Your Finals

While most of you posted your final podcasts to our Facebook group I thought I'd create a playlist here on our blog as well. Note that a number of students attached their podcasts to their e-mails and didn't put them up on SoundCloud, so their tracks are missing here (but feel free to upload them, drop me a line, and I'll add them). It's been a great semester and I can't believe our time is over. I hope you have a wonderful summer!

Wednesday, April 22 — Homophonic / Homolinguistic Translation, Mondegreens, etc.

We're closing the term out in somewhat irreverent fashion, but while our readings for today might seem more like fun and games, there are serious aesthetic notions at work beneath the humorous surface. 

First, we'll take a look at homophonic and homolinguistic translations. While the two terms are frequently used interchangeably, if we're getting technical homophonic translation describes transformative processes in which a text is translated from a foreign language into English — as Charles Bernstein explains on his infamous experiments list, "Take a poem in a foreign language that you can pronounce but not necessarily understand and translate the sound of the poem into English (e.g., French "blanc" to blank or "toute" to toot)" — whereas homolinguistic translation describes similar translations of "English into English."

You've already encountered a few examples, including Kenneth Koch's "Transposed Hamlet" ("Tube heat, or nog tube heat . . ."),  Ted Berrigan's "Mess Occupations," and Christian Bök's transformation of Arthur Rimbaud's "Voyelles" as "Veils" in our last class, and I thought we'd take a look at a few more examples for today.

First, here's Kenneth Goldsmith's "Head Citations" [read / listen], which elevates misheard song lyrics to found poetry. Then check out Bernstein's "From the Basque" [link], and Ron Silliman's discussion of the technique [link], which includes examples from Chris Tysh, David Melnick, and his own writing. You can find more examples on the Wikipedia page for homophonic translation, and those interested in far deeper (albeit optional) reading in the form should look at Six Fillious, an ambitious multilingual collaboration between six authors (including George Brecht), which was published in 1978.

This is an avant-garde technique that gets used a hell of a lot more commonly than you might imagine. For example:

or

A few more interesting examples include Italian songwriter Adriano Celentano's 1972 gibberish song "Prisecolinensinenciousol," which is intended to sound like American English:

And a more recent example in the same vein as Celentano's experiment is Skwerl, a short film by Karl Eccleston and Brian Fairbairn, which aims to capture how English sounds to non-English speakers:

If you find this technique interesting, you might also want to check out the related phenomena of Mondegreens and Anguish Language, and in a certain regard, I think this is the most beautifully commonplace poetry, since it infiltrates our everyday lives far more successfully than what we typically think of as poetry. Towards that end, it feels like a very appropriate way in which to end the semester.

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.

Friday, April 17 — Sound and Subversion 2: North America

Christian Bök's "Two Equal Texts," on-site installation.

Our "Sound and Subversion" unit, which will bring the semester to a close, continues on Friday with the work of two iconic Canadian poets representing two generations of groundbreaking work — Christian Bök and bpNichol — and a brief look at the American Google-centric poetic movement known as Flarf.

First up is Christian Bök, who's perhaps best known for his book-length Oulipian experiment, Eunoia, a lipogramatic text, that is one in which some sort of linguistic restriction guides its composition: specifically, each of the five chapters, named for one of the vowels, only contains words containing those vowels. In addition, Bök has instituted several other rules, including making use of at least 98% of all existing words featuring the given vowel, as well as specific tasks, including writing about the act of writing, a feast, a debauch, a nautical journey, etc. You might recall Stefans talking about the text in relation to his setting of the E chapter in last Friday's readings. 

We'll look at two chapters in their entirety, and then a few selections from the companion "Oiseau" section, including several variations on Arthur Rimbaud's "Voyelles," which synesthetically ascribes colors to each of the vowels. [PDF] Recordings from Bök's PennSound author page are linked when available.

