Category Archives: Residency

An Interview with Salome Voegelin

October 1, 2014Residency, ResponsesAdministrator

Salomé Voegelin is an artist and writer engaged in listening and hearing as a socio-political practice of sound. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (Continuum, 2010). Other recent writings include a chapter in the The Multisensory Museum Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space (Alta Mira Press, 2014), ‘Ethics of Listening’ in the Journal of Sonic Studies 2 (2012), and ‘Listening to the Stars’ in What Matters Now? (What Can’t You Hear?) (Noch Publishing, 2013). Her essay ‘Sonic Possible Worlds’ is part of the Sound Arts issue of Leonardo Music Journal 23 (December 2013), and her second book Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound will be published by Bloomsbury in June 2014. Voegelin is a Reader in Sound Arts at the London College of Communication, UAL. She has a PhD from Goldsmiths College, London University.

This interview was conducted by Lawrence Uziell-Hamilton in the anechoic chamber at UCL.

Listen to Salome’s recordings for the Archive here.

How did it feel performing your work in the anechoic chamber?

SV: It was really interesting, because when you come in, your first impression is not only that it’s an anechoic chamber but also that it’s quite a small room, and reading or talking to somebody in this intimate, airtight space, puts a very particular stress on how you read. Also knowing that there was a certain time limit affected my reading. So it was these pressures or limitations that I felt first and then settling in I started to really like the sound, the dryness of the sound – it wasn’t John Cage’s hyperbole about the nervous system that I could hear, it was much more simply a sense of airlessness and lack of space and the clippedness of sounds in extreme dryness that you don’t get anywhere else – it was very particular. And I think it made me read very particularly – I hope not too monotonously – but it certainly affects how one performs any writing, and I think it adds a layer of acute self-consciousness.

In that sense, does your sonic environment always influence your performance to some extent, and in what ways do different, louder environments affect you?

SV: I haven’t performed my own work very often. I write and then perform it in the editing process to myself. I read aloud to myself and that is a very important part of my editing process. But I’ve only recently really started to make the performance of my work more central to my practice, and performing my work I also start to write differently. I’ve noticed on a few occasions, at things like PolyPly, where I’ve been invited to read certain things aloud, that that creates a challenge to write something to be read aloud. So it’s like a cycle, where one process triggers another, and I find that extremely challenging and exciting. I found today very stimulating, because, well, firstly it is a privilege, obviously, to have your own work recorded, but also because you placed me in a very particular environment, within this anechoic chamber, for a very specific moment of time. This specificity made me rethink what the words I normally put on a page mean, and how they come from sounds, because my words come from [listening to] sound, so the way they are re-sounded in a public or shared space is, at this moment, a very interesting process for me.

Do you think of yourself as a poet? I know you’ve performed at events like PolyPly, and perhaps share some similarities in outlook with contemporary sound poets, so how do you find yourself relating to the world of poetry?

SV: I am intrigued by poetry, my current favourite is Edith Södergran, a Swedish-Finnish-Russian poet from the beginning of the twentieth century, but I’ve never thought of myself as a poet. I think of myself as a composer and writer, but I suppose you put those two things together and you compose words, and to an extent I think you become a poet. I think I’ve moved more into poetry since having opportunities to perform readings and taking my texts to spaces, so time-frames and rhythms become part of my writing. I do like more theoretical approaches to poetry too. For example I’m very fond of Julia Kristeva’s idea of a revolution in poetic language. The idea, not of poetry but of the poetic, I think, has always been in my composition and sonic practice as well as in my written practice, as an anarchic, as a phenomenological, experiential element. And although I have never described myself as a poet I like the processes and concepts of poetry to be within my work.

An extensive focus on sound in aesthetic practice is often considered inherently avant-garde or experimental. This seems to be particularly the case with poetry, thinking of Dada sound poets like Hugo Ball to contemporary figures in the Archive of the now like Caroline Bergvall or Holly Pester. Why do you think this is, given the very traditional understanding of poetry as an aural practice?

