How I Made a Podcast

Last year, I was tasked with a weekend project not unlike the audio documents you'll be making as part of your finals: put together an "audio essay" to be shared as part of PennSound's 10th anniversary celebration. The resulting piece, the product of maybe 6–8 hours' work, ran just over nine and a half minutes, and you can listen to it below:

I thought I'd share some notes on my process with the hopes that it might be helpful for you as you get started on your finals.


1. Outline your basic concept

I wanted my piece to generally break down into two basic sections: first, a short discussion of how I came to work at PennSound and some of the notable discoveries I made during my early years there, and second, discussion of a few memorable sessions I'd recorded with a few favorite poets.


2. Gather and prep raw materials

I decided upon the recordings that I wanted to use for my piece and downloaded them from PennSound, then used Audacity to make the smaller cuts I'd be using. Note that I've used simplified yet descriptive file names for the cuts I've made, distinguishing the order I want to use them in, or just their contents.

For the section mimicking several Christian Bök tracks playing simultaneously, I made a sub-mix to export as its own MP3 file. The blue shape under the last track is contouring its volume level to create a fade-in. Thought it's not easy to see, I've also stereo-panned the two beatboxing tracks relatively hard left and right, while the "lead vocal" goes closer to the middle.

Here, while trimming down a short snippet from the Ashbery/Lauterbach "Litany," you can see that I've left  room tone (i.e. "silence;" the noise floor of tape hiss) on either side, so that I can seamlessly integrate it with my own voice-over when stitching the track together.

 

3. Prepare your script

It's much easier to record your voice-over when you're reading from a pre-prepared script, so take the time to write things down in advance, and mark out where your insertions will go as well (as you can see below). Even though you're free to improvise when recording, it'll help you work around tricky diction if you have clear reading copy to work from.

4. Record and edit your voice-over

For my piece, I used my little Tascam portable on a tripod right in front of my laptop, then copied the file to my computer so I could edit it in Audacity.  My preferred method is to record everything linearly in one long take, then go through and pull out the individual files as needed. You're bound to make mistakes, and when you do, just leave a sufficient pause and then start again. It's also not a bad idea to give a second take when in the moment you feel less than enamoured of a certain reading. Try to record sections of voice-over in as continuous sections as you can, but leave sufficient pauses between sections so you can trim down, and/or make splices with enough room tone to cover the gaps.

Here, you can see that I've cut a section of voice-over very closely at the head, to eliminate the sound of me inhaling before I start speaking, but left a silent tail that I can use to overlay another voice-over section.

Organize your voice-over sections in a similar fashion as your samples: I've numbered them in order of their appearance (n.b. two pieces that have alternate takes) and added a few words to clue me in to their contents.


5. Final construction

I opted to use Garageband, since that's the software I'm most comfortable using, to lay out my final podcast. Here's what the full piece looks like in the editor:

You'll notice I've used two tracks for voice-over and two tracks for the inserted samples (which are ducked, i.e. the software will always make the voice-over tracks louder than the samples), plus one track for music (I eventually ended up ditching the backing music).  I use two tracks for each section so that I can put together tighter edits using that room tone before and after the sound snippets without cutting any one track short (i.e. those sounds overlap on adjacent tracks so they can play out through the edit point). Edits often need to be fine-tuned by moving a sample back and forth little by little, sometimes just a fraction of a second to get the right pacing, the right pauses, and natural speech-like flow. You can also use fade-ins and fade-outs to make pieces fit together more smoothly.

Here, you can more clearly see the interplay of tracks on a section from the middle of the piece. The second and third tracks are my own voice-over, while the fourth and fifth are samples of other poets. Originally the last track was just for samples that needed fade-ins (namely the Tardos) but I wound up doing a fade-in on the Bök as well.

It certainly takes a lot of trial and error — and by no means would I call myself an expert — but I hope that this might be of use to you as you start thinking about your final projects.

