Unlove

"The songs are sung outdoors. They are sung in daylight only. They do not exist in the dark. But it is darkness or absence or lostness or vacancy or deprivation that they are about...The constraints...are the most obvious: the guards, escape, sentence length, geographical places remembered or longed for or heard of, sickness, death, guns, the work itself. The songs concentrate on the devices and forms of control and the manifestations of impotence. The language is...highly concrete, but the themes are not; the themes are negatives: things like unlove and unfreedom and unimportance..."

-Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Work Songs from Texas Prisons, collected and edited by Bruce Jackson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. xvi. See Rounder Records 2013. As quoted in Rounder Records 1715 Prison Songs: Historical Records from Parchman Farm 1947-48.

roboc irc universe
titan

not even wholly
part of that
which I might
not yet resemble
is my total point
today, a kinder
setting aside

O arc incessant

Entropy is a measure of disorder in the universe or of the availability of the energy in a system to do work

Questioner: Now these entities incarnate into a third-density vibratory body. I am trying to understand how this transition takes place from third to fourth-density. I will take the example of one of these entities of which we are speaking who is now in a third-density body. He will grow older and then will it be necessary that he die from the third-density physical body and reincarnate in a fourth-density body for that transition?

Ra: I am Ra. These entities are those incarnating with what you may call a double body in activation. It will be noted that the entities birthing these fourth-density entities experience a great feeling of, shall we say, the connection and the use of spiritual energies during pregnancy. This is due to the necessity for manifesting the double body.

This transitional body is one which will be, shall we say, able to appreciate fourth-density vibratory complexes as the instreaming increases without the accompanying disruption of the third-density body. If a third-density entity were, shall we say, electrically aware of fourth-density in full, the third-density electrical fields would fail due to incompatibility.

To answer your query about death, these entities will die according to third-density necessities.

Questioner: You are saying, then, that for the transition from third to fourth-density for one of the entities with doubly activated bodies, in order to make the transition the third-density body will go through the process of what we call death. Is this correct?

Ra: I am Ra. The third and fourth, combination, density’s body will die according to the necessity of third-density mind/body/spirit complex distortions.

We may respond to the heart of your question by noting that the purpose of such combined activation of mind/body/spirit complexes is that such entities, to some extent, conscientiously are aware of those fourth-density understandings which third-density is unable to remember due to the forgetting. Thus fourth-density experience may be begun with the added attraction to an entity oriented toward service-to-others of dwelling in a troubled third-density environment and offering its love and compassion.

Questioner: Would the purpose in transitioning to Earth prior to the complete changeover then be for the experience to be gained here before the harvesting process?

Ra: I am Ra. This is correct. These entities are not Wanderers in the sense that this planetary sphere is their fourth-density home planet. However, the experience of this service is earned only by those harvested third-density entities which have demonstrated a great deal of orientation towards service-to-others. It is a privilege to be allowed this early an incarnation as there is much experiential catalyst in service to other-selves at this harvesting.

Field Report, CRS vol. 5, 21.5.10

What might a reading do?

What is the scope of our insistence on the plurality of address in contemporary experimental poetry? What are the implications of articulating, either by direct or inverse means, a polis whose basis is the entrainment of a readership into a productive and necessary milieu through which to act, to respond, to engage? How does this process relate to poetry’s designs on the folk, the people of which a community of poets is always a slight but inevitable instance? What are the designs of the people upon the poets? What are the ramifications of the activation of space in a play called The Reading for, in the first instance, the people who were there and for whom that space becomes radically theirs, and in the second instance for everybody else? How much does everybody else even matter, or do they remain a they, a kind of vaguely intimidating, abstractly regressive and unproductively somnambulistic Das Man until entrained into the utopian projection of our superabundance of desire? What, in any given reading or performance, can possibly be said to be assumed?

There are two things, I think, to come to terms with before attempting to untangle this deafening masque. The first is that in order to bridge the void between subjectivities the social space which subtends, contains and often undermines those subjectivities must be addressed holistically as well as fractally, preferably at the same time, or at least in the same breath. The second is that the notion of “preaching to the converted” is nonsensical when applied to the Arts, and poetry in particular, first because it assumes that there are only two possible states of play at stake, those of pre- and post-conversion, after which the infinite variety and radical potential of language slides like dribbles of iced latté down the polyethylene meniscus of the initiate's perception; second because “preaching” re-enforces a performer/audience dichotomy that is far less interesting than the active listening which is the axis of social space and of which both speaking and remaining silent are variegated articulations. This is to say that the potential for “creating culture” as opposed to, or perhaps parallel with, “reproducing it”, in Marianne Morris’ terms, are not diminished or somehow reduced in power or scope because the same people go to the same readings all the time. This is not a memorandum to my friends in the business, and I am not advocating an insular and reductive micro-dystopia of writers and performers selected for their collective genome’s compatibility with the esoteric knowledge of experimental poetic technique. Rather, I mean that the very cognizance of friendship, our ability to know each other and to express that knowledge, to work and thrive in the sun of it, is what could be at stake at readings and performances that enact certain desires and put such forces into play. The important question is not how to get more people interested in experimental poetry, but what to do with the ones that already are. In any case, I don’t believe that the same people do go to the same readings all the time; but I do believe that it is a certain quality of poetic disclosure that enables access to that “we” I want to talk about, as well as to its constituting subjectivities, whoever comprises and constitutes “us”, all of whom “I” desire to know as far and as productively as possible.

This then, is a political activation, however we qualify the instance of polis. What we can do to activate the space we inhabit. “My true readers”, says Dorn in the foreword to his Collected Poems, “have known exactly what I have assumed”, and Morris makes a similar, collectively appropriate point:

“a poetry like ours – that’s mine and my poetic colleagues’ – in fact relies on shared experience, both in criticism and engagement with performance as well as in a tacit understanding that a way must be found in poetry of speaking with more than one voice. This is why you see the first person plural pronoun in so much of this poetry – my own included: the ‘we’ that creates community, even where there is none…”

Morris, writing in the face of a deeply cynical, throw-away attack on the Infinite Difference anthology in the TLS, is keenly aware that the views expressed in the “review” were not meant to engage in debate or productive discourse, but simply blank and irreproachable, a derisive snort in the direction of a casual public whose proxy nostrils are cleared by the chummy, hairless tone of arrogant condescension, and as such her comments on the work to be done are directed to her poetic colleagues – Know your enemy is less useful didactic knowledge here than Know your friends, and less important. What then, should we assume? I said just now that it is a certain quality of poetic disclosure that enables access to this “we”, and stopped short of defining poetry as a constitutive force of the reflexively defining first person plural as Morris does. This is because I believe that whilst poetry can give ourselves to each other more truthfully than the static notion of self could bear, the skin-line not a burr thrown up against the world but finally a series of valves or ultra-porous access points through which we contain, refute, are filled and desired by the world, the potential for affinity must surely be pre-requisite for a community to come together and to effect that constitutive “we” in the first place. Community cannot just be created “even where there is none”, but only where “we” desire it to come into being by knowing each other more profoundly than we could by merely having similar preferences for original modes of language use? First of all, we must desire it. We must desire the dialectics of difference to be put to the use of poetic knowledge in order for our capacity for love to be more fully realised. The point is perhaps pedantic and in any case may be elucidatory instead of contradictive. And the first person plural pronoun can of course be put to other uses than those of highlighting our particular historical and collective endeavour, not least to worry that conception and keep us wary of complacency, to indicate other, perhaps more subtly mendacious and illusory methods of collective identity that the widest “we”, the human race, are constantly compartmentalised into, whether productively (not to mention usefully, willingly, falsely or painfully) or not.

Posie Rider & Jow Lindsay’s reading on Friday night assumed much less than it would perhaps be safe to assume a Cambridge Reading Series night of experimental avant-garde poetry would assume, but by this very play was able to open up a space in which the performance of the reading constantly flirted with, insulted, disparaged, castigated, comforted and barely became a means of effecting a communitas based upon what was already there, what we already have, and what we might possibly become. Recent national political discourse was both appropriated and mocked, but also re-constituted into the political space of the reading, tracing a line of constant watchfulness over the machinations universally predicated upon and in the name of the folk whilst at the same time tragically powerless to prevent those machinations from organising/mobilising satirical negations & refutations of constructed collective identity. The creation of the radical experimental “we” through such a gathering was tempered with a dangerously isomorphic “we” of satirical invective and absurdist comedy, the laughter of the audience perhaps the most realistic effect produced by the Wagnerian, mythological, polysemous diatribes flitting between the two barely realistic personas of the poets. The potential for a delineation of a universal WE to be reductive and obscurantist is enormous, and these are the precise means by which corporate advertising and party political affiliation seek to homogenise humanity into demographics and target audiences destined only for differences in the vagaries of their consumption and tactical voting preferences. To say, as I believe I heard Posie Rider say, that “we are the poets laureate” in the midst of an exhausting and increasingly overwhelming dialogic code is a re-appropriation of a political right and the creation of, or at least the exciting image of, a fragile community existing, fleetingly, in the heart of the multi-national flux of assumed identity. What is “assumed”, that is, taken as given, a priori, implicit, hereby becomes inverted to be that which is passed over in haste, ignorance or ambivalence, and what must be attested in the act of the reading is the (newly) human capacity for engendering caucuses of radical community so that we may attain enough trust to assume in the positive sense once more. The figures of Jow Lindsay and Posie Rider are mythological tricksters, ever playing with our trust in assuming that we are assuming the same thing/s as the poets we heed. We are not simply given to assume that we can all trust each other and can therefore sing together the firmament of the new world, but rather the intimidation and awkwardness these trickster aspects produce in the audience (for example, naming specific people in the audience, something I’ve seen Lindsay do a number of times both in improvised performance and in published work) work to make the sense of place more malleable in order that we may mould new ways of listening to and being with each other. Those moments of joyous augmentation, (self-)plagiarisation and re-organisation result in a mixtape-like quality that presents not only a plurality of voice, but voices of real collective experience and instantaneous memory.

Only by carving difference into the universally reductive notion of humanity itself can we become truly human, and by dint of this, humane. That is the axiom at work on the macro-level of experimental poetry communities and the micro-level of the individual reading.

This is also how readings act theatrically without becoming theatre. The creation of such communitas is contingent upon its only lasting as long as the reading itself, its durational nature perhaps the key to the feeling of common endeavour, even if only articulated negatively. Lindsay’s exhaustive prose performances are, I think, a beautifully doomed attestation of the occasion of the reading as the productive mechanism by which communities are made, defining themselves against both an undifferentiated humanity-at-large replete with built-in sensors to detect love, companionship, truth & beauty as well as by more positivist means declaring a space for the activation of radical subjectivities inexpressible within the nexus of the everyday uses of language. The temporality of the reading as play is therefore the crux of the meaning of the performance in terms of its delineation of our time, our language, our wound, our response. It is the proper occasion of song which frames and therefore reveals the event itself as constitutive of a collective grand narrative forged from the desire of those for whom pre-packaged national, gender, ethnic or sexual identities have become useless and restrictive.

How might all this relate to wider conceptions of the people, the folk, the inhabitants of Universe City? I’m as yet unconvinced that it does, or even has to. I am convinced, however, that these trousers somehow contain the answers we all seek.

Dante & the music of the spheres

"...when Dante insists on describing the quality of the musical performances of damned, penitent and blessed souls, he does not do so out of mere aesthetic interest. Music is an agent of divine grace and its use is consistent: Dante employs music in Paradiso as a rain to bless the souls and as a mystical means of expression in order to circumvent the engulfment of poetic language, while in Purgatorio plainchant provides a means for purging sins. By the same token, music in Inferno mocks the damned and reminds them of the salvation they will never reach, in a consistent parody of sacred music. Ironically, the same tool is therefore employed both to fulfill the desire of eternal happiness and to frustrate it.

Dante introduces into his poem the different styles of music of his time, showing an impressive knowledge, if not of the compositional techniques, at least of the repertory and its liturgical uses. He makes music the language of the spirit and incorporates this art into the monumental construction of his other world. References to polyphony are neither accidental nor decorative, but constitute a complex architecture, whose inherently musical meaning mirrors the reconciliation of multiplicity and unity. It is Dante's solution to the age-old problem, of reconciling the multiplicity of individuals with the unity of the Creator. The chants of the Commedia are therefore not a mere accompaniment to the pilgrim's voyage, but an essential component of it. Harmony, in a political, spiritual and musical sense, becomes the end of Dante's journey to polyphony.

The transition from monophony to polyphony accompanies a cathartic progress toward the spiritual union with the Creator. There is a specifically musical quality to this purification process: for the penitents, monophonic singing is the tool of purification as the individual struggles for harmony. The songs in Purgatorio therefore constitute a pharmakon, a remedy to heal the soul from sin, which seems to revive the Pythagorean notion of music as medicine. The change to polyphony in Paradiso reflects the harmony with the Supreme Being, realized, spiritually as well as musically, through the simultaneous resonance of the souls' melodies within the music of God."

- Francesco Ciabattoni, Dante's Journey to Polyphony, (University of Toronto Press, 2010)

I'll never get out of this world alive

Now you're lookin' at a man that's gettin' kinda mad

I had lot's of luck but it's all been bad

No matter how I struggle and strive

I'll never get out of this world a live.

My fishin' pole's broke the creek is full of sand

My woman run away with another man

No matter how I struggle and strive

I'll never get out of this world alive.

A distant uncle passed away and left me quite a batch

And I was livin'g high until that fatal day

A lawyer proved I wasn't born

I was only hatched.

Ev'rything's agin' me and it's got me down

If I jumped in the river I would prob'ly drown

No matter how I struggle and strive

I'll never get out of this world alive.

These shabby shoes I'm wearin' all the time

Are full of holes and nails

And brother if I stepped on a worn out dime

I bet a nickel I could tell you if it was heads or tails.

I'm not gonna worry wrinkles in my brow

'Cause nothin's ever gonna be alright nohow

No matter how I struggle and strive

I'll never get out of this world alive.

I could buy a Sunday suit and it would leave me broke

If it had two pair of pants I would burn the coat

No matter how I struggle and strive

I'll never get out of this world alive.

If it was rainin' gold I wouldn't stand a chance

I wouldn't have a pocket in my patched up pants

No matter how I struggle and strive

I'll never get out of this world alive.

Hank Williams, 1952

Some letters in the meantime, to be sent

Containing some scattered and some more delineated thoughts on failure, O'Hara, theatre, folk song & the faux-pas. The continuation of our grand narrative. On the way back from a Chinese traditional music concert in Oxford at the weekend I mentioned to my housemate that I could quite easily have sat through two hours of solo qin music without the modern recapitulations of sung poetry, to which he responded tetchily "not everyone's you, Joe"; a valid point, but doesn't my desire to expand my self into everything subtend and undermine that protest? I love harder than you, I will encompass your desire and you will see. Love as the great colonizer; the reflexive machinations of Wilkinson's Proud Flesh attempt to dislodge these anxieties but ultimately reinforce and re-inscribe them. Do I drown in this gross superfluity of desire or revel in it?

Letter to Luke Roberts, 14.5.10 

Dear Luke,

Great to hear back from you, and glad to hear you're having a hectic, if not entirely healthy trip. I recently read your Terraform Lecture Notes (long overdue, I know) and was particularly struck by your: 

"What fails but this, the failures I love, into the earthquake shortened day where for milliseconds we might have done something special"  

Which at the moment of writing, shot-through with totally contingent personal lyric from where I sit in the computer room of the Taylorian library on a lunch break, sounds like the fallout from a rebuff, and then after the comma, the interrogation of the validity even of THAT as feeling or (responsible) response. I was looking at Yves Klein's Leap into the Void again for the first time in a long while, and reveling in the pathos and awfulness of the whole endeavour - Klein in some dirty Parisian back street wide-eyed and flapping around, it's all so utterly tragi-comic, leaping into the great Void whilst a disinterested lady cycles down the street with her groceries, completely oblivious, the sincerity of Klein's action just segues into ridiculousness. His imaginary "architecture of the air" becomes a vaguely phallic gesture of pre-failure into which he can throw himself but nothing else. Perhaps, finally, that's where his personal vision of transcendence fails, but fails beautifully. The world accepts and absorbs his passion but then immediately and imperceptibly becomes brittle and dry, leaving him hanging in photo-montaged air, a idiot grinning in the face of the love that he loves.

That's the discrepancy in perception when desire falls short, that the primary result is a feeling of being incommensurable with the world, discontinuous and dis-contemporaneous. This is true whether the subject is a particularly unobtainable Laura or Beatrice (longing - distending - stretching), or video footage of an American helicopter killing Iraqi civilians (impotence - weakness - horror). It's the time dilation involved in the inevitable alienation from the common ground of language, which is possible only thanks to love's greivious machinations. And through that alienation we desire all the more, we're then able to produce the necessary superfluity of desire that could subtend a poetics of the impossible made, if not possible, then at least (mostly) manifest.

Failing beautifully is something I know a few people in our ambit are interested in - Chris Goode is the primum mobile here, who got a lot out of a blog-piece that Matt Trueman wrote, and I've talked with both of them about notions of failure in performance, or perfomative failure, or performing failure, which I think for Chris always needs to orbit an axis of vulnerability and weakness (see his blog post on the matter, which you have probably already done). I wanted to ask you what ARE the failures that you love, and why? Is there something bigger going on here? I mean Keston's working through his tripartite thesis comprising the cardinal points of WRONGNESS, BATHOS and STUPIDITY, which seems to have some parallels with Chris' aesthetics of failure. I don't for a minute want to suggest that Failure and Wrongness are isomorphic, because they're patently not, and anyway Keston and Chris have massively different praxes. But I think there is a more general thrust here towards embracing these antitheses of literature and performance and re-appropriating them in order to re-infuse them with the passionate arguments needed to keep us all afloat.

I've come to think that the tragic is the only true, or perhaps the truest, measure of life. That we have to come at it from that angle. How the tragic opens up a wound in perception that is productive and powerful, both alienating and universal at the same time. I love how "tragic" in common parlance has become a byword for social or artistic failure or faux pas, marking the instances of our descent. On the other hand, how foreign death is immeasurably more powerful when couched in indignation, as opposed to tragedy - "a tragic loss of life" now sounds the hollow apolitical horn of cowardly complicity. Here the tragic is co-opted into the foul and evil-smelling mouth of Brigadier Major Sir Jock Stirrup as a means to dodge & obscure a measure of human life in fact brutally defined by SMART bombs and surgical strikes; this he has to do, because to admit of an adversary's humanity is the first step towards pacification and negotiation, obviously anathema not only to military operations in general but also to the language employed to present such operations as necessary and urgent.