SV: What I’ve found in my own practice of working with sound and words is that we would probably be much happier if we accepted that 90% of the time we don’t understand each other and then there are these moments of coincidence, these exceptions when we do understand each other, and would try to work backwards:. starting with poetry, starting with what one may call experimental but what I would maybe rather call experiential, phenomenological, rather than semiotic words. Then people like the poets you mention, for example, would move more into the mainstream, not in a populist sense, but in the sense that we would have an access to them through our own sense of the inaccessibility of language, its misunderstandings. But I think this sort of engagement gets pushed to the side as something difficult, hence the terms avant-garde and experimental. I think there is something inherently difficult about poetry, particularly spoken poetry, something that people find icky. And I use the word ‘icky’ quite decidedly, because I think it’s almost bodily, using this daily material of words to rephrase them, reframe them, un-frame them, de-frame them, and then deform them, or reform them into something formless and difficult to grab hold of. I think people actually find it very uncomfortable and maybe that’s where its got something in common with what might be called experimental music – I would rather call it sound art – people’s self-consciousness is so great that they begin to feel physically uncomfortable and push works away and think ‘oh that’s avant-garde’.

The Archive of the Now is a database specifically for recordings of poetry. What do you think can be gained from the fact that this encourages close listening, as opposed to close reading?

SV: I think it’s really important, because when you listen to the Archive of the Now, you listen to somebody else’s voice, and these voices, these breaths, these mouths and tongues go straight into your ear, and obviously that can amplify the discomfort we might feel with these often nonsensical words. Whereas with poetry that’s written down, there is a visual distance, a detachment possible. There is a gap where you can feel not quite so physically and bodily involved. So I think its very exciting that it is recorded, it also means that the time we have to record, becomes the time of the listener also, and we start to share something; we start to share the same anxieties around time and bodies, and co-listening and listening alone. I think to throw people into the experience and make them listen and engage in the demands of the spoken, the sonic and the temporal is really very important.

Perhaps counter to that last question, then, I’m interested in the way you translate very ephemeral, subjective experiences of listening into writing. What happens in this process, and do you think anything is lost through it?

SV: What is lost, and what I would say is never there in my writing, is the moment of my listening, because listening is inherently ephemeral and passing. I think that is its strength, and is the intrigue of sound. Even if technologically repeatable, it is not experientially repeatable: every listening is this new moment, this new aesthetic moment of engagement, and this is exactly what I find so particular. There can’t even be the pretence of looking at it again, it is always looking at it anew, so the refrain becomes not again and again, but anew and anew. To write about sound might seem to pretend a holding on to, a framing or a stoppage, but it isn’t, because, while I appreciate that my moment of listening is gone, it opens up other moments of hearing: for the readers to hear their environments at the moment of reading, and to expand that consciousness to other moments, and so to experience the world in terms of temporary moments of listening. This sonic sensibility of course has to meet language, because otherwise it becomes very solipsistic. If we just said ‘listen to the moment’ in a meditative way, that can be interesting, but I am not solipsistic enough to feel satisfied by this. Instead I’m interested in creating points of access, portals, which we produce in language, and through which we can at least try to find moments of coincidence for exchange and communication.

Can you say more about the idea behind your ‘Soundwords’ blog?

SV: I started Soundwords after I’d finished Listening to Noise and Silence. Writing a book has its own temporal demands, it takes quite a long time to go through all the processes until it lives and can be read by other people. What fascinated me about writing a blog was that it was instantaneous; that I could have a sonic experience, and could try to grapple with words to make it tangible, accessible for other people, or rather to make their own moments of listening accessible to themselves. There was a seeming instantaneity about it, and the ease between my hearing and writing and your reading and listening is what fascinated me. I am still writing this blog now, four years on, maybe not as religiously and often as I’d like it to but it’s still a real moment of engagement because I also immediately imagine other listeners when I write, so it seems very reciprocal.

I get the feeling reading your book Listening to Noise and Silence that your phenomenological approach is often accessed in an unorthodox way, through a creative and poetic descriptive psychology. How do you feel your theoretical work relates to your creative practice?

