“Writing is never wasted. I tell my students this, urging them to throw away a draft and start again…difficult to do, to trust. I have variously taken drafts and burned them, tore them into tiny shreds, let them go…the old drafts become the texture and resonances in the new.”  — Lemon Hound/Harriet comment stream. (Sina Queyras.)

“Anyway. I got the books in the post yesterday. I felt nothing looking at the book. Nothing. The books look beautiful. But I felt empty. Like these books were a refuse of my past, and them being printed and packaged and made into commodity objects is totally separate from why I created the work. I am looking forward to having new readers, that dialogue. But I looked at the books and I thought of matchsticks, yes that’s what I thought of, matchsticks. Maybe because the books are paper. And I thought of burning them, like Artaud writing about poems, meant to be read once and then burned.” — Frances Farmer Is My Sister. (Kate Zambreno.)

“Bhanu, the red, letting it soak back in (still thinking of Pamela Lu’s de-red-ing), I think of your earlier statement about killing the character in your project, but now with this idea of the rose, your impossibility of destruction, I am reminded of how, in physics, matter cannot be eliminated, just changed.” — Harriet comment stream. (Amy Catanzano.)

“The notebook is non-reproductive. You could say it is a mutation that is never seen and only becomes available, in a more formed condition, in the book. But the book depends upon the notebook.  What’s in the notebook.  In fact, the larger the non-reproductive store of a population is, then the more rapidly its outer limit, that dotted line, evolves. So for species, if you have a large number of mutations that don’t become built structures, that never emerge, that’s good.” – - E-mail.  (Andrea Spain.)

Then I met Jarvis Fosdick at the cafe.  Jarvis is someone I can text with the words PANTHER MARTINI? and he’ll text back YES.  Jarvis makes quilts; we became friends when it turned out he had Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge’s “Concordance” in his car.  We both had it in our cars.  In Colorado, you need a car. I hope this does not sound too boring if you are reading this in a city.  I once had a lover who texted me: NATURE KILLS AND SEPARATES.  A text I still have.  Jarvis said: “How do the words get to the page?“  We were talking about fire and water as purgative mediums.  About the painting, pre-quilt, that nobody sees, embedded beneath the layers of silver oil; the notebook – -a diagonal line across the page: its casual and brutal NO.  Jarvis said: “If you destroy the words, if they are never seen, what calls them back?” Luckily, Jarvis scrawled some rapid notes towards the end of our coffee (easily substituted for a drink) and so, apparently (according to his little yellow notebook), I replied:

“The page is an attractant.  It’s sticky.  For those of us who love theory, we get it, that the dirt and glitter of the border appears in these books in another form.  Displaced.  Projected.  So that we’re writing back to the page from these flecks.  This is not retrieval in a duration. It is entirely spatial.  So that part of it is aperture, stance…and part of it is an occult practice.  You have to prepare the page.  You have to empty it out or darken it.  And the book you write will not, perhaps, be verdant. This is not that book.  It is not “a book for you,” for example.”

……………..

The thing about theory sounds insane out of context.  Let’s just ignore that, if at all possible, and go with these questions instead:

1.How do the words get to the page?  2. What attracts them?  3. What did you burn? 4. What did you give to the river?  5. What book do you have in your car, rucksack, kitchen, suitcase, etc, in case of emergencies?  6.Where’s the aperture?  7. What regenerated?  8. What survived the fire?

I guess looking like shit is a matter of opinion, or taste, or preference, or fixation, or habit. Senator Harry Reid, who is from Searchlight, Nevada, a town I’ve been through many times as it is the one stop on the 111-mile route between Las Vegas and Needles, CA, home of my grandmother Beulah, who will be 91 in February, may not look like shit – if televised press conferences and talking head style interviews (sans rhythmic fear of air) are any indication he seems to possess a vigorous sheen no doubt succored by the folksy austerity borne of communing with creosote bushes while speculating on the nature of dialect and avoiding the speed trap that is the other major feature of Searchlight (pop. 562) along with a few casinos and a little gas station/McDonald’s/convenience store triumvirate that wields a large portrait of the Senator himself in its connective tissue between businesses and the oddly over-mirrored restrooms. It’s entirely possible, in fact, that a political son of Searchlight (there’s a great song by the late band Mule called “Searchlight” / which might / if I recall with any accuracy / which I do not typically / when it comes to memory / be about being pulled over / in the existential manner) may stake claim to a wholly archaic relationship with the notion of dialect – regular trips to our nation’s capital notwithstanding; one’s professional life and one’s speculations on human speech patterns in solemn collectivity should be separated by a near-impenetrable magnetic shield, as any creative commenter will tell you -– given that one may go very long periods of time in Searchlight, decades even, in isolated contemplation. This can produce a personal diction of curious historical range and one no doubt difficult to contextualize rapidly, as would be required on a word-by-word or even syllable-by-syllable basis. Serious reframing. Who can know from one word to the next if passing terms are from last year, last decade, or last century?

