We'll continue looking at transcription poetry today, reading two works that not only make use of audio recordings as their sources, but also have a common thread of being composed by the authors while driving.
First up we have Allen Ginsberg's classic "Wichita Vortex Sutra," the best-known of a long series of "auto-poesy" pieces written by the poet with the help of a Uher tape recorder (purchased for him by Bob Dylan) as he drove across the U.S. in a Volkswagen microbus across the U.S. during the mid-1960s. Here's Ginsberg's description of the process, as taken from the volume, Composed on the Tongue:
The way this was determined was: I dictated it on this Uher tape recorder. Now this Uher microphone has a little on-off gadget here (click!) and then when you hear the click it starts it again, so the way I was doing it was this (click!); when I clicked it on again it meant I had something to say. So—if you listen to the original tape composition of this, it would be
That the rest of earth is unseen, (Click!)
an outer universe invisible, (Click!)
Unknown (Click!) except thru
(Click!) language
(Click!) airprint
(Click!) magic images
or prophecy of the secret (Click!)
heart the same (Click!)
in Waterville as Saigon one human form (Click!)
So when transcribing, I pay attention to the clicking on and off of the machine, which is literally the pauses, as words come out of my--as I wait for phrases to formulate themselves. . . .
And then, having paid attention to the clicks, arrange the phrasings on the page visually, as somewhat the equivalent of how they arrive in the mind and how they're vocalized on the tape recorder. . . .
It's not the clicks that I use, it's simply a use of pauses--exactly the same as writing on a page: where you stop, you write, in the little notebook, you write that one line or one phrase on one line, and then you have to wait for another phrase to come, so you go on then to another line, represented by another click.
. . . These lines in "Wichita" are arranged according to their organic time-spacing as per the mind's coming up with the phrases and the mouth pronouncing them. With pauses maybe of a minute or two minutes between each line as I'm formulating it in my mind and the recording.
. . . Like if you're talking aloud, if you're talking--composing aloud or talking aloud to yourself. Actually I was in the back of a bus, talking to myself, except with a tape recorder. So everytime I said something interesting to myself I put it on tape.
You can read the complete text of the poem here, and listen to several recordings of Ginsberg reading the poem below:
Recorded in May 1995 at the Knitting Factory in NYC:
- Wichita Vortex Sutra I (3:14): MP3
- Wichita Vortex Sutra II (12:52): MP3
- Wichita Vortex Sutra III (5:51): MP3
- Wichita Vortex Sutra IV (5:41): MP3
Next, here's a rather breathtaking musical setting of a long portion of the poem by Philip Glass, part of his collaboration with Ginsberg, Hydrogen Jukebox (a term you'll recall from "Howl"):
And here's a very interesting recording I uncovered a few summers back, in the tape archives of the poet Robert Creeley, which sets a lengthy excerpt of the poem to musical soundscape including chanting, sound effects and a snippet of Bob Dylan's "Queen Jane Approximately," among other noises:
- Wichita Vortex Sutra (28:00): MP3
You can read my write-up of the recording (and several others released at the same time) here.
Jumping forward four decades, our other reading for Thursday is a sequence by Eileen Myles entitled "Myles/Driving," which was written in a fashion not unlike Ginsberg's compositional methods in "Wichita Vortex Sutra." As Myles explains:
I was leaving my job at UCSD and I gave a rather moving speech to a small crowd who had come to the going away party. I bought a little recorder to have in my pocket. I had some purpose for recording my own remarks like I thought of it as related to something I was working on or would be working on. I thought I might use it for a novel I would write in the future about the academy. I was bugging myself for art. But the little record- er didn't do what I intended. I don't know if I knew how to run it. After that I started occasionally flipping it on when I drove to LA from SD and vice versa. It was fun. I had no idea if anything had recorded until I visited the gathered family of Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein last summer in Provincetown and all of them except for Susan knew how to turn sound files into something I could hear. It happened.
Earlier—a few years ago—I was caught in a park in SD without pen and notebook and left a poem on my cellphone. I called it in. So I've been imaginatively involved with the idea of transcripton since then. Really always. I use a digital camera a lot, or did, and would compose texts as I walked and thought that it felt like a fleshing out of the idea of a poem as a score. A talky instead.
We'll continue our focus on transcription poetry with one more class next week, when we'll read work by Kenneth Goldsmith, Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch, and Andy Warhol.
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