SV: Maybe if I just quickly go through the first part of your question about the sort of psychological, phenomenological approach. I think as much as I feel that as an artist I can play with what composition is, and I can play with what poetry is – as I said previously, I’m an artist who sometimes does poetry, and who sometimes does different things. In the same way, there is a certain freedom for me to do philosophy, and use phenomenology, among other philosophical methods, in a slightly unorthodox way, maybe in an upside down way, in a useful way for me. And I think you’re quite right to point out that mine is a sort of psychological phenomenology, hence also my preference for Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose phenomenology relates to psychology, rather than for example, Husserl, whose phenomenology was influenced by mathematics, a mathematical sense and rationality of perception, whereas for Merleau-Ponty there is nonsense, there is sensate sense, there is doubt and the uncontrollable, and I feel that really gives me the tools to write about sound. And here I come to the second part of your question about how my writing relates to my practice. My creative practice is a compositional practice, in that I compose sound works on my own and in collaboration, and I also see writing as part of this practice. And having these theoretical approaches that are, for me, open enough, but have a certain ground, I feel I can use them to be in communication without stifling the material expression of my work. Because there is of course a desire to communicate the heard, and so for me phenomenology, and, more recently logic has been very useful to theorise without arresting the process of making work.

Talking about logic, your forthcoming book is an approach to sound through the concept of possible worlds and set theory. Could you maybe explain what led you to this, and how it may be affecting your creative output?

SV: Yes, my next book is called Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound, and if I can plug it here, it’s going to come out in June this year (2014). My last book, Listening to Noise and Silence, ends with a chapter called Now that is all about the constant ‘now’ of sound, and about where this sonic now meets memory in present perception. And somehow, the whole book, it seems to me now, reflecting on it after its publication, is somehow about accessing an other layer of the world – the world built by Tarkovsky’s refrain and evoked through a Bergsonian sense of memory in sound. We listen out for sounds of cars, of loudspeakers, of announcements and of language, because obviously these sounds are vital signifiers, related to our daily lives and survival. But there are other signifiers, relationships and materialities, at least potentially accessible through a sonic sensibility, that could provide a whole other sense of the world. And that led me to use the idea of possible worlds in my next book, and sparked my intrigue with possible world theory. Within that philosophy there are some unorthodox characters, like David K. Lewis, for whom every world that is possible is an actual world for somebody. That sort of thought really comes together with my idea that, more often than not, we misunderstand each other and only in moments of coincidence do we understand each other that I mentioned earlier. Since your world is your actual world because it is possible for you, and there are some aspects of your world that are completely impossible for me, completely inaccessible to me and do not hold up for me. In turn there are some worlds that are possible for me only, like the way my actual world is possible for me because it’s accessible to me and I inhabit it. Lewis talks about how inhabiting the world is what makes it real to you, and of course, he still says so as a logician, where its not about the “really” real world, but about the world of language and thought. But through marrying his radical realist conception of possible worlds with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological lifeworlds, I come to possible lifeworlds and of course, I had already talked of sonic lifeworlds, and now they become sonic possible lifeworlds, and this opened up new possibilities about how we inhabit the soundscape, and how it becomes possible as an actuality and thus how other worlds, as other possibilities of this world, become accessible through sound also.

So on the one hand there is an aesthetic dialogue to be had about artworks and how we can access them through possible world theory married with phenomenology, but there are also real political and social implications in a conceptual sonic possible lifeworld. It makes accessible, as in thinkable, all the works, languages, people, cultures and traditions that are excluded from or at the margins of our so called ‘actual’ world, representing at best an inferior possibility. A sonic sensibility provides different access to those possibilities that we even sometimes declare as impossibilities, and that remain inaudible not because they do not sound but because for ideological, social or political or even aesthetic reasons we cannot hear them and thus we grant them no actuality. In this sense listening and sound, conceptual and actual, become tools to access the as yet inaudible, the possible impossible, to make the sounding but unheard take part in the configuration of actual reality.

Kiddy Kamarade: “Crackling Hot in Pans Sometimes”

May 19, 2014Hive, ResidencySophie Mayer

Welcome to Kiddy Kamarade! The Archive of the Now and Rich Mix invite you to join our carousel of poets, providing ideas and inspiration for making word-art together with your children. Try out our imaginative techniques — and have a chance to show off what you create!

Station 1: Sarah Crewe and Chris McCabe – Poem Post Office

Sarah and Chris had a stack of postcards with mystery recipients (including Roald Dahl, Mr. Tumble and the Pope) written on one side – it was up to you to send them a message that might describe them before you knew who they were! The message you wrote was a description of something you could see in Venue 2, the long, sunny upstairs bar where the event was taking place.

