“Spy swap.” “Disney…Disney…” “Hand gun…laser weapon.” These are only a couple of fragments from Holly Pester’s ongoing news poem made of breaths and words. Sourced from the Today programme’s news bulletins on BBC Radio 4. A sample if you click here.

A brief description from the Ball of Wax Bandcamp page:

5 artists were each assigned a different book to read by Paul Constant, books editor at the Stranger in Seattle. We went on to write 5 and record 3 songs inspired by these books. The full 15-song CD (Volume 25 of Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly) will be released at a concert on August 19th at the Fremont Abbey Arts Center.

You can hear a preview of Fuller’s “Free Men,” in addition to one song from each of the four other authors there.

Nelson also has a new book of criticism out, which we wrote about here.

Singer Mike Scott explains:

Since 1991, when I sang a few Yeats interpretations onstage at the Abbey as part of a festival, I’ve had the vision of a whole show and an album using Yeats’ words as song lyrics. Over the years I’ve returned again and again to my book of The Complete Poems and have slowly built up a repertoire. And I should stress these are songs – rock’n’roll, pop, psychedelic and roots songs – not recitations…. My purpose isn’t to treat Yeats as a museum piece, but to connect with the soul of the poems – as they appear to me – then go wherever the music in my head suggests; and that means some surprising places.

We’re surprised. And intrigued.

The album, which sets Yeats’s poems to music, is called “An Appointment with Mr Yeats.” It’s been in the works for two decades, and will appear on September 19th. Find an audio track from the album here.

How often do you seek out the books that printed criticism recommends? If the answer is “not so often” — and as I realized it might be, for me, for poetry, “not so often” — what is criticism for? (I mean the kind that mostly covers newish work, and attempts to say what’s good and why; the kind that comes up with new interpretations of “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” is fine with me, but it’s not what I mean now.)

If I spend more time writing about and recommending new poets and new poetry than I do, these days, in following up on other critics’ printed and finished recommendations, does that make me a hypocrite? or an unfair trader? someone who assumes other people will do for me what I won’t do for them?

Not quite, and I’ve almost ceased to worry. Here’s why.

Last year, I started to purchase less music, and started (Jessie realized it belonged on our iPhones) to experiment the Internet music service Pandora. It’s software you put on your phone, or in your computer; you can tell it to construct what it calls a “radio station,” though I’d rather call it a channel, or a stream, based on a song or an artist or a composer or a style. You can ask it to play you Indian classical music, or songs that sound like Game Theory, or composers you might enjoy if you like Anton Webern (I have done all these things).

If you ask it to play you music in a style, or based on an artist, whom you know well, what you get is what the real Pandora got: an unpredictable disappointment. The Chills are a fine New Zealand-based pop group with something like seven albums over twenty years, but Pandora appeared to know only one of them, and flailed after US college rock instead. The Jam were repeatedly top of the charts in Britain in 1979-81, but Pandora (as of a few weeks ago) appeared not to know much about them, playing very few songs by the band itself, and offering up the sort of much-circulated songs you’d find on those old Just Can’t Get Enough compilations.

If you ask it to help you discover music you don’t know much about, on the other hand, Pandora is a frustration but also a godsend. I don’t know very much about twelve-tone composition, but I know that I like some of it; now I know, thanks to Pandora, that I want to learn more about Arthur Berger, whose more or less atonal chamber compositions pop out at me with their pizzicatos, torn bits of near-melodies, and dissonances in the bass. Pandora will do silly things in this province as well — in particular it considers individual movements of sonatas and symphonies and quartets as independent pieces, since each one is its own sound file or CD track; so you won’t get the integrated experience of any multi-movement composed piece that the composer wanted you to get — but you’ll get to hear part of a lot of pieces you might not otherwise hear anywhere.

And that’s what some part of criticism, a very large part of reviewing, might have to be, at less than its best but more than its worst. I don’t seek out a lot of contemporary poetry in English based on other people’s reviews, these days, because I see so much of it (especially American poetry) before it gets reviewed — of course I want to see more; I don’t often seek out a book based on Ange’s or Daisy’s assessments (to name two fine reviewers who show up in this very space at times) because I already have the book, or have had the chance to get it. I welcome arguments with other poetry reviewers, and sometimes they convince me, with regard to work I already know, but that’s another story.

