Friday, March 27 — Performance 1: Jackson Mac Low and Ann Tardos, Susan Sontag

Anne Tardos and Jackson Mac Low in Rhinecliff, NY, 1981.

While we'll see the idea of poetry and performance (or better yet, poetry in performance) made manifest in many different ways by many different poets over the course of the many classes we'll be spending on the topic, there's perhaps no better place to start than with Jackson Mac Low.

While we do no harm in calling Mac Low's ambitious hybrid works poetry, there's a lot more going on in them than what we typically think of poetry. There's a significant compositional emphasis placed upon aleatory procedures, a lá John Cage, with many of his pieces being written through chance operations (things like coin flips, cards drawn from a deck, tossing the I Ching, etc.) or conceptual games (like anagrams and acrostics), and this spirit of randomness carries over into the live realization of these works, which frequently give reader/performers a tremendous amount of interpretive leeway. At the same time, we also see very careful attention paid to scoring the performance of other pieces, with intricate instructions concerning the tempo, pitch, and duration. I've selected a number of Mac Low pieces, often presented with explanations and/or instructions, to give you a sense of the breadth of his poetics, and provided PennSound recordings (of work in the PDFs or similar pieces from related series) as well.  In some cases, I've reproduced sections covering certain series from two different volumes — the earlier Representative Works (published in 1985), and a later posthumous collection, Thing of Beauty (edited by Mac Low's widow and frequent collaborator, Anne Tardos) — so there might be some overlap. (n.b. each linked title below is a separate PDF)

Asymmetries

• Asymmetry 1 [MP3]
• Asymmetry 4 [MP3]
• Asymmetry 12 [MP3]

Gathas

• Milarepa Gatha [MP3] (Mac Low / Tardos) / [MP3] (Mac Low)
• Free Gatha 1 & 2 [MP3] (Mac Low / Tardos)
• Free Gatha 1 [MP3] (Mac Low / Charles Bernstein / Nick Piombino)
• see also: The 8-Voice Black Tarantula Crossword Gatha  [MP3]

A Vocabulary for Annie Brigitte Gilles Tardos
Is That Wool Hat My Hat?
Daily Life
Night Walk
More Recent Things

I don't want to overwhelm you with readings, but did want to present one standalone piece by Anne Tardos that I find particularly charming: 1975's "Refrigerator Defrosting": [MP3] / with vocal improvisation [MP3]

Tardos' drawing of the recording setup, "the score as it were."

Finally, to give some framing to today's readings — and our unit on performance in general — I'd like you to take a look at Susan Sontag's groundbreaking essay, "Happenings: an Art of Radical Juxtaposition," from 1966's Against Interpretation: [PDF]

Wednesday, March 25 — Poetic Physicality

CAConrad, purveyor of (soma)tic poetry rituals, at Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market.

As we make the transition from thinking about poetic practices influenced by technology to poetry in performance, an understanding of the body and its role in the poetic practice will be useful. We'll spend Wednesday's class considering this question from a number of perspectives.

First up, we'll take a look at "The Grain of the Voice," a classic essay by Roland Barthes, which considers the specific place of the body, as the physical manifestation of the speaking subject, in light of some of the ideas we've already discussed during our foundations class on Barthes: [PDF]

From there, we'll move on to the work of CAConrad, who's pioneered the field of somatic poetics over the last several years. We'll read a few excerpts from his 2012 book A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics, which begins with "The Right to Manifest Manifesto," where Conrad gives some background on the practice:

I cannot stress enough how much this mechanistic world, as it becomes more and more efficient, resulting in ever increasing brutality, has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry.

(Soma)tic poetry is a praxis I've developed to more fully engage the everyday through writing. Soma is an Indo-Persian word which means "the divine." Somatic is Greek. Its meaning translates as "the tissue", or "nervous system." The goal is to coalesce soma and somatic, while triangulating patterns of experience with the world around us. Experiences that are unorthodox steps in the writing process can shift the poet's perception of the quotidian, if only for a series of moments. This offers an opportunity to see the details clearer. Through music, dirt, food, scent, taste, in storms, in bed, on the subway and at the grocery store, (Soma)tic exercises and the poems that result are just waiting to be utilized or invented, everywhere, and anytime.

