I met and became friends with Ryan Eckes when I lived in Philadelphia. What I like about Ryan’s poems is the way they often drift between concrete physical landscapes and language as its own landscape, and between humility and harshness. I re-read Ryan’s chapbook the other day while taking a bath and I ended up reading the whole thing until my skin got all prune-y.

Ryan Eckes comments on his poems

Ryan reading some poems:
Paying Respects

Out The Window

Stolen Car

Bhagavad-CVS

PhillySound feature on Ryan

Ryan’s chapbook when i come here

New MP3’s picked by Danny Snelson.

I really like the Darren Wershler-Henry recording.

C.D. Wright reads all of Deepstep Come Shining

Alvin Lucier’s The Only Talking Machine of its Kind in the World (for speaker and tape-delay system)

LINK to page on UBUweb

Performers:
Chris Cogburn - speaker
Christopher Burns - computer and electronics
Matt Ingalls - computer and electronics

The Score:
Alvin Lucier - “The Only Talking Machine of Its Kind in the World” for any stutterer, stammerer, lisper, person with faulty or halting speech, regional dialect or foreign accent or any other anxious speaker who believes in the healing power of sound (1969)

“Ask friends to design a tape-delay system in the form of a totem pole, mandala, labyrinth, tree or any other visual configuration. Talk to an audience through a public address system for a long enough time to reveal the peculiarities of your speech. After the peculiarities of your speech have been revealed, your friends may begin building the tape-delay system into which your speech, tapped from the public address system, is fed. Talk, during the building of the tape-delay system, about that which will best reveal the peculiarities of your speech; but from time to time read from a text or tell a story of a people, real or imagined, who have not had or do not now have any idea about anxious speech. Continue talking after the completion of the tape-delay system until, due to the annihilation of the peculiarities of your speech by the tape-delay system, anxiety about your speech is relieved or it becomes clear that the tape-delay system is failing and will continue to fail to bring this about.”

Juliana Spahr reading Thrashing Seems Crazy

This is a recording of Nathaniel Mackey reading from Will Alexander’s Letters to Rosa. Some excerpts of this project appear in Chain #6.

This is Nathaniel Mackey reading from his first epistolary novel Bedouin Hornbook. It is one of my favorite recordings of anything ever. I remember listening to this recording in the late 90’s and turning around a corner in my apartment just as Mackey read the phrase “Dear Birds” about halfway through. It was a physical sensation of being “hit” by something, of hearing something that was very important to hear but I didn’t know why. I had ordered the cassette from SFSU and I remember being excited that my cassette deck had an endless repeat function. I think this one looped all day and night long. (The other side was this John Taggart reading.) I would walk in and out of the room and catch different parts of it. There were several minutes of silence at the end of each side, and I remember being startled each time the voices would start up again. Even now, after hearing it maybe 60 or 70 times I still get caught up in it. In listening to it again recently, I was struck by the longstanding resonances between the works of Alexander and Mackey.

Listen to Will Alexander read his poem A National Day in Bangladesh from the KENNING magazine CD.

PENNsound has just made all of their William Carlos Williams recordings available as singles. This is a big deal, especially for anyone teaching his work. Yay!

These are some MP3’s I’ve been listening to lately:

Stacy Doris, Initial

Brian Kim Stefans, Um, Uh

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Health and Safety

John Godfrey, This Big Wingspread

Summi Kaipa reads The Epics on PENNsound.

Here’s a link to a brief print excerpt and ordering information via Leroy Chapbooks.

I was excited to see this recording of Rachel Blau DuPlessis reading her poem “Draft 85: Hard Copy” up on PENNsound. In the poem’s footnotes, DuPlessis explains: “This poem, as will be evident, is mapped loosely on, thinks about, and responds to George Oppen’s 1968 work ‘Of Being Numerous.’” I thought it might be useful to collect the audio text, the print version, as well as two recordings of Oppen reading Of Being Numerous. I included two Oppen readings here because the first is complete but the second is of higher sound quality.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis reads “Draft 85: Hard Copy”.

Full text of “Draft 85: Hard Copy” on Web Conjunctions.