It’s with other art forms that I now trust, have to trust, am easily steered by, long-form reviewers and practical critics: glenn mcdonald on pop music, Alex Ross on “classical” music, John Clute on science fiction, John Lanchester and Jenny Diski at the London Review of Books or Jenny Davidson anywhere on prose… these and other critics do change what I do, what I see, and if I get to have the same effect on somebody else, somebody who reads fiction or listens to music voraciously and checks out some poetry some of the time — well, I hope I did not steer them wrong.

Today I turned in an essay about Allan Peterson. Next week I think it’s Harmony Holiday. After that, maybe Cooper will write some more poems.

Instead, that record, with its spare arrangements, the songs drawn from it, and the new songs that sound like they could have been on it, call attention not just to her amazing voice, to the characters she projects (students, disappointed ingenues, kids moving out of the house– she’s young), but also to how the songs she writes fall together. You can’t– I can’t– listen to her without thinking about where the lyrics fit the chords, where they fit each other, where (more rarely) they miss, and because they’re so effective when she sings them but so clear, so banal at times, when read silently, they’re a great excuse to think again about how poetic lines are like the words in songs, and how they couldn’t differ more.

If you haven’t heard Longley yet (and you probably haven’t) and if you have any affection for singer-songwriter styles (and you may not), stop and watch and listen to “When You’ve Got Trouble,” or maybe to “Goodbye Love” or to “Out of My Head.”

OK. Take “Trouble” (also the lead song on Hot Loose Wire): “You’ve been kicking in your sleep, tossing and turning, relentlessly, and I know you’d be lying if you told me you were fine.” Or take “Out of My Head”: “I found your mix tape for the road, and two tickets for the show, and your sock underneath my bed, and now I can’t get you out of my head.” If you read them before you saw the video or heard the music, did you notice how the long vowels line up, from “know” to “told,” “road” to “show” to “now” and “out”? Did you see the words as naive? as beautiful and accurate about emotion and its causes? as too flat to be poetry? as all three?

Berklee College of Music, which Longley attended, has a songwriting major, teachers of lyrics-writing, and a somewhat scarily practical guide to the writing of lyrics for would-be hit songs, whose mere existence might remind you, if you doubted it, how different the working of words-for-music can be from words for recitation, for reading aloud or reading silently without music to back them up. It’s a truth that certain verbally dense masters of songcraft (one named Elvis, one named Bob) can render obscure, but other masters, or gifted practitioners (Longley counts here as a gifted practitioner), render unmistakable: if you’re not used to hearing how words work with music, even before the music gets written, you might not see how the euphonies and clarities in her lyrics, in Sondheim’s words for “Tonight” or Marcy Mays’s words for “Charles,” make them such powerful songs.

W. H. Auden– who was writing about opera libretti, not pop hits- went so far as to say that the demands of lyrics stood directly opposed to the demands of poetry proper, since the former had to sound incomplete, unsatisfactory, without music to complete it. Ezra Pound once claimed that whenever the art of poetry drifted too far away from the art of music, the former stood in danger; but if you read Pound’s own poems, they don’t sound like he meant it literally– he was not writing words meant to be sung (or rather, he sometimes was, but that’s not the Pound we usually read). Poetry, lyric poetry (hence the name) evolved from song, but it’s not song now; it’s usually not sung, and the best lyricists aren’t making words we read as poems. I want to hear Liz Longley sing what she writes (and what other people write too).

To me the great mystery about poetry and lyrics, poetry and song, isn’t so much whether they are the same thing– they are not– or whether they are related– they certainly are– as why we keep mistaking their relation for one of identity. Why do we so often want or expect (and “we” hear includes both naive and critically sophisticated readers) poems and songs to overlap as categories? why do we think they’re alike?

Is it because poems use, as songs also use, overt acoustic patterns as ways to carry meaning and emotion, though in poems, the acoustic patterns are all in the words; in songs, they are partly in words, but partly external to them, imposed on them, by singers and instruments? Is it because songs and “lyric” poems both present souls, personae, speakers without bodies, their inner lives made into vibrations in air, so that we can imagine (as we use our outer or our inward ear) that we are them? Is there some other reason? When you hear your favorite song, your favorite singer, are you moved in the same way as you are moved by your favorite poems?

Want to read more on these questions? There’s more about the idea of lyric just now up in online essays (so recent I’ve barely had time to scan them) from the critic, poet and songwriter Franklin Bruno, and there’s a lot more about song lyrics and the nature of poetry in the last chapter of Robert von Hallberg’s thoughtful book Lyric Powers.