We'll read several somatic rituals and the poems that they yielded; recordings of select poems can be found below: [PDF]

• distorted torque of FLORA'S red: [MP3]
• a little orange bag believe it or not CAN hold all that remains: [MP3]
• we're on the brink of UTTER befuddlement yellow hankie style: [MP3]
• say it with grEEn paint for the comfort and healing of their wounds: [MP3]
• rehab saved his life but drugs saved mine at the blue HOUR: [MP3]
• smells of summer crotch smells of new car's purple MAjestY: [MP3]
• from the womb not the anus WHITE asbestos snowfall on 911: [MP3]

• Guessing My Death: [MP3]

Another poet who's working with physicality in a very different way is Jordan Scott, who uses his stutter as a key part of "Flub and Utter: A Poetic Memoir of the Mouth," an innovated film/text/performance experience, which you can watch here: [link]

Finally, it might be worthwhile to consider a very different sort of interaction between sound and the body: ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, which has been a controversial topic over the past several years. Defined as "a perceptual phenomenon characterized as a distinct, pleasurable tingling sensation in the head, scalp, back, or peripheral regions of the body in response to visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or cognitive stimuli," some people consider ASMR to be pseudoscience, while others swear by their experiences. In addition to the Wikipedia page on the phenomenon, VICE offers up one of the first mainstream media articles on ASMR.

Monday, March 23 — Media Considerations / Close Listening

We'll kick off the second half of the semester with a hodgepodge of readings focused on the aesthetic potentials of various media and their historic connection to poetry in various guises. You'll see a lot of familiar names return in these various readings, as well as some poets and artists who'll be coming up in the second half of the semester. Some of these readings will largely be aimed towards providing background information and historical contexts, but there'll be a lot for us to discuss as well.

First, we'll consider the role of public readings in shaping mid-century poetic movements. Daniel Kane's excellent book, All Poets Welcome: the Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s will provide us with a short history of the reading series at Les Deux Mégots and Le Metro, which were important precursors to the St. Mark's Poetry Project. You can stop reading when you get to "Harassment of the Arts at Le Metro" on pg. 48, though that's an interesting story as well: [PDF]

Ed Sanders' drawing of the Peace Eye mimeograph, which
was used to publish Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts

Next, we'll piggy-back on the example of mimeographed (or Rexographed) journals like Poets at Les Deux Mégots and Poets at Le Metro to read a little about the traditions of underground presses and journals facilitated through the use of business technology like the mimeograph (a precursor to the photocopier). Specifically, we'll read a few pieces from Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips' excellent survey, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing 1960–1980: the co-authors' "A Little History of the Mimeograph Revolution" [PDF] and Jerome Rothenberg's "Pre-Face" to the volume [PDF]. A few online archives of small press journals that you can browse at your leisure:

• Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts [link]
• Yugen [link]
• L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E [link]
• Alcheringa [link]
• Roof [link]

Moving back into the audio realm, I'm including a brief piece by Charles Bernstein, "Hearing Voices," which lays out some of the key ideas to his notion of "close listening," in a more concise and up-to-date way than his classic introduction to the volume of the same name where those concepts were first codified a generation ago: [PDF].

You'll also want to take a look at the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective on John Giorno's "Dial-A-Poem" project  — put together as part of the Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language exhibition several years back — which allows you to interact with the GPS archives as one might have in the late 60s and early 70s when the phone-based poetry service was in existence.

While we're speaking of media manipulations of the human voice towards aesthetic ends, we should also consider a few classic experimental compositions of the late 1960s. All three pieces feature a (relatively) simple text that's then altered through processes of replication that takes advantages of the imprecise characteristics of the recording medium itself to produce radical revisions of the material.

