We’re reading Little Disturbances of Men (1959) for Tuesday’s class, which is the first book in the Collected Stories. We have two weeks (4 classes) to deal with the whole Collected Stories.

I think I’m going to begin class by playing a more recent essay/story Travelling, which deals with issues surrouding race relations in 3 different time periods. At the beginning of “Travelling” Paley comments about the blurry line between fiction and nonfiction in her work, which I think will be helpful to address right away.

Noy Holland’s Intro to Paley is great. Actually I think I might play the intro after playing Travelling. Holland recounts a great comment about Paley’s character Faith, who bears some resemblance to Paley. When asked about her relationship to the fictional character, Paley said “Faith works for me.” I like how this articulates a seperation between author and character while acknowledging more than a trivial relationship between the two.

After talking about the line between fiction and nonfiction, I will probably play Inherit the War a 2 minute story that satirizes generational nostalgia for war. Neither of these stories is in the book.

I’m hoping that a discussion about audio files (which my students won’t have read on the page) will lead us into a deeper consideration of Paley’s early work.

There is a longer story, My Father Addresses Me On The Facts of Old Age, which is too long to play in class but might be a good thing to assign as listening homework.

When I assign audio listenings as homework, I like asking simple questions like “What (images, words, phrases, intonational patterns) did you remember from your listening?” and building a conversation from students’ individual impressions. There will probably be some talk about different tones, approaches, stylistic choices Paley makes between these pieces.

I tend to be hesitant to play very long recordings in class, as it feels like a time-killer to students. I also don’t want to use too much audio per class. I mostly teach poetry audio files, but I think these fiction recordings are pretty helpful. I’m curious about how they will respond to her voicing of the stories and her comments.

I have taught Paley’s story Living several times in creative writing classes. Students are often surprised by the audience laughter. Reading the piece on the page sometimes creates a darker, more somber sense of the story. I will play this piece after they read Living on the 3rd or 4th class. We can talk about the complexity of Paley’s tone via a conversation of the audience response. I tend to shy away from presenting audio versions of texts after students read print versions, but in this case, I think it’s o.k. I’m hoping it will be a good way of talking about the context of the live event in shaping the meaning of texts.

Anyway, I wanted to think through some issues related to sequencing and framing audio texts so they don’t instantly pin down the author or become a passive illustration of what students have already read.

When I teach intro poetry classes, I have found that playing these recordings next to one another provoked a lively discussion of diction, tone, etc. Obviously, the contrast between these two poets and poems is fairly stark, but we also look at any formal similarities between the poems. We talk about the ways these two recordings might distort one another. For example, students often pick up on Yeats’ elevated diction and contrast than to Mayer’s generally conversational word choice, but there are often several words and references in Mayer’s poem that students are not familiar with, and we talk about that too. The idea is not to come out with an aesthetic winner, but to talk about both content and context in a more organic, experiential way than listing and defining terms on the board. I like this kind of discussion because students build an understanding of terms and techniques out of their own concrete perceptual experiences.

Tan Lin’s new book 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE] is now available from Wesleyan University Press.

Read Moten’s blog posts on Harriet on the Poetry Foundation website.

Moten’s commentary and one of his poems on the Poetry Society of America site.

Moten’s new book B Jenkins (Duke University Press) is available on Amazon (and elsewhere) now.

I. Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (Segue Series, April 12, 1986)
II. Thorow: Introduction (Radio Readings Project, 1998)
Thorow: I
Thorow: II
Thorow: III
III. Scattering As Behavior Toward Risk (SUNY Buffalo, March 31, 1995)

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Some alternate versions of Thorow:

In the following version of Thorow she either chooses not to include some of the most difficult to read pages (or perhaps they weren’t in this manuscript version): Thorow (Segue Series, June 20, 1987)

In this recording Howe reads all of Thorow at the Kelly Writers House, Wednesday, February 14, 2007. Here, she begins with some epigraphs not included in “Singularities”.

I’m also uploading a 16 second excerpt from Thorow – Part Three as performed by Susan Howe & Dave Grubbs on the CD Thiefth. It’s a wonderful recording that seems to be out of print. In this small clip you can hear some of the ways Howe & Grubbs rendered the polyvocality of the text.

It’s also available individually/as part of an album on iTunes and from the Smithsonian Folkways website (though it appears you can only buy it as part of the entire album).

The Blue Stairs
Saving Tallow
An Emphasis Falls on Reality

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These three poems were recorded in Boston (sometime between 2002 and 2004?) I like these recordings because you can hear some of my friends laughing in the audience:
Token Enabler
The Ambition Of Ahrrrrrrrrr
On Revelations

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Two recordings from the Naropa online audio archives:

Mayer leads a class on memory at Naropa in 1978.

Mayer talks about several of her books at Naropa in 1989.