Final Project Guidelines (Due Thursday, April 30th)

Scope and Components

The concept behind your final project is relatively simple: you'll choose one idea/technique/author that we've covered during the semester and undertake a more in-depth critical investigation, which will have both a written and audio component.  In terms of the scope this might take several forms:

• You might choose to do deeper reading/listening within the assigned texts for a given topic (i.e. including the assigned work that we did cover as well as those texts we didn't).
• You might choose to do deeper reading/listening outside of the assigned texts for a given topic (i.e. read more widely within a certain assigned author's work and/or find other authors to include in your analysis).
• You might choose to make ideological/aesthetic/technique-based connections between authors/topics — ideally ones not explicitly made during our class discussions — working within or outside of the assigned readings.

The key point here that you don't want to lose is that you'll be making an argument, taking a stand, tracing aesthetic threads and/or lineages (i.e. the development of ideas), and not just compiling a greatest hits list, or rehashing points that we've made as a class, or that I've made through the organization of the class. Likewise, in terms of outside readings, I can make suggestions but also welcome you to do your own research on the topic(s) of your choosing.

As for the audio component of the final, it might also take several forms:

• It will very likely be something following the podcast model, establishing a dialogue, of sorts, between your recorded voice-over and samples of recordings by poets themselves (taken from archives like PennSound, the Elliston Project, UbuWeb, etc.) or of you reading their work (if recordings don't exist). In essence, this would be more like a distilled version of your paper that's augmented by actual recordings of the poets.
• It could be an audio artifact that critically demonstrates some key point from your essay, which is then set up by the essay itself, however it's important to be mindful of the fact that this shouldn't be a creative endeavor like the midterm sound collages. If you want to pursue this route, we should discuss your plans before I greenlight your project.
• It could be a largely textual endeavor in which micro-edits of recorded audio are embedded throughout, serving the same function as, and accompanying, quotations. A fine example of this possibility can be found here, in Bob Perelman's "A Williams Soundscript," an analysis of William Carlos Williams' "The Sea-Elephant." Again, we'll need to discuss your plans in advance to make sure you're on the right track.

As for podcast models, there are a great many to follow as inspiration, including PoemTalk, Al Filreis' PennSound Podcasts, Charles Bernstein's Close Listening, This American Life, Garrison Keillor's the Writers Almanac, and several from the Poetry Foundation: Poetry Off the Shelf, Essential American Poets, and Kenny Goldsmith's Avant-Garde All the Time, among others. Ideally, you'll want to aim for something more finely interwoven and dialogic than the DJ model — i.e. you talk for a little bit and then play an entire recording.


Facts and Figures (i.e. deadlines, page count, formatting, etc.)

I want you to do your best work without feeling constrained, but at the same time I don't want to set minimum length requirements that are impossible for the average student to reach. Therefore, I'm setting minimums that I expect many of you will greatly exceed, and I welcome you to do so.  Your written essay should be at least six (6) full pages long (and by six pages, I mean that the text of your essay itself makes it to the very bottom of the the page, or better yet onto a seventh), and written in MLA style (including a proper header, parenthetical in-text citations and a works cited list, which doesn't count towards your page count, at the end), double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman, no tricked-out margins, etc. Your audio component should me a minimum of three minutes, though I could very easily see students producing pieces five, ten, even fifteen minutes long.

While six pages seems like an endlessly long paper, I can assure you that it's not really a lot of space to discuss these topics in great depth, therefore I wholeheartedly encourage you to dispense with any and all filler, including bloated rhetoric and lengthy five-paragraph-style introductions that ultimately say very little while taking up a lot of word count. Don't hover over the surface of the issues — dive right in and get to the heart of your argument from the start. I also recommend that unless you have compelling reasons to do otherwise, organize your essay around the topics (characters/techniques/etc.) you've chosen to discuss, rather than proceeding chronologically or dealing with each author individually, and also that you write through the source texts themselves, as demonstrated in the "Making Effective Arguments" post I put up at the start of the term. Finally, make sure that you are following the conventions of MLA formatting (which can be found in numerous places on the internet; a link with guidelines can be found on the right-hand sidebar as well).