• Eunoia, chapter A [MP3]
• Eunoia, chapter O [MP3]
• Voyelles [MP3]
• Vowels [MP3]
• Phonemes [MP3]
• Veils
• Vocables [MP3]
• AEIOU
• And Sometimes [MP3]
• Vowels [MP3]
• H (for bpNichol)
• Voile [MP3]

 

Next, we have bpNichol, shown above with his poem, "The Complete Works." We'll take a look at some selections from The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol Reader, which highlight some of nichol's more purely sonic experimentations, however he worked in a wide variety of media, starting as a concrete poet (a genre that often indirectly features some sort of sonic subterfuge), but moving on to work in collages, musical theatre, television (among other jobs, he wrote scripts and songs for Fraggle Rock) and even very early experiments in computer poetry with First Screening: Computer Poems (1983–84) for the Apple IIe (you can watch an emulated version here). Sadly, nichol died at the very young age of 43 after complications from surgery on his back but his work and influence carry on, most notably in bpNichol Lane (see below) in Toronto, where, at #80, you can find Coach House Press, one of Canada's longest and most-acclaimed publishers of experimental poetry. nichol's PennSound author page can be found here, and your readings are here: [PDF]

In addition to his own writing, nichol founded The Four Horsemen with poets Steve McCaffery, Paul Dutton, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera. This group, which took the ideas of concrete and sound poetry into fascinating — if sometimes perplexing — live performances that combined high-minded literary conceptualism with the raucous energy of a rock show. You can see their performance from Ron Mann's film, Poetry in Motion below, and find a wide variety of recordings on their PennSound author page. For an optional, yet highly-intriguing sonic experience, you might also want to check out Paul Dutton's "so'nets."

Finally, we'll look a a suite of poems published in Poetry Magazine in a special 2009 issue devoted to Flarf and Conceptual poetry which was edited by Kenneth Goldsmith. In his introduction, he makes some (understandably) controversial statements that nonetheless aptly give a sense of the state of contemporary cutting-edge poetic practice: 

Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry. Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard? And what fun to wreck it: knock it down, hit delete, and start all over again. There’s a sense of gluttony, of joy, and of fun. Like kids at a touch table, we’re delighted to feel language again, to roll in it, to get our hands dirty. With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let’s just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material. How much did you say that paragraph weighed? 

As no better (and more appropriate) a source than the Wikipedia page on Flarf observes, "Its first practitioners, working in loose collaboration on an email listserv, used an approach that rejected conventional standards of quality and explored subject matter and tonality not typically considered appropriate for poetry. One of their central methods, invented by Drew Gardner, was to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, plays and other texts."

In particular, I'd like you to take a look at the contributions — which can be found here — from Jordan Davis, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, and Gary Sullivan. Aside from Bök, you'll also note the issue contains work by Caroline Bergvall, who we'll be reading next week.

Bonus: Kit Robinson and Dolch Sight Words

This is completely independent of the readings we're doing at this point in the semester, but something I just stumbled upon, found interesting, and thought I'd share, both as a fascinating text that fits perfectly within our work this term, and to document the way in which associatively chasing ideas down the rabbit hole can yield interesting results.

I was just spending some time thinking about how I might organize my Backgrounds for English Studies course next fall — which a few of you are signed up for — and as part of that process, I looked up a list of the most common words in the English language (thanks, Wikipedia!). One of the related links at the bottom was for the Dolch word list (a list of important yet challenging words necessary for children to learn to become fluent English speakers) and that strange eponym got me thinking about Kit Robinson's poetic sequence, "The Dolch Stanzas," which I last read several years back. Harboring the suspicion that Robinson's poems, which feature very basic and straightforward language, might be composed from the Dolch list I did a little research and found this statement, from a blog post about poetry and labor:

The question of the employment of the poet has interested me almost from the beginning. My "Taxicab Diaries," from the summer of 1971 in Boston, was the first thing I had published in Barrett Watten's This magazine. My serial poem "The Dolch Stanzas" was written in 1974 while I was working as a paraprofessional teacher's aide at a San Francisco elementary school.  Like work of mine to come, "Dolch" made use of the material of the workplace, in this case the Dolch Basic Sight Word List.