At any rate, to solve the two-poems-left mystery I decided to turn to K. Silem Mohammad’s book Breathalyzer and read only the next to last lines in all of his poems. The book was kindly just sent to me by the publisher in the same box as many copies of old books of mine that I didn’t even have to pay for because our publisher is too broke to charge me for copies in the first place and there’s a great deal of generosity to be found in a situation that can’t afford the integrity of a large scale distribution apparatus, much less a staff to keep track of shit, which I will nonetheless look like eventually before I get elected Senator (“I’d be a terrific Senator / because I’d love it”). In looking through one of my books I came across a poem I wrote in 1999 with the title “The banana peel is an important part of the eco-system,” which is something my brother Edmund said to me and which I even attributed to him out of some momentary moral failure (or else I was sub-consciously predicting the next century’s waves of attribution). But what got my attention was the following stream of words: “In the Iceman’s days nicknames / Were prevalent: Annie Annie Oakley / Ansy Slem Arnold Anton Ralton Leston / Selmton Tonton Selmselm Fuckton Cuntton Asston Workton.”

Seeing all those monikers again lit within me a burning urge to identify their sources so they might not get misunderstood as operating within a type of white dialect that could prevent me from getting elected in the future. I used to get e-mails from the Harry Reid folks that were part of a “Give ‘Em Hell Harry” general campaign of political schlock and aww, and if I take that example and run with it I want people to understand just what “Give ‘Em Argh Asston” is all about. Anselm can be a difficult name for you Americans to pronounce, and the above “lines” are actually a list of nicknames conferred upon this body across a roughly twelve year period that began at the age of nine in fourth grade when a few classmates decided it would be easier to call me Annie than try and deal with the tongrobatics required to utter the lm combination in Anselm. Christian Ortiz discovered a little biography of Annie Oakley in a pile of books at the back of the classroom one day, having been ordered there to mull over his loquacious bouts of inattentiveness, and his punishment gave way to the realization that it would be far more entertaining for our class to refer to me as Annie Oakley than just Annie, and so that stuck for several years.

Ansy represents a sadder tale, if you can believe that, for it was the teasing nickname my wonderful half-sister Kate used to call me and which I pretended to detest but secretly didn’t mind hearing until her abrupt and tragic death in 1987. No one has been allowed to call me Ansy since, though no one else really knew about it so its circulation was a little easier to control as opposed to the viral spreading of Annie Oakley around the halls of P.S. 19. Pointing out that Ms. Oakley was a crack shot with a rifle did not advance the cause of my true name. Slem was a kindlier nickname in that one of my track coaches in high school, Mr. O’Neal, simply could not pronounce Anselm without swapping the e and l and decided to shorten Anslem to Slem, thereby making things easier for the whole team. This worked until I got to college in Buffalo and starting being called Arnold by my three horrifying roommates who heard me do an imitation of the Hans and Franz “pump you up” characters from late-eighties SNL and decided Arnold was more apt for my then-130-lb. geek frame than Anselm. Finally came the –ton years. A very drunk but generally genial bass-throated gentleman named Mac started loudly calling me Anton one day from a balcony in downtown Buffalo during a massively attended street festival and that stuck. Shortly thereafter a new housemate (one of seven) revealed that some friends in his hometown, three brothers as it were, went by the names of Anton, Ralton, and Leston. Suddenly I found myself with a modular nickname, thus begetting, depending on the nature of an evening’s activities, Selmton (for those who could do the lm combo), Tonton, Selmselm, Fuckton, Cuntton (never sure if that should have one t or two), and on and on. It also became situational: Workton was what I was called leaving home for any job; Schoolton when threatening to study; Foodton I remember as well as Peanutbutter Foldton (a Buffalo delicacy) during culinary moments. One guy refused to call me anything but Ralton, thinking it the funniest thing he’d ever heard. No day went by during which I wasn’t referred to by a half-dozen different nicknames, a condition which, as one might imagine, had cause to infect my humor with a brooding idiosyncrasy.