Oppen reading all of Of Being Numerous at the 92nd Street Y, 1967

Oppen reading an excerpt from Of Being Numerous (sections 1-22) from Selected Readings, 1979 recording

Note: Because of time constraints I haven’t updated this site very regularly. I think for the time being I might post more frequently but in less detail. Right now I’m interested in simply pointing out recordings that interest me. Perhaps I’ll come back later and flesh out more of a response. Also, I’m always open to comments other people might have about the recordings I post.

Since moving to Denver last week, I had a chance to use my Olympus Digital Voice Recorder with my Sony digital recording microphone. This combination of relatively cheap equipment (~$200 total) creates good quality recordings in .wav format which can easily be converted to MP3’s using Switch, a free audio format converter. Once a file is converted to MP3, it can be edited and exported using Audacity with the LAME MP3 encoder. This combination of hardware and software works well for me in terms of portability, price, and ease of use. Anyone interested in making an online audio archive of readings could record them using this stuff and then host it on WordPress. There might be better hardware, software, and web hosting options out there but I figured I would give some specific examples.

Two Joseph Ceravolo readings have just been posted to PENNsound. These are both wonderful recordings.

These are some of my favorites:White Fish in Reeds and Dangers of the Journey to the Happy Land.

See earlier posts on Ceravolo (with excerpts from these readings) here and here.

This recording of Spicer reading all of Language was just posted to PENNsound.

A recording of Spicer reading all of The Holy Grail is also available on the PENNsound Spicer Page.

I’m hoping to comment on these readings in more detail when I get the chance.

Andrew Joron in Amherst (2005)

See previous posts on Joron here and here.

Alice Notley in Buffalo (1987)

This is one of my favorites from the 1987 reading. All My Life

The following poem is from a 2006 reading in Philly: More Important… Notley’s comments at the end of the poem (”I don’t know if that’s true or not. I think about it a lot.”) create an interesting juxtaposition because the language in the poem is so adamant. I find the phrase “I think about it a lot” especially moving for reasons I can’t easily put my finger on. Maybe it’s the sharp contrast between the forcefullness of the poem and the questioning expressed in the comments. This mixture of ways of speaking gets at the frequent polyvocality in much of Notley’s writing. I like to think about the comments after Notley reads the poem “More important…” as part of the poem.

This poem and Notley’s comments on it explicitly address the idea of polyvocality (”a talkin’ voice” “a now-I’m-telling-you-this-voice”): Love Song

Piero Heliczer reads You coul(d) hear the snow dripping and falling into the deers mouth.

See earlier post on Heliczer.

In an earlier post I discussed aspects of Bhanu Kapil’s 1999 reading in Colorado. PennSound recently posted a 2001 reading in Hawaii which includes Kapil reading some of the same poems.

I wanted to place some brief but notable moments from both readings next to one another. I’ve become very interested in paying attention to multiple recorded versions of the same poem, particularly parts of poems that really stand out in one version as emphasized and are somewhat less foregrounded in another version. (This issue came up in my earlier post on Baraka.)

The following clips place an excerpt from the Colorado reading before the same part of the poem during the Hawaii reading:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SKIN

“I came here…”

2 consecutive versions of parts from “The House of Waters”

This is a print excerpt of “The House of Waters” from Autobiography of a Cyborg.

See the Kapil Page on PENNsound for full readings.

The following recordings are from “In The American Tree” a radio show hosted by Lyn Hejinian & Kit Robinson (8-11-78):

From a List of Delusions of the Insane (What They Are Afraid Of)

Berrigan discusses his various methods

#1 Catullus #48 (studio recording)

#2 Catullus #48 Naropa (1987)

#3 Catullus #48 from Rattle Up A Deer (Live at Penny Lane 1989)

*

#1+#2 overlapped

As I mentioned in the Baraka post, when I heard Mackey’s live reading on PENNsound of “Song of the Andoumboulou: 19″ I had another version in my memory that included music.