I was describing the event itself – but there was a magical, funny collision with the recipient who was revealed to be:

I like to think She enjoyed it. Especially the glitter… of which more at Station 3: Poetry Potions!

But first, Station 2: Tim Atkins – Wonderful Day Haiku Station

Tim posted this haiku by Shiki Masaoka (in English and Japanese!) and invited us to imagine our wonderful day in brilliant colour! the delicious array of food treats available around the venue (including bagels) was a popular theme – as was the event itself…

The bright colours continued at Station 3, where Tom Jenks had poetry potions…

There was lots of magic here, with potions that (like poems) could be and do anything at all. Superpowers of all kinds were a popular option: here’s Pavel in the lab with Tom – and then showing off the muscles and superstrength that resulted!

There were also some inventive and evocative poetic spellings of pousun/poshen.

More spells and spelling next door at Jeff Hilson‘s ACROSTIC station, where we were asked to make our names into poems that described us, writing one word for each letter. One food item took the time to participate, inventing a new poetic form: the ACROSCHIP.

At Station 5, in the middle of the floor, Giles Goodland had us playing the classic Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse – with a twist! Each new line was inspired by a random find from the dictionary, creating a dazzling cascade of words and tricksy storytelling…

2014-05-19 15.40.18

Even trickier in performance – but Giles and Stefan gave a brilliant reading, with cheers as audience members recognised their own lines:

There were more random gems and story generators at Station 6, where Lucy Sheerman was leading fearless astronauts on Your Chance to Go to the Moon. Using a dice game to choose page and sentence numbers from a collection of books about space, Lucy and her collaborators cut and pasted ten one-minute chapters about a very strange and wonderful journey…

and then they recorded them and we used iMovie to turn the recording into a soundtrack for a famous short film, Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, which is over 100 years old!

Kiddy Kamarade tells A Trip to the Moon from Sophie Mayer on Vimeo.

You can see it playing here, over another project that produced a report from a wonderful journey, Lucy Harvest Clarke‘s A Visit to the Ocean:

Lucy found all the BLUE crayons, pencils, markers and chalks that we had, ranging from the palest pastel to darkest deepest midnight. We unrolled a roll of wallpaper along the floor (it’s lucky it was such a LONG venue!), blue-tacked it down, and everyone drew and wrote their ideas of the sea. Octopi, mermaids, plankton, boats, fish, and one confused Totoro later…

Look at the vastness of the ocean unfurled here behind Tim Atkins’ performance of a section from “Fathers & Daughters”!

A huge thank you to all the Station chiefs and their families who made Kiddy Kamarade such a brilliant event – and to all the young poets and artists who contributed their imaginations and energy. Phew! Time to visit…

The all-important Chill Out Zone / beanbag crash pad. This was perfectly soundtracked by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett‘s long sound poem “Exotic Birds,” curated by Emily Critchley. Poetry naps all round!

Poster art and much else besides on the day by the fabulous Archive of the Now intern team! Big thanks to Francisco, Jesse (who also took most of the photos used here – all the good ones!), Kester and Lawrence for everything.

“We Are Primed for Patterned Language”: Listening Together

Cutting Up the Archive: Practice

[Theory to follow].

Cut-ups by the teach-in group, strike day, Thurs 6th Feb, 2014.

A fabulous strike day teach-in led by Dr. Katy Price, and undertaken with gusto by a collective of students (who kindly gave me permission to reproduce their poems here), reminded me of the power of the cut-up: for releasing rage against the [textual] machine (or the text-machines we are supposed to be in academia, it feels), and for generating striking new ways of speaking.

After my cut-up experiment with Infinite Difference recordings from the Archive, a participant in Syndicate asked if I could write a tutorial on audio cut-ups, so here it is: a practicum on intervening in the Archive.

1. Choose Your Constraint

This is the non-technical part: your methodology. I decided to cut up the first five minutes of a video recording of a lecture by Anne Cvetkovich about the queer archive (more on whom in my subsequent theory post). I decided I would take 10-15 second segments of the recording that caught my interest – not necessarily complete sentences – and intercut them with material from the Archive.

Based on Cvetkovich’s name, I decided to use the first four poets whose surnames begin with C (in the Archive’s index, as of 1 March), and use the first 45 seconds of their fourth poem (or last poem, if they didn’t have four). The track I made is: CutupCounterarChive, and I uploaded it onto SoundCloud.