• First, we have two tape-phase pieces by Steve Reich, It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). You can read more about the pieces at the links above, and listen to each below:

• Next, we have Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room (1969), which you can read about at the link above and listen to here. Lucier's piece recently inspired a 21st century visual version, "Sitting in Stagram," which applies the same aesthetic ideas to a different medium.

Finally, because we already have so much to discuss, I offer up these last two things purely as voluntary supplemental reading — something to go back to after the semester is over, perhaps:

• Hua Hsu's Artforum essay, "Thanks for the Memorex," on the history of Sony's Walkman and the larger intellectual property issues raised by its existence: [link (requires registration)][PDF]
• Museum of Obsolete Media: for every physical medium that stands the test of time, there are so many that have failed

Friday, March 13 — Song 3: the Fugs, Lou Reed, Jim Carroll

The Fugs play in New York City, 1967.

For our last class on song and poetry, we'll shift gears a little bit into the realm of rock and roll.

First, we go back to poet and publisher (most famously of the notorious Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts), Ed Sanders with a selection of tracks from the Fugs, the poetry-rock band Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and Ken Weaver founded with members of the Holy Modal Rounders (and a variety of other musicians) in 1963, and who continue to perform to this day. Their repertoire included both original compositions — which placed an emphasis on political messages and sexual liberation — and settings of classic (and contemporary) poetry:

"I'm Doin All Right" (with lyrics written by Ted Berrigan)

"Kill for Peace" (can't be embedded, but click through to witness Tuli Kupferberg tormenting New Yorkers)


"Morning, Morning"


"When the Mood of the Music Changes"


"Crystal Liason"


"Johnny Pissoff Meets the Red Angel"



"I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Rock" (a setting of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl")


"Ah, Sunflower" (a setting of William Blake's poem, which Ginsberg also "covered")


"Dover Beach" (a setting of Matthew Arnold's poem)

Lou Reed from the photoshoot that would provide covers for his albums Transformer and The Blue Mask.

Next up, we'll take a look at a few selections from Lou Reed, the former frontman for the Velvet Underground — house band at Warhol's Factory — and a respected solo artist in his own right. While, perhaps, too many rock stars have literary ambitions, Reed had a legitimate bookish pedigree, having studied with doomed poet Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse as an undergrad, and Schwartz would have a lasting influence on his work, along with writers like William Burroughs and Edgar Allan Poe. I've scanned some lyrics from Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed (1993) and embedded a YouTube playlist below with each track, which spans both Reed's solo career and his years with the Velvets: [PDF]

Finally, we'll look at a few videos by Jim Carroll, the New York School poet and memoirist (cf. The Basketball Diaries, made into a film in the late 1990s, and its follow-up, Forced Entries), who had a sideline gig leading the punky new wave Jim Carroll band:


"People Who Died" (watch a live version at punk mecca Mabuhay Gardens here; also cf. Ted Berrigan's "People Who Died" [MP3], which inspired Carroll's track)


"Catholic Boy"

Wednesday, March 11 — Song 2: Brown, Sanders, Bernstein

We start off today by continuing to look at poets' use of the ballad form, and other song-inflected poetic forms, with Lee Ann Brown. Specifically we'll look at a number of poems from her 2003 book, The Sleep that Changed Everything, including several that also appear in her song cycle, 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Links to PennSound MP3s are provided when available, and the readings are here: [PDF]

• Ballad of Amiri B. (60's)
• Ballad of New Orleans
• Ballad of Vertical Integration [MP3]
• Ballad of Phoebe Steele [MP3]
• Ballad of Susan Smith [MP3, followed by "Ballad of Vertical Integration"]
• Red Fox [MP3]
• 3 Rings [MP3]
• Vision Crown [MP3]

You should also listen to some of the other tracks from 13th Sunday at your leisure — specifically the suite of Girl Scout songs in the middle — to get a broader sense of the materials from which Brown is drawing in the sequence. You can read my 2008 write-up of the song cycle here.

