Final Portfolio Guidelines

While it's hard to believe the end of the semester is upon us, it will be here soon, and that means it's time to think about reflecting upon the work we've done together over these past 15 weeks. Your final portfolios will be your opportunity to do exactly that, and they will be due by 11:59pm on Tuesday, December 8th via e-mail. They should include the following components:

• (at least) five (5) revised poems — In each case you should include both the original draft and the revised version, plus a short note (a sentence or two, this can be sketchy) detailing the changes you've made and your motivations for doing so. Two important things to remember: 1) while I've asked you to try to adhere to the spirit of each project's restraints for our workshop rounds, you need not do so at this stage, and 2) work can jump format in this stage as well if necessary (that is, an audio piece can transform into a written text and vice-versa). The workshop rounds are about pushing your boundaries and generating new ideas and language, but the revision stage is about getting something that serves you out of that process. What you e-mail me might be Word docs, MP3s, or SoundCloud links. Try to organize the material (including use of descriptive filenames) as best as you can, but you don't necessarily need to consolidate everything into one file.
• a short reflection upon your work this term — I'm thinking something in the realm of 2–3 pages double-spaced. This isn't a venue for you to heap praise upon me in hopes of getting a better grade, but rather a place where you can figure out exactly what parts of your workshop experience were useful to you: what ideas and practices you'll carry forward, what didn't work for you, how your perspectives have changed over the course of our 15 weeks together, what writers and techniques you've discovered that you're excited about, etc. 
• one representative audio piece  — Ideally via SoundCloud. This will serve as your contribution to the retrospective playlist I'd like to put together (and share with the whole world). This can (and probably should) be one of your final drafts — it doesn't have to be a separate piece. Just indicate which one you'd like to use. If your favorite piece is a written text you can simply submit a recording of you reading it.

Your final grades will be determined based on the quality of your final pieces, the evolution demonstrated in comparing the final versions to their earlier drafts, and how you were (or weren't) a "good citizen" of our workshop (i.e. being present and on time, commenting on your peers' work in class and via written notes, etc.). Late porfolios will be docked accordingly, and I can't accept anything after Monday, December 14th. If you have any questions, I'll be more than happy to answer them. Please e-mail your portfolios to me via me gmail address. I'll send a short note acknowledging receipt once I've been able to check that all of the files are problem-free.

Project 10 — Retrospective Reconfiguration

I can't think of any better way to end the semester than to reflect upon the work you've done as a whole over the past several months. Towards that end, the instructions for your last project are pretty simple: you've made a lot of audio this term — either as the final product of a given prompt or as an intermediary step — and I'd like you to remix and reconfigure some or all of that audio to produce a new piece. 

You can use entire compositions, strip them down to constituent parts (one easy way to do so: mute certain tracks in your project file and then re-export a new MP3), deconstruct them via cutting/pasting or adding effects (distortion, modulation, filtering, reversing, reverb, etc.) — the sky's the limit — and the only restriction is that you can't add any new material to the final product: you can only work with the audio you've already created/used in some way, shape, or form (raw recordings or source tracks, for example, are okay to use).

Your final pieces should be either MP3s or SoundCloud links and should be sent to me in advance of your workshop day. We'll do a quick two-day workshop without pre-written comments. Here's our final randomized schedule of the term:

• Wednesday, Nov. 25: No Class — Thanksgiving
• Friday, Nov. 27: No Class — Thanksgiving
• Monday, Nov. 30: Hoffman, Haig, Nelson, Roller
• Wednesday, Dec. 2: Edgar, Pieper, Scheifele, Hardcastle
• Friday, Dec. 4: Baxter

N.b.: on Friday, December 4th, we'll set aside some time to talk about your overall experience of the workshop this semester.

Project 9 — Somatic Poetics

CAConrad, purveyor of (soma)tic poetry rituals, at Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market.

As we reach our penultimate project for the semester, after our long session of poetry performances, I think it's worthwhile to remember the place of the body — our eyes observing, our hands writing, our voices speaking — within the poetic process.

Our work this time around will be influenced by the poetry of CAConrad, who's pioneered the field of somatic poetics over the last several years. Below you'll find 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]

You might choose to recreate one of Conrad's projects, but I'd be even more interested in you devising your own set of rituals, constraints, and/or sensations to guide your poetic process. Our "Orange Immersion" in-class writing session today can and should offer you firsthand experience of the ways in which these prompts work. Your responses to this prompt should be in written form, but can include audio components. You should also include some sort of explanation of the processes that resulted in your poem — this doesn't need to be long or complicated, but will be useful in helping us understand what guided your work — and should be sent to the group no later than our class meeting on Monday, November 16th.

Here's our randomly-determined schedule for workshop session 9:

• Wednesday, Nov. 18: Scheifele, Pieper, Hoffman
• Friday, Nov. 20: Baxter, Haig, Roller
• Monday, Nov. 23: Edgar (audio), Nelson, Hardcastle

Monday, Nov. 2 — Orange Immersion

Your subject matter for today: the humble orange.

I thought an in-class writing assignment was a worthwhile way to blow off steam after passing the 2/3 mark of the semester, particularly when it looks forward to our ninth project on somatic poetics. We'll worry more about the details of that project shortly, but for now, sit back, enjoy an orange, read our seed texts (from Frank O'Hara and John McPhee), listen to our citrus-themed soundtrack, and write whatever comes to mind. After a few minutes for initial reading, we'll set aside approximately 12 minutes for writing and then everyone can share whatever they've come up with.