When I left Buffalo in 1994 for San Francisco I left behind that whole world of –tons as well, and the poem in question was written during a flashback on a return visit to SF after having left that cuckoo joint for New York some sequence of trips later. The names poured back onto me and would have drownded me with their peculiar histories had poetry not been my ally and filter. Speaking of poetry, the experiment with Mr. Mohammad’s next-to-last lines in regards to the two-more-poems phenomenon (I have even, myself, felt the phrase ready its frame in my larynx for articulation wholly unprovoked by my own intentions, such as they may be, as if the words were their own act…which is why I only read from single long poems at readings now) have led me to isolate the following line as potentially useful in the classic ambiguous-yet-vitally-internal fashion of replaceable reference as practiced by Mallarmé, early Polvo, and the old weird America: “in a way love is all there is.” In order to finish the experiment I will from this moment forward choose to hear “in a way love is all there is” at any instance a reader is forced by mysterious compulsion to state “two more poems” near the end of their reading (I already ignore the awful apology implied by the occasional inclusion of “just” ahead of “two more poems” or “two more”). If you do it too then we can get together some day, and we’ll have a good time, for I will not report the results of our experiment here.

At any rate on the way home it occurred to me that the slow demise of the newspaper industry (my old journalism teacher in college, Lee Smith, a by-then-retired former newspaperman used to tell us that tv news really began the work of reducing the citizenry’s reliance on things like multiple editions of papers per day) could kill off the New York Post and I’d have to find another source for terms such as “cheese eating surrender monkeys” to put into poems. I mean, the internet version of the paper is nice and free and all, or mostly free, but I’m less likely to read it as opposed to scanning it as if it were a photograph containing certain points of significance to get loopy with. I learned at an early age to read the newspaper backwards – this, incidentally, led me to instinctively “get” the value of studying any language-based composition from back to front unit by unit (sentence by sentence, clause by clause, word by word, etc) as imparted in instruction manuals for teaching remedial English and comp. – but that pleasure is somewhat negated on-line, though I suppose it’s possible to replicate through some mildly masochistic plodding of course.

Speaking of portals, I have this terrific issue of Callaloo from 1999 (vol. 22 no. 2) that has repeatedly been useful to me through its features on Lorenzo Thomas and Will Alexander along with some very fine essay and interview work by Harryette Mullen. The interview Mullen conducts with Alexander is really great: fluid, funny, searching, and idiosyncratic the way a long conversation between friendly minds might be (Mullen: We all tend to be separated into our various boxes / Alexander: I just want to throw the box away). It’s also especially important to me to have access to an in-person conversation between two poets whose work is radically different from one another and who both openly admire each other’s work. While her essay focuses mainly on Alexander’s book Asia & Haiti, I have recently found Mullen’s descriptive terms vis-à-vis Alexander’s use of hypotaxis (syntactic subordination of one clause or construction to another) to be useful in discussing the title poem from Exobiology as Goddess, a book published five years after the feature in Callaloo.

Mullen muses on WA’s hypotaxis to the point of recasting it as “hyperhypotaxis” and figuring it’s attractive at least in part because it can “accommodate lavishly expansive sentence construction” as well as the many fields of knowledge to which Alexander has access. I started teaching Alexander’s work this year, and while it’s a challenge for me to do so – I tend to feel like his poems know far more than I can convey, for starters, though that should probably be the case for any material one might teach ­– I have found the undergrad writing students I’m working with to be quite open to Alexander’s incantatory ranging from pre-history to post-existence. In fact, we read the poem Exobiology As Goddess, which is fifty pages long, in one sitting a few weeks ago, person-by-person, page-by-page. The poem fuses language from exobiology, geography, Egyptian mythology and paleontology, among other subjects, into a clause-driven swirl that actually has a lot of space in it (double-spaced lines as well as a feeling of an aerial view stretching across the work) and reads fairly quickly once you let yourself go. It does at times feel like one long continuous and insistently rhythmic sentence-as-vehicle.

I’m hesitant to quote from the poem because I’m inclined to believe that you need to take the whole trip and I’m not interested in choosing lines at the moment and when I did begin to I wound up typing up the first five pages of the poem and that’s just not going to work. But there are his poems on this site, as you can find through an author search, and there are recordings of his readings over at Penn Sound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Alexander-Will.php) and that’s plenty. Actually, screw it, have a few lines from the middle:

If I say two poles of wheat

or a series of Minoan grain invictas

none of this projects her mirage

exchanged through fertility by scansion

by evanescent radii

by thought as magnetic migration

say I ignited the earth as a failing covenant of thoughts

Solea would erupt

closing her form

within neutron delay

within vibrational microbe as essence

& because we vibrate

we are odd rotational deltas

as gathered oblivious ice

sparked by summoned meta-concentration

There’s this other bit of his writing in Callaloo that I’m currently fixated on, though: a short personal essay entitled “My Interior Vita” that I’m finding to be valuable and kind (even though I need some of that garish quotidian the way an elm needs to get high). This is the third of seven paragraphs in the piece, and I’ll leave things here:

“For me, language by its very operation is alchemical, mesmeric, totalic in the way that it condenses and at the same time proves capable of leaping the boundaries of genre. Be it the drama, the poem, the essay, the novel, language operates at a level of concentration modulated by the necessity of the character or the circumstance which is speaking. My feeling is that language is capable of creating shifts in the human neural field, capable of transmuting behaviours and judgments. Humans conduct themselves through language, and, when the latter transmutes, the human transmutes. The advertisers know this linkage, but to a superficial degree, so when language is mined at a more seminal depth of poetic strata, chance can take on a more lasting significance. And I do not mean in a didactic manner, but in the way that osmosis transpires, allowing one to see areas of reality that here-to-fore had remained elided or obscured. I’m speaking here of an organic imaginal level which rises far beyond the narrow perspective of up and down, or left side and right side, which is the mind working in the service of mechanical reaction. Rather, I am thinking of magnetic savor, allowing the mind to live at a pitch far beyond the garish modes of the quotidian. One’s life then begins to expand into the quality of nuance naturally superseding a bleak statistical diorama.”

When I do come across the 5-10% of poets who know how to illuminate their poems at a reading, without getting in their own way…I’m grateful to have been a witness. Creeley was an amazing between-poem talker, and Will’s mantle, functioning as sage-storyteller…showed me another side to the fine art of settling into your work. I felt it was a master class in astral projection, in accepting density as lineage. The operative parable for me, how poetry is a difficult art form to listen to, maybe related to his particular work and its wealth of trajectories…(the word-scapes in his new book, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, the seepage that drenches the poet during the poem’s genesis, is incredibly rich)…but I imagine he meant poetry in general. 

And so he says, his solution at a reading is to contain the work. To frame/re-frame its context without giving it away. To sort of create a buffer between the intensity of the work by talking about the one plane of reality, before diving into the next.  Aware of each plane equally, the challenging one, shifting…depending on alignment.

 And I realized that’s something I attempt when I spend hours preparing for a reading, choosing the trajectory within my time slot, the vibration of material being the dynamic that drives the reading. But a speaker in touch with his many hemispheres can perform that sort of delicate dance without losing focus. I felt he was determined to impart on us a deeper, fluid note beneath his tone. His drive, mesmerizing, as poem gave way to filter.

 But maybe this cushioning relates to a more mystical writing, one that knows body as vehicle more than witness. Anyway, just a thought about getting lost in preparation when the work tells you what you need…and when the need speaks louder.

That said, I would like to build on the conversation that gathered a few angles in the comments on Douglas Oliver’s letter. My feeling is that prosody in performance (and taking off on Doug’s sense of this we can include public performance and private readings both aloud and internally of a poem under this umbrella), if it’s unchained from any particular polemic or prejudice, can be a connective thread of discussion across poetries that might be radically different. The difficulty is often in finding a solid opening question, so I’ll try one with the understanding (and hope!) that most answers will by necessity be various: how do you – you being anyone reading this who reads or writes – begin to hear in your practice of reading and/or writing? Or how do you think you begin to hear?  My own angle on this is slanted towards the writing side of the question, but I’m interested in any possible take. For my part I often, but not always, look for a single sound, usually a consonant or two, to begin writing with or against. That listening for a sound might be something like an attempt to get near Doug’s “smallest possible unit” of the poem-in-formation (though what I hear to begin with isn’t necessarily a stress point), but I also understand it as part of a working desire to find a sonic point of beginning that is not yet bound to a particular tone of voice. This is when I am looking for a way to begin and don’t have an idea, a subject, a line, a text, a work in progress, etc., to be clear about it. And I’m not assuming that hearing begins when writing begins. In fact, there are many times when I’m quite conscious that I’m listening before I begin writing. Anyway, this is a different kind of attempt at beginning, so please take it from here and change it as you like……

So we can say: “The ‘neutral’ or ‘unmarked’ tune is that which the words would assume for an average voice in a given dialect when no special emphasis is given to the line, providing there were absolute agreement between different readers about the semantic, emotional and syntactical interpretation.” Just because there can’t be absolute agreement doesn’t mean that very often we don’t have such close agreement that we begin to sense the possibility of a perfect tune.