And here is as good a place as any to apologize for an unlyrical omission: a year and a half ago I wrote about poets, some based in Chicago, who wanted their poems to be less like talk, more like durable objects, and sometimes a bit more like song. I credited the city and the University of Chicago for some of those poets, but I should have credited von Hallberg, who seems to have taught a lot of them, at that time too. Points to Robert Baird, who quite rightly called me out on it at that time.

More Longley, covering Joni Mitchell, here: more Scrawl rocking out here. More on von Hallberg in the current (I think it’s still current) Chicago Review, lauded by this very blog a few months ago.

Never been much for writing to music, though–since music is another attempt at language, it clashes with, and sometimes overwhelms, my words. But every year around Easter, prompted by my weepy annual ritual of watching the 1961 film “King of Kings,” I suddenly write a flurry of frighteningly religious stanzas, in which I repent and confess to everything short of electing George Bush for a second term. These purging poetics are inevitably accompanied and electrified by the movie’s holy, humongously dramatic theme song (it revs up just after the overture):

OK, so maybe it’s just a wildly overwrought, manipulative arrangement of musical notes that reminds me that I haven’t gone to church in awhile. But sometimes we all crave it, don’t we, something that makes us feel small and swept along, something that puts someone else in charge for a change, some weighted melody that gives us an excuse to cry and inspires sappy poems in which we forgive ourselves and everyone around us.

And we start over. Reminded of how profoundly a moment can move us, we start over.

Epiphany No 2: One of the first things that struck me about Napster was how damn impure (read: eclectic) people’s tastes were. While browsing another user’s files, I was stunned to find John Cage MP3s alphabetically snuggled up next to, say, Mariah Carey files in the same directory. Everyone has guilty pleasures; however, never before had they been so exposed – and celebrated – so publicly. While such impure impulses have always existed in the avant garde, they’ve pretty much remained hidden. For instance, on UbuWeb we host a compilation of the ultra-modernist conductor and musicologist Nicholas Slonimsky’s early recordings of Varèse, Ives and Ruggles. But we also host a recording of Slonimsky croaking out bawdy tunes about constipated children – “Opens up the BOW-ELS” – on an out-of-tune piano. He sounds absolutely smashed. The Slonimsky recording is part of The 365 Days Project, which is a collection of crazy stuff: celebrity, children, demonstration, indigenous, Industrial, outsider, song-poem, spoken, ventriloquism, etc; snuggled in with the crazy Mormons, twangy garage bands and singing stewardesses is one of the fathers of the avant garde, Nicholas Slonimsky.

Epiphany No 3: File sharing is non-contextual. The cohesive vision of an album has been ditched in favour of the single or the playlist. Many people getting music online have no idea where something came from, nor do they care. For instance, we find that many people downloading MP3s from UbuWeb have no interest in the historical context; instead, the site is seen as a vast resource of ‘cool’ and ‘weird’ sounds to remix or throw into dance mixes. It has been reported that samples from Bruce Nauman’s mantric chant, Get Out Of My Mind, Get Out Of This Room [MP3 link], from his Raw Materials compilation on Ubu, has recently been mixed with beats and is somewhat the rage with unwitting partygoers on dancefloors in São Paulo.

Epiphany No 4: As a result, just like you, I stopped buying music. I used to be a record junkie. For years, I spent most of my free time hunting down discs in dusty corners of the world. I’ll never forget my honeymoon in Amsterdam in 1989. I had to purchase an extra suitcase so that I could bring home dozens of Dutch reissues of Stax and Atco soul LPs that were completely unavailable in New York. While I travel extensively these days, I haven’t set foot in a record store in well over a decade. Why bother, when the best record store sits on my laptop in my hotel room? A few nights ago at home, after putting the kids to bed, I was parked in front of the computer sipping bourbon. My wife asked me what I was doing. I told her I was going record shopping. As I glanced at my screen, ten ultra-rare discs I would have killed for way back when were streaming down to my living room for free.

Epiphany No 5: I don’t know about you, but I’ve lost my object fetish. But then again, I was never the type of collector who bought records for their cool covers: the music had to be great. Still, I have 10,000 vinyls gathering dust in my hallway and as many CDs in racks on my wall. I don’t use them. To me, if music can’t be shared, I’m not interested in it. However, once I digitize these objects and they enter into the file sharing ecosystem, they become alive for me again. As many dead LPs and CDs as I have, I’ve got many times that number of discs sitting on a dozen hard drives, flying up and down my network.

Epiphany No 6: It’s all about quantity. Just like you, I’m drowning in my riches. I’ve got more music on my drives than I’ll ever be able to listen to in the next ten lifetimes. As a matter of fact, records that I’ve been craving for years (such as the complete recordings of Jean Cocteau, which we just posted on Ubu) are languishing unlistened-to. I’ll never get to them either, because I’m more interested in the hunt than I am in the prey. The minute I get something, I just crave more. And so something has really changed – and I think this is the real epiphany: the ways in which culture is distributed have become profoundly more intriguing than the cultural artifact itself. What we’ve experienced is an inversion of consumption, one in which we’ve come to prefer the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring, the bottles over the wine.

[ I published this piece in the April 2011 issue of The Wire, but see it as a companion piece to my previous Harriet post, Archiving Is The New Folk Art.]

You know what you can do with newborns, or babies, or toddlers, or even agreeable preschoolers, around who require attention much of the time? You can listen to music, especially if it’s instrumental music (so no need to worry about what words they learn). Partly for that reason, partly because our preschooler takes his own sustained interest in music, I’ve ended up spending big slices of arts-attention this year not on poetry nor on literary fiction so much as on almost-randomly-selected pieces of composed (I try to avoid the term “classical” in this sense) music: listening over and over, for example, to César Franck’s sonata for violin and piano, Franck’s prelude-fugue-variations for piano and another keyboard instrument, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (also the subject of a book for children!), chamber music by Poulenc, string quartets by Shostakovich, and Stravinsky’s Firebird (which Nathan especially likes: it tells a neat story, and one that won’t repel children). I’ve also been reading Alex Ross, whose terrific new book begins with a reminiscence of the radio station where I used to play obscure rock music.

It’s not that I didn’t know who (e.g.) Shostakovich was five years ago, but I didn’t spend time or money seeking his works out. And now I do. At least a little bit. And I can listen to his works (however imperfectly) while doing the dishes, which isn’t something you could say about the arts that use only words.

And so, two questions for the assembled:

1. The composed music to which I’ve been listening over and over seems to have something in common with the rock music I like: alternating harsh and sweet textures; spare rather than lush instrumentation, with obvious open space; strong, easily remembered melodic lines. (I realize that compared to real musicologists’ comments, that’s not saying much at all: it’s sort of baby music criticism — though I do wonder whether Franck has something deeper in common with today’s indiepop world, to both of their credit.) Are there analogies from this sort of generalized preference to a preference, or a set of tastes, in poetry?

2. The “classical” repertoire is just huge, almost unimaginably vast, too vast for a busy adult to learn fully unless she or he were already deeply engaged from youth (I was shallowly engaged in youth), and it’s vast in at least two separable dimensions: competing versions of the same work by famous composers (ten versions of a given quartet), and new or recent works (which may only exist in one recording, but there are so many more composers today!)

And so thinking about what I want and like and don’t like in this vast world with which I have been only shallowly acquainted makes me think anew about the people who discover poetry, or decide that they care about it a lot, as grownups who have only limited time for the arts. How far “behind” do they feel? should they feel? can they feel? How can we (how can critics like me) help them find what they like, learn what they don’t know, and prevent them from feeling — other than productively, or delightfully — lost? To what extent, if any, is poetry, any poetry, an art whose rules a listener has to learn?

Is “poetry” actually a lot like “music:” something that used to have its own set rules of composition in the West, but that we should now recognize as having split up into several overlapping, intersecting but non-coincident provinces of practice and expectation, each with its own community, its own internally recognized set of forms and rules?

Well, yes. And so we now have poets who happen to speak to more than one such community, cross-pollinators or crossover writers, as it were (H. L. Hix and Claudia Rankine come immediately to mind); we also have poets whose popularity in one community makes them suspicious (as too arid, or as vulgar sellouts) in another, and debates about such topics that obscure, rather than reveal, what we like (that is, what I like) about individual poets, individual works.

That Franck sonata, by the way, turns out to have a literary afterlife, though you or your young child can also find it in this considerably less highbrow source.

Allen Ginsberg:

Wyn Cooper:

And Ed Sanders & Tuli Kupferberg:

You can download Foucault and Olstein’s collaboration here.