Letter to Y.S., 5.5.10

Dear Y,  

I hope you don't mind my writing to you - I'm sorry I had to rush off after the seminar & I would've liked to talk more about O'Hara and your paper, which I really enjoyed. It was rather depressing, in one sense, to encounter a rather regressive streak in the audience that still clung to the idea of art for Art's sake as some kind of tautological and self-referential institution that runs like a parallel line alongside life, culture and politics, as if such a discourse hadn't worn itself out over the course of the entire gamut of twentieth-century acts of embedded, contextual, engaged and active art & performance. Still, I don't want to get bogged down in refuting such a concept - we might just quote Oscar Wilde or Guy Debord and be done with it - but at the same time it mirrors an argument that still to some extent plagues any work, particularly poetry that is self-avowedly or even critically referred to as "political"...You were totally right to say that everything is political - at least any art that engages with human relationships, as all human experience is conducted & mediated in liminal zones whose boundaries and limits are themselves defined by the given cultural and political rules of engagement. Of course a poem is not a sit-in, or a march - and I wondered what exactly was the point of labouring this issue, especially given the fact that the questioner had already decided that art is to be referred to and thought about Artistically in light of the Canon. A manifesto is as inert as a poem on the page if it is not taken up and given a social role, and surely readerly practice has as much to do with how far a work can be "politically effective" as the agency, or lack thereof, of the (debased and outmoded idea of) "art in itself". What I find striking about O'Hara's work, and this is inevitably coloured by the kind of criticism I read around him, especially Malcolm Phillips', is the the fact that the interstices and rivulets of interaction and time that he works in create fragile and transient occasions for being together, moments of engagement that are not transcendental or escapist (the major difference for me between O'Hara and Ginsberg) but actually fully committed to working in the gaps and fissures of the urban consumerist absurdity that characterises New York in so many of his poems. Now, that kind of work is political on a more complex and deep level than the gapingly large definition I provided just now because it figures out the various spaces in which thought and love and motion can be processed in the glaring mass of the city - these moments of extreme and often all-too-tender intimacy are conditioned by the melee that goes on around them, the flux that is constantly tearing O'Hara from one party to the next. I think there's a reason that O'Hara and Berrigan talked about Coke and pills all the time, and I think it has a dark side to it, that it reflects negatively the positions these poets had to adopt to stay both committed to lived reality and create instances of new forms of engagement within that reality - to whit, they must have gotten pretty tired being so various. The tone of quiet resignation that pervades poems like Having a coke with you and Aus Einem April I think bears this out.

But to be more specific, I think a poem can be politically just as much, if not more than, it can mean politically; the latter category segues all too easily into a position of reflection and critique, which is not what O'Hara does to my mind - or if he does, it's constantly his self that is being critiqued for staying in the same place for too long, and thus missing out on something going on down the street. The denial of national identity in Grand Central is a wound almost protected by the breezy tone of the way "love" is bandied about immediately following this statement (even that I find slightly disturbing - as if he didn't quite trust love enough and felt more comfortable using it as a kind of human shield, using a part of himself to defend another, wayward part that won't play along), but finally left open to the machinations of the reader - the self from which the poetic voice is reconstructed is ALWAYS to some extent created by the readerly act, and that's a kind of political manoeuvre that bleeds out frequently from O'Hara's more naked poems. What is more political than manipulation at the hands of a distant other? This is what I mean by the poem acting, or being political more than meaning someTHING political, in that narrow sense that politics sets up for itself when being referenced in those terms. Is the faux pas in O'Hara a radical wound through which the poet allows the reader a glimpse into their own manipulative designs upon the body of the other?

Letter to Jonny Liron, 9.5.10 

Dear Jonny,  

So, the terms of engagement. After spending the last couple of days with some sort of letter sploshing around in my head, I'm not even sure any more of the points I was supposed to make, or even if they need to be made. What am I trying to do comparing Poetry and Theatre when what I should be doing is getting on with making poems? I remember reading about Yves Klein and his entourage, that Klein was approaching Art through his painting, one of his friends through poetry, another through music, etc, but the point seemed to be that they were all looking for the same essential fix, they just differed on their respective ways in. I don't think that sets up our terms very satisfactorily, because I wouldn't presume to want the same thing that you do, and I think to assume that is arrogant and stupid. There isn't just some great big Art that we're traveling towards through our different praxes, no point at which we can all say - we've arrived, Jonny get here through theatre, Joe through poetry, that's just too universalist and ultimately bland and reductive.

Nor do I want to "defend" poetry - it's failures and limitations are what interest me most. Have you seen the recent discussions on the List about sestina form and wrong poetry?

But I am interested in the form an event takes. The liveness of any art is contingent on the act of its occurrence - any given performance of a composed piece of music or a written poem is an instance of a singular thing that acts to transform that thing - it is no longer inert but performative. In some musical cultures the idea that there is no such thing as a piece of music outside of the act of its being played is more explicit than in others, and only relatively recently have Western musicologists questioned the superiority of the idea of the "Great Work" that exists before and after any of its articulations in performance, and subtends those individual instances within some grand structure of meaning. That's obviously not how we encounter art in our lives - meaning is totally contextual, delineated by the subjective and the communal, and tied up with culturally ingrained responses. Theatre brings these things to the forefront of the stage, as it were, as it is. The continuing and responsive present moment of being, distended indefinitely. The ultimate mode would of course be Chris's utopia of ever-on-going theatre that the public would and could encounter at any point - the never-ending present distended indefinitely in actual praxis. I don't know, maybe this stuff is just so totally intuitive it doesn't need pointing out, and the dialectic between a work and its articulations in lived experience is just something that hovers at varying radii from any practice. This is why I'm so fascinated by folk song - it is constantly dealing with this dialectic (or what in the essay on Dorn which I attach I call a trialectic, because you have to take the singer into account as well) at the forefront of its practice. That discrepancy between the artwork and its articulation in performance, whether what is being performed is the same essential THING or whether it becomes a new phenomenon each time, and the discrepancy between the artist and the historical context out of which she arises, are isomorphic. I'm building patterns of reality in the hope that they'll break down and split. An act of tuning. The history of temperament.