2: The Science Bit

There are many tools you can use to edit mp3s, including QuickTime. I used Audacity because it’s open source, free to use, and offers an audio recording tool as well. It’s also fairly intuitive.

I downloaded mp3s from the individual poet’s pages on the Archive, and extracted an mp3 from a YouTube video via video2mp3.

Once I had all my mp3s, I opened Audacity and created a new file: this would eventually be my cut-up track. I then copied (dragged) the first mp3 I wanted to cut up into Audacity, so it opened in its own window.

Once I’d listened to the mp3, I knew what I wanted to clip. Audacity is automatically set to the “mark” tool (what looks like a capital I in the toolbar). It creates a pointer when you move it over the audio waves. Click at the beginning or end of your clip, and drag forwards or backwards until you have a shaded area covering the material you want to clip.

You have two options now: you can delete the shaded material (useful for cutting out glitches — or creating them!) or you can copy it, exactly as you would in a Word document, and then paste it into the empty project file.

You can move the clip to anywhere in the timeline using the Time Shift tool: click on the double-headed arrow in the toolbar (highlighted below) and move it over the section of sound you want to move. This allows you to join two sections of sound together, or to re-order them.

If you switch back to the marker tool (I), you can select your newly-conjoined clips and play them through, or select just a few seconds either side of the join to listen to the transition.

Are you hearing the end of a word or a gulp or breath that you’d rather wasn’t there? It can be hard to clip exactly, especially with fast-paced speech. Audacity offers a Zoom tool (yep, click on the little magnifying glass) that lets you expand the time scale down to milliseconds.

This means that the time indicator whips past when the track is playing! My rule of thumb is to zoom in until I can see the flattened areas that mark silence or almost silence fairly clearly: that’s where I want to drop my cut, cleanly between words.

This screen-grab shows the process of clipping five seconds from a very fast speaker.

Then I can zoom out to see the whole track: this one consists of nine clips of sound from five different mp3s. It’s easy to see which are poetry and which are academic prose from the relative density of the sound waves!

Play

Once you’ve played your cut-up track through, zooming in for final edits, zooming out for an overview, perhaps making a new cut and dropping a clip into it from elsewhere, save the project — and export it.

I exported mine as an mp3 for easy upload to SoundCloud, and to play in iTunes, but there are multiple (higher-quality) formats available. Being an (An)Archivist, I also added some category data that will be encoded into the mp3 — so if anyone downloads it, they will know the names of the speakers, etc.

My poets were: Stuart Calton, Jason Camlot, Vahni Capildeo, and John Cayley. SoundCloud is a free sound hosting and streaming site, and you can make your uploads public or private. And the photograph hiding behind Audacity was taken at La Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s house in Mexico, DF, a living archive. Kahlo collaged directly onto her body casts.

After Turing: A Digital Poethics

January 6, 2014Hive, ResidencySophie Mayer

Following in the Christmassy footsteps of Vladimir Putin and his cheery amnesty for activists who should never have been in prison, the Queen has issued a pardon to Alan Turing, under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy, sixty years too late. In 1952, Turing was sentenced to chemical castration after being convicted of gross indecency for a consenting relationship with another adult man.

I wonder what Turing would have thought if he could (have) see(n) Pussy Riot using the technological advances that resulted from his work on computing to share their Punk Prayer, which opens with the lyric “Gay Pride sent to Siberia in chains.” Digital cameras, YouTube, Twitter… all these have become tools for digital arts as well as activism, and have their deep roots in the code-breaking at Bletchley Park and Turing’s ideas about machine intelligence.

The more customary association between Turing and digital poetics is that of the Turing test, a philosophical problem usually stated as testing whether machines can think – and articulate that thought in such a way as to convince humans that the source of the articulation is human, not a computer. Turing’s thought on the question developed through the 50s (documented beautifully here), and the phrase has become a standard referent, particularly for projects in computational creativity.

According to Stephen McGregor,

Margaret Boden’s book The Creative Mind is often taken as the Urtext for the general field of computational creativity. QMUL’s own Geraint Wiggins has written a more concise formalisation of Boden’s framework for creativity And Geraint and Simon Colton have written a fairly approachable treatment of the subject, marked by their own affection for popular science fiction.

Computational creativity takes artistic practice as one of the distinctions between human and machine processes – something that has been challenged by constraint-based writing since Mallarmé’s enquiries into the throw of the dice. Unlike, say, haiku generators, poets engaged with generative constraints could be said to be trying to pass the Turing test in the opposite direction: to disengage from the Romantic self, and write as an automaton, often engaged with principles of randomness, error, and non-sense.

So a more complex philosophical, if not programmatic, Turing test could be formulated, enquiring into the poethics of our engagement with the machine as mirror, prosthesis, weapon, tool, transparency, medium, mask, megaphone, soapbox, sandbox… A Turing poetics – a computational creativity inspired by the scientist’s life and work – could be one that explores difference, rather than trying to conform or convince. A machine that revels in being machinic or hybrid; a critique of creativity as the highest form of (human) consciousness. Releasing the monkeys from their Shakespeare assignment.

E-poetry, the longest running international digital literature event, hosts projects from both directions or philosophies, something I got to taste at a similar event hosted by Samantha Walton, Jow Lindsay and Lila Matsumoto in their technology and poetry series Syndicate, which has just come to a storming close. Some of the guests at the final night were kind enough to share some ideas for the future of the Archive.

The suggestions range from the practical (easier access to downloads, new ways to work with them) to the expansive (more Scottish poets!) to the ideological (kitten videos + poetry + Prynne), querying how the Archive blends with or stands apart from the flow of digital information and internet trends. In general, the poethics suggested here moves towards the accessible, the cumulative, the diverse, the interventive…

As Turing, a keen chess player, might have said: your move.

Girls Get Life

December 2, 2013Arc, ResidencySophie Mayer

don’t worry sound

carries meaning intact

carrie[‘]s meaning in t[‘] act
state ly
breath y
flute s ighing / out
the longheld
secret / do the sleepers hear it, girls?
get voluptuous
encounters (with) strangeness

for grace

goes: she has the gift analphabet
(girls) shine is from inside endless
… … little… …cuts… …thirst in her
big sister inventing my own

mythsreally but must

finish the sentence (such red
to last) regard… …les

All words (heard) not author’s own. You can hear “Girls Get Life” here, remixed from live readings at the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association conference on experimental women’s writing.

On my way to the conference, hosted by the University of Manchester on 12th October 2013, I was in two minds (that were one, to paraphrase Luce Irigaray): one stack of papers on the train table were poems for a reading set as part of the Infinite Difference anthology collective, chaired by Carrie Etter, and the other stack were poems submitted for Michelle McGrane’s online poetry anthology Against Rape. Not least since co-editing Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot and Binders Full of Women, I’ve found that my writing – creative and critical – has become obsessive in its address to the persistence of narrative, poetic, and even semantic structures dependent on/perpetuating gendered violence. Each project feels like a joyful, collaborative, enlarging response to resurgent patriarchy – and each time, it encounters a repetition of the cultural circumstances that made it needful.

Found text from the School of Music and Drama, University of Manchester, 12th October 2013

As she was part of the Infinite Difference reading, I also had the chance to make an Archive of the Now recording of Anna Reckin; the university kindly let us use a drama rehearsal room, which came complete with the prompt photographed above. Unconscious aggression towards the conference below? Or even confused postfeminist misreading of the critical porn of writers such as Kathy Acker, Dodie Bellamy and Eileen Myles (whose live tweeted review-poem of Blue is the Warmest Colo[u]r makes clear the distinction betwixt and between).

Either way, “girls get life,” as Harriet Tarlo put it. As sentence, its grammar is indestructible: life sentence, no appeal. “Get a life” a sub vocalic imperative inscribing a missed comma: follow the script, you failed punctuators, fantasise rightly: subject verb object, full stop. Yet (yes), you get what you give (biological imperative?): that seems the only way out, but it’s an essentialist reading. And there’s no giving here, just receiving: as gift, as idea. Yes, we get it: life. Three monosyllables that, three-read, totally make a mockery of the furrowed brows of philosophy and derange the grammar of the patriarchal sentence.

The post therefore starts with some of the other un-sentences – some settings-free, free of their setting (and mise-en-page) – I heard at the reading, spoken by Etter, Frances Presley, Reckin, Lucy Sheerman and Tarlo. You can hear, in situ and singularity, the recordings of each author that I cut up to make the opening poem.

