Experiments in Text

Dear All,

Below are the week’s “readings.”  They are all audio files – as this week we are moving from the physical page as art object, to sound poetry, which may or may not use or deal with physical pages.  The last file bridges us into performance, situationism, gesture, and “happenings,” for next week, i.e., the last file includes video and voice as persona.

I send these a bit late because I wanted not to interfere with that great discussion that has begun online.  So many excellent thoughts are streaming in – keep up that conversation.  Lots to talk about this Saturday for casual seminar, it seems, which at that point we will be settling into our groups and going from reading and small writing work to the working primarily on the performative events.  Remember, groups will be solid by Saturday – thanks for all your input, do keep it coming, as it’s helpful to know your ideas and preferences.

There are three optional listenings here- two attached are sound pieces that I did for UbuWeb and the American Cybernetics conference (one uses Chris Mann’s “For Headphones” as found poetry, cut up by me), and the other is below – a John Cage piece that we will be listening to and working with in class.  Again, these are optional.

See you tomorrow
David

Christian Bok:
http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/bok/Bok-Christian_Seahorses-and-Flying-Fish.mp3

Steve McCaffrey/bpNicol (The Four Horsemen) -
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/bpNichol/Ear-Rational-1982/bpNichol_15_Alphabet-Game_1972.mp3

Tracie Morris on Sound Poetry
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Morris/Close-Lstening/Morris-Tracie_09_Discussion4_WPS1_NY_5-22-05.mp3

Tracie Morris – Petro
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Morris/Close-Lstening/Morris-Tracie_12_Petro_WPS1_NY_5-22-05.mp3

Chris Mann – PRESS UPPER RIGHT BUTTON, FAR RIGHT CORNER, THEN FEEL FREE TO PLAY
http://theuse.info/

Caroline Bergvall, About Face
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Bergvall/Bergvall-Caroline-About-Face-2004.mp3

Finally, heading from sound to sound + video, Linh Dinh, “Late Weather”
http://lowerhalf.blogspot.com/search?q=Late+Weather

And finally finally, heading from sound and video to Situationist-inspired “derive / automatic poetry…” from Sam Truitt, Vertical Elegies
http://ubu.wfmu.org/sound/truitt_sam/Truitt-Sam_01_rock.avi

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For In-Class Writing Activity, John Cage - “Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake” ( a longer audio file you can listen to ahead of time if you wish)
http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/dial_a_poem_poets/nova/Nova-Convention_12_cage.mp3

Dear All,

***IMPORTANT NOTE: READ THIS EMAIL TO THE END – IMPORTANT SCHEDULE INFO AT VERY BOTTOM OF THIS EMAIL***

Apologies about getting this work to you a little late, but for the most part you’ve already read this week’s readings.  Please refamiliarize yourself with the two altered books I assigned last week, the Gardner and the Nelson below.  On the other reading: please read the Jenna Osman essay on found poetry and then read the Fitterman fragment.

SO: as I wrote before about the altered book, to get a sense of where we’re headed in lecture thereabout, feel free after doing the readings below to peruse our optional blog.  But: what do the found poem (or found prose piece) and the altered book have in common?  Why put these things together?  Well, both are, for me, instances of yet other ways to think of “performing text,” but are also forms that very much rely on a) plagiarism (hey, a good thing sometimes in poetry!), and b) relatedly, appropriation of often well known texts or tropes.  Both are, in a sense, collaborations, no?  Albeit not with a live person, but “overt” collaborations with other texts, not, say, the more subtle idea of “unavoidable collaboration,” i.e., “we’re always collaborating whether we know it or not” that Gabe brought up – a subtle and good point, so perhaps the distinction is in degrees?  Anyway, chew on these things, their connections, etc., as you read this work.  Should be fun. (Note: Jim Andrews is introducing us to Rob Fitterman in the excerpt below, and we encountered him before in a completely different arena – in visual poetry).

See you Weds!
David

http://jacketmagazine.com/32/p-osman.shtml – Jenna Osman on found poetry

http://bostonreview.net/BR26.5/fitterman.html – fragment of Rob Fitterman’s found poem cutup trilogy, “Metropolis XXX” (a cutup of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, interspersed with “found” lines from streets of Manhattan)
http://www.dusie.org/ebbport.pdf – Susana Gardner, altered from EBB

http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/works/altn.xml – Altered Book, Beverly Nelson (press “images”, and then read/look at the book via zooming in, clicking the right arrow, etc – play around till you get to end..)
————————————————————- OPTIONAL —————————————-

The Isou film, his Lettrist Manifesto, parts of which I was going to show last week.  Feel free to look.  It’s fun!!!  Or maybe not.

http://www.archive.org/details/venom_and_eternity

—————————————-SCEDULING CHANGE/INFO————————————-

This upcoming Saturday, instead of class, those interested will be going to procession of the species with Diann.  Get in contact with her if you are interested in going.  For the rest of you – instead of taking the whole darn day off, it’d be good to maybe work on forming ideas to bring to your group regarding what you might want to do…

To make up for that missed time (no class Sat), I propose that we do a session the following Saturday at my house, PRIOR to us moving into “get together mode.”  That is, instead of losing that Saturday to the class get-together, we’ll have small group work for 1 1/2–2 hrs, then hang out for refreshments, music, etc.  So, 4pm at my house Saturday after next, with directions coming to you next week.  6pm onward we can relax, enjoy, even more than we will be relaxing and enjoying seminaring in a place not on campus.

PERFORMATIVE EVENT GROUPS:

Please email me who you definitely do want to work with and who you definitely do not asap (unless you have no preference whatsoever). Let me know, too, any other pertinant info, like what sort of thing you’re interested in (medium or media, say), and whether you’d rather work with folks who have experience in collaborative work or would rather be with folks who maybe don’t have any experience.  We’ll try to work it out so that you have the greatest level of ease going into what should be considered a fun experiment, hard work yes, but something for which we’re not being “judged.”  From that data I will then form groups of 3 or 4 and post them via email and blog next week.  After that we can tweak, but we’ll only have that following Saturday to try the tweaking – then it’s off to the races…don’t worry – I don’t get off the hook, either.  If you need me as a prop, a worker bee, a whatever, let me know.  I don’t take all requests, but I will take some.

ARC OF WEDS LECTURES NEXT 3 WEEKS:

This week, found/altered text

Week 5 – we leave the normative page behind and do sound, gesture, & “theatricality from Situationism to Steve McCaffrey and the Four Horseman to Tina Darragh and Rodrigo Toscano

Week 6 – we round out our major readings for the course by returning to the page – procedures, forms, and instances of collaborative writings (2 or more authors), including translation work (Linh Dinh’s video poems), translation as we normally think of the term, Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney, authors of “Eclipse,”; example of ekphrastic writing (1 or more writers in collaboration with 1 or more artists of other media); and, perhaps, if anyone has work of their own by then – your/our work!!!

Dear All,

Here are the readings for Weds. It appears as a long list, but don’t forget, these are concrete and visual poems, along with two beautiful altered books.  What are concrete and visual poems?  “Vispo,” as the movement is now called (kinda gross), comes out of Dada and Fluxus.  Again, here, the ideas set forth have sociopolitical, as well as performative, implications.  From early Dada works, especially among the group of artists within the broader early French movement that called themselves “Lettrists,” there was the notion that a) normative modes of speaking, writing, and living, were habituated and harmful.  Many Lettrists, with neo-Marxist backgrounds, felt that the elemental structures of poetry and writing in general, needed to be deconstructed, and viewed as codes made up of material sensuous objects that can be invented anew, thus inventing a new way of thinking about self, other, community, etc.  More on this in lecture.  But that is the background for what has turned into a broader movement of writers and artists looking to move away from the sentence as unit of meaning, and move towards the physical structures that make up languages, moving ever further from the normative “page” and normative notion of “the book” and “the poem.”  Think reinvention, interrogation, and new media as you look at these.

Regarding the altered book, just look for now at these 2 below, and if you feel like hearing about where my lecture will go, think about the photo of the Talmud I showed during the opening lecture, and feel free to visit the optional “discussion” blog covering my two programs, here: http://davidwolach.blogspot.com/ (scroll down till you get to my entry on Gardner’s “Altered Book”).

Ultimately, what do visual poems and the altered book have in common?  How do they relate to “movement” on and off the page?  In what sense are they “performances” of text?

See you Weds.

Very Best,
David

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Hugo_ball_karawane.png&imgrefurl=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hugo_ball_karawane.png&h=560&w=366&sz=96&tbnid=EmjR_7js9PiOgM::&tbnh=133&tbnw=87&prev=/images%3Fq%3DHugo%2BBall&hl=en&usg=__yIQEz2L8Kuo0XoJ-XUYwlULQ1HU=&ei=7azjScHoE4WItAPLnKWrCQ&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=4&ct=image – CONCRETE POEM, EARLY DADA

bpNichol

http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/bpaf03.htm – Concrete Poem
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/bpaf10.htm – Concrete Poem
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/bpaf08.htm – Concrete Poem
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/4hm-int.htm – OPTIONAL, the first writings regarding bpNichol’s and Steve McCaffrey’s sound – performance – poetry troupe, which we will get to when we get to sound poetry and performance & collaboration (weeks 4 and 5)

Betty Danon

http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/danon/bd-staf1.htm – Concrete poem: keep clicking “next” until you get to artist’s statement, read that.

Jim Andrews

http://www.vispo.com/A/aa.html – visual poem (feel free, once you’ve done the readings, to look around this site – some interesting things, some not so much)

Wheelhouse Installations

http://www.wheelhousemagazine.com/archive/spring_summer08/give_it_up.html – Concrete Poem, Jesse Patrick Ferguson

http://www.wheelhousemagazine.com/archive/winter08/portal_1.html – Concrete Poem, Andrew Topel

The Altered Book

http://www.dusie.org/ebbport.pdf – Susana Gardner, altered from EBB

http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/works/altn.xml – Altered Book, Beverly Nelson (press “images”, and then read/look at the book via zooming in, clicking the right arrow, etc – play around till you get to end..)

Let us take “collaboration” to mean a) physical/active/real time work with your peers, and b) the work or contribution the “audience” or “readership” puts in to that which you and your peers have created.  You don’t know who (b) consists of, but you want the words on the page to move.  That is, you strive for “motion on the page” in a poem, or a piece of text.  Thus, a performance of this text, among other possible things, could be the reader(s) making the poem move - by the eyes scanning this way and that, by the work being read aloud, by the work being read aloud by multiple persons or in multiple ways, depending on how one reads the words on the page.  How do you get the poem or piece of text and/or the person who is reading the poem or piece of text to move in, say new or potentially unfamiliar ways?  In what way does a recipe (like, for cooking something) relate to this question?

For this week: write a very 1-2 page max. “response” to the questions above (due by Saturday).  Email them to David by Saturday.

For this week: read the links below (due this Wednesday):

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=175675 -George Oppen, “Image of the Engine”

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/coolidge/space.html – Clark Coolidge, from “Space”

http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/passages/passages5/the.html – Larry Eigner, excerpt

http://www.altx.com/thebody/ – Shelly Jackson, My Body (it’s a book, but with hypertext, so play with it – I don’t expect you to read even close to every word, but get the idea, read it all when you can)

We’ll read and work with Mallarme, arguably one of the earliest to complicate the ideas about text and motion, on Saturday.  Feel free to look ahead of time:

http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.htm#_Toc160699751

http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/works/loan.xml – Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee (artist book)

http://lowerhalf.blogspot.com/ – David Wolach (altered book)

http://lowerhalf.blogspot.com/2009/03/rachel-defay-liautard.html (mathematical hyberbook)

http://theuse.info/ – Chris Mann (cybernetic sound prose-poems)

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Morris.html – Tracie Morris (sound poem – composition)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKgHrE7OaXY – Rodrigo Toscano &, (Collapsible Poetics Theater)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M4N9olU3V8 – Artaud, Jet of Blood (Ignite)

And what about Cage and stretched out speech units?  Or gesture in Kenneth Goldsmith, or Merce Cunningham, or interactivity & ephemerality in Kaprow & Debord? Or Carrie Noland & computer generated work?  More to come!!!  Even Toscano, here, has moved from the written, to the “acted” to now, lately, the almost purely genstural…