From a letter to Neil Pattison, 1.5.10

So, enough quotation. I want to address folk song in Olsonian terms, especially the sense of the phylogenetic in the ontogenetic, which is something I reference above when talking about Jonathan P. Stock's response to Victor Grauer's article on the evolution of musical forms in the journal World of Music, and then move onto talking about the use of song in modern poetry, specifically with reference to Ed Dorn's Geography. One of the key elements of folk song, as I mentioned at the very beginning, is the position of the singer within the song. When a folk singer sings, is she singing "the song", her "version" of the song, or something else entirely? Cecil Sharp tries to pin down the question of the authorship of folk songs in his English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, rejecting both the idea that the folk song has no author and simply arises out of an anonymous collective tradition, and the super-relativistic conception of there being no such thing as "a song" and that each interpretation of such a phenomena is a new song in itself. His compromise is to cite a constant development of the body of song in which the songs are transformed over the course of generations to mean the particular version that is sung at any given time - in other words, that each articulation of the body of song will occur in an environment in which that song's status is always already assumed. The divergences and discrepancies between "different" versions of the "same" song is a paradox that is contained within the legitimacy allowed to such "versions" within their communities. Nonetheless, always with folk song there is the looming sense of the singer coming out of and returning to a wider tradition that both authenticates and subtends her voice - that determines its variation and encompasses its scope. Always in folk song there seems to me that essential ontology of being one amongst many, how to determine the scope of one's voice. The dialectic can be disturbing - folk song, in any culture, is a closed system, or cosmology. It prescribes and determines the limits of one's capacity for love.

Photograph from the Brighton Poetry Festival by Marianne Morris

Work Songs

The BRight-On Poesie Festival still ringing in my beleaguered ears as I type, a full and proper redaction of the weekend's mountains and pitfalls will surely appear as soon as I don't have to sleep immediately. For now I'll post my 2 cents worth of World of Work, Chris Goode and Jonny Liron's rambunctious, fecund and SHLONGO!!!-centered menagerie - what I called a 'work song' for the purposes of the piece, and what has since developed into a kernel of an idea for a thought about such performance stimuli, and where and how they could possibly go. Again, the material is Feld via some Fluxus STUFF and maybe even some Mac Low, as he's certainly on the agenda. Meanwhile, a review I wrote of Andrea Brady's incendiary new Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity & Illumination has popped up in the new QUID (20) alongside poetry by JL the finer, an essay by Lowri Jenkins on Tim Atkins and a hole buncha other celebrity gossip and free moisturiser samples. Top tens, seaside prattle and everything else will turn up laterz. Ouch. x

Phil Tanner, for Peter

Just left the house for the first time in 3 days and the air is primed and musky with a lurid stickiness that even drowned out the cat alarms, but what the fields must have smelled like down in the village of Llangennith on the Gower peninsula back in 1937 one can only strive to imagine. Ale, probably. Llangenny's Phil Tanner was recorded by the BBC in 1937 and 1949 singing a selection of traditional ballads, bawdy verses and "mouth music", the latter a vocal style imitating the whiddles and trumps of fiddle music and sounding gloriously like a kind of drunken rural glossolalia, interspersed with dance accompaniment instructions ["step"] and the odd joyous yelp. A victim of the grossly unjust late 19th century land laws in Wales that were investigated in 1893 by the Liberal government, Tanner married a 50 year-old widowed landlady at 25 and was a weaver and farm labourer for most of his life. The liner notes to Veteran's 2003 release The Gower Nightingale make a pretty good effort at re-inserting the socio-economic context of Tanner's life and times into the sickeningly halcyon nostalgia of Wynford Vaughan Thomas' caricature of the man as one of the "amiable eccentrics" peddled on his 1976 BBC radio programme of the same name. Thomas, whose commentary on Tanner appears on the CD in two parts, essentially presents the folk singer as a vehicle for his own brand of lamentable faded-youth Hardy-esque countryside quaintness who "wasn't concerned with protest in the slightest degree" (despite the fact that he was one of the very few farm labourers actually to give evidence of the working man's plight in the district to the Royal Commission on Land in Wales & Monmouth as part of the above mentioned investigation, and was consistently refused farm tenancy and thus social advancement by the machinations of the local landowner) and was always "happy and contented" (despite the cruel and ineluctable fates of the characters in the songs he sang). The liners, meanwhile, present a lovingly researched history not only of Tanner and his clan, but of wassailing, bidding weddings and mouth music, and Roy Palmer provides some interesting commentaries on the songs themselves.

I've put up a few of Tanner's more astonishing songs here, including an example of his mouth music, a style that prevails amongst those crazy "travelling folk" of most areas of the British Isles, and quite remarkably beautifully is called "tuning" by the Renals & Legg family of North Cornwall in particular (says Palmer). The Gower Wassail would've been sung as Tanner went wassailing with his own brew, and exchanged verses with those upon whom he'd called for a dance and a drink. Young Roger Esquire seems to be a particularly self-reflexive & satirical song, the last verse apparently deflating the entire episode with a cod-heroic statement from our greedy eponymous hero. Palmer dates the song to early 19th century, which fits. The Gower Reel mouth music is a joy and a hoot - three separate versions are presented on the CD, which can be found here. And is it just me, or perhaps my latent ageism and beardism, but does anyone else spot the uncanny resemblance between Tanner (above), and a certain late, famous British sound poet in full flow? Just a teenchy bit? And isn't the mouth music the icing on the cake of that potentially spurious comparison? How fruitful would it be to think about Cobbing's work less in terms of pure sound, and more in terms of song?

Lastly, I should point to a particularly stunning verse from Tanner's version of the Wassail that, according to Palmer, is found in no others:

We know by the moon that we are not too soon,
And we know by the sky that we are not too high;
We know by the stars that we are not too far,
And we know by the ground that we are within sound.

Which I suppose is pretty much about as Hölderlinian as you can get 70 years ago in rural South Wales, that measuring of song as breath and spirit, deeply alive (and probably just as deeply drunk), isomorphic with the measuring of oneself against the body of song from which the singer emerges, and into which he disappears.

Go To FileFactory.com

Teengirl Fantasy!!!!

bird sound words

There is much splashing
& the song
hardens
into many simultaneous
drops

*

1) place names very close together
2) place names very far apart

This follows
the general song axiom
to always be abstract
before being explicit

*

In effect
the instrument's sound flows
indexically to the body's flow

by the singer, whose song
demands confirmation
singling out
one, two
or a number of audience members
who may be provoked
to tears

*

These phrases beg for help
attention
and recognition

and result in a feeling
of sorrow

*

The song had proceeded, hardened
& climaxed; here, at the end,
you are what you call
"home"

-

Adapted from Steven Feld's Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression, (2nd ed. 1990) University of Pennsylvania Press.

An open letter to Chris Goode

Dear Chris,

I’ve been figuring out how best to arrange this, in the sense that it was originally reaction to your piece Who You Are, but now must necessarily take the position of reaction to the reactions to that performance from both yourself [of which, by the way, I'm very touched to be the dedicatee] and Lowri Jenkins on Repetitive Strain, then somewhere below the sternum coagulate into coherent arguments oriented towards an object of discussion to which I was a party. The whole thing seemed a little daunting, and I thought about just posting recorded conversations I’d had with Jonny and Matt at the bar, and these might crop up now and then as they seem to capture something fleeting and analogue that I wouldn’t know how to write down on my own if I tried.

There is a point at which desire segues into didacticism. There is also a point at which it comes back out the other side, and is, hopefully, greeted with some kind of confirmation or conversation. This loop, this glass, is what I’m interested in here, and what I saw in Who You Are was at least in part a negotiation of the desire to find new ways of being with, and closer together to, other people, and the risk of alienation that is ineffably built into that desire and which sends it ramming up against its own projections in a kind of beautifully tender dialectical frottage. The precariousness of those projections are perhaps more obviously consciously composed than some would believe, or like to believe, or care about, but the fragility of that ultra-reality in theatrical space demands at least some kind of cognitive leap on behalf of the audience (or perhaps a physical one in a different type of piece). Now this is what the piece did, and in that sense my reactions to Balka’s How It Is as an artwork or installation were inescapably wired into the performance that took place inside it. Immediately after the show, for example, I was thinking about that grumpy critic, and reflecting on my own grumpiness inside How It Is when I was first in there a couple of weeks ago. My grumpiness was predicated on the space of that works’ immediate occurrence, and irritation that what you saw as a momentary finding oneself, and celebrating that fact, I saw as an essentially touristy form of instant nostalgia, wiping out the very theatricality of the space by illuminating it, instead of perhaps trying to find oneself, or other people, in the dark. Of course, these two reactions are not mutually exclusive or incommensurate [edit: no, hang on, actually they are], and in fact given the increasing level of light inside How It Is, I imagine frustration of the sort I experienced will quickly become pointless in the extreme. My desire inside How It Is was frustrated because I wanted everyone else to be doing the same thing I was doing, so that we could all be together. Yours was not because you revelled in the conceptual and literal cracks in the walls that would permit the all-too massive artifice of the piece to be ruptured by an ecstatic refusal to do what everyone else was doing, and you found that through that process you could feel more together with those others than you would have done had you closed your eyes and fumbled about claiming purity of artifice. By a similar twist Who You Are could be transformative only if each individual audience member took it upon himself or herself to first realise the impossible speciousness of transcendence before desiring it anyway [any way]. That was a terrible way of putting it. By a similar twist Who You Are enacted the failure of the theatrical artifice (falling back into "performance") and wriggled around inside the gap it opened up. By a twist not un-similiar to whatever, Who You Are understood the imperialism behind the words "love this" and sought to love us instead.

Who You Are was not trying to be transcendental, or metaphysical, and nor was it – it was grounded, tenderly and quietly in the disruptions between the categories of selves and others, performers and audiences, theatre and…theatre. What are we doing with our privacy if not at all times attempting to give it away? I say “we” here meaning our gang, obviously. If you’re not, I really don’t want to know. Or perhaps I do and I don’t know it yet. There is a point at which it comes back out the other side. Say, I should try and get into the nitty-gritty. This is how, for example, I saw the “biographical” section of the piece, or even perhaps the way you described your elation at the kids taking photos of themselves in the dark. The immediate suggestion, the sound coming out is one of want – the utter, natural body, the voice in the body which is the body’s, is speaking to us, the audience, but more specifically, to me, Joe Luna, telling me utter truths that it could tell to no-one else, and yet is, because this is a public confessional, which becomes dangerous – why is he telling me these things? What does he want? The confessional becomes a kind of violence perpetrated upon the audience for daring to believe they could be listening to any kind of truth, the value of which is irrelevant in this situation anyway because we’re in a fucking box – the desire becomes a lecture, it becomes, in the audience’s mind, an attempt at wanting them to want, to encourage a reciprocal desire, the didacticism of desire, as it washes over us, what then, is the difference between this string of words, and the digitally randomly generated names we heard earlier? The search terms bundled into a body. As you said,

…the six minute duration was intended to be long enough to allow the audience to experience exactly the shift that I've been through and which I now experience as a kind of drone of ambivalence and tension. What seems like an act of making oneself vulnerable quickly becomes powerful, even aggressive -- just as Lowri notes, apparently supposing this to be a flaw in the work, rather than a question that it's trying to ventilate. The image I had in my mind as I wrote it was of someone kind of hurling their body against that invisible fourth wall, the edge of the huge vitrine that all gallery art and so much performance is trapped in, often not even knowing that that plane is there, is still there. The image of a wasp trapped behind a window, that keeps banging its head, unable to comprehend the unseen barrier between itself and the outside.