On Friday, we'll be looking at Ed Sanders' 1960s poetry rock group, the Fugs, but today we're looking at a later project by the poet. In 1992, Sanders conceived of a wide-ranging poetic projecting centered on the hymn "Amazing Grace," written by British poet and clergyman John Newton in 1779. He wrote to many of his poet friends, asking them to contribute their own reworkings of the piece, which is not only a fine example of traditional ballad meter, but also what's known as "Protestant hymn meter" — basically, alternating iambic lines of four and three feet (this is the form that the vast majority of Emily Dickinson's poetry is set in, by the way). The end result is The New Amazing Grace, which was first publicly performed in 1994 in New York City. I'd like you to read Sanders' introduction and the sequence itself — the appendix with letters from the contributors is interesting, but not essential (though feel free to read if you'd like). Here are a two poets performing their contributions to the collection:

Allen Ginsberg's "New Stanzas for 'Amazing Grace'"

Lee Ann Brown, "Three Graces" (includes Brown's "Amazing Grits" and two variations by Bernadette Mayer)  [MP3]


Finally, we've already encountered Charles Bernstein's work a few weeks back, and we'll come across it again before the term's over. For today, I'd like you to look at his "The Ballad of the Girlie Man" [MP3].

Monday, March 9 — Song 1: Blake/Ginsberg, Koch/Ginsberg, Adam

While Enlightenment verse reached an almost-rococo focus on metrical perfection, that came at the cost of emotion and energy, producing work that was smart but somewhat bloodless. It's not until the Romantic period that we see a truly unbridled emotional poetry emerge, and not surprisingly, the name that they gave this verse was often "song."

Perhaps the finest early example of this are William Blake's companion volumes Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.  You've almost certainly encountered these works before in your academic careers — if nothing else, then "The Lamb" and "The Tiger" — but we're going to consider these works in a different fashion, namely through a record released by Allen Ginsberg in 1970, Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, Tuned by Allen Ginsberg. Featuring musical settings of 21 poems by Ginsberg and performed by an all-star group of jazz and folk musicians including Don Cherry, Elvin Jones and Bob Dorough, this album was recorded before a live audience in December 1969. We've put together a page for the record at PennSound, where the individual tracks are accompanied by links to lithographs at the Blake Archives so you can read along as you listen.

While the Ginsberg/Blake album will be our main focus, I'd like to take a look at a few more examples of poets working in a more traditional fashion with song and balladry, starting with Kenneth Koch and Allen Ginsberg's "Popeye and William Blake Fight to the Death," a live improvisation at the St. Mark's Poetry Project on May 9, 1979 [MP3] (n.b. Koch's instructions to Ginsberg regarding the proper metrics of the ballad at the beginning of the track).

Finally, we have San Francisco's marvelous and mystical Helen Adam, who's perhaps best known for her wonderfully eccentric lyric opera, San Francisco's Burning, first performed on stage and then memorably produced by Charles Ruas for WBAI-FM's "The Audio-Experimental Theater" in 1977. We'll take a look at two pieces by Adam with audio accompaniment: "The Fair Young Wife" [MP3] and "Cheerless Junkie's Song":

March 4–6: Midterm Showcase

On Wednesday and Friday we'll take a break from our readings to spend a little time with the 30 second audio collages you've put together for your midterm projects. I'll add a playlist to this thread so that we can keep track of everyone's pieces. I've done the math and we should have 4.5 minutes for each student, which includes listening to the track and commenting, so remember that if you go over 30 seconds that'll cut into your response time.

If you need to reacquaint yourself with the assignment requirements, they're here. Don't forget that your write-up will be due, and your audio piece will need to be posted to Soundcloud, prior to Wednesday's class, regardless of whether we listen to your piece on Wednesday or Friday.

(n.b. please post your track to our Facebook group as well so we won't miss anyone's pieces)