You'll e-mail your papers to me (at hennessey [dot] michael [@t] gmail [dot] com) no later than 7:00 PM on Thursday, April 30th. Please include a link to your audio piece on Soundcloud in that e-mail and feel free to share it with our class Facebook group (also, please enable downloads on SoundCloud so I can archive a copy). Because e-mail is an imperfect delivery medium and the UC system is prone to collapse, take note that I'll reply to each paper received, letting students know that it's arrived safely, so if you don't receive that e-mail, get in touch with me, and should you have any questions or concerns prior to the deadline, don't hesitate to drop me a line.

Also, please don't forget that tardy projects will be docked a full letter grade for every day they're late and that papers that are less than the stated limit of six full pages will automatically receive an F.

Class Feedback

Finally, because I consider this course an organic and malleable construct, I'd greatly appreciate it if you took the time to answer these questions in a separate document. Please don't feel the need to flatter me or the course materials either — I respect your honest opinions about the class and what did or didn't appeal to you.

• What 10 authors/class topics were most useful/interesting to you?
• What 5 authors/class topics were least useful/interesting?
• Are there any authors/topics you wish we had covered that we didn't?
• Are there any activities (i.e. audio work) that you'd have liked to do? (Or, should the class involve more audio work?)
• Are there any authors you're eager to investigate further after the term is over?

Monday, April 6 — Performance Scores: Brecht, Ono, Grenier, Brautigan

George Brecht performs "Incidental Music" in 1961.

We've read Susan Sontag's thoughts on the (then-)burgeoning artform known as "happenings," have seen some pieces from Jackson Mac Low and Hannah Weiner that embody their spirit, and have acquainted ourselves with the aesthetic philosophies of one of their major influences, John Cage. Today, we'll spend some time looking at a selection of pieces from George Brecht and Yoko Ono, two key members of the Fluxus movement, an international Neo-Dadaist collective that came to prominence in the 1960s.

Two event scores by George Brecht.

First, the master of the event score, George Brecht, whose ambitious hybrid pieces found connections between poetry, music, choreography, and drama, and frequently demonstrated a subversive sense of humor.  You can read through a collection of many of Brecht's pieces here, and even see variations between different performances in different years.

Next, we'll read selections from Yoko Ono's iconic book Grapefruit. First published in 1964, the book received more mainstream attention after a 1970 edition featuring an introduction by Ono's husband, John Lennon — "Hi! My name is John Lennon. I'd like you to meet Yoko Ono..." — and the surrealistic performance instructions contained therein fit nicely with the couple's "bagism" ethos, and even, in a way, the rhetoric behind their "War is Over! (if you want it)" billboard campaign.

In Grapefruit, Ono creates hybrid aesthetic constructs similar to Brecht's, with performance scores that create paintings, films, music, and personal meditative acts.  You can read selections from Grapefruit here: [PDF].  Acorn, a sequel of sorts to Grapefruit, was published in 2013; you can read a few excerpts from it here.

Ono reads from Grapefruit

a performance of Ono's "Voice Piece for Soprano" from Sonic Youth's Goodbye 20th Century (the voice belongs to Coco Hayley Gordon Moore, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore's daughter)

Next, we'll shift gears a little bit, to look at two imaginative texts that demand an interactive performance from their readers.  First, Robert Grenier's Sentences (1978), originally produced as a boxed version of 500 individual cards, which can be read in any order. You can browse a virtual version of the text, which will randomly and reductively select cards from the deck until all options are exhausted, here (read as much or as little as you'd like). Photos of the original version can be found here.

Cards from Grenier's Sentences on display in a gallery in Brooklyn, May 2013.

Another iconic conceptual poetic text which demands a sort of performance from its readers is Richard Brautigan's Please Plant This Book, first published in the spring of 1968 as a folder containing eight seed packets, each with a poem printed on the outside. Like the Grenier, it's been lovingly resurrected in a virtual version here, however the seeds aren't included. Nonetheless, try to imagine the experience of the original, whereby the reader completes the act of reading each poem by planting the seeds, and thereafter the poem continues, in a sense, as the plant, flower, or vegetable that comes forth.  In "Lettuce," Brautigan muses that "The only hope we have is our / children and the seeds we give them / and the gardens we plan together," and that figurative wisdom becomes literal with a strange and wonderful hybrid text like Please Plant This Book.