But the unseen barrier is also (in) me, and I felt it very calmly and clearly somewhere around my solar plexus during this part of the performance, and during the section in which we were asked, did we think about the performers like they think about us? Did we wonder what they were going to perform for us? Will they get it wrong? Will they get it right? Now through me, and only through me, can this possibility of empathy be given a wasp’s chance in hell of getting through. Empathy is erotic: What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain (Bataille). What I desire, in the context of such a piece of theatre as Who You Are, is not only sustaining but possible, and this is before “we” as an audience can get anywhere as a collective unit. It is the elective nature of the work that pushes it back out of didacticism and completes the feedback loop, that I want it, even as the fourth wall of every person in the audience becomes momentarily clear. Something that both you and Jonny have said is also becoming much clearer – that the theatrical has the potential to be more real than everything else that goes on around it, and I think this has something to do with the giddy patterns the superfluity of desire traces as it negotiates the risk, harm & warmth of every potential encounter.

I told you I was troubled after the show, and I still am, because it seemed to me to strike a chord which has been reverberating throughout a lot of performances and readings I’ve attended lately, and this is the failure of passion, or more precisely, passionate failure. I’m not even sure what else I want to say about that, and anyway, I think you know what I mean. Have you been listening to that JLS song too? No? Shit.

“It won’t be me”. Well, exactly. But it might be.

x

misc/fest

It could be a breeding ground. I think this is pretty important, and the related stew, for vignettes as brilliant as:

"I believe that the future of the money shot will involve the impossibility of male ejaculation, which is still too human, too teleological. Impotent men will toss themselves off in vain while a pretty young girl gazes up at them as if at the cosmos itself. There will be no mediation."

amongst others. Having been in Cambridge a lot, I am stoked about Katko, Liron, Weber and Manson to such a degree that I'm having trouble sleeping; Katko reading the lyrics to JLS' One Shot as the song played through in its entirety was both funny and incredibly touching, the Epic/Sony production juggernaut being filtered through Katko playing Pinter/Wournos in the basement darkness of the Judith E. Wilson studio a premise the song could (probably) never have anticipated, its proxy, slick, crotch-grabbing emotion somehow hi-jacked into live & singular tenderness by its appropriation through Will Stuart's Transfigurations. The re-figuring of corporate passion as substitute, placebo, satiric enjambment or brutally relentless subjectivity, not to mention knife-wielding compassion, seems hard-wired into any useful reaction to what is commonly known as love & shopping - I'll get the lads out, Robbie's already downed a bottle of absinthe and is sicking up the alphabet. In any case, I loved Jordan Hunt's piece as well, and perhaps I wouldn't have done had I seen it in any other setting, but I didn't, and as far as I'm concerned it rammed its own futility up the backside of most of the derision it could've engendered, flailing helplessly & all-too-aware of its own impotence in the face of non- contemporaneousness both relational and chronological. Shit hurts. I'm not talking about boyfriends by the way :) O Tuborg dark, the liquid soundtrack washing me to gentler shores. Tate tomorrow. Hype Williams & the Hounds of Hate, all of that, etc. x

how we roll

some material aspects of the preceding

Icarus '05

Valentine's Donk

This poem was literally fashioned out of concrete.

Don't let Rawls get wind of this

Daniels:

O but fathom my heart’s
beleaguered forfeit,
some merry hack-job
in blackest panties,
romance pro-rata

McNulty:

The best poem ever:
O Death Where is Thy Sting
or, tea-bagging a milf smoking
a photocopied cigarette

Daniels:

[ignoring him]
Nor is any loss
abstract-able.
Whose fearful pomp
delivers crucial salmon –

The day is goaded
’cross the tripwire of
her smile

McNulty:

[starts quoting Veronica Forrest-Thompson
then thinks better of it]
a.k.a. no slack resplendent,
your faded corpse-paint
edits only less frenetic
self-inflicted; the bookends
of our lives are sound &
song

Omar:

Indeed.

Daniels:

Put a Breendonk on it asshole –
Aeolian is all, and I the reed.
In ’76 I caught a glimpse
of everything, the darkness
spread thin as ink, her fingernails
cute as sugared almonds

McNulty:

Squinting at the legislature
foreshortens the money-shot.
Any mouth is theoretically
compromised if all you do
is rip & run

Greggs:

[balks, incredulous]
& fuck you very much –
the chapter headed
Scourge of the Dialectic
cross-fades all blissful-like unto
the setting sun

Daniels:

[increasingly agitated]
My rank protectorate
so discharged, night
terrors come in caravans
to mix my blood with olive oil
& tear me a new one.
This fear completes me.

McNulty:

This whole screwy cosmogony
chides us with spirit propaganda
[sings]
1, 2, buckle my shoe,
3, 4, murder a whore

Daniels:

Odi et amo…
But most of all, I love my job.

Prez:

What’s cosmogony?

McNulty:

It is finished in ignorance
and blessed with caustic irony.
How may any man
Not love and be deceived?

Daniels:

A little something called
Chain of command, shitbird.
Lord knows I’m tired of this
existentialist tourette’s, hetero-throats
& death breath…
[he begins to weep, gently]
I bury my head in her digital bosom –

McNulty:

– and show me yr tits on chat roulette.
I love you back
but it comes out pebble-dash;
fuck you
& fuck the bosses.
The poem is a plug.

Bunk:

[aside]
And the smoke hangs in the air
Like smoke.

Bled Ink (Robbie Dawson)

This is from Robbie Dawson's flickr account, the source of some joy, some exasperation and much clicking to-and-fro this otherwise utterly banal evening. There was talk at the back of my head about a post on poetic practice, some kind of extraction & distillation of recent work, but the juice of it keeps leaking in unpredictable ways and I'd feel more comfortable if we all just did it anyway. An emergency falling asleep, indeed. I hope the next one doesn't feel so amputated. Hej da x

