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.

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.

Project 4 Workshops — Oct. 5–7

I fired up the list randomizer again and here's our schedule for the fourth mini-round of workshops, focusing on the 30-second loop pieces you made in response to Project 4: Micro-Loops:

• Monday, Oct. 5: Pieper, Nelson, Hoffman, Haig
• Wednesday, Oct. 7: Roller , Edgar, Scheifele, Hardcastle, Baxter

Please send out your work — either as attached MP3 files or a SoundCloud link — to me and me alone no later than the end of the evening on Saturday October 3rd. As I mentioned in the prompt itself, you won't be writing responses in advance for this project. Instead we'll respond on the fly in class, and we should have a little time left on Wednesday for general comments on this round.

Project 3 Workshops — Sept. 28 – Oct. 2

Here's our randomized schedule for the third round of workshops, focusing on the audiotexts you made in response to Project 3: Constrained Cut-Ups. 

• Monday, Sept. 28: Haig, Pieper, Hardcastle
• Wednesday, Sept. 30: Nelson, Hoffman, Edgar
• Friday, Oct. 2: Roller, Scheifele, Baxter

Please send out your work — either as attached MP3 files or a SoundCloud link — to the list by the time of our class meeting on this Friday, September 25th. As I mentioned in class today, you won't be able to do line-by-line comments but do send your peers a short note (either in a Word doc or just an e-mail message) with your feedback on their pieces. Some things in particular that you might want to focus on: sound, semantics, and technique.

Project 5: Improvise and Excise

Robert Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing" (1953)

For our next project, we'll be working with two parallel forces — creation and destruction — to produce a finished poem.

The first step will involve making a short recording of improvised speech (or singing, or freestyling — basically you making words however you'd like), which you'll then process. Ninety seconds might be an ideal length but feel free to do more or less as you prefer. In any case, set the time frame and stick to it.

You should only record one take and fill that time with as much or as little speech as you'd like. Perhaps you'll try to work out a new poem you haven't yet written or recall an old one from memory; maybe you'll make a to-do list or tell a story, talk to a friend, talk to yourself, string together stream-of-consciousness associations, or make one straightforward statement. In any case, once you're done, transcribe what you've recorded. 

Now the second step of the project commences. Using your complete transcription as a source text that you'll break down via the process of erasure to yield a final text, not unlike how a sculptor begins with a block of marble and chips it away a little bit at a time to create their finished piece. You can cut as much or as little as you'd like, and can remove words in complete units (i.e. clauses, sentences, paragraphs) or individual words (or even letters). That is to say that your final piece will be as cohesive (or deconstructive) as you want it to be. You might choose to work in Word itself, deleting text as you desire, or with a print-out of the document, using a Sharpie, Wite-out, scissors, drops of paint, etc. and then retranscribe the results into Word.

Before we get to specifications for this assignment, a few precedents and contexts: Wave Poetry is a publisher with a serious interest in the erasure technique and they've gone so far as to produce an erasure engine that allows visitors to make their own texts from sources as diverse as Melville's Moby Dick, Kant's The Critique of Practical Reasoning, and Aristophanes' The Clouds. Other poets using this technique include Joseph Massey and Mary Ruefele, and one of the ur-texts in this genre is Tom Phillips' A Humument — a book-length text created by "treating" a Victorian novel, A Human Document.  As for improvisation and transcription, those techniques are at the heart of poet David Antin's practice: his published works begin as spontaneously-generated talks in various locations, which are recorded, transcribed, and lightly-edited to yield their final versions.

Your responses to this prompt should be written texts texts (ideally in Word format) of a reasonable length (~1 page) and should be e-mailed out no later than our class meeting on Monday, October 5th. If our class stays on schedule, we should be workshopping these pieces from October 9–14, taking us up to the fall reading days.

Project 4: Micro-Loops

Our fourth project builds upon its predecessor and will work a little different than our usual prompts, but more on that in a moment . . .

Repetition is a technique at the very heart of poetic practice: from the strict patterns of rhythm and rhyme found in traditional verse to devices like litany and alliteration. For this mini-prompt, we'll be taking repetition to absurd lengths via technological means.

