Wednesday, April 1 — Talk Poetics: Cage, Antin, Anderson, Ranaldo

Our investigation of poetry in performance takes another new turn today as we consider a group of artists and works that might loosely be grouped together under the umbrella of "talk poetics," though within that concept we'll find a multiplicity of expressive possibilities.

To start, we'll return to our old friend, John Cage, and one of his best-known works, the 1959 album Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form and Electronic Music (Smithsonian Folkways), recorded with his frequent collaborator, David Tudor. The concept behind this work is relatively simple: Cage would read ninety microstories of various lengths — you've already encountered some of these pieces in "How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run" at the start of the semester — fitting each one into a one minute span (which necessitated slowing down or speeding up his delivery of certain pieces), while in a separate studio, Tudor produced a ninety-minute soundtrack that included both live and pre-recorded performances of Cage's compositions, including Concert for Piano and Orchestra and Fontana Mix. Both men worked simultaneously and independently of one another, and without rehearsing in advance of the session.

We'll listen to the first side of the first disc of the two-LP set: [MP3] You can read the album's liner notes here. Here's a link to Eddie Kohler's wonderful interactive online Indeterminacy site; the first story is here. You can generate random stories by clicking the asterisk on any page. Stories that continue across multiple pieces are interlinked using ¶ and §.  The easiest way to proceed directly through the stories as you listen is to change the URL by hand (i.e. make the number at the end of the address one higher and then hit enter).

While Cage's source texts in Indeterminacy are pre-composed, poet and critic David Antin has made a name for himself through the medium of talk poems improvised on the spot, with topics or themes that are often related to the specifics of the place in which he's performing. Antin then consults tape recordings of these performances to produce written texts that constitute the published versions of his work. While Antin started out working in a more traditional manner, he developed this more extemporaneous compositional method when he grew frustrated with the limitations of reading the same texts in public over and over again. We'll consider Antin's piece, "The Noise of Time," from two different angles: first, video of his 1994 improvised talk at the University of Colorado (you don't need to watch the entire video, but maybe listen for five or ten minutes, or as long as you see fit):

Then we'll read his published version of "The Noise of Time," from Boston Review in 2001: [link]

To close, we'll switch gears into more of a rock mode, starting with a few select tracks by performance artist Laurie Anderson, taken from her 1982 crossover album, Big Science.  Most of these pieces were also part of United States, an ambitious longform (i.e. running more than four hours) multimedia performance piece which Anderson performed widely throughout the early 1980s. In these pieces, Anderson combines her characteristic sprechstimme with acoustic instruments, synthesizers (mostly the Oberheim OB-Xa), devices that Anderson designed herself (primarily a doctored violin with magnetic tape stretched across the bow and a playback head built into the body) and digital processing units including pitch-shifters and vocoders.

O Superman (for Massenet)


From The Air


Let X = X / It Tango


Big Science


And finally, here's "the Bridge," a performance piece by Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, which features an accompaniment of live guitar and manipulated loops:

Monday, March 30 — Performance 2: Anne Waldman and Hannah Weiner

Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan at the Naropa Institute, 1976.

We're staying in New York City for our second day on poetry in performance, and while the time period's the same, we're shifting aesthetic tribes from the Fluxus-inspired performance poetry scene to look at two poets who came to prominence as part of the New York School's later permutations: Anne Waldman and Hannah Weiner.

We begin with "Memorial Day," a collaborative work by Waldman and Ted Berrigan written especially for a joint reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in May 1971.  You can listen to their sole performance of the poem in its entirety here [MP3] and read more about the poem (and the convoluted history of this lost and recovered recording) here.  I've also chosen a small group of poems by Waldman that demonstrate that while performance considerations have been a key part of her poetics from the very beginning, her approach to form and the poem's appearance on the page have evolved over her long career.  The first five poems are from 1970's Baby Breakdown, while the remainder are from her selected poems, Helping the Dreamer, and date from the 70s and 80s.  Certainly, the voice remains an important center in Waldman's writing in the 21st century (cf. more recent poems like "Rogue State": MP3).

Selected poems by Waldman: [PDF]

• "Hi Everyone!"
• "Non Stop"
• "* Baby Breakdown *"
• "Night Poem"
• "* & Now It's Time *"
• "Fast Speaking Woman" [excerpt: MP3]
• "Mirror Meditation"

Waldman reads from "Fast Speaking Woman"

Waldman's New Wave anti-nukes pop song, "Uh Oh, Plutonium"

Moving forward just a few years, we'll take a look at the work of Hannah Weiner (right), who emerged in the cusp between the New York School's second and third generations, but ultimately aimed for a different aesthetic, starting with Mac Low-esque performance pieces and staged happenings before moving into forms that prefigured Language writing of the mid-to-late-70s, specifically her "clairvoyant" style (in part originating in her schizophrenia) through which she experienced aural and visual hallucinations of words and phrases that she transcribed into poetry.  To authentically render these multi-vocal texts, Weiner had to devise unique styles of layout, making use of all-caps text and italics, along with super- and sub-scripts.  First, we'll take a look at a few pieces from the marvelous Hannah Weiner's Open House: [PDF]

• "Hannah Weiner at Her Job"
• from Code Poems: "Romeo and Juliet" (see below)
• "The words in CAPITALS..." (an explanation of Weiner's "clair-style")
• "The Zero One"
• "Radcliffe Women and Guatemalan Women"

Then, from her best known work, Clairvoyant Journal we'll look at excerpts from March and April — you'll find a reproduction at the link above — which correspond to recordings of these sections performed by Regina Beck, Sharon Mattlin, Peggy De Coursey, and Hannah Weiner released on a 1978 New Wilderness Audiographics cassette: March [MP3] / April [MP3].

Additionally, you can watch a performance of "Romeo and Juliet" by Kaplan Harris, Rodrigo Toscano, and Laura Elrick about a third of the way through the first video on this page.

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].