What makes this particular interesting for our class is the nature of many of the words on the list, as this page notes: "Many of the 220 words in the Dolch list, can not be 'sounded out,' and hence must be learned by sight." Thus the phonemic character of these words comes via memorization, rather than any visual cues.

If you'd like to read Robinson's brief sequence, you can find it here; a 1990 reading of the series can be found here: [MP3]

Bonus Fun Fact: Kit Robinson and I share the same birthday (May 17), which is a popular birthday for poets, also being shared by Lyn Hejinian and Sara Wintz. Go Taureans!

Wednesday, April 15 — Dada Poetics and the Indecipherable

(l) Hugo Ball performs "Karawane" at the Cabaret Voltaire in "a cubist costume"
(r) Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven strikes a provocative pose.

As the end of the semester nears, we're coming full-circle, returning to the Dadaist poetics of Tristan Tzara and his peers, however whereas before we simply considered his instructions for creating Dada poetry as a precursor of Burroughs and Gysin's cut-up techniques, today we'll actually take a look at the work he created through those methods.

A potent international multimedia movement with roots in Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, Dadaism emerged in reaction to the horrors of the First World War. While its aesthetic far too often gets reduced to formulas like "the world didn't make sense so their art didn't make sense," there are far more complex ideological underpinnings that took issue with nationalism and colonialism, bourgeois politics and aesthetics, and the destructive potential of modern industrialism.  That having been said, Dadist ideology was largely centered on shock value and the opportunity for critical rethinking that came with it.  One key way they achieved this was through the use of unconventional materials (cf. Marcel Duchamp's readymades) and multiple media; another frequently used method exploited the malleability of language, and this was perhaps inspired by many of the artists being conversant in multiple languages.

We'll start with selections from Jerry Rothenberg and Pierre Joris' Poems for the Millennium, including a brief critical intro and work by Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Kurt Schwitters: [PDF].  Through the materials below, we'll look in greater depth at interpretations of selections from "The Complete Sound-Poems of Hugo Ball" 

"Karawane," perhaps Ball's best-known poem.

First, here's the one and only Marie Osmond(!) discussing Ball on the old Ripley's Believe It or Not television show and reciting "Karawane":

And here's Canadian conceptual poet Christian Bök performing the piece [MP3] along with "Seahorses and Flying Fish" (Seepferdchen und flugfische) [MP3] and "Totenklage"[MP3]. Dutch composer and sound poet Jaap Blonk offers a take on "Seahorses and Flying Fish" here: [MP3] (we'll be encountering more from Bök and Blonk in our next two classes, by the way). Next, here are two takes on "Karawane" by Jerry Rothenberg, one with musical accompaniment by Bertram Turetzky [MP3] and a solo vocal performance here [MP3].

While working on Talking Heads' third album, Fear of Music (1979), David Byrne found himself unable to come up with words for an evocative polyrhythmic track the band pulled together at the end of the sessions. Producer Brian Eno suggested he try singing lines from Ball's poem "Gadji beri bimba" over the track as a way around his writer's block, but rather than simply use them as placeholder lyrics, the band wound up keeping Ball's gibberish, and the finished song, "I Zimbra," was not only given prominent place as the album's opening track, but served as a blueprint for the musical experimentation they'd do on future records like Remain in Light (1980) and Speaking in Tongues (1983). Here's a particularly incendiary version of "I Zimbra" (paired with Byrne's solo track, "Big Business") from the concert film Stop Making Sense ("I Zimbra" begins at 4:52):

For comparison's sake, here are the lyrics to "I Zimbra":

I Zimbra

Gadji beri bimba clandridi
Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
A bim beri glassala glandride
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

Bim blassa galassasa zimbrabim
Blassa glallassasa zimbrabim

A bim beri glassala grandrid
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

