Poetry: Sound, Media, and Performance (Spring 2015): Wednesday, Feb. 18 — Collage Poetics: Berrigan, Bernstein, Hills, et al.

Ted Berrigan, Charles Bernstein, Henry Hills.

In today's texts, we're still operating under the general aesthetics of the cut-up, but expanding it a little into work whose composition is more consciously done in the spirit of collage (instead of foregrounding the cut-up process itself). We'll have three main "readings," though in actuality one's a written text, one's an audio text and one's a short film.

First up is a healthy selection of poems from Ted Berrigan's magnum opus, The Sonnets (1964). Guided by the work of Tzara, Burroughs, and Gysin, Berrigan created a sequence of eighty-eight poems that stand alone as independent texts, while also functioning as a cohesive whole. A spirit of appropriation guides the endeavor, with the young poet borrowing and recontextualizing lines from friends and peers (like Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, and Joe Brainard), New York School poets he admired (including John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara) and older writers like Arthur Rimbaud and Henri Michaud. He also effectively samples himself — poems written before the start of The Sonnets, but also poems written as part of the sequence — and thus one of the great joys of reading the book in its entirety is seeing how quickly it starts to digest itself, how lines and images reappear time and time again over its course.

In an interview with Tom Clark, Berrigan describes his collage aesthetic: "I often think of my words as sort of bricks. But the bricks then are underneath the words, sort of. I use the words a lot of times to disguise the fact that it's a brick underneath, or to make the brick float. And then there'll be a key-word or rhyme to put the brick right there." He expands upon this in another interview (with Anne Waldman and Jim Cohn):

I had a lot more variables to work with and a lot more possibilities of structures. It was just like cubism. I was totally influenced by what my take on cubism was. Take all those planes, put them flat up like this, and they're different. They go this way and they don't go. They turn into optical illusions.

You can listen to Berrigan read The Sonnets in its entirety, as part of a residency at San Francisco's New Langton Arts Center not long before his death, on his PennSound author page (use the segmented tracks to follow along with your reading). Our readings can be found here: [PDF]

Next up, you'll be listening to several tracks from Class, a cassette of audio-poetic experiments that Charles Bernstein recorded in the mid-1970s. Specifically, I'd like you to listen to "My/My/My," "Class," and "Goodnight," all of which were recorded in 1976. On PennSound's Class page, you can read Bernstein's introduction to the pieces and a description of the techniques at play in the various tracks. He also provides a link to the published version of "My/My/My" and a PDF version of Asylums, the book in which it appeared. Finally, you can read excerpts from an article I wrote on Class for The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein at Jacket2 (it's also linked on the PennSound page).

Our final main text for today is Money, a 1985 short by Henry Hills, a filmmaker who had close connections with both New York's avant-garde poetry scene as well as its downtown music scene during this tumultuous (but very exciting) era. Here's Hills' description of the film:

Money (1985) is a manic collage film from the mid-80s when it still seemed that Reaganism of the soul could be defeated. Filmed primarily on the streets of Manhattan for the ambient sounds and movements and occasional pedestrian interaction to create a rich tapestry of swirling colors and juxtaposed architectural spaces in deep focus and present the intense urban overflowing energy that is experience living here. Money is thematically centered around a discussion of economic problems facing avant-garde artists. Discussion, however, is fragmented into words and phrases and reassembled into writing. Musical and movement phrases are woven through this conversation to create an almost operatic composition. Give me money! Starring: John Zorn, Diane Ward, Carmen Vigil, Susie Timmons, Sally Silvers, Ron Silliman, James Sherry, Peter Hall, David Moss, Mark Miller, Christian Marclay, Arto Lindsay, Pooh Kaye, Fred Frith, Alan Davies, Tom Cora, Jack Collom, Yoshiko Chuma, Abigail Child, Charles Bernstein, Derek Bailey, and Bruce Andrews.

More information and stills from the film can be found here, and you can watch the film below:

Finally, as contextual tangents, you can see how the collage techniques at play in these various pieces prefigure much of our contemporary remix culture. While you're probably well-acquainted with artists like Girl Talk (better still, watch Girl Walk // All Day, which Pharrell shamelessly ripped off), I thought I'd share a few earlier milestones along the way: