Poetry Show #7, November 11, 2016.
Playlist:
1. Broken Sonnets (live), 1:58.
2. Old Man Beaver’s Blessing Song (American Indian), 1:33.
3. The Chapter Of Changing Into Ptah (Egyptian)(live), 6:46.
4. Listen The Night, 1:43.
5. Mysterious Cat, 0:57.
6. Creatures (live), 2:59.
7. Pot Of Flowers (live), 0:43.
8. N+495 (live), 1:47.
9. The Logics, 6:14.
10. I Am Sitting In a Room (edit), 13:58.
11. Words Through The Worlds, 1:07.
12. The Boticellian Trees (live), 1:00.
13. The Bridge, 3:39.
14. Bicycle Riders (live), 1:44.
15. Asylum For Indeterminacy, 4:00.
16. The Last Acts of St. Fuck You, 9:31.
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Musical Intermission: Perfect Harmony (live), 1:36.
……………………………..The Shepherd, 1:06.
……………………………..That’s Why, 3:47.
……………………………..Roll The Dice, 2:24.
17. Not Waving But Drowning, 0:41.
18. Miss Laura (live), 4:43.
19. We Real Cool, 0:22.
20. Poem, 0:37.
21. The Sentence, 0:39.
22. The Great Order Of The Universe (live), 0:41.
23. Eunoia: Chapter ‘I’ (live), 0:55.
24. Crack In The World, 4:00.
25. The DNA Molecule, 3:57.
26. Down To The Sea, 3:13.
27. The Holy Longing (excerpt), 0:36.
28. Bed By The Window (live), 1:01.
29. TV Vérité, 4:33.
30. Eunoia: Chapter ‘U’ (live), 5:15.
31. Due Giorno Dopo, 3:16.
32. Mushroom Clouds (live), 2:14.
33. Overpopulation (live), 5:28.
34. Starbuck’s Epigrams (live), 1:00.
35. The Delicate World, 3:22.
36. Point Joe (live), 2:33.
37. Sonnet 29, 0:57.
Total Time, 1:47:19.
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Notes:
1. Lin Tan reading at Segue Ear Inn, NY, 12-9-95. Tan Lin is the author of 12 books, including Heath Course Pak, Bib. Rev. Ed., Insomnia and the Aunt, 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking, Plagiarism/Outsource, Ambience is a Novel with a Logo, BlipSoak01, and Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Conjunctions, Artforum, Criticism, boundary2, Cabinet, the New York Times Book Review, Art in America, and Purple. His video, theatrical, and LCD work have been shown at Artists Space, the Marianne Boesky Gallery, the Yale Art Museum, Sophienholm Museum (Copenhagen), Ontological Hysterical Theatre, and as part of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Soundcheck Series. Lin is the recipient of a 2012 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Poetry, a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant for 2004-2005 and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant to complete a book-length study of the writings of Andy Warhol.
2. Jerome Rothenberg reading from Records for the Rockdrill CD series. Rockdrill 6: Sightings, Jerome Rothenberg: Poems 1960-1983. Published by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Optic Nerve for Birkbeck College, 2004. Produced by Colin Still. Used with the permission of Colin Still.
3. Bob Holman reading from A 40th Anniversary Celebration of Technicians of the Sacred, edited by Jerome Rothenberg, at the Bowery Poetry Club, September 14, 2008. Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians Of The Sacred, is anthropology: “Since its first publication in 1968, Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred has educated a generation of poets, artists, and readers to the multiple faces and possibilities of poetry throughout the world. Hailed by Robert Creeley as “both a deeply useful work book and an unequivocal delight,” and by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the hundred most recommended American books of the last thirty-five years, it appears here in a revised and expanded version several years in the making. Rothenberg’s revision follows the structure and themes of the original version while reworking the contents to include a European section and a large number of newly gathered and translated poems that reflect the work set in motion since 1968. ”
4. Klyd & Linda Watkins, Poetry Out Loud #5. Out Loud Records – OLP 105. Vinyl, LP, Compilation. US, 1971; genre: Non-Music; Style:Poetry. First issues of the Poetry Out Loud LP-series (published from 1969 to 1977) included sound poetry live recordings inspired by shamanism and beat poetry, though when reaching Number Six, Klyd Watkins and Peter Harleman had moved to studio recording with their wifes Linda and Patricia. Elements found in Poetry Out Loud records: poetic homophony, repetition of words, congregational call-and-response singing, delay and reverb effects, hand drums.
