Stephen Ratcliffe reads the entirety of one of his 1,000-page books

10-hour recording added to PennSound

Al Filreis

C o n t i n u u m, written between January 5, 2011 and September 30, 2013, is the fourth book in Stephen Ratcliffe's ongoing series of 1,000-page books, each written in 1,000 consecutive days.

Listening to Ratcliffe reading the words of the day on the page as it turns from one day to the next, one hears the poem's acoustic 'shape': the length and pitch of its syllables and words (plus those silences between them) sounding the air. What one doesn't hear is its visual 'shape': words set in Courier, font of equivalent spacing; the nine lines on the page divided into four stanzas; first three lines all the same length, followed by two pairs of indented lines (both first lines the same length, both second lines six spaces shorter), followed by two final lines (back on the left margin, both lines also the same length) (see photo of "9.30", top right).The visual 'shape' of the words on the page 'corresponds to' / 'performs' the 'shape' of 'things' / 'actions' / 'events' out there in the world, which are themselves being 'pointed toward' / 'simply recorded' / 'described' / 'transcribed' / 'enacted' / 'documented' / 'testified to' / 'celebrated' in the first and last stanzas and 'considered' / 'thought about' / 'reflected upon' in the two middle ones.

Ratcliffe's readings of the previous volumes in his series (HUMAN / NATURE, Remarks on Color / Sound, and Temporality), in collaboration with the musicians in Thingamajigs Performance Ensemble, are also available on PennSound. The texts of all four books are available at Editions Eclipse.

Here are the segments of the ten-hour audio recording of Ratcliffe performing Continuum. Zach Carduner engineered the recording and then edited and segmented it. Stephen Ratcliffe himself contributed part of the description/commentary above.

Part 1: 1.5 to 4.14 (56:50): MP3
Part 2: 4.15 to 7.23 (57:04): MP3
Part 3: 7.24 to 10.31 (58:14): MP3
Part 4: 11.1 to 2.8 (57:36): MP3
Part 5: 2.9 to 5.18 (56:37): MP3
Part 6: 5.19 to 8.26 (53:33): MP3
Part 7: 8.27 to 12.4 (55:10): MP3
Part 8: 12.5 to 3.14 (57:26): MP3
Part 9: 3.15 to 6.22 (55:21): MP3
Part 10: 6.23 to 9.30 (57:16): MP3

June 16, 2014

TAGS:

Stephen Ratcliffe

< 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.