1) This is the live PENNsound recording: Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou: 19″ without music

2) This version is from Mackey’s studio recording “Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25″. SPD lists the CD as “temporarily out of stock” which might mean the CD is sold out. Hopefully more are on the way. If you can find a copy you should buy it. It’s an incredible recording: Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou: 19″ accompanied by Hafez Modirzadeh and Royal Hartigan

Mackey’s ongoing sequence “Song of the Andoumboulou” takes its title from a Dogon funeral song. This is a 1956 recording of a Dogon performance of the Song of the Andoumboulou: Song of the Andoumboulou

Near the end of the recording, as the pitch from a horn wavers up and down, the sound enacts an ambiguity between a human shout and the sound of a musical instrument: clip of horn blasts from Song of the Andoumboulou

The slide between speech, song, and noise is a dynamic Mackey seems to continually explore.

—–
Try listening to the live recording (#1) and the Dogon funeral song simultaneously.
Try listening to both versions of “Song of the Andoumboulou: 19″ simultaneously.

I find that by doing overlapping listenings with different performances of the same poem I can really tune into all kinds of micro level tonal shifts. If you are interested in trying to do an overlapped listening, the version with music begins at 30 seconds and the live version begins at 3 seconds. You can move the progress bar in the audio application to each of those times while the recording is paused, then you can click play on both as quickly as possible when they’re ready.

The versions of Baraka’s “Black Dada Nihilsmus” and Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou: 19″ that I picked for the PENNsound MP3 feature are not accompanied by music. However, when I picked these tracks I had the echoes of other versions that were accompanied music in the back of my head. (I’ll discuss the Mackey in a separate post.)

Baraka’s “Black Dada Nihilismus” voice-only

Baraka’s “Black Dada Nihilismus (w/ DJ Spooky)” voice + music

The actual reading of the poem begins in the “voice-only” version at about 46 seconds. The poem begins in the second version (voice + music) at about 15 seconds. If you wanted to listen to them simultaneously you could sync them up.

——-

This is a brief clip from the “voice only” version: excerpt without music

This is an excerpt of roughly the same part of the poem from the voice+music version: excerpt with music

This moment in the recordings seemed to be a point of maximum contrast. The DJ Spooky version is a recording I’ve had for several years. It was on a compilation CD of musicians (David Byrne, DJ Spooky, etc.) performing the work of and responding to “beat authors”. Over the years, I’ve listened to that version enough times to solidify it in my memory. When I heard the “voice-only” version from Baraka’s 1964 reading up on PENNsound recently, I listened to it filtered through the history of my listening to the “voice + music” version.

Even without considering the issue of musical accompaniment these are very different performances of the poem. For example, in the “voice-only” clip from 1964, Baraka seems to speak the word “scream” in a higher pitched, slightly elongated way, as if holding the note of a song. There’s an ambiguity between singing and speaking voice here. However, if you listen to the “voice + music” version, the word “scream” is performed more literally (”scream”=SCREAM).

Another moment in this tiny clip that fascinated me was the part in the “voice-only” version when Baraka pauses to turn the page between the word “unearthly” and the word “hollering”. I found that completely surprising. I think it was so surprising because that part in the “voice + music” version (that had been in my head for so long) was performed at such a high level of intensity and velocity. Also, it points to how closely he’s scoring the work according to the page in the “voice-only” version.

As I was listening to this Eileen Myles recording from Boston in 2002 this particular sentence stood out: Myles’ comments

(See the previous Eleni Sikelianos post for more context about paratextual comments as poems.)

My friend Stan Mir recently let me borrow a bunch of tapes so that we could digitize them. One of the tapes that I was really excited about was a George Stanley reading from 2000 at the Poetry Project. Happily, the cassette was labeled well and had a listing of poems. I’ve had the tape for a few weeks and I can’t believe it took me this long to look closely enough at it to find that the poem “Veracruz” was included. It’s a really incredible poem. I’m fairly new to Stanley’s work but I got excited about it after reading “A Tall, Serious Girl” (his selected poems on Qua Press). A few minutes ago I decided to hurry up and digitize just that poem so I could post it here. Listening to this recording, it was interesting to discover that this was a “dictated” poem (in Spicer’s sense of poetic dictation). Here’s the recording: Veracruz

Here’s a print version: text of “Veracruz”

I picked the current featured MP3’s up on PENNsound.