5. Track 21, The Mysterious Cat. From The W. Cabell Greet Recordings: Reading at Columbia University, 1931. “The Mysterious Cat” is appended to the B-side of record 321, following the second part of “Simon Legree.” These recordings were made in 1931 at Columbia University, recorded by Barnard professor W. Cabell Greet, a lexicologist and scholar of American dialects. For more information see Mustazza on The Contemporary Poets Series in Jacket2 and Mustazza’s “Vachel Lindsay and The W. Cabell Greet Recordings” in the Chicago Review. PennSound wishes to thank the staff at Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, especially Thai Jones, Jennifer Lee, and Karla Nielsen, for helping us to make these recordings available.
6. Alice Notley reading Reading in Bolinas, CA, December 2, 1971.
7. William Carlos Williams, reading at The Poetry Center, San Francisco Museum of Art, 05/19/1955.
8. Ange Mlinko reading from the Bernadette Mayer Celebration at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, October 1, 1998.
9. Marjorie Welish reading for the Belladonna Series, NYC, May 9, 2006. The Belladonna Reading Series, a reading series and independent press that promotes the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language.
10. Alvin Lucier; album: Source Magazine. © The Artist(s) 2005, UbuWeb (ubu.com), WFMU (wfmu.org), PennSound (writing.upenn.edu/pennsound), The Center for Literary Computing (clc.wvu.edu), Artmob (artmob.ca). All materials at UbuWeb are available for free exchange for noncommerical purposes.
11. Ricardo Del Farra, The Frog Peak Collaborations Project.
12. William Carlos Williams: May 19, 1955. The Poetry Center presents William Carlos Williams reads and discusses the development of his poetry, from his early poems to several longer poems from his final books, The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954) and Journey to Love (1955). Added to Poetry Center Digital Archive on April 20, 2011. Copyright © 2009-2012 San Francisco State University.
13. Lisa Jarnot, “The Bridge” from Ring of Fire. Copyright © 2003 by Lisa Jarnot. Reprinted by permission of Salt Publishing. Source: Ring of Fire (Salt Publishing, 2003).
14. Lawrence Ferlinghetti: October 4, 1961. The Poetry Center presents Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading from his selected works. Added to Poetry Center Digital Archive on September 29, 2014. Copyright © 2009-2012 San Francisco State University.
15. Marjorie Welish: In The Futurity Lounge: Asylum For Indeterminacy (excerpt), from the Whenever We Feel Like It Reading Series, at Kelly Writers House. Reading excerpts from her long “misreading of Baudelaire’s poem ‘Correspondences'”. April 17, 2012.
16. By found poet Bern Porter (1911-2004). http://www.ubu.com/historical/porter/index.html , © The Artist(s) 2005, UbuWeb (ubu.com),WFMU (wfmu.org),PennSound (writing.upenn.edu/pennsound), The Center for Literary Computing (clc.wvu.edu), Artmob (artmob.ca). The words of this poem are here as a pdf: http://ubu.com/historical/porter/Porter-Bern_The-Last-Acts-of-St.-Fuck-You.pdf
Musical Intermission:
A. Perfect Harmony, Bob Holman, In With The Out Crowd.
B. The Shepherd, Allen Ginsberg singing William Blake.
C. That’s Why, Bob Holman, In With The Out Crowd.
D. Roll The Dice, set to music (First Breath After Coma) by Guilherme Moretti Cheriato, read by Bono Vox (U2).
17. Stevie Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning” from Collected Poems of Stevie Smith. Copyright © 1972 by Stevie Smith. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Source: New Selected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1988).
18. Helen Adam: April 7, 1957. The Poetry Center presents Helen Adam reading from Ballads and other poems. Added to Poetry Center Digital Archive on April 20, 2011. Note that the audio recording was ruined. Only one poem was suitable for this Show, that was not totally ruined by noise and distortion in the original recording.
19. Read by John Ulrich, South Boston, MA. © 2000 New England Foundation For The Arts.
20. By Frank O’Hara. Read by Richard Samuel, Seattle, Washington. © 2000 New England Foundation For The Arts.
21. By Anna Akhmatova. Read by Nancy Narsessian, Atlanta, Georgia. Translated from Russian by Judith Hemschmeyer. © 2000 New England Foundation For The Arts.
22. A permuted or combined paragraph that results in a quotation from “The Great Order of the Universe” by Democritus. Christian Bök at Reading for Umlaut Machine: Selected Visual Works at the Kelly Writers House, November 18, 2009, co-sponsored by Writers Without Borders and KWH Art.