This implies to me, against much that is fashionable in literature today, that it does make sense to talk of people being able to read poetry better than others. There is no need for this to be in the least anti-democratic, because my statement also acknowledges that other interpretations will yield other tunes; but there again the notion of a better or worse reader will arise.

I needed to take such trouble over what may seem a minor point because I couldn’t reform the description of prosody unless I could put into it some secure-ish notion of the melody of a given poem. My prosodic reform begins with a redefinition of what a poetic stress is. All poetic music in any language, just about, depend upon duration, stress (or rhythm), and melody (intonation). Stress seems to happen in an instant of time that we may click with our fingers. Duration is its paradoxical bedfellow because everything that makes a syllable seem to carry a heavy stress takes time to happen. I have given many lectures testing out the following definition of stress before audiences, mostly by playing them the same blues song and asking them what causes a certain syllable to carry stress. As much as possible, I don’t influence their replies.

By common consensus we find at least one or two, often more, of the following elements as reasons why we think a syllable bears a stress. The basic model to bear in mind is like this:

Backwater Blues done caused me to pack my things and go.

… past of stress stress pause future of the stress

From everything audiences say the following can be factors in making us think a stress is heavy or light:

1. The sound: pitch (melody), duration, loudness, and voice quality. Since the stress happens in a notional instant of time – without content – duration is also the element that gives stress its content.

2. The main assignment of the position of a heavy stress is from abstract metrical pattern (if used) – or other poetic forms of patterning – plus linguistic factors, including the natural individual word-stress, the main information focus in the sentence (very important), syntax, etc.

3. In actual performance, 1 and 2 are combined with how important the meaning of the word is and how important is its emotional significance. A stress is a moment when we think we have unified the sound, the meaning, the emotional significance, and the functioning of the word within the sentence, into a single moment when all these come together into a single “beat”.

4. In practice, this gets more complex than I have time to go into. For example, audiences always agree that the pause after the word “Blues” affects our sense of how stressed the word is. How quick the syllables are before counts; how quick they are afterwards counts. The fact that “Blues” is part of the title (meaning) or that it is “blued” in the singing (emotional significance, plus voice quality) are part of the reasons why we think it is stressed. And so on.

5. All that is unified in the beat needs time to develop in the past or the future of the stress, or otherwise we have no time to make the comparisons which tell us whether a word is high or low in pitch or in loudness, important in meaning, emotionally significant, and so on. The past of the stress and the future are therefore read back both ways by the mind on to a single moment when we think the stress had occurred in the immediate past.

–––––––––––––> <––––––––––––––

past of the stress stress pause future of the stress

Backwater Blues done caused me to pack my things and go.

6. All this boils down to saying that the stress is the smallest moment in a poem when we perceive the developing artistic form. For poems I’d define form principally as a unity between sound, meaning, and emotional significance. I accept that forms are never perfect: again, I’m not reactionary. But someone has to explain why an audience when it sings along knows exactly at what moment to clap and knows when it gets the beat slightly “off”. It is not a moment of exact mathematical interval between the beats, but a much more mysterious interval which depends upon a formal perception.

7. Edgar Allen Poe thought metrics was like mathematics. In a way so do I, except that it is a mathematics of durations and pitches which has to take account of our emotional response to meaning.

Once stress has been redefined, it can also be seen as the sliding point where the instant of time through which the sounds have passed is united with duration. That is, it is also the moment when we unite the individual (and ineffable) instant of form into the ongoing processes of form. And we do that by reading durations of time both ways (past and future) on to that instant.

You can think of the instant as quantum-like if you wish. This is why I keep saying “notional instant” and “instant” – it’s an ancient philosophical problem whether we can bring an instant of time into consciousness. We can’t.