I would like to point out that this site allows multiple clips to play simultaneously. If you hold the cursor over any of the pink text (without clicking on it) an audio player application will pop up and you can hit play. Once one of the files is playing you can move on to another one and start it off too. My favorite combination is the applause at the end of Mark McMorris’ reading and Andrew Joron reading the Hugo Ball poem. Another good combination is all 3 versions of the O’Hara poem simultaneously. This kind of thing is especially useful when you’re trying to pay attention to the sound environment of different versions of the same poem. 

Sometimes while I’m listening to audio files (or listening during a live reading) a reader will say something in between poems that seems like a poem itself. For example, several years ago (late 90’s?) I heard Forrest Gander read in Fort Wayne, Indiana and he had a bad cold. He was carrying around a carton of orange juice and (although I thought he sounded fine from the audience) he felt his voice getting scratchy. After one of the poems he said “I apologize for my voice turning to dust.” That sentence stuck with me and it eventually ended up in a poem I wrote years later. Since then, I’ve been especially tuned into the language used between poems.

A few weeks ago I was on the bus in Philadelphia listening to an Eleni Sikelianos reading from the Segue/Bowery Poetry Club series which I got from Pennsound: full reading. My listening environment was full of ambient sounds and so my attention was often split in several directions, dipping in and out of the reading and my immediate surroundings. I was struck by a particular moment when she made some comments between poems: Eleni Sikelianos’ comments

Notice the different kinds of shifts in her voice as she finishes one poem, addresses a specific audience member (a child, in this case), addresses the entire crowd (”You might take a cue she’s laying down to listen”), reads the title of her next poem, and begins reading the body of the poem. The musicality of the sentence about “laying down to listen” made it exist momentarily in the same mental space as her poems. There is something about the intonation she uses when saying that particular sentence that triggered a kind of “poetry listening response” in me.

A month or two ago my friends Sara Veglahn and Noah Eli Gordon, who live in Denver, hosted a reading at their house by the poets Andrew Joron, Brian Henry, and Laynie Brown. Noah knew that I would want to hear Andrew’s reading in particular, so he called me up on Andrew’s cellphone then he set the phone to “speaker” mode and Andrew read with it open on a nearby table so I could listen along.

This changed the dynamic of the physical reading in some subtle ways (Noah made a joke about the “Philadelphia Simulcast” during the intro) and my experience of the relayed reading was obviously different than if I had been present in the space. One of the things I sometimes find frustrating about really engaging live readings is that I have to physically sit still. I find that my one of my weird responses to paying close attention to something is that I tend to pace. My dream came true with this reading because I was able to pace around my apartment while listening.

In terms of technology, this is a pretty simple arrangement, one we stumbled upon when I happened to call Noah while he was listening to a reading at AWP a few weeks ago. Instead of ignoring my call, he opened up his phone, whispered “I’m at a poetry reading. Do you want to listen?” Then he held it up while it was set on “speaker” mode from his seat in the audience. This initial relayed listening experience was much different from Andrew’s reading, mainly because of the relay point I was listening from. At the AWP reading, my listening was primarily aligned with/filtered through Noah’s physical presence (shifting around, coughing, laughing at funny parts of poems) separate from the larger collective laughter and ambient noises from the rest of the audience. The reader at AWP was unaware of the Philly Simulcast. Listening to Andrew’s reading in Denver, my listening was aligned more with Andrew’s physical presence than with a particular audience member, and the fact that Andrew was conscious of the presence of an alternate, single audience member changes things a bit (and resonates nicely with some of his concerns with technology/disembodied voices, etc).

The use of technology to create extended audiences is not new (I’m thinking of live broadcasts of poetry readings and even more interactive computer-mediated exchanges in the past at the Kelly Writer’s House) but I like the low-tech possibilities of the cellphone relay and how it connects the experience to individual audience members. Noah and I had talked about making more conscious use of the ubiquity of cellphones to orchestrate different kinds of reading/listening experiences. For example, you might have many audience members each calling another person on their cellphone and putting it on speaker so there would be a simultaneous physically present audience that corresponds with a fragmented audience connecting to the reading through a variety of physical listeners. Or, you might also have a collective audience agreement to have a roomful of people receive calls from a live reading happening elsewhere and have a massive, weird amplification effect of having a pile of cellphones recreate the sonic experience happening elsewhere from several different receiver points.