My aim was choral, in the umbra of reading Adriana Cavarero’s For More than One Voice: Towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford UP, 2005). It’s the first philosophical study of vocality and sonority which, as Cavarero points out (drawing on Julia Kristeva’s chora) are feminised in EuroWestern thought, in its corporeality, internality, lability and affective power. So this is an attempt to speak, chorally, from the archora.

The Women’s Liberation Music Archive, the HerNoise Archive, the Women in Punk archive, Women and Social Movements, International: these labours of love stand distinct from the institutional archive that Jacques Derrida famously theorised in Archive Fever [JSTOR access required]: click and you’re not listening to the House of the Archon, but to the voices power excludes. Through guest curation, open interfaces that invite submission from users, and through narrative context, these archoric spaces create what Lucy Bolton, via Luce Irigaray, calls a “feminist genealogy”: a sense that past history is neither devoid of female artists and thinkers, nor home only to a token few. Here are conversations, chains of influence, transgenerational involvement: all invitational, opening outwards.

There’s no poetry equivalent (so far) for Allison Anders’ blog about listening to Greta Garbo’s record collection, which she bought at auction, and her daughter Tiffany’s blog Jumblequeen about the unsung female singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 70s – although Al Filreis’ PoemTalk offers the occasional feminist genealogical gem, as in this episode with Rae Armantrout, Laura Elrick, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis discussing Cathy Wagner‘s “This is a fucking poem.” But – as well as hosting an anthology-reading within a conference – the Archive of the Now hosts such a latent archora, for construction/curation by (future) listeners…

More Infinite Difference contributors on the Archive of the Now:

Caroline Bergvall
Elisabeth Bletsoe
Anne Blonstein
Andrea Brady
Emily Critchley
Catherine Hales
Frances Kruk
Marianne Morris
Wendy Mulford
Redell Olsen
Sophie Robinson
Zoë Skoulding

“Always an Alibi Available”: Performance Writing(s) & Text Festivals

November 5, 2013Hive, ResidencySophie Mayer

John Hall‘s alliterative epithet for what he calls “live utterance” seems like an appropriate appropriation for the title of this post, which is not so much a review of the monumental achievement of Hall’s Essays in Performance Writing. Poetics and Poetry Vols. 1 and 2 and of Tony Lopez‘ The Text Festivals: Language Art and Material Poetry, as it is a way of thinking with their relation and co-incidence, published within weeks of each other. Handily for me, as I’m leading the first of three Archive of the Now workshops this week, in which I’ll be working with A-Level students to investigate

the blurring, sliding and abandonment to silence or physical gesture that live utterance allows, where the buck can be passed from code to code, always an alibi available, or a continuity to override the end of something being joined (Hall, 58, Vol. 1).

“The end of something being joined” might stand as a description of the current mainstream poetry of closure against which both performance writings and text art experiment. Hall’s and Lopez’s books follow on the heels of Geraldine Monk‘s CUSP: Recollections of Poetry in Transition, all three offering critically-attuned insider accounts – auto-ethnographies, really – of the diffuse, ex-centric British avant-garde. Monk’s is the broadest, being transgenerational, while Hall’s focuses through his involvement in the foundation of the Performance Writing course at Dartington to provide a wider statement and review of its manifestations in poetics beyond Dartington; Lopez, meanwhile, offers a vertical tranche of the Text Festival archives, provided primarily through thick description by participants, as well as his and Tony Trehy’s introductory overviews of text art and/or vispo.

Contested terminologies (Hall provides a glossary), interlocking communities, and readings in (what can feel like) a vacuum are common to both books: they go with the territory. While contextualising the field, Hall is predominantly committed to arguing for performance writing as a theory of itself, and hence for our attention as readers to its internal logics; to his formulations as contingent, attendant on a given text, rather than as transferable conclusions. These “implicated readings” as the second volume is subtitled, are not only implicated by Hall’s friendship with the writers whom he discusses, but proceed – as pedagogical and critical models – by implication.