Then we may build up a hierarchy of formal development in the poem, considered in its ideal (ineffable) formal perfection:

The stress unites change (notional instant) and flow, but has to be anchored down in time before we can appreciate this. We anchor it in the syllable. The syllables unite into words and poetic lines, phrases, sentences, cadences, stanzas, and so on. Again, described in ideal perfection, the poem would then meet the Romantic poet’s ideal: the union of the part (stress) with the whole (the poem) within the one form, a form which gives “delight”.

Of course poems never do this perfectly and much experimental poetry is designed to allow them to do it as little as possible, by forbidding closure. But the forbidding of closure presupposes closure, so that avant-garde forms or art are always in tension with traditional forms; and much of their interest stems from that. We are, however, in a new era of space-time mathematics and our descriptions of the human mind are, in tandem, changing. This doesn’t mean that the human mind itself has changed much, perhaps….

Love,

Doug

Tue, July 2, 1996

Dear Anselm

You asked me to describe the basic themes of Poetry and Narrative in Performance: it’s a very dense, technical book, so I’m just going to describe those themes which relate to poetry, not to fiction.

My central concentration is upon the idea that a poem has a possible infinity of meanings depending upon the individual response of readers. Allied to that, does it make any sense to say that a poem has a particular music natural to it – since, again, a multitude of readers when reading it give it a different music? Is it elitist to say that any reader’s version of the poem is superior to anyone else’s and is even the poet’s own version subject to this? Such an ideology fits in with all manner of other kinds of philosophy which are currently fashionable: multi-culturalism with its insistence that no-one’s culture can be challenged without taking up an elitist or power-driven position; anti-foundationalist philosophy, which states that there are no truths external to language and to our individual expressions of them: that both truths and the “self” therefore are social constructions and have no warrant outside language.

This line of philosophy starts with Wittgenstein, and runs through Heidegger, Derrida, to people like Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. Rorty, in particular, has promoted a new form of pragmatic philosophy which ran very hot at the time I wrote the book – and even today the new philosophy books bought by the American Library in Paris carry that stamp: they’re about Nietzche, Dewey, Rorty, and “anti-foundationalism”.

I’m not reactionary about this: I believe 100% in the multi-cultural attitude and almost entirely (with one vital reservation) in the notion that truth is a socially constructed entity which is difficult, perhaps impossible, to extricate from its imprisonment in language. However, if no one reading of a poem is better than any other reading (an obvious nonsense), then all my own readings of my own poems are as good as any other readings! And if that were true, I could never improve either my reading or my writing of my own poems. And if a given reading is superior there would have to be, I think, some generally shared notion of what a good reading consists in. The idea of an external standard of truth comes very near us then, though it is not quite reached. I am more interested in the fact that we nearly reach it than in the fact that we don’t finally do reach it; and that is a difference between me and the anti-foundationalists.

So I have this reservation: there is a crucial distinction between describing an experience and performing it. There is a similar distinction between trying to fix Truth into a single description (which would be wrong) and half-sensing a perfect truthfulness as a possibility hidden within our actions (performances). The first kind of Truth would be dogmatic and religious; the second kind is a non-existent entity which nevertheless seems to guide us – a real mystery in fact.

If I describe my “self” I see it as a social entity: if I “perform” my “self” by being it, it is something more mysterious. Similarly, if I try to describe the tune of a poem I can’t without seeking a consensus in society about what tune it should be. If I perform the poem, then, for that moment, there is only one tune that I’m trying to make. The description is public and subject to all the problems of truth as socially constructed. The performance is private, interior, and almost indescribable. In poetry, by “performance” I mean that moment when the poem is first written down (created), or read out loud by a reader or “performed” silently in the reader’s head.

What I have done is to get different readers to record performances of the same poem by reading into linguistic machinery with electrodes round their necks. The results basically give a graph of:

1. the rise and fall of the voice (the intonation)
2. plus the speed at which the sounds travel (duration)
3. plus the presence of any pauses in the reading
4. plus the patterns created by those stretches of sound when the larynx (voice box, adam’s apple) is continuously sounding (during the speaking of vowels and voiced consonants) and those other shorter moments when unvoiced consonants occur. In the following words, I have underlined the voiced parts when the voice-box is sounding:

buzzing wasp

Try it: b and z make your voicebox vibrate, w is made only with
the lips and air, and so are sp.