What I like about the cellphone relayed reading is that it requires very little planning and no technological expertise. Obviously there are limitations of sound quality which might be distracting. This type of listening seems to be “split” or overlapping in the sense that my attention (in the AWP reading) was divided between the reader’s voice and a particular listener’s response.

I typed the word “applause” into the search window of my iTunes library and 3 tracks came up. Apparently, I had separately tracked off applause on Jack Spicer’s July 15th 1965 reading of The Holy Grail, David Shapiro’s 2004 UMass reading, and Mark McMorris’ 2005 UMass reading. Recorded applause seems like something no one really thinks about much. What was interesting was that all three tracks lasted between 23 and 25 seconds long. The Spicer has about 15 seconds of actual clapping and then it dies down. Mark McMorris has almost 24 full seconds of clapping. The Shapiro applause is pretty long too but it seems to die down a bit and then pick up again near the end. Of the three, I think my favorite is the Spicer because the sound is less easily identifiable as applause due to tape decay and recording limitations.

McMorris
Shapiro
Spicer

I feel like something could be learned by studying the applause from various readings across time. It’s valuable to recognize that applause as a sonic phenomenon is more various than is generally acknowledged. Applause is one of the constants at the end of most poetry recordings so it might be a good baseline indicator of the sound/recording environment. For example, some of my recordings were made from the audience in a space with a PA system. You might not be able to tell that until the end when you hear hands clapping 4 inches from the mic. I find that sometimes as I listen to an audio recording the dissonance and materiality of the recording fades somewhat as I am filtering for clear speech. However, when the applause happens at the end I am often reminded again of the textures of the sound environment. Also, in the same way that crowd laughter doesn’t necessarily “mean” one static thing (that something is funny) I would argue that applause is not always just a fixed response of approval. One example of this might be the way some readers have been cut off during an extraordinarily long reading by interruptive applause from someone in charge of the event.

These are 3 different versions of Frank O’Hara’s “Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!”)

1) The first one I think I got somewhere on the internet as a streaming RealAudio file in 2001. At that point, in order to get the file off the internet and onto a CD I had to loop a mini cable from the output into the input on the back of my computer and record it onto Roxio Toast’s Spin Doctor program. The surface crackle makes me wonder if this wasn’t recorded from vinyl. version one

2) The second one is from a different reading. Maybe I got it from the same site. I can’t remember. It has a totally different feel to it. O’Hara hams it up a bit more at the end: version two

3) The third version is from the Voice of the Poet series of audio CD’s. This is a different technical rendering of the same recording from #1. The audio engineer decided to clip it in a weird way and it sounds very “digital” to me. Here, I mean that pejoratively. This version* annoys me in the way that bad CGI annoys me. version three (excerpt)

The first and third recordings raise the issue of the audio file as a mediated/ “translated” text. Perhaps the audio engineer was going for more hiss reduction or something. In general the Voice of the Poet versions of O’Hara’s poems seem kind of “off” to me in the way that bad translations of work I’m very familiar can feel “off”. One thing that was sort of interesting to me was thinking about it as digital answering machine quality. That resonates with O’Hara’s personism and the technology of the phone, albeit in a perverse, monstrous and anachronistic way.

Why is this “noise” on the surface of the recording annoying to me while the “hiss” in Bernadette Mayer’s recording is interesting? Whenever I get really distracted by noise in a recording I try to slow down and pay attention to it. I think Cage talks about trying to listen to a set of sounds until your evaluative framework falls away. Putting something on infinite repeat is a good way to do that. Sometimes if I really love a recording I will intentionally try to burn out on it so I’ll be able to see past the parts I think are most interesting and significant and see other things I haven’t noticed. I’m not necessariy holding up an idea of objectivity or neutrality as a goal (or a possibility), but I do think it’s a good habit to try to listen to something until it becomes loosened from an initial set of value judgements.

*Note: I have excerpted the “Voice of the Poet” version so that it is clear I am not trying to freely distribute a commercially available file.