The music, scored for mezzo-soprano, keyboards, percussion and electronics, is a partial setting of Robert Fitterman’s enormous and beautiful poem of the same name. In his work, Fitterman uses the phrase “This window makes me feel” as the basis of hundreds of Google searches in which the results complete the sentence over and over again, creating over time a unique portrait of humanity. Sometimes funny, sometimes mundane, often surprisingly meaningful, the text accumulates a poignancy that I found intriguing. I also saw in it a simple musical structure, with the title phrase acting as a ‘refrain’ and each search result comprising the ‘verses.’ I applied this structure to the musical setting in which the mezzo-soprano sings “This window makes me feel” continuously in long, slow phrases while a recorded voice whispers the rest of the text.

[Mônica] Bergamo’s column in [Folha de Sao Paulo] went viral, sending the Brazilian twittersphere a flutter.  Their argument was not that poetry didn’t deserve recognition. Sure it does, and who better than a name brand musician to do just that? Maybe, they argue, a rich and famous singer like Bethania does not need government money to start a blog.

The Cultural Ministry responded late Wednesday by saying that the singer would be receiving that money, but added that a large portion of it would be coming from the private sector. Under Brazil’s audiovisual laws, investors or companies can deduct a portion of their taxes by investing in cultural incentives.

Unbelievable but true! Baudrillard recites his poetry backed up by an all star band featuring Tom Watson, Mike Kelley, George Hurley, Lynn Johnston, Dave Muller and Amy Stoll, special guest vocalist Allucquère Rosanne Stone. Recorded live as part of the Chance Festival at Whiskey Pete’s Casino in Stateline Nevada, 1996.

As a jazz & poetry performer, Jan Erik Vold has been constantly active for more than forty years, since his first album Briskeby Blues was produced. With Jan Garbarek he made three albums 1969–1977, and with Egil Kapstad eight albums 1986–2008. Love, Rain (1974) is a radio play based on the poetry of Robert Creeley. Rainy Day Women (1977) is a translation of 70 Bob Dylan songs, which resulted in the Dylan song album Stones. Rains (1981), in cooperation with blues guitarist Kåre Virud. The Day Lady Died (1986) is an album featuring the poems of Frank O’Hara. Storytellers (1998) brings international poetry by Rimbaud, D. H. Lawrence, Paul Celan, Ekelöf, Szymborska. Enclosed is Jan Erik Vold’s liner notes on Chet Baker.

The final product was the result of Baker, Vold, guitarist Philip Catherine, and Norwegian session musicians. Despite their varied backgrounds and the poems’ performance being entirely in Vold’s native Nowegian, the process was smooth and the album has become “the holy grail of Chet Baker albums” over the years– even though its original title referred to the search for a blue goat.

The original title of the album was BLÅMANN! BLÅMANN!, which refers to a beloved Norwegian folk tune about a young boy’s search for his blue-shagged goat (blåmann=blue body), lost in the hills of Telemark. In Norway, this has been a best-selling album for more that twenty years. The English version of the poems, translated by the poet, was read and edited 2009 in Rainbow Studio, Oslo.

Chet Baker was very happy about the recording sessions in Paris. He wrote to producer Jon Larsen: “Had a great a time, thank’s so much”. To the Norwegian poet: “We must do this again soon”. Of the possibility of translating the poems: Of course, that would give you a much larger audience.”

The Wave Pictures – Sweetheart from Ben Reed on Vimeo.

This music video for The Wave Picture’s “Sweetheart” is made out of animated, torn up, drawn on and maybe even a few intact secondhand books. “I will write you without poetry,” they sing, but no matter– it’s all in the visuals. The text and images go together beautifully, just like Shakespeare, karate, pastries and disembodied spinning hearts.

Um, well, at least those things go together in the world of video director Ben Reed.

I determined that I would set the most important of these poems not in English translations, but rather in their original language. The final version of the libretto thus became a multi-lingual mix, so richly evocative of our present-day life in California. Poems by Sor Juana and Rosario Castellanos formed the expressive core. I set other poems in English translations by the great Chileans Gabriela Mistral and Vicente Huidobro and by the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío. The emotional and sensory power of these Latin American poets is abundant. The poems are always about the spirit, about the deepest matters of our existence, but they are cast in webs of imagery that is unlike anything I’ve read in North American or European texts. Huidobro’s “Dawn Air,” for example, is an encomium to “the Queen of Heaven,” drawing on his “Creationist” techniques of seemingly incongruous juxtapositions that evoke a dreamlike, psychedelic awareness.

Discussing the difficulties that a composer faces working from source texts verbatim, even in one’s native language, Adams delves into how even the less artistic struggles like publishing rights have a tremendous impact on the final piece.

I did not speak Spanish very well when I made this piece. I’m much better at Spanish now. Pues, it’s a word in English, you’d say ‘since’. “Since” I’m talking to you…”since” I have to go home. We put it in very quickly. Pues is like that. I started the aria with a big long melisma on Pues, a big leap on the word Pues, thereby accentuating it in a way that runs counter to the way Spanish people speak. So I consider it an error in prosody. You know, composers do that, even in their own language. I think my goal in setting text is to make the text flow exactly as it flows when it’s spoken…

…In the case of a piece like this, the text generates the musical ideas. I would not have started any of these pieces, any of the arias without the text. It’s frequently the case that while I compose the piece, my publisher is trying to get the licensing. And it’s scary because if there ever were a situation were an office says “no, I don’t want my text set to music,” I’d have to just start all over again. There is no way I can keep the music and plug in a different text.

“I think (Thurston) will convey his passion for poetry to his students, and will give a sense of the delicate collaboration between words and music in his own work,” said Anne Waldman, who co-founded the Jack Kerouac School with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1974. “He is a true lineage holder of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa. He ‘gets’ the ‘outrider’ tradition, which means creating work outside the usual institutional mainstreams.

Most famous for his 30 years as a singer and guitarist in the art-rock band Sonic Youth, Moore is also a poet, writer, avid collector and archivist. Known for supporting and publishing many other artists, poets, and musicians through his Ecstatic Peace label, he’ll be appropriately participating in the course “Economics of the Counter-Culture: Performance, Publishing, Collaboration,” a pretty decent summation of his career.

We thought Saskia Hamilton was doing well when she edited that Robert Lowell letter collection. We cheered her on when she won a Lilly Fellowship. We’re impressed by her teaching position at Barnard. But we understand that this is what she was going for all along.

Sticking only to the school-age side of the road means ignoring his prodigious work as a songwriter (Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue”? Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show’s “The Cover of the Rolling Stone”? The Irish Rovers’ “Unicorn”? The Oscar-nominated “I’m Checking Out” from Postcards From the Edge? All penned by Shel), his one-act plays for Off-Off Broadway venues (which attracted the attention, and later friendship, of David Mamet) and a tentative foray into crime fiction that, if not for his premature passing, might have blossomed into something greater.

Then there’s Silverstein’s album, Freakin’ At the Freakers Ball.  A number of songs that didn’t make the cut showcase a risque and raunchy side of Shel:

But Freakers Ball was likely the compromise point on a series of songs Shel recorded a couple of years before the final album was released, songs with eye-popping titles like “Fuck ‘Em”, “I Am Not a Fag” and “I Love My Right Hand.” Some of these songs are available on YouTube. Others may wish to seek the bootleg.

As a recent example, Milani points to a song that Shajarian recorded after the regime began its crackdown last year.

“He sang this song ["Language of Fire"] from a poet that was kind of a Perry Como of Iranian poetry,” says Milani. “If there were Hallmark cards [in Iran], his poetry would likely be a candidate to be on those Hallmark cards. And he picked one of this guy’s songs and rendered it into a virtual manifesto of that peaceful, democratic movement.”

Though singing classical poetry isn’t a direct denouncement of the government, Shajarian has openly expressed his disapproval of the Islamic Revolution:

“He has made it particularly clear since last June’s contested election, letting it be known that he is, as he says himself, the voice of the people, and does not want his music to be used to justify oppression. And I think he hasn’t been arrested because he is now an international figure, and the regime figures that it will pay a very, very heavy political cost for it.”

In North America, however, nearly all his concerts have sold out.

Take the Fugs and their reworking of Allen Ginsberg’s totemic “Howl.” On the one hand a piece of garage-rock r’n'b, on the other a platter of disorienting descant in which lines from the poem are picked up at random and repeated as a series of conflicting refrains. To make things even more unsettling, it’s sung so jauntily you wonder if you’re listening to avant-garde barbershop…. Stereolab mumble Baudelaire to a backdrop of droning jangle. Björk’s Sun in My Mouth is an adaptation of EE Cummings’s I Will Wade Out. It takes a poem about oneness with nature and sets it to glitchy techno. Yet it seems appropriate – malfunctioning music alongside lyrics conveying sensory overload (“I will take the sun in my mouth/and leap into the ripe air”). Benjamin Britten’s composition for Shelley’s On a Poet’s Lips I Slept is more powerful still; apparently discordant throughout, but testifying to the immortal power of imagination of which Shelley speaks.