I'd like you to construct a 30 second audiotext that involves looping as its constitutional technique. While the length is absolute, all other details are open: you can use found sound or record your own audio, and you can select a loop of any length — it might be a five second sample that loops six times, half a second that loops sixty times, etc. and your loop need not begin and end cleanly, either.

"You know what's an excellent word to say out loud repeatedly?" Nicole Bonner chewed her hair. " 'Rinse.' Think about it, Mr. Kerchek. Rinse. Rinse."

— David Schickler, "The Smoker"

The point here, perhaps, is to find a new sort of beauty in language when we divorce ourselves from our usual relationship with it, achieving something not unlike a reduced reaction to semantic information (as in the example above). Or maybe what you'll find will be more semantic à la the potential for truths being revealed through the cut-up process (as Burroughs suggests). Also, while you'll be working in audio, there are textual precedents for this sort of experiment: cf. Ron Padgett's "Nothing in That Drawer," "Sonnet for Andy Warhol" and Two Stories for Andy Warhol (n.b. the detail shown on the linked page is one of ten identical pages from Padgett's book), or Aram Saroyan's minimalist work: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

You can set up loops pretty easily in both Audacity (highlight a portion of the waveform and hold down shift as you hit the space bar to start loop play mode) and Garageband (use the loop button in the toolbar with play, stop, etc. and set your loop area by dragging the edges of the yellow bar above the waveform) and you'll likely want to fine-tune your loops points before cutting and pasting your final product together. Likewise you'll probably want to make a number of these constructs — which can be pretty quickly thrown together — before deciding on the one that you want to present in workshop.

Your responses to this prompt should be in MP3 format — either as a SoundCloud link or an e-mail attachment — and should be exactly 30 seconds long. Please send your pieces to me (and me alone) by our class time on Friday, October 2nd. We'll go over these pieces in class on the 5th and 7th of October in a randomized order and you'll be encountering them for the first time in class, so you won't be writing comments ahead of time. You should, however, come prepared to discuss your peers' work on the fly.

Project 2 Workshops — Sept. 21–25

I ran the class roll through the randomizer again and here's the schedule we got for our second round of workshops, focusing on poems written in response to Project 2: Surveillance Poetics:

• Monday, Sept. 21: Edgar, Baxter, Hoffman
• Wednesday, Sept. 23: Haig, Pieper, Roller
• Friday, Sept. 25: Nelson, Scheifele, Hardcastle

Please send out your poems to the list no later than our class meeting on Friday, September 18th.

Also I wanted to jot down a few reminders on responses coming out of our first round of workshopping:

• You should be making specific comments on certain lines, words, phrases, etc. using the comments function in Word. If you're not using Word or a program with similar functionality, please add numbered references in brackets and make end note-like comments at the bottom of the document. These can be in-the-moment reactions to these elements as you read them.
• You should also write some sort of narrative response to the poem at the bottom of the page. In contrast to the in-the-moment comments this provides you with a chance to reflect on the poem after reading it in its entirety.
• Comments should, above all, be constructive and respectful — which doesn't mean that you can't disagree with the choices the poet made, just that you shouldn't be a jerk about it — and should be substantive. Empty praise doesn't help the poet, nor do vague comments: back up your claims with rationale; explain the effects their choices have upon you as a reader. "I don't understand this" is a cop out as well — make your best effort to absorb the poem and report on the impressions that you do get.
• Proposing alternatives (to word choices, line breaks, etc.) is a very effective sort of feedback as well. Though it shouldn't be the sum total of your response, playing "if I was writing this poem" is a great approach to take.

N.b. I've posted a shrunk (so as to be somewhat anonymized) screen cap of my comments on Kelly's first poem above. You won't necessarily write that much, but it's something to aim towards. Showing your peers that you care about and respect their work is, first and foremost, being a good workshop citizen. It's also not a bad way to get the same treatment from them as well!

Project 1 Workshops — Sept. 14–18

Here's the randomly-generated schedule we'll follow for our first round of workshops, focusing on poems you wrote in response to Project 1: Sonic Survey.

