New York Public Theater
Language/Noise Festival, at New York Public Theater
January 11, 1982
Foreman Introduction (transcription) (mp3 of this segment):
I didn't think it was gonna be quite dramatic –– “to tell you something about the writing,” I don't know. I feel it would be a little pretentious of me even to begin doing that. There are two reasons why I'm here, I suppose ... The other reason I'm here is because a great thing happened to me about a year and a half ago. I've spent my life being in theater, trying to keep up with what's going on in literature. I was very shocked after being out of the country about six months last year, coming back and picking up a copy of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine at a a bookstore in SoHo and coming upon a whole developed literary school that I had known nothing of that totally knocked me out.
And it was an experience to me, like the experience I had back in the early sixties when I first ran into the first manifestations of minimal art. Because I had been a kid very interested in painting, seeing abstract expressions and, okay, all of a sudden, minimal art. Wow. I thought for the first time, I'm living in a world where there are people who, you know, seem to be living on the same planet, the same yearnings, the same stuff going on that seemed logical to me. I had the same feeling when I encountered L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, led by publications like Roof and This on the West Coast, and various publications that all these poets have been putting out the last, I don't know, 10 years.
What knocked me out about it? I don't know. It's difficult to say. I’ve been thinking a lot about aesthetics for the last 15 years, but mostly to try to explain to me what I want to do in the theater. And I came upon poetry and well, you know, we shouldn't really call it poetry anymore, but it is, writing, you know, that did what I'm waiting to see done. Well, what I been waiting to see done. There is the classical description, classical contrast between poetry and prose, right? Where you're supposed to look through prose, like the window, and you look through prose, like in a novel, to see the world. And, you know, the language is supposed to disappear as you look through it and see the configuration, the activities of the world past that. Then there is poetry, which is supposed to stop you on the page, so that you're not looking through the language, you are stopping and seeing the words do their work and seeing the words create their own structures, their own music, and so forth.
Now, these L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets for me, aren't really poets. They're doing something else. They are “language” writers. And the next step –– okay, prose, look through the prose, see the world; poetry, stopping you with the page, seeing the language, working on the page. This is very sort of vague, but this third category of meaning that these people have evoked has something to do with the world now being me in my life with my given consciousness, all life going on around me in full spectrum, my awareness. And somehow, it's as if for me, this spectrum, this hum of the totality of my life, my experience. Somehow the page is here, and the words of these L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets picks out ping, ping, ping, ping from different parts of my own field, little pieces, and makes a structure that re-evokes for me, in a more dynamic, more alive sense –– this total potential of my lived field.
When you listen to it, then when it's read, seems to me, you know, obvious. I mean, I feel pretentious in telling you, telling a lot of you this, like some of you, perhaps it's helpful for . . . When you listen, it's not a matter of course of trying to follow, see where is it going, but. rather, rather, I think a matter of bringing yourself, bringing your whole, you know –– Can you, can you postulate in your head for a second –– okay –– my whole experience, my whole life, my whole knowledge of the world –– okay, it's all there. I bring it there for a moment, like a big balloon around my head. Now this language writing somehow works on that balloon that you bring present from the start. Filling it in like that, with that kind of music, with that kind of noise, then in the end makes you more present to all your own potential excitement.
And just the other day, just, because I just came back again after being out of the country for six months, and saw on the newsstands in the bookstores, the new, copy of volume four of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which I highly recommend, which is full of articles that will do amazing things for your understanding of this work and the general potential of art at this moment. One of the articles is by sort of an elder statement of this movement. Who has started doing things related to what current L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets are doing, I don't know, about 30, 20 years ago. Jackson Mac Low. He speaks of it. He suggests it shouldn't be called language writing. It should be called –– What is it? –– Charles –– yeah, perceiver. Perceiver, right? [Perceiver-centered writing.] You see this balloon of you ––you –– your balloon is being knocked out of bed, made giddy through that being done to your head.
To me that is exhilarating and lucid dealing with what is not <inaudible>. And that's what art is about. And that's why The Public Theater is having this double event for a group of artists who I think are the –– really the most exciting young writing artists in America.
side 1: MP3
Richard Foreman: introduction
James Sherry @ 8:00
Hannah Weiner w/ Charles Bernstein and Sherry reading Clairvoyant Journal: @15:53 (mp3 of this segment)
Peter Seaton and Michael Gottlieb @24:11
side 2: MP3
Ray DiPalma
DiPalma & Bernstein, reading Legend (collaboration also with Ron Silliman) — @ 11min
Bernstein, “Azoot D’Puund” @19:50
Bruce Andrews @23
The poetry performances were accompanied by music by the Sonic Youth Band and David Rosenbloom’s Experimental Chorus and Orchestra
Originally published by Widemouth tapes in Baltimore as a cassette.
reference tape without noise reduction at UCSD: here (1) and here (2)