Monday, April 20 — Sound and Subversion 3: Outside the US

Caroline Bergvall in performance, 2014.

As we near the end of our semester's work, I wanted to take a little time to consider the work of a few non-American poets whose work pays special attention to sound and performance.

First, Caroline Bergvall, whose peripatetic lifestyle — born in Germany to French and Norwegian parents, Bergvall has lived in Geneva, Paris, Oslo, and New York before settling in London — plays an important role in the development of her poetics. Language is first and foremost a constructed thing, and a living construct at that, ripe for deconstruction, contradiction, reconfiguration and rediscovery. Specifically, in Bergvall's hands, the English language is a most malleable medium, which is brought into contact with its own roots (both Middle English and the Latinate and Germanic tongues that helped shape it), yielding spectacular results in her "Shorter Chaucer Tales," which reintent the Canterbury Tales in modern ways. One other idea to bear in mind is Bergvall's multidisciplinary approach to poetry. She bills herself as both a poet and a text-based artist, and the spirit of live performance, as well as a responsiveness to texts of various media (cf. "Untitled" and "Fuses," which respond to song and film, respectively) permeate her writings: [PDF]

• The Host Tale [MP3]
• The Summer Tale (Deus Hic 1) [MP3]
• The Franker Tale (Deus Hic 2) [MP3]
• Untitled (Roberta Flack can clean your soul — out!) [MP3]
• Fuses (after Carolee Schneemann) [MP3]
• Doll (starts in PDF after "Fuses" on pg. 71, recording doesn't exactly match text) [MP3]

(clockwise from bottom-left) Steve Evans (back to camera), Jaap Blonk, Ken Sherwood, yours truly, Steve
McLaughlin, Jeff Boruszak, Michael Nardone (plus Al Filreis' wife, Jane) in having tacos in Austin, May 2013.

Next, we'll look at a few pieces by Dutch modern-day avant-garde troubadour, Jaap Blonk, whose aesthetic journey began as a free-jazz saxophonist and evolved into musical/textual performances involving electronics before he came to a performance style focused solely on the voice, and his voice is an astounding instrument, fully matching his imposing six-and-a-half foot frame. We'll look at three pieces by Blonk, along with a few performances of others work.

• Let's Go Out (text with audio, another recording here [MP3])
• Sound (text with audio)
• What the President Will Say and Do [MP3]

• Kurt Schwitters' "Sonata in Primordial Sound" or "Ursonate" [MP3]
• Theo van Doesburg's "Letter Sound Images" [MP3]

A detail from Martín Gubbins' "White Pages."

Finally, because of the overlap between concrete poetry and sound poetry, I thought it might be fun to take a look at "Antología Poesía Visual," a marvelous anthology of Chilean visual poetry curated by Nico Vassilakis for Jacket2 in 2014, which contains work by Anamaría Briede, Gregorio Fontén, Kurt Folch, Martín Barkero, and Martín Gubbins.