• Monday, Sept. 14: Scheifele, Pieper, Nelson
• Wednesday, Sept. 16: Roller, Baxter, Edgar
• Friday, Sept. 18: Hoffman, Hardcastle, Haig

Please send out your poems for this round to our e-mail list no later than Friday, Sept. 11.

Workshop Organization

On Monday we'll start workshopping the poems you wrote in response to Project #1 and I imagine that we will be able to very easily get through three poems a day, so that round should only last the week. Here's how we'll conduct each workshop round over the rest of the semester:

1. By our class meeting on the project deadline day (usually one class before the start of the round) you should e-mail your poem and/or any other supporting materials (MP3s, links, etc.) to the rest of the class in one e-mail message (creating an alias with all nine addresses will help) with a subject line like this: Project X / Your Last Name. If you haven't yet added your address to the thread on Facebook please do so immediately.
2. A workshop schedule will be posted in advance of each round. For the first round I've used a list randomizer to generate slots and if there are no issues we can continue doing this for every round.
3. Prior to each class you should e-mail your written comments to both the poets being workshopped and me (one e-mail per poet) — I'm doing this to ensure that everyone is getting substantive and constructive feedback, basically that everyone is doing their job.
4. At the start of each workshop session I'll set a timer (probably for 12 minutes per person) so that we keep on schedule. Typically the poet being workshopped is not allowed to talk or ask questions until after her peers have spoken but we'll reserve time for dialogue at the end of each session.
5. You're more than welcome to send follow-up comments to your peers after we've workshopped their poems.

If you have any questions about this, let me know. I imagine we'll get into the swing of things pretty quickly.

Project 3: Constrained Cut-Ups

The many faces of cut-up pioneer William S. Burroughs.

You've already received more thorough instructions on this assignment than I'm going to provide here in your foundations readings from Burroughs and Gysin, but for inspiration's sake, here are a few passages from "The Invisible Generation" to help you re-engage with the cut-up methodology:

it's all done with tape recorders consider this machine and what it can do it can record and play back activating a past time set by precise association a recording can be played back any number of times you can study and analyze every pause and inflection of a recorded conversation  

the simplest variety of cut up on tape can be carried out with one machine like this record any text rewind to the beginning now run forward an arbitrary interval stop the machine and record a short text wind forward stop record where you have recorded over the original text the words are wiped out and replaced with new words do this several times creating arbitrary juxtapositions you will notice that the arbitrary cuts in are appropriate in many cases and your cut up tape makes surprising sense 

the use of irrelevant response will be found effective in breaking obsessional association tracks all association tracks are obsessional get it out of your head and into the machines stop arguing stop complaining stop talking let the machines argue complain and talk a tape recorder is an externalized section of the human nervous system you can find out more about the nervous system and gain more control over your reactions by using the tape recorder than you could find out sitting twenty years in the lotus posture or wasting your time on the analytic couch

Okay, so now on to the technical specifics of the project. First, as the title suggests, your participation will be constrained in two ways:

1. I've chosen the four recordings you'll be using for this project and have numbered them in a somewhat anonymous way so that you won't know what you're getting until you've chosen.
2. The number of tracks you'll need to make use of in some way (a lot or a little, this can vary depending on your needs) will be chosen by a random number generator in the form of drawing a card from a deck of four.

Click here to draw your card. The card showing when the page loads is your selection. Then download your recording(s) from the links below:

1   /   2   /   3   /   4

As I said above, you can use as much or as little of the source recording(s) as you like. You can also manipulate the recordings — speed up, slow down, reverse, echo, pitch-shift, distort, ring modulate, etc. — however you see fit. For most poets, the prevailing impulse will be to create something intentional out of these raw materials but you might desire to make more random cuts and juxtapositions and see what emerges. Don't forget Pierre Schaeffer's framing of concrete composition (vs. the traditional "abstract" method; see right), which might be another useful guide as you complete this project.

Your responses to this prompt should be in MP3 format — either as a SoundCloud link or an e-mail attachment — with a minimum length of ~30 seconds and a maximum length of ~2 minutes (if you're really inspired and produce something longer let me know and we can discuss). Please post your response by our class time on Friday, September 25th, and we can probably aim to start workshopping these poems the week of the 28th.

