sound poetry

Charlie Morrow visited the Kelly Writers House recently and gave a packed house quite a performance. As usual, of course, he got us involved in making meaning of “mere” sound. The program is further described here. Soon — but not yet — links to both the audio and video recordings will be available at that page and also at PennSound.

This is Part III of a four-part essay that appears in Portuguese in Deslocamentos Críticos (Lisbon: Babel; São Paulo, Itaú Cultural, 2011) under the title "Obra Sonora Poética: 1980-2010." Read Part I here and Part II here.

Brazilian Poetic Sound Work: 1980-2010

III.

“Barulho”’s suggestion of the physicality of poetry through both its sound and sense resonates anew in the “cross-platform” work of Ricardo Aleixo.[11] In Gullar, sound functions within Poundian melopoeia, plucking noises, rhythm, and melodies out of printed words via poetic devices including rhyme, assonance, and alliteration (even as it reaches to involve the body of the reader through the idea of breath). Aleixo’s poetry combines these devices with sonic devices in means and media beyond the realm of the printed page. His most important medium may be his own performing body and voice. Through performance, he actualizes the movement, voice, lyric self, and voice-body-sound relationship that Gullar’s poem evokes.

Last year, I wrote an essay on sound in contemporary Brazilian poetry that was published in Portuguese in Deslocamentos Críticos (Lisbon: Babel; São Paulo, Itaú Cultural, 2011). I am glad to share the English version of the essay here over the next several posts. My great thanks to Rumos Literatura do Itaú Cultural, the literary criticism program of Itaú Cultural, for their support of this research.

Brazilian Poetic Sound Work: 1980-2010

I.

In the course of performing Um Ano Entre Os Humanos, poet Ricardo Aleixo (b. 1960) recites and sings.¹ He plays guitar and bits of hardware. He dj’s from a laptop. Some of these sounds are scripted; others, improvised. All complement the visual aspects of the performance, which include video, a simple set of a chair and table holding just the laptop, a microphone, and percussion instruments, and Aleixo and his co-performer’s both choreographed and spontaneous movements. Sound contrasts, however, with the piece’s most striking visual symbol: the poemanto, a large black cloth emblazoned with white letters that Aleixo wraps himself in and animates for part of the performance, and that appears in a video that plays for part of the piece.

What would it sound like if you compressed all the Beatles UK LPs into a single one-hour mp3? The compression rate would have to be 800%. Conceiving of this as sound art, Steve McLaughlin did just that a few years ago. It’s posted to the WFMU web site. So go here, settle in, and hear nearly everything the Beatles released in one hour. There's a certain strange hepped-up beauty to it, I have to say. It's like a super-fast running of my youth, an aural brain chute. Someone at WFMU then decided to un-compress several of the singles. So at the same site you can click on links to mp3s of “Julia,” “I Will,” and “Revolution” back at normal speed but eerily distorted from having been through the first compression.

PennSound's Maggie O'Sullivan page includes a recording of a discussion with Penn students in Charles Bernstein's "studio 111" seminar. Michael Nardone has transcribed the session now and here is a portion:

PENN STUDENT:
Thank you for your close reading, Ms. O’Sullivan. I was wondering if you could describe the relationship between performing your work and writing it.

O’SULLIVAN:
Well, it depends on, every situation is different. Performing it is another opportunity to re-engage with the text at different levels, and another opportunity to negotiate the text on the page.

As you’ve probably heard, I often find my work is quite difficult for me to read from the page. Writing it, I hear the sounds often in my ear. But having to perform it, all the difficulties emerge. There’s lots of disconnectiveness and disjunctiveness that is kind of working against how I sort of, how sometimes it seems it may be read.

PENN STUDENT:
Would you consider, sort of, maybe, performing it to be more body intensive than, I guess, writing it.

O’SULLIVAN:
Well, writing is a body-intensive activity, totally. Absolutely, totally. The whole body is engaged in the act of writing. Whether it’s on the computer, with using a pen in the hands. The breath is involved in all activities. But with the performing, there are others that you have to connect with, and the place of performing also figures on it.

PENN STUDENT:
A number of your poems integrate different languages, musical notes, pictures, and streaks, and they push the possibilities of poetic forms on the page. I was wondering whether this is supposed to conflict with the words, compliment them, or maybe even both.

O’SULLIVAN:
The words working as part of all this kind of radical shifting—

At the recent gathering on conceptual poetry in Tucson, Tracie Morris performed a piece based on a single sentence she heard spoken in a stentorian, didactic-pedagogical "Afro-Shakespearean voice" - "It all started when we were brought here as slaves from Africa." She creates a sound poem of the line in her unique way of singing-uttering. You can watch a video of the whole reading at which this piece is the final performance. Better yet, listen to the audio-only mp3 I created from the video, which is now linked to Tracie Morris's PennSound page.

If it's true, as Bob Cobbing put it in 1969, that "Sound poetry dances, tastes, has shape," then those of us who have been teaching poetry-as-printed (poetry on the page, unsounded poetry, what have you...) would presumably have to add at least these three dimensions to the realms of approach in the classroom. Which is perhaps too elaborate a way of saying that to have been prepared to teach words on a page, no matter how complex, is not to be prepared to help present a language as a kind of dance, as something to be tasted, as something that has a physical shape.

Cobbing again: "Leonardo da Vinci asked the poet to give him something he might see and touch and not just something he could hear. Sound poetry seems a to me to be achieving this aim."* Same problem here, I'd suggest. See and even hear we can do, with work. But touch? That's difficult. (And although seeing a printed poem - really seeing it as a thing, in William Carlos Williams's sense ("Poems aren't beautiful statements. They're things!") - is something we think we do in a close reading when often it is not what we're really doing.)

I just received a copy of English Studies in Canada volume 33, issue 4. (It’s dated December 2007 and so I assume it’s been delayed.) This is a special issue edited by Louis Cabri and Peter Quartermain, with a “digital sound editor” — namely PennSound’s own Mike Hennessey. The issue is titled “On Discreteness: Event and Sound in Poetry.” The table of contents is tantalizing, including: Bob Perelman on listening to WCW’s “The Sea-Elephant,” Brook Houglum on Kenneth Rexroth and radio reading, Brian Reed on Gertrude Stein speaking, Sarah Parry on the “LP era” in poetry, and Geoffrey Hlibchuk on the relationship between shortwave number stations and twentieth-century poetry. Can’t wait to read this stuff! And listen: comes with a CD of recordings edited by Hennessey.

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.