23. “Eunoia” is the shortest word in English that contains all five (regular) vowels (but not including ‘w’ or ‘y’), and the word quite literally means “beautiful thinking.” “The word was originally coined by Aristotle, to describe the state of mind you need to be in in order to make a friend.” (Bök). “EUNOIA is a universal lipogram, in which each chapter restricts itself to the use of a single vowel. Inspired by the Oulipo–the avant-garde group renowned for its literary experimentation with formalist constraints–the text makes a Sisyphean spectacle of its labor, willfully crippling its language in order to show that, even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can still express uncanny thought. A triumphant feat, seven years in the making, this work of literature is “an exemplary monument for 21st-century poetry””–Charles Bernstein. MJ Nicholls rated it & liked it: “Poor Christian. He wants to be in the Oulipo so badly. Surely they could make him an honorary member? Or put his name on a shortlist or something? Sweet dear. He spent seven years in Toronto, poring over his Perec and Queneau, dreaming up Eunoia. He thought it was his ticket into the French experimental elite. Yet, one Griffin Poetry Prize later, and NOTHING. Not even a phone call! I mean, they let Harry Mathews in, fer chrissake! Surely they can let one Canadian in? Come on!!! “
24. Anne Waldman reading at Naropa, Crack In The World, and Pieces Of An Hour, date not available. http://www.archive.org , the Naropa Poetry Archives.
25. The Caedmon Poetry Collection: A Century of Poets Reading Their Work [CD] – A choice gathering of some of the twentieth century’s greatest poetry. Disc 1. The DNA Molecule – May Swenson.
26. Linda Watkins, Poetry Out Loud #6. LP released by Out Loud Records, Madison, NJ, 1972, OLP 106. Vinyl, LP, Compilation.Genre: Non-Music, Folk, World, & Country. Style: Poetry, Folk . These legendary, long out-of-print sides privately pressed by Peter and Patricia Harleman and Klyd and Linda Watkins 1969-1977 in order to document their wild experiments with vocal form. Across the space of these beautiful looking LPs, the two couples navigate the same kind of formless, disembodied zone that defined Jandek’s unaccompanied vocal trilogy while touching on poles as temporally and spatially diverse as the associative poetry of Matthew Valentine, Jack Kerouac and Charles Olson, the wowing use of heavy delay/reverb associated with contemporary heads like The Skaters and Excepter, the slum-prose of The Fugs, Patti Smith and Lisa Suckdog and the sound poetry experiments of Henri Chopin, Bernard Heidsieck, Bob Cobbing, Brion Gysin and others associated with the legendary Revue Ou. That this was going on in almost complete seclusion somewhere in American throughout the 70s is nothing short of mind-boggling. “These days we hear now and then of new fans who have continued to find Poetry Out Loud through the used record bins. Thirty years later, the world has not entirely forgotten Poetry Out Loud, just as it never entirely heard of it in the first place. [Klyd Watkins, from Volcanic Tongue]”
27. From “The Holy Longing” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, read by Olivia Milward, San Francisco, Ca. © 2000 New England Foundation For The Arts.
28. Robinson Jeffers Memorial Program: December 4, 1962. The Poetry Center presents a two-part program dedicated to Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962). Read by Joseph Miksak. Copyright © 2009-2012 San Francisco State University.
29. Ll. Dunn, W. Ng. L. Hodges; N© 1985, PhonoStatic (http://psrf.detritus.net), UbuWeb (http://ubu.com), PennSound (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/). PhotoStatic was a magazine, a periodical series of printed works that focused on xerography as the source of a particular visual language that was widely used by graphic artists in the various art and music underground scenes of the 80s and 90s. During this time, the publication served as a forum to collect and redistribute artworks that originated in these scenes. Eventually, its scope extended to embrace not only graphic works, but also concrete poetry, correspondence art, ephemera from works in other media, essays, fiction, reviews, and reports on various cultural scenes, including Neoism, the home taping community, the zine community, and mail art.
30. © 2004 Christian Bök. Eunoia, Recorded on June 2, 2002 by Steve Venright, Torpor Vigil Industries. Complete text of Eunoia avalable at Coach House Books website. Digital setting of Eunoia available at UBUWEB. Order the book and CD or the reading from Coach House.
31. Ricardo Dal Farra, Travels Of The Spider: Electroacoustic Music From Argentina.
32. From The Cyborg Opera, from Reading for Umlaut Machine: Selected Visual Works at the Kelly Writers House, November 18, 2009, co-sponsored by Writers Without Borders and KWH Art. PennSound Christian Bök.htm .
33. Lawrence Ferlinghetti: October 4, 1961. The Poetry Center presents Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading from his selected works. Added to Poetry Center Digital Archive on September 29, 2014. The Poetry Center Digital Archive is a Project of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. DIVA is a project of Academic Technology at San Francisco State University. Copyright © 2009-2012 San Francisco State University.