Week 3 — How I Made a Podcast

In the fall of 2013, I put together an "audio essay" to be shared as part of PennSound's 10th anniversary celebration. The resulting piece, the product of maybe 6–8 hours' work, ran just over nine and a half minutes, and you can listen to it below:

I thought I'd document the process of assembling this piece and share my notes with students in the hopes that it might be a helpful tool.


1. Outline your basic concept

I wanted my piece to generally break down into two basic sections: first, a short discussion of how I came to work at PennSound and some of the notable discoveries I made during my early years there, and second, discussion of a few memorable sessions I'd recorded with a few favorite poets.


2. Gather and prep raw materials

I decided upon the recordings that I wanted to use for my piece and downloaded them from PennSound, then used Audacity to make the smaller cuts I'd be using. Note that I've used simplified yet descriptive file names for the cuts I've made, distinguishing the order I want to use them in, or just their contents.

For the section mimicking several Christian Bök tracks playing simultaneously, I made a sub-mix to export as its own MP3 file. The blue shape under the last track is contouring its volume level to create a fade-in. Thought it's not easy to see, I've also stereo-panned the two beatboxing tracks relatively hard left and right, while the "lead vocal" goes closer to the middle.

Here, while trimming down a short snippet from the Ashbery/Lauterbach "Litany," you can see that I've left  room tone (i.e. "silence;" the noise floor of tape hiss) on either side, so that I can seamlessly integrate it with my own voice-over when stitching the track together.

 

3. Prepare your script

It's much easier to record your voice-over when you're reading from a pre-prepared script, so take the time to write things down in advance, and mark out where your insertions will go as well (as you can see below). Even though you're free to improvise when recording, it'll help you work around tricky diction if you have clear reading copy to work from.

4. Record and edit your voice-over

For my piece, I used my little Tascam portable on a tripod right in front of my laptop, then copied the file to my computer so I could edit it in Audacity.  My preferred method is to record everything linearly in one long take, then go through and pull out the individual files as needed. You're bound to make mistakes, and when you do, just leave a sufficient pause and then start again. It's also not a bad idea to give a second take when in the moment you feel less than enamoured of a certain reading. Try to record sections of voice-over in as continuous sections as you can, but leave sufficient pauses between sections so you can trim down, and/or make splices with enough room tone to cover the gaps.

Here, you can see that I've cut a section of voice-over very closely at the head, to eliminate the sound of me inhaling before I start speaking, but left a silent tail that I can use to overlay another voice-over section.

Organize your voice-over sections in a similar fashion as your samples: I've numbered them in order of their appearance (n.b. two pieces that have alternate takes) and added a few words to clue me in to their contents.


5. Final construction

I opted to use Garageband, since that's the software I'm most comfortable using, to lay out my final podcast. Here's what the full piece looks like in the editor:

You'll notice I've used two tracks for voice-over and two tracks for the inserted samples (which are ducked, i.e. the software will always make the voice-over tracks louder than the samples), plus one track for music (I eventually ended up ditching the backing music).  I use two tracks for each section so that I can put together tighter edits using that room tone before and after the sound snippets without cutting any one track short (i.e. those sounds overlap on adjacent tracks so they can play out through the edit point). Edits often need to be fine-tuned by moving a sample back and forth little by little, sometimes just a fraction of a second to get the right pacing, the right pauses, and natural speech-like flow. You can also use fade-ins and fade-outs to make pieces fit together more smoothly.

Here, you can more clearly see the interplay of tracks on a section from the middle of the piece. The second and third tracks are my own voice-over, while the fourth and fifth are samples of other poets. Originally the last track was just for samples that needed fade-ins (namely the Tardos) but I wound up doing a fade-in on the Bök as well.

It certainly takes a lot of trial and error — and by no means would I call myself an expert — but I hope that this might be of use to you over the course of the semester.

Week 3 — A Crash Course in Audio Editing

Spend long enough editing audio and you'll have the same blank stare John Cage has here.