Listen to Perelman read at Emily Carr University, New Poetics Colloquium, Friday, August 23, 1985.

This reading is hosted on the Kootenay School of Writing’s website. Here is a link to a list of their audio files.

This is a link to Mobilio talking with Leonard Schwartz on XCP in 2005.

Mobilio reads “step 1″ and “step 2″ from The Geographics (excerpted from the XCP program).

You can find a few last copies of The Geographics (Hard Press, 1995) and his great chapbook Bendable Siege (Red Dust, 1991) here at SPD. His book Me With Animal Towering (Black Square Editions, 2002) is available here at Amazon.

This is the kind of recording that I’m especially interested in. There’s a ton of background sound (planes, cars, motorcycles, etc.) but you can still hear her voice clearly. This is one of the recordings I used to play on repeat on headphones when I lived in Philadelphia. It was great because it was like superimposing another sonic landscape on top of wherever I was walking. Because there are so many sounds on the recording in addition to speech, I found myself particularly keyed into the material qualities of the language. Phrases and individual words such as the “also” in “And also I was in the street.” accrue an understated power.

PENNsound currently has several recordings of Renee Gladman reading:
NYC The Line Series 5/22/01 (This reading is a manuscript version of an excerpt from her book The Activist)

NYC Segue Series 2/12/05

NYC Segue Series 5/10/08

Tucson, AZ POG Series 2/21/09

Tuned Droves by Eric Baus
(Octopus Books, Portland, OR and Brooklyn, N.Y., 2008)

Being able to attenuate the ear from behind a variously constructed partition is key, for the speaker and reader of Tuned Droves; in the first section the reader is told the tell-tale signs of a “perfect listener.” From “The Wires Led to a Hive”: “Think of something quieter. Child-flower, bed-flower, the long pause/ her name created./ If a singer neglects her title long enough to lose her tone, the first of/ many eyes emerge./ This is the sign of a perfect listener.”

In Baus’ world, not only speech, but being, is created by projection. Thus, there is a danger implicit in quietude, yet the world the speaker inhabits is one in which silence, as in a game of hide-and-seek, is often necessary. Certain passages in this collection halve sonically, such as the last word “stream” in an untitled prose poem from the section “I Know the Letters This Way,” easily misread, during the first reading, as “scream”: “Do you want to hear my second sound is her shortest sound . . . A tone beside another. They think they have seen my name before. It was here. It was here. We heard it. It was here before they started swimming. Look. We have similar streams.”

The fragility of wire communication and the ecosystem, in which whole universes can shift with the alteration of one word or species, is the weighty axis upon which this tensile collection of verse rests. Directives are given readily: “Do not call out the conductor’s name. Do not repeat the perfect page . . . Be still. Do not discuss the continuous corner.” Cosmic definitions are also proffered with mathematical precision, such as “the core of any sonar is silence,” or, from “The Formation of Flowers”: When a phonograph and a projector converge, they conceive two distinct components: echoes and antennae.” The speaker’s authority comes to a hilt when he coins the most revolutionary vehicle since the Model T-Ford: a “non-lethal ambulance.” “The mandatory distance from the non-lethal ambulance is one hundred solid digits. Keep that in mind. The minimum time for hive transfers is half of half of that.”

Characters are alluded to in the most generic of terms: a man and a woman. The woman is also referred to as “Miss” or “Miss Toy” and the [a] man, as a “king without subjects.” The fringe benefits of naming are delimitation, yet, as there is also violence in this art of naming, Baus again advises caution: “When I write her name is a secret name, the wax removed lets some-/thing tumble over me from the air.”

Entire sections of the book have a subaqueous feel, as if written in utero; communication thereby is reduced from song to speech to gesture, then further reduced to whatever form of dissolution comes after that: “How do I know there is going to be an accident. I can no longer speak with my hands.”

A world in which the bee and the tortoise “survive as obstacles to grammar and song” is a fraught world, wherein the chief peril is not to mankind, nor really even to nature, but to the text, where ambushes by vultures and wolves menace the dark undergrowth surrounding the oft-referenced “perfect page.” Receptive listening becomes, in this context, not an idle pastime, but an imperative. In Baus’ work, the objective of the speaker is not what, but rather who, to listen for. From the penultimate poem “They Showed a Film of Walking to Water”:

“She was folding her arms to make a mirage, touching the snow in a/ sentence. She knows I know I will disappear tonight, a time-lapsed/ splash in my place./ Inside any good song is a small piece of snow is the one I am listening/ for.”

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Virginia Konchan’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, The New Republic, Notre Dame Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a contributing reviewer for The Rumpus and ForeWord Magazine.

Jean Daive reads in French and Leonard Schwartz reads Rosmarie Waldrop’s english translation.

Nathalie Stephens reads and discusses recent work on XCP.