34. LeeAnn Brown: Starbucks Epigrams, Andrew’s Epigram, Too Many Epigrams. Introduced by Bernadette Mayer; The Line Reading Series, The Drawing Center, NYC, 4/18/00, pt. 3.
35. Heather Thomas live at the Kelly Writer’s House (KWH). “LIVE at the Writers House” is a long-standing collaboration of the people of the Kelly Writers House and of WXPN (88.5 FM). Six times annually between September and April, the Writers House airs a one-hour broadcast of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art, along with one musical guest — from our Arts Cafe onto the airwaves at WXPN. “LIVE” is broadcast on WXPN. “LIVE” is made possible through the generous support of BigRoc. Episode 33 – 01/14/2002 – Best. Written by Tom Devaney, co-produced by Venise Battle, and Hosted by Michaela Majoun. “LIVE” stands in a tradition of “new writing” on radio; Cid Corman, a poet and great supporter of experimental poetry in the 1950s, created his own broadcast, “This is Poetry,” over WMEX-FM (Boston).
36. Robinson Jeffers Memorial Program: December 4, 1962. The Poetry Center presents a two-part program dedicated to Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962). Read by Joseph Miksak. Copyright © 2009-2012 San Francisco State University.
37. By William Shakespeare, read by Sir John Gielgud.
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A Note On Oulipian Poetry.
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As an introduction, a quotation from From “Anomalous 14” (2015). “Special issue on constraints (via anomalouspress.org): The Oulipo, short for the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop for potential literature), was founded in Paris in 1960 by two polymaths: Raymond Queneau, a former surrealist known for writing Zazie in the Metro, and François Le Lionnais, a mathematician and engineer. Interdisciplinary in nature, the Oulipo came to embrace a rigorous formalism, insisting that literary freedom could be unleashed not through the energies of chance, the unconscious, or automatic writing (à la surrealism) but, paradoxically, through rule-bound procedures, severe formal restrictions, and mathematical constraints. Oulipians follow the cunning design of Daedalus rather than the irrational urges of the Minotaur; as Queneau famously said, they are “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”
Oulipian poetry should be thought of as a subset of, and type of, Oulipian Literature; and all of that is types of Experimental Writing. Note that Italo Calvino is (or was) a member of the Oulipo.
Computers and digitization allowed people to combine ideas from there, from the digital data of computers and all the transformations that happen or can happen to that data, with the materials, the “contents” of literature, including poetry. Occasional works were made in that category during the 1970s and 1980s; it all exploded during the 1990s, like the Dot Com Revolution, into many projects, experiments, websites, and so on, which manipulated or transformed linguistic, lexical, etc., materials, and in which results or links to them were displayed. The usual was new then: videos of the art installations or shows on the website, links to gallery openings there, and so on.
The experimental manipulation of literature including poetry, as well as the manipulation of lexical and linguistic materials, is a separate area of it own, and people still do shows and experiments in it today (2016). This area of work touches the “constrained art” of the Oulipo, and similar groups of experimenters. Computer algorithms can be used to produce constrained art, such as literature or poetry.
In Oulipian Poetry, they are best known for only one of their many ideas, that of writing using the noun which is an integer m away from the given noun in some standard dictionary. This is generally called N + m poetry. The websites still extant online usually mention N + 4 or N + 5 poems.
From the examples mentioned in the website articles linked to below, very few indeed are available online in any form, and (alas!) none are available as audio or video. Related works by the same authors were selected for this show, and also by authors not mentioned in the articles, but whose work is ‘mechanical’ is some way, whether Oulipian or in the first category above, digital algorithmic manipulations of language. The primary difference with the Oulipian poems is that they are constrained writing; the other categories are other kinds is avant-garde and experimental writing.
One notable exception is that the Eunoia works (and others) of Christian Bök, are online in audio form, and there are a few videos around as well. Those use the constraint of a single vowel employed in an entire chapter. That is not mentioned explicitly in any or the websites extant about the Oulipo, however, is the kind of constraint that they used. See the notes for the Christian Bök “poems”. Another is the poem “Before Sextet” by Bernadette Mayer, text is here: http://writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette_Before-Sextet.html .
Those of you who have been listening to these Poetry shows, will have noticed already that experimental and avant-garde poetry and “audio” is included in these shows. Some experimental or avant-garde “prose” or non-poetry has also been included. An example noteworthy here, is “Pledge” by Lee Ann Brown, which started the Poetry Show #2 (October, 2015). It is mentioned explicitly on two of the webpages, see Experimental Writing Seminar: Constraints & Collaborations, at http://www.metafilter.com/149803/English-111-
Comp-Lit-115/rss . That page will also show you one teacher’s category names for the various kinds ow writings discussed here and appearing in our shows: Substitution, Homophonic & Dialect Translation, Chance Operation & the Aleatoric, The Art of Constraint, and so on.