After the Labor Day holiday, and before we begin our workshop rounds in earnest, I thought it would be worthwhile to spend a little time going over the basics of audio editing. In particular, we'll be discussing the very powerful freeware editing software Audacity (which you can download here; you'll also need to download the LAME encoder here to be able to process MP3 files), though you can use any other method or program for editing audio that you're comfortable with. This will hopefully give you enough of a foundation to start playing around on your own in preparation for later workshop projects that will either use the recording medium as a compositional tool, or produce audio works as their final products. You'll note that the first few prompts are writing based, so you'll have more time to get familiar with Audacity before you actually need to use it.

As part of your audio experimentation, you might want to use some of Audacity's built-in effects, and I encourage you to play around with them. You'll find Wikipedia pages for various effects here and more detailed descriptions of some of the basic types of effects you'll encounter here. Another helpful resource is Audacity's own tips wiki, and of course, you can and should also feel free to use our Facebook group to troubleshoot any obstacles you face.

I've been editing audio and recording digitally for more than eight years now (through Adobe Audition, Audacity and Apple's Garageband), and before that spent many years working on 4-track recorders and regular tape decks. Programs like Audacity are relatively user-friendly, but that doesn't mean you won't run into difficulties along the way, especially if you've never worked with audio before. A few general pointers before you get started:

• The best way to learn is through trial and error. You will make mistakes, accidentally erase tracks, and maybe even lose projects, and it's better to do that this weekend than a few hours before the midterm project's due.
• Always be sure to save backup copies of your recordings, work with safety copies, and export new mixes as new versions rather than overwriting your originals. Copy rather than cut, and open a new project or window if necessary. Redundancy is key here, but don't forget that you can always download a new copy of online recordings (from the sources below or your SoundCloud account) if needed.
• Thoroughly document your efforts: use descriptive file names and keep a log of the various steps you take while manipulating your audio, including settings for effects, filters, etc. This will make it easier to recreate processes if you want to apply them to multiple samples or to start over when needed.
• Undo (ctrl/command+Z) is your best friend. If you screw something up (and you will), it's better to undo it and try again rather than take further steps to try to fix it.
• Wear headphones while working and remember that you have the whole stereo field to work with. You can go a long way towards making cleaner, uncluttered recordings if you aim for dynamic range and balance: pan two voice tracks left and right for separation, keep higher and lower frequency sounds apart for greater definition, give quiet sounds room to breathe away from louder signals.
• Try to have fun with the process and remember that nobody expects perfection.

Finally, here are some sources for audio that might be useful over the course of the semester:

• UC's Elliston Project
• PennSound
• UbuWeb Sound
• the SFSU Poetry Center Online Archives
• the Internet Archive Community Audio
• the Library of Congress' National Jukebox
• the Alan Lomax Archives at Cultural Equity

Project 2: Surveillance Poetics

Gene Hackman, detail from movie poster for The Conversation (1974).

If you've ever dreamt of working for the NSA, then perhaps this is the poetry prompt for you. Our second project builds off of the active listening that you did in Project 1 but changes the scope somewhat, with the focus this time being speech exclusively, instead of non-verbal sounds. It's based, in part, on separate entries from Charles Bernstein's experiment list ("Write a poem consisting entirely of overheard conversation.") and Bernadette Mayer's list of poetry journal ideas  (which lists "answering machine messages" and "telephone calls [taped?]" among other possibilities). Bernstein offers Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy as an example, and you can find that work — "an unedited document of every word [Goldsmith] spoke during the week of April 15–21, 1996" — and instructions for navigating it here.

Of course, as Goldsmith's book suggests, your own speech might be a part of this project, though one's first inclination might be to only consider others' speech. As was the case in the first project, your choice of listening location, time of day, etc. will greatly influence the outcome. You might also opt to record ambient conversation and then transcribe, but simply writing things down as you hear them is probably quicker and easier. Feel free to include/exclude material as suits you. Your responses might walk the fine line between Chion's notions of semantic and reduced sound, as well as touch upon some ideas from Eno/Schaeffer (re: the re- or de-constructive manipulation of materials) and Burroughs/Gysin (in terms of juxtapositions and gaps).

