning with his 1961 reading for the Living Theater.

He became especially interested in listening to the room tone and background noise in all the recordings: the recorded texture of the room, the sound made by the recording device itself, and the non-vocal presence of Ashbery himself (a page turning, lighting a cigarette, sipping from glass of water and swallowing). Working with a friend, the artist Simone Kearney, Hawkey scanned the roughly 45 extant recordings on Pennsound to find, in each one, a clip of “silence” — a brief 3-to-7-second non-vocal moment (longer proved impossible to find) between poems, or between commentary and poems, or between title and poem. They then assembled the clips into one audio file.

It was surprisingly difficult to do this, they found, since most sound engineers remove as much dead sound and background sound as possible, or they snip off the silence at the beginning or end of a reading. Hawkey became increasingly fascinated with this project because it reads a kind of ecopoetics back into the poet’s auditory (and by extension textual) performance: what is normally elided in recordings (background, room tone, noise) is here entirely foregrounded, and Hawkey thinks this is analogous to, true to, aspects of Ashbery’s own aesthetic, where junk speech or everyday speech (that which is often censored from normative “literary” writing) is, in his work, front and center, foregrounded as sociolect, various vernaculars, ideolects.

Here is the recording.

Christian Hawkey, star of When You Think Of It, is the author of three books of poetry: The Book of Funnels (Verse Press, 2004), Citizen Of (Wave Books, 2007) and Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). He also co-directs, with Rachel Levitsky, OoRS

Here, in order of appearance, are the recordings from which the silences and other forms of ambience were taken:

1. Reading at The Living Theatre, New York City, September 16, 1963

2. Reading at the Washington Square Art Gallery, NYC, August 23, 1964

3. Interview with Bruce Kawin on WKCR Radio, May 5, 1966

4. Reading at YM-YWHA, with an introduction by Richard Howard. Episode #23157: "The Poetry of John Ashbery," March 27, 1967

5. Appearing at Poetry's 19th Annual Poetry Day, WFMT Chicago, November 17, 1973

6. The Songs We Know Best, 1973

7. Potpourri of Poetry Reading at the Naropa Institute, Summer 1975

8. Reading for WBAI-FM, Produced by Susan Howe, New York, May 14 and June 7, 1975

9. Reading in Buffalo, October 15, 1975

10. Reading at Sanders Theater, Harvard University, sponsored by the Woodberry Poetry Room, May 16, 1976

11. Reading at Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, May 17, 1977

12. Appearing with Barbara Guest on P.E.N. Portraits, hosted by Anne Fremantle, WNYC, May 22, 1977

13. Segue Series Reading at the Ear Inn with Michael Lally, September 16, 1978

14. Reading at the Science Center, Harvard University, November 9, 1978

15. Lecture on Giorgio de Chirico at the Poetry Project, NYC, March 22, 1979

16. Reading at the University of Arizona, November 4, 1980

17. Reading at Harvard University as part of the Morris Gray Lecture Series, October 16, 1985

18. Reading at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, NM, November 20, 1985

19. WQXR Radio Program, New York, April 8, 1986

20. New Letters on the Air: a production of New Letters Magazine, University of Missouri, Kansas City, August 1986, Ashbery's Commencement Address to students at the Kansas City Art Institute

21. Reading in Boylston Hall, Harvard University, November 10, 1987

22. Recording for Radio Helicon, hosted by John Tranter, ABC, June 19, 1988

23. John Ashbery reads Eliot as part of "In Different Voices: T.S. Eliot at 100," organized by Richard Howard, Symphony Space, New York City, October 22, 1988

24. Reading at the Poets' Corner Vespers Service for the Induction of Wiliam Faulkner and Wallace Stevens, The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, NYC, October 22, 1989

25. Reading at 92nd Street Y with James Schuyler, November 11, 1989

26. Reading for the Modern Languages Auditorium, University of Arizona, Septeber 12, 1990

27. "Poets Reading in the Village", April 25, 1991

28. Reading excerpts from Flow Chart on WBAI Radio, New York. April 25, 1991

29. Reading and interview on The Book Show, 1992

29. Reading of "Syringa" for WNYC's 50th Anniversary, June 13, 1994

30. 1996 Lyrikmagasinet Reading; May 15

31. Reading for Wednesdays @ 4Plus, University at Buffalo, October 12, 1996

32. Appearing on BBC Radio 3, Contemporary American Poetry Program, July 24, 1999

33. From The Voice of the Poet, 2001

34. Reading at the Kelly Writers House, March 25, 2002

35. In discussion with Al Filreis, March 26th, 2002 must switch (this is before Kelly writer’s house)

36. From The Key West Literary Seminar, 2003

37. John Ashbery, Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series, Beinecke Library, September 20, 2006

38. Mo Pitkin's, New York, June 6, 2007

39. Reading Pierre Martory at "Poets in the Sheep Meadow Fold, AWP, New York, February 2, 2008

40. Reading at Haverford College, February 19, 2008

41. Reading and Forum at The New School, April 15, 2008

42. from State of the Union: a Poetry Reading, at the CUNY Graduate Center, October 30, 2008

43. New York Review of Books Podcast, 2009

44. Reading at St. Mark's, Introduced by Charles North, New York, May 14, 2009

45. Reading for the Tibor de Nagy Gallery 60th Anniversary Program at The New School, New York, January 31, 2011

February 10, 2013

TAGS:

< previous post next post >

RSS feed | subscribe by email

DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.