For the complete playlist, click here.

Much of the hurt of Bukowski’s poems comes from his vicious, infamous rage, often directed towards women. It’s one of the reasons that his work has remained, to a surprising degree for a famous poet, marginal, if divisive on college campuses.

“Of course, it’s very sexist stuff,” Lemper admitted, “but it’s part of his legacy and part of his life story, this disdain for everything, including himself, including men and women. … I am a woman performing this, [but] I want to try to get away from the gender-specific rage in this poetry and in his body of work. I try to get a little bit more philosophical, to the analysis of the world, to emotion, to the analysis of his own life and soul and heart and mind. It’s pretty deep sometimes, and hurtful, but it gets to the point that it’s actually very beautiful, what he wrote…”

And if you want more about Bukowski as a soft, gentle dude, read Molly Young’s “Charles Bukowski, Family Guy.”

The collaboration between poet and critic Anne Carson and dancer-choreographer Rashaun Mitchell has resulted in a multi-layered mash-up of poetry and dance. Carson’s Nox, her most recent book, and Mitchell’s Bracko, her most recent dance composition, were presented by Summer Stages Dance and the Institute of Contemporary Art in a piece that illuminates how poetry can manifest itself in a physical medium. Carson used the poems of the Sappho and the Roman poet Catullus as part of her inspiration.

From the New York Times:

Ms. Carson’s involvement in ancient Greek literature and culture has  always been a prime component of her work. The  title of “Bracko” alludes to the many brackets that mark the fragmentary texts of Sappho’s poems, whose incomplete nature becomes obvious in live performance. (Alternating voices speak “bracket,” “sinful” and “bracket.”) Ms. Carson includes Sappho’s best-known and most complete poems (notably the classic “He Seems to Me a God”), but her larger point  is that our idea of this Greek poet is shaped by what we don’t know, and what we choose to imagine, about  her . . .

President, philanthropist, lady’s man….and the next Don Giovanni? Oh yes. Bill Clinton is the subject of a new opera slated to open in Little Rock, Arkansas this fall, reports the New York Daily News. Arkansas poet Britt Barber (bio here) and musician Bonnie Montgomery, who called Clinton’s life “the perfect operatic vision,” are bringing the former president’s life to the stage. The Daily News muffles its guffaw thusly:

“Billy Blythe” – titled after the 42nd President’s birth name, William Jefferson Blythe – takes a look at his difficult childhood.

But it’s Clinton’s inner diva that will underscore the piece.

We poets write a lot about the music of poetry, its roots in oral/aural traditions, its rhythm and need to be sounded aloud, but very little about the meter of poetry—meter, which is a requirement of rhythm and of what most Westerners consider song.

It’s a missed opportunity, because for metrical verse to work, it doesn’t much matter how the stresses—or pulses—in each measure are perceived. The beat of 3/4 or 4/4 time is as effective a cadence as that of trimeter or tetrameter, and the syncopation of the vocalist as nimble a device for varying those beats as a formal poet’s phrasing. Lyric poetry, after all, was first written for the lyre.

So I call Darnielle a poet, and I proselytize.

“It’s going to be a Whitman freak-out jam by the waterfront,” Zach Layton said.

The Wall Street Journal has more.

The Star-Ledger reports from Wamfest:

MADISON — Getting on like old friends even though they’d never met, New Jersey giants Robert Pinsky and Bruce Springsteen swapped stories yesterday during an intimate conversation, during which they talked about their artistic influences, the creative process and growing old.

The poet and rocker performed and talked for almost two hours on stage at the Dreyfuss Theater, the final event of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Words and Music Festival — known as Wamfest. They sat on stools, Springsteen holding a guitar, Pinsky sometimes with a book or paper but more often reciting from memory . . .

Here’s the whole map (with lyrics).

1. Andy Warhol – The Plastic Exploding Inevitable Newspaper
2. John Cage – Memogram Correspondences
3. Vito Acconci – Two Track (1971)
4. Yvonne Rainer – Hand Movie (1966)
5. Ernst Jandl – Sound Poems
6. Carl Fernbach Flarsheim – Visual Poems
7. Morton Feldman – Audio Works
8. Steve Reich – Score for Pendulum Music, 1968
9. Al Hansen – Incomplete Requiem for W. C. Fields (1966)
10. Ian Hamilton Finlay – Wave/rock

Dinh Q. Lê. Untitled from the South China Sea Pishkun series (still 1) 2009, c-print, 50 x 89 inches. Courtesy P•P•O•W.