Your responses to this prompt should be written, and again there's no minimum or maximum length (though be reasonable). Let's tentatively say that your poems should be posted no later than our class on Friday, September 18th and depending on how quickly our first round of workshops goes, we could start talking about these poems as early as September 21st.

Project 1: Sonic Survey

Spend 20–30 minutes actively listening to the sounds around you. Document everything you hear in the form of a poem. Just as William Carlos Williams offers us "no ideas but in things" as a poetic credo, can you use sound alone here (and the documentation thereof) to provide any emotional and/or contextual information that you want to convey? Moving beyond Chion's ideas of causal and semantic listening, can you use reduced listening effectively here to further reinforce those extra-textual effects? Can Cage offer any ideas that might be useful in shaping your poetic responses? How will your choice of setting influence the final results?

As will likely always be the case, you're more than welcome to write multiple poems following the response — using different locations at different times — but you'll need to choose one to the workshopped. Your responses to this prompt should be written (i.e. not audio), with no minimum or maximum length (though be reasonable) and should be posted no later than our class on Friday, September 11th. We'll workshop these poems during the week of September 14th.

Friday, Sept. 4 — Foundations 5: Olson and Bernstein

Charles Olson (left) strikes a pensive pose.

We'll wrap up our foundations classes with a few short essays specifically addressing poetic practice. First we have an era-defining manifesto by Charles Olson, "Projective Verse," in which he lays out his ideas concerning the composition of modern poetry, including "composition by field" and the relationship between the breath and the poetic line. As a complement to Olson's essay, we'll also take a look at a few poems that exemplify his ideas, written by Olson himself and two of his Black Mountain school peers, Robert Creeley and Paul Blackburn.

Charles Olson

• Projective Verse

• Maximus, to Himself [MP3]
• The Songs of Maximus: Song 1 [MP3 (starts around 3:00 and follows with Song 2)]
• The Songs of Maximus: Song 2 [MP3 (Song 1 and 2 at the beginning)]

Robert Creeley

• I Know a Man [MP3]
• A Wicker Basket [MP3]
• The Rain [MP3]
• For Love [MP3]
• The Language [MP3]

Paul Blackburn

• 7th Game : 1960 Series [MP3]
• Brooklyn Narcissus [MP3]
• Ritual VIII
• Ritual X : the Evening Pair of Ales

Next, I'd like you to read two brief essays by Charles Bernstein. First, we have "Hearing Voices," which lays out some of the key ideas to his notion of "close listening," in a more concise and up-to-date way than his classic introduction to the volume of the same name where those concepts were first codified a generation ago: [PDF].

Finally, here's "The Difficult Poem," which offers strategies for navigating challenging poetry while buoying the reader with its irreverent perspective: [PDF]

Wednesday, Sept. 2 — Foundations 4: Tzara, Burroughs, Gysin

Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs flooding their brains with alpha waves
via Ian Sommerville's Dreamachine (read more about it here).

As we near the end of our foundations classes, we're finally moving from the musical/aesthetic realm into discrete literary theory. Along with some of the ideas from our last class, today's readings on the Cut-Up will provide you some tools that will serve you well as you take on projects rooted in several interrelated techniques and aesthetic ideologies — from fragmentation and collage through iterative (or repetitive) and juxtapositional processes, and into composition via transcription (which itself takes several forms).  

While the cut-up is often attributed to Beat novelist William S. Burroughs and artist and writer Brion Gysin during the 1950s, its true origins lie in the aesthetic methodologies of Tristan Tzara, formulated in the 1920s:

To make a Dadaist poem:

• Take a newspaper.
• Take a pair of scissors.
• Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
• Cut out the article.
• Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
• Shake it gently.
• Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
• Copy conscientiously.
• The poem will be like you.
• And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

You can read two poems Tzara composed using this method here: [PDF]

Still, Burroughs and Gysin did a great deal to further refine its procedures, including moving beyond text-based methods to work with both audiotape and film (and the repetitive nature of cut-ups would also greatly influence Gysin's painting).  Here's a brief video clip of Burroughs describing the discovery and development of the technique:

Burroughs would use the technique in Naked Lunch as well as the three novels of his Nova Trilogy: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express, and collaborations between the two would be published in the late 1970s as The Third Mind.  These excerpts from Naked Lunch's "Atrophied Preface" give a sense of how well the cut-up meshed with Burroughs' aesthetic worldview:

Why all this waste paper getting The People from one place to another? Perhaps to spare the Reader stress of sudden space shifts and keep him Gentle? And so a ticket is bought, a taxi called, a plane boarded.  We are allowed a glimpse into the warm peach-lined cave as She (the airline hostess, of course) leans over us to murmur of chewing gum, dramamine, even nembutal.