Project 8 — Poetry in Performance

Laurie Anderson performs United States I–IV

As we near the end of the semester we'll take a little more time with our eighth project to ensure that everyone has the chance to try something ambitious without time constraints and that we as a class can enjoy, participate, and still offer critical perspectives.

The short version: over the course of weeks 11–13 you'll each have roughly half a class to engage in poetry in performance. Let's say 10–15 minutes max for each performance — though less time is fine as well — so that we'll also have sufficient time for discussion after the fact. So what can you do in those 15 minutes? Basically there are three main options:

1. You can engage in a talk poetry piece with or without musical (or other sonic) accompaniment (either live or pre-recorded). Rather than post everything here, I'm simply going to provide links to materials I've assembled for my Poetry: Sound, Media, and Performance class: specifically pieces by John Cage, David Antin, Laurie Anderson, and Lee Ranaldo [link].
2. You can write one or several short pieces of poets theater, which we as a class can act out. You'll find a number of longer examples as well as many tiny plays by Kenneth Koch here: [link]. There's also a helpful link to a Poetry Foundation essay on the genre and what links it to and separates it from traditional drama.
3. You can write a performance script, or several small scripts, for us that are less narrative/dramatic and more deconstructive in approach to sound and/or performance. You can find several performance scores by Jackson Mac Low here: [link; and recordings of last spring's PSMP class performing a few pieces here: link] You'll find several Fluxus performance scores by Yoko Ono and George Brecht here [link]

The sky's the limit here and we can be your witting puppets, so have fun, produce something weird and wonderful, and let us bask in your genius(!) You're more than welcome, if you'd like, to arrange for pre-recorded sounds (which we can play over the classroom PA if you give me a link and/or bring in a device with an 1/8" jack [standard headphone size] we can plug into the laptop connection). Likewise, we can display whatever visuals you'd like over the two screens if necessary.

If you want to bring your own mics, instruments, effects, amps, etc. that's great as well but you should arrive early to set up and/or bring a pre-connected set-up (if possible). Talk to me about technical concerns in advance and we'll try to sort them out. In general, if you have any logistics questions, let's talk before your date and we'll figure out any potential issues.

If your piece has a written component — particularly in the case of poets theater or performance scores — you're responsible for making sure you bring enough copies for everyone in the class (10 in total).

I imagine that the element of surprise will be key here, so each piece will be due on its performance date. Materials will not be distributed in advance or formally written up, but we'll allow for a sufficient amount of time during each class for proper workshopping.

Here's our schedule, randomly selected as always:

Wednesday, Nov. 4: Edgar / Nelson

Friday, Nov. 6: Pieper / Haig

Monday, Nov. 9: Hardcastle / discussion of final portfolios

Wednesday, Nov. 11: No Class — Veterans Day

Friday, Nov. 13: Hoffman / Scheifele

Monday, Nov. 16: Baxter / Roller

Project 7 — Voicing the Concrete

Detail from "White Pages" by Martín Gubbins.

Concrete poetry is, on the face of things, about as far as we can get from audiopoetics: often interchangeably called "visual poetry," it's by and large a typographical form rendered largely ineffable precisely because of the mechanisms of its creation. That is, it's for the eye, not the ear.

And yet that's not necessarily the case. As you will see, while concrete poetry is very much a product of the page that doesn't mean that there's not a considerable amount of attention to sound within the form, whether playing with unpronounceability, making homophonic puns, engaging in wordplay between different languages, etc. We'll draw our examples for this week's project from a landmark collection for the genre: Emmett Williams' An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (Something Else Press, 1967) [PDF]

In the linked excerpts you'll find work from a wide array of poets — including Bob Cobbing, Ian Hamilton Findlay, Aram Saroyan, Brion Gysin, Eugen Gomringer, Reinhard Döhl, Ronaldo Azeredo, Maurizio Nannucci, bpNichol, and Williams himself — that span continents and generations. If you'd like another more contemporary set of examples to browse, feel free to take a look at Nico Vassilakis' "Antología Poesía Visual" (a selection of Chilean visual poetry), which Jacket2 published in 2014.

Your primary assignment here will be to create your own work of concrete or visual poetry. In conjunction with our workshopping of individual poems, however, everyone will have a chance to treat their peers' work as a performance score and record the results. We'll have two performers for each piece being workshopped and we'll listen to their recordings as part of each day's workshop process.

Your initial responses should be in either Word, PDF, or JPG format and should be e-mailed to the group no later than Saturday, October 24th. Here's our randomly-assigned schedule for the Week 10 workshops, along with the assigned interpreters for each poet's piece (in parentheses after each name):

• Monday, Oct. 26: Hardcastle (Scheifele, Edgar), Roller (Hardcastle, Nelson), Hoffman (Haig, Baxter)
• Wednesday, Oct. 28: Nelson (Haig, Hoffman), Scheifele (Nelson, Roller), Haig (Pieper, Baxter)
• Friday, Oct. 30: Pieper (Roller, Edgar), Baxter (Scheifele, Hoffman), Edgar (Pieper, Hardcastle)

Project 6 Workshops — October 19–23

Here is our randomized schedule for our sixth round of workshops — focusing on the audio pieces you produced in response to Project 6: Multivocal Poetics:

• Monday, Oct. 19: Nelson, Hoffman, Pieper
• Wednesday, Oct. 21 Hardcastle, Scheifele, Baxter
• Friday, Oct. 23: Edgar, Roller, Haig

Please send out your work out to the list in as either an MP3 file or a SoundCloud link by the time of Saturday October 17th, and make sure your comments on your peers' work is sent to them (and me) in advance of each workshop meeting.