On that page, a short example of the N + m substitution rule of the Oulipo, is shown: “It’s too bad the N+7 machine doesn’t let you permalink to your results. Some of their suggested experiments turn out to be quite beautiful, like this pretty familiar one (it mistakes “bear” for a noun and that somehow just makes it even better): You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour. N+1 You shall not beard false witticism against your neighbourhood. N+2 You shall not bearer false wizard against your neologism. N+3 You shall not bearing false wodge against your neophyte. N+4 You shall not bearskin false woe against your nephew. N+5 You shall not beast false wog against your nerve. N+6 You shall not beat false wok against your nest. N+7 You shall not beater false wolf against your nestle. N+8 You shall not beating false wolfhound against your nestling. N+9 You shall not beatnik false woman against your net. N+10 You shall not beau false womanizer against your nettle. N+11 You shall not beaut false womb against your network. N+12 You shall not beautician false wombat against your neuron. N+13 You shall not beauty false wonder against your neurosis. “
-Jone.
URLs for further information (not an exhaustive list):
http://www.nous.org.uk/oulipo.html }OULIPO is the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature, a
group of writers and mathematicians. Members include Raymond Queneau, François Le Lionnais, Claude Berge, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino.
http://hyperallergic.com/206802/rats-build-their-labyrinth-oulipo-in-the-21st-century/ }Rats Build Their Labyrinth: Oulipo in the 21st Century. Interdisciplinary in nature, the Oulipo came to embrace a rigorous formalism, insisting that literary freedom could be unleashed not through the energies of chance, the unconscious, or automatic writing (à la surrealism) but, paradoxically, through rule-bound procedures, severe formal restrictions, and mathematical constraints. Oulipians follow the cunning design of Daedalus rather than the irrational urges of the Minotaur; as Queneau famously said, they are “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”
http://conversationalreading.com/the-noulipian-analects/ }Very cool book for people into Oulipo or interesting writing in general: The /n/oulipian Analects, published by Les Figues Press. It’s essentially an anthology of recent constrained writing (both from without the Oulipo and outside of it), plus interesting essays and short bits on the ideas behind such writing. (Read it alongside The End of Oulipo?)
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_08_24_archive.html }Ron Silliman on homophonic translations. “Saturday, August 30, 2003. My second example of what I might characterize as a noble shipwreck in poetry is Chris Tysh’s homophonic translations from the French, “Acoustic Room,” the brief third section of her book, Continuity Girl. Here is an example.”
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20120630080740/http://www.uiowa.edu/%7Eiwp/newmedia/gallery.html }New Media Poetry: New Media Gallery. The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program Presents The Third Annual Paul Engle Day Festival.
http://philipgalanter.com/resources/ }Generative Art Links: Following is a selected list of links to web sites that are generally related to generative art. For a huge list of technology art related web sites please see Stephan Wilson’s Information Arts Link pages. Additional topic-specific links can be found on each page of the Generative Art Wiki.
https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Public-Works/PhonoStatic/phono_02/018b-TV_Verite-Dunn_Ng_HodgesAudio_Verite_(PhonoStatic_2)-1985.mp3
Welish:
http://writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette_Before-Sextet.html
http://www.slought.org/series/Welish/
http://coffeehousepress.org/authors/marjorie-welish/
http://bombmagazine.org/article/3155/two-poems-and-two-paintings }BOMB Magazine — Two Poems and Two Paintings by Marjorie Welish.
https://slought.org/resources/of_the_diagram }Of the Diagram, A symposium on the work of poet, painter, and critic Marjorie Welish. Since the late 1970s, as a poet, painter, and art critic, Welish has cultivated a position of independence from fixed schools or tendencies and has premised her work on the relentlessly self-interrogative questions: What needs to be done now? What would be an art in consequence of that question? The criticality evident in her answers joins demanding inquiry with clever playfulness. She has constructed grammars of reflexive lyricism, “thought forms having to do with possible paradigms.”
https://slought.org/media/files/of_the_diagram.pdf
Christian Bök:
http://www.ubu.com/contemp/bok/eunoia_final.html }written.
http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2009/07/christian-bok-excerpts-from-eunoia.html }first paragraph of given letters.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/765252.Eunoia }Eunoia by Christian Bök. Poetry. Fiction. Cross Genre. “A marvelous, musical texture of rhymes and echoes”–Harry Matthews.
Featured Image: Anselm Hollo, Anne Waldman, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and Jack Collom.
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