Gadji beri bimba glandridi
Lauli lonni cadora gadjam
A bim beri glassasa glandrid
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

As an interesting intertextual complement to these contemporaneous Dada poems and later interpretations, I'd also like you to take a look at a few selections from Rothenberg's 1983 collection, That Dada Strain [PDF].  Audio for certain poems is posted below:

• on That Dada Strain [MP3]
• That Dada Strain [MP3]; with musical accompaniment [MP3]
• A Glass Tube Ecstacy (for Hugo Ball): [MP3]; with musical accompaniment [MP3]

Mamie Smith's "That Dada Strain" (1922), which gives Rothenberg's sequence its title, can he heard below:

Finally, let's consider two more contemporaneous experiments in asemic writing. First, our old friend Charles Bernstein's provocative poem, "Lift-Off" [link, click "next page" for the end of the poem] from 1979's Poetic Justice, which transcribes the contents of the correction (think Wite-Out) ribbon on the poet's typewriter. You can hear Kenny Goldsmith's performance of the poem at a celebration of Bernstein's new and selected poems, All the Whiskey in Heaven, here: [MP3]. Also, here's David Melnick's PCOET [link], a book of 83 deeply fragmented micropoems (feel free to browse as much or as little as you'd like).

Monday, April 13 — Indigenous Poetics via Jerome Rothenberg

On Monday we'll spend an entire class considering the work of Jerome Rothenberg, primarily through his role as a cultural anthropologist and archivist of Native American poetic traditions, but we'll also look at a little of his own poetry inspired by his proximity to the Seneca Nation.

It's impossible to understate Rothenberg's importance as, for all intents and purposes, the inaugurator of the field of Ethnopoetics, through groundbreaking anthologies including Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia and Oceania (1968) and Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas (1972) — from which most of our readings today will be drawn — continuing to the brand-new Barbaric Vast and Wild: An Assemblage of Outside and Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present.

Part of the innovation in Rothenberg's approach is that he treated his subjects with the utmost respect, immersing himself within the cultural traditions under consideration, rather than engaging in cultural tourism. He sought to undertake, as David Noriega observes, "a method of translation that would encompass more than just the poetic content and structure of the songs," including their "intricate and polyphonic arrangement of voices, images, and 'pure' sounds." As he notes on the back cover of Shaking the Pumpkin: "I am not doing this for the sake of curiosity, but I have smoked a pipe to the powers from whom these songs came, and I ask them not to be offended with me for signing these songs which belong to them."

As part of this dedication, Rothenberg moved to the Allegheny Seneca Reservation in 1972, where he studied under Richard Johnny John, "one of the leading singers and makers-of-songs at the Allegany (Seneca) Reservation in western New York State, descended from singers ... very important in their own time." In A Seneca Journal (1978) we see firsthand the influence this experience had upon Rothenberg's own poetry.

Three Friendly Warnings (1973), Richard Johnny John, Jerome Rothenberg, Ian Tyson (click to enlarge).

Native American Poetries and Songs: [PDF] (MP3 selections below)

• 12 Songs to Welcome the Society of Mystic Animals [MP3]
• Shaking the Pumpkin [MP3] (includes "A Song of My Song, in Three Parts," "Caw Caw the Crows Caw Caw," "The Owl," "Three Ways to Screw Up on Your Way to the Doings Three Ways," among others)
• the Thirteenth Horse Song of Frank Mitchell [MP3]

from A Seneca Journal: [PDF]

• Seneca Journal 1: "A Poem of Beavers" [MP3]
• Old Man Beaver's Blessing Song [MP3][MP3]

more from Shaking the Pumpkin: [PDF]

• Gift Event (from the Kwakiutl) [MP3]
• Crazy Dog Events [MP3]

If you're interested in learning more about Rothenberg's "total translations" of Navajo horse songs, here's an article on the Poetry Foundation's website: [link]. Rothenberg's three-part interview with Richard Johnny John can be found here and here. These last resources are entirely supplemental, and not required for Monday.