For fun and because I found his post provocative, I thought I’d answer the six sets of questions Thom Donovan provided in “For an Archive of the Future Anterior.” You, too, can play along at home. I chose a musical example, but it also works well with poetry.

“1. Is there a particular historical moment or configuration that, though it is past, still holds conditions of possibility for the future? Such moments can include events of revolutionary participation and/or insurrection, as well as movements for socio-political progress. They might also indicate historical conditions which never ‘amounted’ to anything; which is to say, never culminated in a visible and/or legible result.”

Early to mid-’80s African American electro music: Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force’s “Planet Rock,” of course; but also the Jonzun Crew, Planet Patrol, Newcleus, Royal Cash, Captain Rock, and, slightly earlier, Zapp—and before all of these groups, Sun Ra and P-Funk. How to be an exile in your “own” land while both critically embracing that condition and dreaming of a better place.

“2. Some notions of utopia are placed in the irretrievable or non-existent past (myth) while others are placed in the distant future (sci fi fantasy). Either way utopia, as an idea, is set in dialectical opposition to notions of ‘reality’ and ‘present’. It may be argued that the tension between that which is present and that which is possible creates a vector of becoming. Do you feel that such ideas of utopia are still useful in producing social and political movement?”

The idea of utopia is useful only to the extent that its literal translation is “no place.” One cutting edge of current progressive politics emphasizes no demands and the whatever. And while there’s also a privilege inherent in not needing to demand anything, this politics provisionally opens a radically utopian—again, in the literal sense of the word—space. “Space is the place,” according to both Sun Ra and Newcleus. What are the demands embedded in electro/electro-funk/electro-boogie? Yet it arose out of a profound dissatisfaction with prevailing conditions in the United States.

“3. If advertising and most mass media function by producing and then mobilizing our desires, how do we separate our notions of past and future from those given to us by hegemonic forces (forces of commodity, sovereignty, corporate interest)? Is there a relative autonomy that we are able to exercise within the tense of the future anterior to confront and examine these forces and produce new sensibilities that are outside or in opposition to them? What might it mean to confront the memory traces of past cultural products through their unrecognized and/or abandoned potential?”

Hegemonic forces are not outside of us any more than we are outside of them. Any progressive politics should first and foremost begin with its own complicities with power, and go from there. Electro is an excellent example of incorporating and then subverting technological, cultural, and informational hegemonies. Royal Cash’s “Radio Activity’s Rapp (Let’s Jam)” punned on height-of-the-Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation. Dave Tompkins’s new book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop—The Machine Speaks, traces the origins of the use of the vocoder in popular music, and especially African American music, back to military technology. Electro is also an excellent example of the “memory traces of past cultural products” sought in the concluding question of #3.

“4. Do you feel that there are certain birth-traits—qualities based upon where and when you were born or the circumstances in which you grew up—that predispose you to certain futures? Do you feel that you have exerted a certain amount of resistance to produce a future that you were not predisposed to?”

The future is not a free-floating signifier, and it’s important not to underestimate the degree to which it’s an institutional apparatus. Also, to quote Black Atlantic theorist Paul Gilory and various hip-hop artists: “It’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.”

“5. Is there a particular idea that you had begun to research or pursue that never developed into anything (or that was arrested in its development) that still haunts your practice? An idea that you remain unsure about, but persists in your mind and that you hope to one day reengage/follow-through with?”

I’m slowly letting go of a long desire to visit Vietnam and write a creative nonfiction piece on the Vietnamese American visual artist Dinh Q. Lê that also incorporates an engagement with my father’s participation in the Vietnam War.

“6. Are there projects that persist in your mind but are never realized because they seem embarrassing, awkward, or simply unrepresentable beyond their personal content?”

Yes, although I believe in, and partly practice, a poetics of the “embarrassing, awkward, or simply unrepresentable beyond their personal content.”

While other people were reading, you know, some dorky crap, I was reading, you know, Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire and things like that, so, and it just sprung from that, and on TV I was just watching old horror movies and like, you know crime, so, and Elvis, you know so that’s it. —Glenn Danzig