"Talk paregoric, Sweet Thing, and I will hear." 

I am not American Express.... If one of my people is seen in New York walking around in citizen clothes and next sentence Timbuktu putting down lad talk on a gazelle-eyed youth, we may assume that he (the party non-resident of Timbuktu) transported himself there by the usual methods of communication... [...]

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer... 

We'll read a variety of texts by these two authors for today's class, which are contained in one file: [PDF]

William S. Burroughs (from Word Virus: the William S. Burroughs Reader, ed. James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg)

• Atrophied Preface (Wouldn't You?)
• Quick . . .
• Operation Rewrite
• The Invisible Generation
• The Exterminator
• The Future of the Novel
• Notes on These Pages

Brion Gysin (from Back in No Time: the Brion Gysin Reader, ed. Jason Weiss)

• Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success
• Cut-Ups Self-Explained
• First Cut-Ups
• Minutes to Go
• Permutation Poems (intro and poems)

On UbuWeb you'll find a complete set of the cut-up films made by Burroughs, Gysin, and Antony Balch in the 1960s and 70s (perhaps look at "Towers Open Fire" and "The Cut-Ups").  You can also listen to a variety of Gysin's audio cut-ups here.

Monday, Aug. 31 — Foundations 3: Eno / Schaeffer

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, looking far more sensible than his glam heyday.

Our foundations readings continue with a few more readings from the musical sphere, which, nonetheless, have useful implications for the sorts of poetic investigations we'll be doing this semester.

We begin with Brian Eno, a groundbreaking (non-)musician and producer who's worked with the likes of David Bowie, Devo, Talking Heads, and U2, and is perhaps best known as an innovator and originator of ambient music, which draws heavily from the ideologies of John Cage. Below you'll find two masterpieces of the genre, along with their liner notes, which provide a surprisingly succinct explanation of the ideas behind these works. Read the notes and take a few minutes to listen to a little of each piece (or better still, leave them running in the background as you do your other readings, brush your teeth, do laundry, etc.):

Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) [liner notes]

Discreet Music (1975) [liner notes]

I'd also like you to read Eno's germinal 1979 essay, "The Studio as Compositional Tool," which speaks directly to the challenges and advantages of working objectively and transformatively with creative materials in a hands-on fashion, and provides some useful contexts for the development of the practices that we now take for granted.

Pierre Schaeffer in the studio.

From there, we'll move on to Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995), whose ideas we've already encountered in Michel Chion's writings on reduced listening. Schaeffer's pivotal works emerged from his employment at Radiodiffusion Française (the French national television and radio network) in the postwar era, where he engineered and hosted radio programs and composed music for the air. He's credited as the father of musique concrète, the precursor to contemporary sample-based musics from hip-hop to plunderphonics to mashup culture, in which acousmatic materials (i.e. prerecorded sounds divorced from their sources and semantics) are edited, manipulated and collaged to create new sounds. Etude aux chemins de fer (Study of the railroads), composed in 1948, is his first major breakthrough in this genre:

For Monday I'd like to to read a few excerpts from his In Search of a Concrete Music, first published in France in 1952, but not available in an English-language translation until 2012. I've assembled a few entries from chapter 2 of his "First Journal of Concrete Music" (1948–1949) along with chapters 3 and 5, and for the sake of continuity, I've kept longer passages, rather than chop out little key bits. There's a lot of discussion here that might be oblique (especially references to composers/pieces that you're not familiar with) and it's okay to overlook those. Mostly, I want you to focus on the bigger picture ideas relating to practice and form.