The significance of point 4 is that we are able to make the tune of a song or a poem only when the voice box is sounding: it is in the throat that we make the fundamental frequency of the voice, and it is in higher parts of the vocal apparatus that we make all the higher frequencies. The ear chooses to regard only the fundamental frequency as the tune. This has been much neglected in the study of poetry, in my view. Stretches of continuous voicing affect the pace of a poem and also such questions as the continuousness of a held thought or awareness. My favourite line to show this is from Wyatt:

So unwarily was never no man caught
With steadfast look upon a goodly face…

where the whole of that first segment shows up as continuously voiced and helps to convey an expression of continuous rapture at the sight of the beautiful face before the word caught raps at the end of the line to catch our attention back again. (The w, by the way, is strictly unvoiced but the nasalization of the n can just about maintain the voicing while the lips are forming the w.) The role of voicing in a poem is never talked about by anyone, but I believe I have shown it is complex in its effects.

So I’ve made all these recordings and compared the results from the different readers. They were asked not to read “dramatically” but to feel for the neutral music of the words. There is, in fact, some old work by a German linguist, Sievers, showing that it is possible to identify the neutral music.

Then, in some of my experiments especially, I have asked audiences of, say 20-30 people, to identify the “best” readings, so that I can escape, as much as possible, my own subjective, “elitist” judgments about which are good and which are bad readings. This is the social consensus I’ve talked of.

I have then developed a complicated method for comparing the graphs of these “best” readers and measuring them against those of “worst” readers. The basic results are these:

(a) It is important first of all to make sure there is a broad consensus
about how to interpret the meaning of a poem

(b) If a poem is orthodox metrically, inexperienced readers generally find it
easier to decide what tune to give it.

(c) When performing orthodox, clear poems, the “best” readers tend to
create markedly similar tunes. The “worst” readers typically read
with a flat intonation or give a unorthodox interpretation
of meaning. This does not alter (c).

(d) Talented alternative versions of the tune are possible, but will be
perceived as “dramatic” or unusual in some allied way.

(e) If a poem is very experimental in its prosody, inexperienced readers
may mess up in reading it. Again, this does not alter the convincing
evidence from (c) that it does make sense to talk of a neutral tune for
a poem, providing the reader knows how to interpret it.

People sometimes think I’m being Platonic: claiming that there is a perfect tune that arises within the performance like an Ideal form. In fact, I believe that this perfect tune is ineffable, which is the same as saying it doesn’t quite exist. Nevertheless we sense it as a possibility.

The Poetry Foundation cordially invites all kids and grown-ups to the following events with our Children’s Poet Laureates, past and present:

“The Chicago Reading” with Mary Ann Hoberman
Wednesday, October 7 at 6:45
Ida Noyes Hall (The Cloister Club)
University of Chicago
1212 East 59th Street, Chicago
(Reception and book signing follows; free and open to the public)

Current Children’s Poet Laureate Mary Ann Hoberman will give a free reading to children and their parents on October 7. The winner of the National Book Award, the National Council of Teachers of English Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children, a Society of School Librarians International Best Book award, and a National Parenting Publications Awards gold medal, she has most recently published an anthology of more than one hundred poems, The Tree That Time Built. She’s collected one hundred of her favorite poems in The Llama Who Had No Pajama. Other popular titles include Strawberry Hill, Hoberman’s first novel; The Seven Silly Eaters; and the You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You series.

The premiere of “Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant,” a concert based on the book by Jack Prelutsky:

Wednesday, November 4 at 9:45 a.m. and 11:45 a.m.
Thursday, November 5 at 9:45 a.m. and 11:45 a.m.
Sunday, November 8, at 2 p.m.

San Diego Symphony
1245 7th Avenue, San Diego

What do you get when you mix music and poetry? And what do you get when you mix a tuba with a baboon? Learn the answers to these questions (and more) during this concert based on Jack Prelutsky’s “Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant,” where animals and objects have been scrambled together to create entirely new creatures.

Prelutsky served as the Poetry Foundation’s Children’s Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2008. He has written more than 40 children’s books, often working with well-known illustrators such as Garth Williams, Arnold Lobel, and Marilyn Hafner. Prelutsky has also edited collections of poetry for children, including The 20th Century Children’s Poetry Treasury (1999). Jack Prelutsky lives in Washington state with his wife, Carolyn; they have no children, but they do have pets.

Co-sponsored with the National Endowment for the Arts, the JP Morgan Chase Foundation and the Living History Centre. For more information click here.

