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.

Project 6 — Multivocal Poetics

To begin, let me say I have nothing against monophony. As humans it's the fundamental limit placed upon our otherwise very versatile vocal instrument, and even as a musician I started out on a monophonic instrument (the alto saxophone) and find myself predominately drawn to them (electric bass, analogue synthesizers) to this day. Likewise, while the predominate lyrical impulse in poetry is towards a singular perspective, and the linearity of reading locks us into monolexical mode, that doesn't mean that we can't benefit from injecting a little polyphony into our poetic practice. In fact, a number of you already did this to tremendous effect in your responses to prompt #2.

So for this project, I'd like you to make an audiotext that's in some way multivocal. There are a number of different ways in which you might pursue this and I'll outline them below.

At the most basic level you might opt to perform a poem and then multitrack a second (and third, etc.) recording of the same text. Double-tracking is a very common technique producers use to beef up vocals in particular. Despite one's best efforts towards perfectly matching pacing, emphasis, etc. it's inevitable that variations will occur and these produce a signal that's both denser and modulated (this basic chorus effect is why orchestras have string sections and not just one violin, one viola, etc.). Here's a brief example of John Lennon's double-tracked vocals from an early Beatles track for example:

You might choose to write and then perform a text that involves multiple voices and/or perspectives in such a way that each voice is separate and non-overlapping — if you do this you might even want to cast other voices. The works that some of you produced for prompt #2 would fit this mode well.

Finally, you might choose to write and perform a text that plays around with simultaneity (some examples below): that is, a text that can't necessarily be read in full on its own by one person, but which, in audio form and via multitrack recording, can be experienced as intended.

A few contextual examples for you to browse at your leisure:

• John Ashbery's 1979 long poem "Litany" begins with these instructions: "The two columns of 'Litany' are meant to be read as simultaneous but independent monologues." That's impossible to do on the page, a 1980 studio recording featuring Ashbery reading the left column in the left channel and poet Ann Lauterbach the right in the right channel, allows us to experience it as intended. —  "Litany," Part One [PDF, MP3]
• Charles Bernstein's 1976 tapework "Piffle (Breathing)" [MP3] features simultaneous spontaneous dialogues between the poet, Greg Ball and Susan Bee Bernstein. Jumping forward to 2003 we can listen to a  two-voice rendition of his poem "War Stories" featuring his daughter, Emma [poem and MP3 here]
• John Giorno's early poetry was based on appropriation of found texts. By the late 1960s he'd moved on to manipulate these source materials in a staggered two-column format approximating stereo channels, as seen in poems like "Johnny Guitar" [PDF]. In the live setting poems like this were performed with the help of pre-made recordings and tape delay systems, as you can hear in this recording of "I Don't Need It, I Don't Want It, and You Cheated Me Out Of It."
• Hannah Weiner's clairvoyantly-derived writings — in part originating in her schizophrenia, through which she experienced aural and visual hallucinations of words and phrases that she transcribed into poetry — required a unique style of layout, making use of all-caps text and italics, along with super- and sub-scripts. You can listen to a live multi-voice performance from 1978 and read along with the text [MP3, text begins here with the complete work here] 
• Listen, a 1972 radio play written by Robert Creeley, and performed by Robert and Bobbie Creeley, was released on cassette by Black Sparrow Press in 1972 — Listen (23:09): MP3
• Susan Howe and David Grubbs' 2005 CD release Thiefth 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) by Grubbs. You can listen to the tracks and read the record's liner notes on PennSound's Howe/Grubbs author page, where you'll also find later collaborations.
• The Velvet Underground's infamous "The Murder Mystery" (taken from their self-titled 1969 album), exploits the stereo medium with Lou 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]

Your responses to this prompt should be in audio format (either MP3 or SoundCloud link) of a reasonable length and should be e-mailed out no later than Saturday, October 17th. We'll begin workshopping these pieces when we return from the fall reading days on the week of the 19th.

Project 5 Workshops — Oct. 9–14

Here's the random schedule for the fifth round of workshops — focusing on the poems you wrote in response to Project 5: Improvise and Excise — which will take us up to the fall reading days (and a well deserved break):

• Friday, Oct. 9: Edgar, Roller, Haig
• Monday, Oct. 12: Hoffman, Baxter, Pieper
• Wednesday, Oct. 14: Nelson, Hardcastle, Scheifele

Please send out your work in Word format to the list by the time of our class meeting on Wednesday, October 7th, and make sure your comments on your peers' work is sent to them (and me) in advance of each workshop meeting.