Sublime Usurper

I've been plugging the Edinburgh-based improvisers Usurper (above) to anyone who'll listen for a few years now, and continue to do so in a piece that should be up on Foxy Digitalis in the next few days. In it I propose, roughly, that Usurper are like, Adorno, but like, not. I can't believe The Wire haven't offered me a job yet. In other Foxy D news an interesting and pertinent review of a new Sublime Frequencies release has been posted by Jan-Arne Sohns, who argues that Bishop and Gergis's latest shows worrying signs of an extremely counter-productive fetishism and de-historicising of the material at hand, as a result of which what is on one level an undeniably noble program tends to segue, however unwittingly, into a culturally dubious proxy-nostalgia that offers archive Asian pop music a chance to escape its obscurity only by being streamlined through a bastardised commodity-fetish presentation of its own outlandish otherness. Now, this won't be news to a lot of people, and the debate over SF's ethical water-tightness has been bubbling away for years and usually surfaces in interviews in the form of a question about royalties and the suchlike, to which the answers are for the most part perfectly reasonable - when SF is able to pay a living artist it does, although as a great deal of their catalogue represents archive compilations this to me isn't the most pertinent question concerning their methodology. Alan Bishop is an intelligent man and will deliberately fly in the face of perceived criticism of the label on any kind of anthropological grounds, often deliberately imitating a kind of gaudy post-imperialist sarcasm and making sweeping statements about the "system" and the "industry" which leads only to an opaque and seemingly ill-conceived notion of how SF fits into the "industry" picture. But these kind of statements are a part of the structures which SF uses to reflect its position with regard to what Bishop has termed the "academically catalogued/corporately funded "we've done all the work so stay home and shutup" elitist ethno-agenda", and more to the point (because no-one's trying to defend Songlines or Tower Records) the design and manufacture of the records displays the hand of the compiler in such a way that, in the words of Marcus Boon:

more than being eclecticism for its own sake, these "foreign" intrusions mark the presence of the editors, their own tastes and idiosyncrasies, the subjective nature of their choices. They also mark "the foreign" or "the intrusive" as something that is already being negotiated and appropriated through montage as a source of power and pleasure in these places...

These "intrusions" also take the form of absence, in the often stark and limited manner in which SF packages its CDs, something that Sohns takes particular offence to in his review of the latest Thai Pop Spectacular. This, too, can be recovered into the socio-political remit of the label in terms of a refutation of the kind of "elitist ethno-agenda" Bishop mentions in the Foxy interview - by serving up little aperitifs of text in the accompanying packaging, you reduce the need of the listener to actually find out where this music is coming from, what it's doing, when and why. After all, what is "fifty words of wall text next to a sweet ceremonial mask or hitting Wikipedia to explain jihad" if not base and misleading scholarly nonsense that would be condescending to all involved? The point is that for all the SF team's excellent and productive discussion of travel as the means of furthering one's cultural horizons instead of constantly searching for the traces of one's own, and the obvious encouragement for people who buy their records to search the stuff out for themselves, visit cassette shops and junk markets and find the musicians, the material itself suffers from a dearth of historical and social contextual information because this would be at odds with the aesthetic aura that defines the label's output.

The world of social anthropology has come a long way since Malinowski, and I think it safe to say that appeasing the likes of Sohns in terms of a few more liners in the releases would not only be possible within the parameters of SF's political aesthetic but actually boost the credibility of their status as an outsider label operating as a cultural jammer, feeding the ignorant Western music industry music it was too lazy or too disinterested to appropriate for its own ends. It's also fair to assume, and Bishop has been explicit about this in at least one interview, that the places from which, say, the golden-age nuggets of South-East Asian pop culture come from aren't particularly interested in having them re-discovered, and that the image of nostalgia that is marketed in the CDs design and presentation is to a certain extent a substitute for researching the providence and cultural legacy of the music more rigorously. The attitude sometimes adopted seems to be very much in line with something Bishop says in a Believer interview from 2008, and which chimes with others I've read:

BLVR: Travelling as frequently as you do, I’m curious as to how many languages you speak.

AB: I don’t speak anything very well. The longer that you travel, you find out that you really don’t even need to speak the language to get around and get things done, to live in those places. If you’re somewhat resourceful and perceptive, you’re pretty much going to know what’s going on because human nature is human nature: they understand it, you understand it, and it works.

This strikes me as odd coming from someone who is obviously a champion and an advocate of the culturally mysterious, weird and wonderful as spanners to throw in the monocultural works - he also states that this willful ignorance is an active and positive force in the creation of the SF canon, as if, for example, Bishop is listening to a Thai pop song from "the 70s" and doesn't know what the lyrics mean,

I can read it into my own way of formulating what it means to me. For the same reason that the guy singing that Thai song may even listen to Western music, but he’s not going to know what’s going on with the Western music either. He doesn’t know the fine points. He doesn’t speak English. Let’s say that all the Thais are listening to all this Western pop music and they don’t understand what they’re saying either. But they love it because it’s doing the exact same thing to them as their songs do to me. That’s the similarity here. That’s what is much more interesting than knowing what the songs are about.

which is where I suppose we would fundamentally disagree about the nature of the universal experience Bishop espouses, even if it can even be posited with any validity that such experience is culturally exchangeable in the terms described. If the desire is to actually encounter otherness and embrace that encounter instead of appropriating and translating it then why prioritise "what it means to me" as the sole barometer of cultural legacy? Is this kind of ultra-subjectivity towards musical meaning the only valid and meaningful interpretation left of how musics themselves translate as experience or commodity? Or is Bishop's stance the appropriate response to the "ethno-elitism" that itself appropriates, designates meaning and then presents its findings to the world at large? Is it, indeed, a part of the guerrilla tactics which Bishop clearly sees as necessary for SF to use in order to remain differentiated from the industry and closer to the non-aesthetic of Thai or Indonesian bootleg CD stalls, at which discographical information is at best patchy and in most cases non-existent? If the latter is true, which is probably the case, then it remains a strange image of a non-existent aesthetic, propagating as style something that is, in a sense, poverty or loss. At any rate, it does not, to my mind, serve SF's wider agenda, especially in terms of realising something of the nature of the “exotic”, that its predilection for a dearth of historical-contextual information may serve to have its products consumed as blindly and as familiarly as any other product of the Western-oriented pop hegemony; and the fact that so much of the South-East Asian material in some way involves American or European influences as essential ingredients in order to concoct their original histories complicates instead of simplifying the picture.

It should not escape note that I own a number of SF releases, and believe the SF canon to be a brilliant, vibrant and important document of modern and archival sounds, and hope they continue releasing this stuff if only because you're not going to hear Blondie in Khmer Camouflage anywhere else. But I am wary, like Sohns, of consuming at face value what are often very historically and culturally complex documents from incredibly diverse cultural backgrounds whilst being told that we are all human and thus all musical meaning is somehow directly culturally symmetrical.

untitled

so, song as not response
but inculcation on the variant
instance, what is hewn
at the point, of fraternity

utterly unimpeachable