*Update: I think I originally got the first file from UbuWeb a few years ago and then segmented it on my own. O’Hara at Ubu

This was at the end of a cassette tape I digitized. It’s from the same reading as “Migratory Noon” (see a few posts ago). This kind of thing is usually not listened to and generally gets clipped from digital presentations on websites such as PennSound. I like to put it on repeat on headphones. I think of this as something like an exponential inverse of listening to Cage’s 4′33″ (it is full of sound and is about 4 times as long). It gets pretty great about 5 or 6 minutes into it.

16 minutes and 10 seconds

I’m interested in the instances when poets bring the work of other writers into their readings. How do these other texts/authors function in relation to the reader’s work/performance? This clip is from Andrew Joron’s Spring 2005 reading in Amherst, MA. Joron began his reading with some comments about the relationship between culture, politics, physics, and sound. He was able to talk about these issues in remarks on a Hugo Ball sound poem he was about to read. In Joron’s case, the Ball poem seems to function as a map of some of Joron’s aesthetic, philosophical, scientific, and social concerns. I love it when he says “Sound means a lot to me.” That is a pretty big understatement if you’re familiar with his Joron’s work. Here are the comments: comments on Hugo Ball poem

Here is Joron reading Ball’s poem Hugo Ball poem

Several poems later, Joron read “Dolphy at Delphi” from his book Fathom. I’m interested in how the discussion of the title as well as Joron’s brief comments before he reads the poem which suggest a backstory (”It’s about. In my mind it was about…”) gave me a more fleshed out environment for me to imagine the poem. On the page, I might not have framed the language in terms of the particular scenario Joron describes.

I love the little accidental slips/substitutions in Joron’s reading (”… the perpetual motion … emotion”) because they emphasize the importance of micro-level phonemic shifts and embedded undertones in his work. There is so much homonymic substitution and slippage in Joron’s work that when he (unconsciously?) deviates from the text it underscores the significance of tiny variations. This idea of error as alternate take comes up obliquely in the poem itself (”how the wrong notes compose their own song”). Also, if you listen to this recording you will learn what a “moldy fig” is: Dolphy at Delphi

I thought it might be useful to talk a little bit about the specific tools I’ve used in digitizing and segmenting files. I used to record live readings with a SONY MD Walkman MZ-R700 recorder with a plug in mic. Then I would play the minidisc record in real time back into my Macintosh (the connection was a mini from the MD player to a mini input on the back of my computer). I used Roxio Toast’s Spin Doctor software to digitize the file and track it off, usually by looking for an absence or extremely short lines in the wave form that tend to mean a pause between poems. Another way would be to look for spikes that signal applause. I would then burn them using Toast onto a blank CD, then import that burned CD back into ITunes, where I would enter in the bibliographic info. This was a huge pain and it explains why I still have a stack of minidiscs of readings from a long time ago. I’ve talked to other people who have the same problem. Playing the recordings back in real time is inconvenient because it takes up a lot of time and you can’t do much else on your computer without it crashing or making bleeps and blips from applications intrude into the recording.

What I’m mostly doing for this site is taking files I’ve already imported into my iTunes library and opening them up in Audacity. From there, I can select a portion of the reading and make a duplicate of it. I then export it as an MP3. Save it to my desktop and then upload it using wordpress.com’s blogging software. Audacity is good for segmenting tracks. It’s pretty easy to use. Now for live readings, I use this digital voice recorder Charles recommended (Olympus WS-320M 1 GB Digital Voice Recorder and Music Player) which records as Windows Media Player files which you can convert to MP3’s and then segment using Audacity. The recorder opens up to reveal a USB connecter which hooks up directly to your computer. This is much better because it skips the real time playback of mini-discs. The sound quality is pretty good and it’s simple and relatively cheap (120 dollars on Amazon).

I would be curious if anyone out there wants to comment about the processes they use or have used. For example, my friend Stan Mir (who just showed me how to segment with Audacity, Thanks Stan!) told me about an elaborate process using, I think, a Mini-Disc recorder, Garageband, and like 10 other steps. I feel a deep deep sympathetic connection to people who have been the audio/tech person when the technology was really primordial.