Friday, April 3 — Polyvocality: Ashbery/Lauterbach, Howe/Grubbs, Bernstein, the Velvet Underground

Today we'll continue an aesthetic thread that, for us, began with some of the later John Giorno poems we looked at and then carries on through Jackson Mac Low and Hannah Weiner — namely, texts that, either through their presentation on the page or their realization in performance, stress a polyvocal approach to poetry, with multiple voices that complement or even compete with one another.

Ann Lauterbach (left) and John Ashbery (right).

First up, we have a 1980 recording of the first section of John Ashbery's "Litany" (first published in 1979's As We Know), which famously provides readers with these instructions: "The two columns of 'Litany' are meant to be read as simultaneous but independent monologues." Of course such things are impossible for a solitary reader, but when reimagined as a stereo multitrack version (with Ashbery reading the left column and poet Ann Lauterbach the right), we finally hear the poem as it was intended to be received, though at the same time suddenly lose access to much its semantic content as we try to pay attention to the two voices at once. Ironically, in several readings around the time of its release, Ashbery offered less proscriptive takes on how the poem could be performed, and he himself tended to either jump from column to column as he saw fit, or to read the left and right pages sequentially.  "Litany," Part One [PDF, MP3]

Susan Howe and David Grubbs.

Next, we'll look at two tracks from Thiefth, a 2005 CD release by poet Susan Howe and multi-instrumentalist David Grubbs, which features complex performances of two of Howe's historical investigations — "Thorow" [PDF] and "Melville's Marginalia" [excerpt: PDF] — with musical accompaniment and voice manipulation (via the MAX/MSP software). The album's liner notes provide more background on the collaboration:

Thiefth is the first collaboration between poet Susan Howe and musician and composer David Grubbs. The two were brought together when the Fondation Cartier proposed a collaborative performance. Grubbs had been an ardent reader of Howe's for more than a decade, and the opportunity to work with Howe's poetry and her voice immediately intrigued. In late 2003, the two set about to create performance versions of "Thorow" and "Melville's Marginalia," two of Howe's longer poems. 

Drawing from the journals of Sir William Johnson and Henry David Thoreau, "Thorow" both evokes the winter landscape that surrounds Lake George in upstate New York, and explores collisions and collusions of historical violence and national identity. "Thorow" is an act of second seeing in which Howe and Grubbs engage the lake's glittering, ice surface as well as the insistent voices that haunt an unseen world underneath. 

"Melville's Marginalia" is an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Herman Melville's own reading and the notations he made in some of the books he owned and loved. The collaging and mirror-imaging of words and sounds are concretions of verbal static, visual mediations on what can and cannot be said.

You'll find PDFs of the texts at the links above, and you can listen to the album's individual tracks (along with several later collaborations including "Souls of the Labadie Tract" and "Frolic Architecture") on PennSound's Howe/Grubbs author page. 

Charles and Emma Bee Bernstein

We'll also visit again briefly with Charles Bernstein, taking a look at a pair of pieces from diverse periods in his career.  First, listen to "Piffle (Breathing)" [MP3] — another track from Class (you've already listened to "Class," "My/My/My," and "Goodnight"), which was recorded with Greg Ball and Susan Bee Bernstein in 1976.  Then we'll jump forward to the 2003 poem "War Stories" and a two-voice rendition of it performed with the poet's daughter, Emma [poem and MP3 here]

The Velvet Underground in 1969 around the release of their third album:
(left to right) Doug Yule, Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker.

Finally, we've already talked a little bit about the Velvet Underground's Lou Reed recently, taking a look at some of his more narrative songs, but today I'd like to take a look at one of that band's more infamous tracks, "The Murder Mystery" (taken from their self-titled 1969 album).  This nine-minute track exploited the stereo medium with Reed and guitarist Sterling Morrison reading separate competing lyrics in the left and right channels during the verses, with drummer Maureen Tucker and bass/keyboard player Doug Yule trading off overlapping vocals on the choruses.  Reed would later publish a version of the lyrics in The Paris Review in 1972, but this version comes from his collected lyrics, Between Thought and Expression: [PDF]

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]