Both events are sponsored by The Poetry Foundation. Call (312) 799-8010 with any questions.

ADVANCING FEMINIST POETICS & ACTIVISM
DAY 1
So, the conference—ADFEMPO has drawn together a remarkable and wildly ranging crew of writers and thinkers. The conference takes place over two days at CUNY GC, Thursday, September 24th, and Friday, September 25th. Thursday’s opening plenary started a bit late as we sorted through the tech difficulties, consolidating the audio/visual components of the opening plenary onto one windows-running Macbook. As the chair of the opening panel, which featured Meta DuEwa Jones, John Keene, Julie Patton, and Evie Shockley, I was excited about the opportunity to pick up threads of various conversations that I’ve had one-on-one with each of these writers. The chance for us to puzzle through a few things in a group conversation. (Next time I’ll make sure to emphasize the import of open and opening conversations between and among the panel and the audience, between the us that is made. We had an hour to cover years worth of territory, so were a bit rushed. The second panel of the afternoon was chaired by Laura Elrick and poets Ammiel Alcalay, Cathy Park Hong, Anne Waldman, and Rachel Zolf. The final plenary consisted of readings and performances by Kathleen Fraser, Erica Hunt, and Eileen Myles. They were a wonderful and nourishing mix of voices that brought questions of belonging, family (made and chosen), bodies (sex and sexed), waste and the wasted, and what words do. This weekend, I’ll post more detailed comments, some of the conference remarks, as well as audio and video clips.

Day two begins later this morning at 10 AM. Here’s a link to the impossible and terrific conference schedule: http://belladonnaseries.org/adfemposchedule.html

Participants spotted on the Program and in Thursday’s audiences. Emily Abendroth, Ammiel Alcalay, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Emily Beall, Dodie Bellamy, Caroline Bergvall, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Tamiko Beyer, Cecilia Biagini, Julia Bloch, Pamela S. Booker, Susan Briante, Lee Ann Brown, Laynie Browne, Louis Bury, David Buuck, Angela Carr, Margaret Carson, CAConrad, Ching-In Chen, Mónica de la Torre, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Sarah Dowling, Rachel Blau DuPlessis,Marcella Durand, Kate Eichhorn, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Laura Elrick, Zhang Er, Marilou Esguerra, Jennifer Firestone, Dahlia Fischbein, Kass Fleisher, Kathleen Fraser, Corey Frost, Sarah Gambito, Rosario Garcia-Montero, Nada Gordon, Dana Greene, Monica Hand, Duriel Harris, Carla Harryman, Jeanne Heuving, Kythe Heller, David Henderson, Laura Hinton, Jen Hofer, Cathy Park Hong, Christine Hume, Erica Hunt, Brenda Iijima, The Institute for Domestic Research (IDR: Jacqueline Leggat, Catriona Strang and Christine Stewart), Laura Jaramillo, Meta DuEwa Jones, Angela Joosse, Bhanu Kapil, erica kaufman, John Keene, Dulcinea Lara, Ann Lauterbach, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Rachel Levitsky, Majena Mafe, Jill Magi, Anna Moschovakis, Laura Mullen, Eileen Myles, Bob Perelman, Michelle Naka Pierce, Janet Neigh, Hoa Nguyen, Mendi Lewis Obadike, Akilah Oliver, Tom Orange, Justin Parks, Soham Patel, Julie Patton, Sandra Payne, Tim Peterson, Vanessa Place, Kristin Prevallet, Sina Queyras, Joan Retallack, Evelyn Reilly, Margaret Rhee, Kim Rosenfield, Jennifer Russo, Trish Salah, Metta Sama, Kaia Sand, Jennifer Scappettone, Tyler T. Schmidt, Gail Scott, Francie Shaw, James Sherry, Evie Shockley, Sally Silvers, Laura Smith, Linda Sormin, Leah Souffrant, Jane Sprague, Patricia Spears Jones, Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël), Christine Anne Stewart, Stephanie Strickland, Michelle Taransky, Torino: Cecilia Biagini, Dahlia Fischbein, Rosario García-Montero, Rodrigo Toscano, Jacqueline Turner, Chris Tysh, Divya Victor, danielle vogel, Anne Waldman, Christine Wertheim, Kathy Westwater, Simone White, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Rita Wong, Lila Zemborain, Rachel Zolf, Steven Zultanski

Molly Young and David Noriega read Michael Gizzi’s New Depths of Deadpan.