This Piero Heliczer reading is interesting to me for any number of reasons. First, it’s always mindblowing to hear someone’s actual voice after reading them for several years without it. I think it’s always great to hear someone like Heliczer or Ceravolo read because up until recently it was hard to find their work even in print form. I was eating dinner over at poets Carolina Maugeri and Stan Mir’s apartment in Germantown a few weeks ago and we were talking about poetry recordings and Stan mentioned that Michael Gizzi had given him a taped copy of this Heliczer reading. Needless to say, I freaked out and Stan rummaged around and came back downstairs with the tape. I immediately went home and digitized the reading, tracking it off and making sure I wrote down all the bibliographic info that was available to me. Late late that night, after the reading was tracked off, I went to sleep with it playing. I didn’t actually get a chance to listen to it much while it was being digitized so it was a treat to be able to sit back and absorb it. This is the first poem: fuga xiii

Just as I was nodding off, the track “Paris a scenario for a silent movie” came on. Heliczer’s voice was distorted, shifting in pitch periodically. Aside from scaring the hell out of me and waking me up completely, this track reminded me that the version I was listening to was mediated through at least three kinds of recording technologies. I’m assuming it was recorded to reel to reel if the date was 1960. Is that a reasonable assumption? Then someone eventually made a cassette copy. Actually, there were probably a handful of cassette duplications in between the reel to reel and Stan’s copy. Finally, that night I had made the digital version. Here it is:
paris a scenario for a silent movie

This Bhanu Kapil recording made me think more about the phenomenon of laughter as a crowd response as well as false starts or re-voicings within an audio text. In this clip, Kapil’s volume and emphasis shifts radically at a few points. One of the effects this has on the audience is that they laugh: Bhanu Kapil excerpt #1

What does/can laughter mean in the context of a live reading? What does the appearance of laughter say about the immediate environment of the performance? How does the existence of laughter at a reading shape (feed back into) the author’s performance of the work? I have found that crowd laughter sometimes corresponds to some sort of excess (the most obvious excess being thematic: something is funny at the level of content BUT ALSO things such as excessive volume, large shifts in reading style, etc.)

Immediately after the clip I’ve included above ends, Kapil begins to read from a different piece and then stops and adjusts her voice. Everyone in the crowd notices this adjustment and laughs and Kapil herself briefly laughs while reading. This moment is so interesting to me because it seems to document the way a crowd’s response influences the reader’s performance, making it momentarily lighter and how the author re-adjusts her performance style to accent a more serious, intense reading voice to match the content of the work. Bhanu Kapil excerpt #2

Maybe it’s not so much a binary between playfulness/humor connected to crowd laughter vs. “seriousness” of an authorial presence in relation to the content of the work. It’s tough to intepret moments like this in a fixed way. One simple way of explaining this shift is that Kapil is clearing her throat or getting back into the rhythm/feel of reading after stopping. I can’t quite put my finger on why this moment interests me so much. I feel like it points to a kind of dynamic between audience, text, and author/performer that is fairly fluid instead of the idea of the writer sticking to the script and not responding to their environment in a significant way. I much prefer reading moments such as these when thinking about these issues instead of really overtly performative work that is highly conscious of the listening/performing environment. It reminds me that these weird, interesting social dynamics, interchanges, etc. are always present to some degree even when they might seem insignificant or invisible.

Another case of a recording that exists in a space between public and private reception is a recording of Joseph Ceravolo reading in his New Jersey apartment with the radio on in the background. What is the status of this recording? The music in the background seems to complement the poems in places. This recording seems to gesture more toward the idea of an audience, but what kind of audience (friends)? How do these private (or very limited distribution) recordings inform our understanding of the poet’s own understanding of their work?

Joe Ceravolo “Drunken Winter” (bibliographic info to come)

For a long time I had a very particular idea about Ceravolo and his work that was informed by listening to this recording. His affect seems somehow both flat and entirely expressive. There’s something one might associate with sadness about the lack of dramatic intonational shifts but Ceravolo’s voice here also has to do with longing, immensity. The slow, measured pace of the speech and the clipped twists and turns of the language gave me something precise and strange, framed but also wild.

Compare this to the sped up pace and different ambience of this recording in a more public space: Joe Ceravolo “Migratory Noon” (St. Marks Poetry Project, ca 1970’s?)

Also, I was struck by Ceravolo’s introductory comments at this reading. After listening to the home recording with music for several years and reading his books (from photocopied out of print books I got from Interlibrary loan or used out of print books I ordered online) I had a sense of a poet who was somewhat isolated, singular, completely out of context, etc. It was so interesting to have my original naive impressions and clumsy assumptions questioned by the following paratextual comments which show him as gregarious, embedded within a community, having his work shaped by others, etc. As I write this I think “of course!” but for years I think I had a distorted (but still completely fascinated and engrossed) impression of his work due to the strange intimacy of the home+radio recording environment. Here’s some of his initial comments to the live reading: Introductory comments to live reading

This is a Bernadette Mayer recording that seems like it was created by Mayer to either practice the performance of a set of poems or to help her revise them. I’m especially interested in these types of recordings that exist in a space between private and public. Is this a private recording that somehow slipped into a wider circulation? If not, how was its reception imagined by Mayer? How does the status of a work’s intended audience/distribution change the nature of how one listens to it? What might recordings like this say about the prevalent but mostly unacknowledged practice of poets privately practicing performances of their work? What do recordings such as these say about the sheer volume of discarded or privately held “personal recordings” of a poet performing their work?

I borrowed and digitized a cassette recording of this from Peter Gizzi a few years ago. I need to check with Peter because I no longer have the bibliographic information. That’s a huge problem with this kind of work. When I first got into doing sound recordings I didn’t pay much attention to dates and places. I just wanted my own private listening copy and I wanted to be able to burn CD’s for friends. However, with the emergence of PennSound and a more systematic approach to archiving these materials, I often want to kick myself for not taking better notes. Aside from my own sloth, I think the lack of urgency I felt about documenting the materials says something about the status, circulation, reception, use, etc. of recordings. Most of the poets I know have a shoebox full of poorly labelled, 10th generation dub cassettes of really amazing stuff. They often exist as secret treasures passed along through a network of friends. There’s usually a huge chain of people who have handled and reproduced these materials. You’re usually not just getting “a copy of a copy” but “a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of…”

Back to the recording itself: Bernadette Mayer “for Helen Decker”

I like the low recording level of this recording, how you have to lean in to hear it. The hiss builds up a surface or texture that her voice moves in and out of. I like to interact with this recording by flipping between hearing and listening. Sometimes I don’t pay attention to the content but experience the interplay between the hiss of the background and all the s sounds of at the ends of the words Mayer catalogs. It also feels like wind. When I listen to the recording I imagine Mayer reading this on a very windy day and I think about the invisible, physical pressure of wind on my body. For some reason I imagine her reading on a screened in porch facing a densely wooded area. Obviously, that’s just me. BUT I don’t want to discount that kind of specific, personal nexus of associations a recording like this might evoke.

This is an excerpt from a reading John Ashbery gave at St. Marks Church in NYC in 1971.

Ashbery comments: “It is kind of an environmental work, if I may be so bold. If you feel like leaving at any point it won’t matter you will have had the experience.” I’m beginning this blog with these comments because they point to (and undermine) several of the underlying assumptions/conventions of the public poetry reading:

1) The audience should pay close attention. The reader should engage the audience during the entirety of the reading. If there is not a consistent and intense level of engagment, someone (audience or reader) is not doing their job.

2) Poetry readings should have a particular, relatively short duration. In the same way that a large release film tends to have set time parameters (anywhere from a little over an hour to just under 3 hours) a single author poetry reading would generally last from say, 10 minutes to 45 or 50 minutes at the outer end.

3) Just as one would tend to sit through an entire movie, it would be expected to stay throughout an entire poetry reading. To leave either one generally signals disapproval/failure.

When Ashbery says that the poem he will read might take anywhere from “an hour and two hours” you can hear a small patch of laughter from the audience. I am always interested in what laughter means in the context of a public reading. I’m going to go into this in more detail in subsequent posts but here it seems to point at the violation of the convention of the usual length of a poetry reading. The fact that he will “declare an intermission” at the halfway point in the reading is interesting because it seems to reframe his reading in terms of other kinds of performances that might have intermissions (long films, extended musical or theatrical performances, etc.)

I think these kinds paratextual comments are useful to think about because they not only tell you about normative public reading practices but (especially in Ashbery’s case) they point to the ways in which an author/reader might create a new kind of work by modifying these conventions.

Ashbery