This is most evident in “Reading J.H. Prynne‘s ‘Acquisition of Love’ and anticipating ‘Blue Slides at Rest.'” Originally given as a talk at Birkbeck, the reading by Hall asks the listener/reader to anticipate an implicated reading of Prynne’s later, and very different, poetics, by contrast and comparison. “What to do with this? It will not come to rest,” he concludes (209, Vol. II), an implication that could stand for the two-volume collection as a whole, as a vivid, mostly unedited collection of moments of reading and speaking. Throughout, Hall is concerned with and compelled by the destabilising effect of speaking and of listening on meaning, as charms against ossification, and the particular value of speaking/listening within the context of poetics because it is – and because it makes poetics unavoidably – a public language. “Public language is always either fully authorised or openly contests authority and its sites of authorisation” (72, Vol. II).

It’s this idea of experimentation producing a reflexively public poetics that inspired the Text Festival as well. As Lopez and Trehy, as well as Christian Bök (who is intervening in genetic code), Carol Watts (intervention: alphabet), Holly Pester (intervention: the archive) and Hester Reeve (HRH.the) (intervention: protest), detail, part of the motivation for making, performing, and curating text art is its critical engagement with “fully authorised” public languages in order to reclaim them for dissent. Reeve’s essay queries conventional attempts to contest public language, and suggests ways to renew them.

By 2003, the second Gulf War had broken out and what turned out to be one of Britain’s largest mass protests had taken place and been rendered ineffectual. What else could we do with our bodies in such circumstances? What was my body able to do, how could it count, what truth could it realise? I became struck by the powerful tactic of the slogan ‘Not in My Name’, which arose at the time and which allowed any one of us anywhere in the country to still make a stand, if only through a slogan (130).

Reeve places the intervention of the first Text Festival (2005) in the context of what Judith Butler calls the “frame of war,” the optic obscured by the very media and political infrastructure that produces it. It’s interesting to consider whether it is this frame of war – bringing with it both a sense of the ineffectuality of protest (which informs and draws on many of the experimental strategies of performance writing and text art, or oral and graphic culture jamming) and its necessity – is in some way a prompt for the current revisitation of the post-war British avant-garde.

Current political challenges to the kind of cultural spaces that made Dartington and the Text Festivals possible may not be directly related to a war economy or wartime surveillance, but they are a product of a militarised economy and surveillant system, and this is of concern to both projects. As Hall says “There is a difference between publicly available and publicly conspicuous: access and reach” (73, Vol.2). These publications – Hall’s book, like Monk’s, by Shearsman, and Lopez’ by University of Plymouth Press (who very generously provide a selection of full-colour plates) – are publicly available, and hope to make the work they detail publicly conspicuous, at a time when avenues for reach (if not access, given digital media) are narrowing. While neither of these books will be etched into a railway bridge, like Lawrence Weiner’s WATER MADE IT WET as described by Lopez in his Text Festivals introduction, they do take place/space in the public sphere.

In doing so, they walk/work the delicate balance involved in archiving the ephemeral without ossifying it, a challenge that all such archives or documentation face in defending experimental work from obscurity. Preserving liveness is an oxymoron, one of which Lopez and his contributors are aware. Watts, describing her artist’s book alphabetise, talks about the way “[w]hat began as a form of journal writing in 2004-05, copied into electronic form, became a series of transpositions, in which the handwritten itself at some point flick-flacks to become secondary to the recording of the printed word” (49). Even as it suggests the supervention of the archival – electronic, recording, printed – the sentence flick-flacks (a movement in gymnastics), an embodied performance that reinscribes the printed text as having bodily movement, the “alibi available” to the performative that Hall suggests.

“In what ways did the sound files resist being archived?” asks Pester, offering a tangential response with a selection of work by Carolyn Thompson, for whom “secrets within an archive are the only spaces fit for occupying” (113, 116). Philip Davenport reports, in both comparison and contra-distinction, on the deliberately elusive effervescence of Bob Cobbing’s work as poet and publisher, of an immediacy that sought to defy reification. “His emphasis was on giving permission, on imagining new routes” (57). Giving permission and imagining new routes is the work of both books: in each case, they offer pragmatic advice as well as conceptual frameworks. Trehy offers pointers on staging a festival, while Pester, Reeve and Robert Grenier give insights both into producing work, and participating as guests in a locale. A guidebook, a catalogue, a manifesto, an imagining: Lopez’ book is an archive constituting its own unpredictable future.

Hall’s book is a textbook by being its opposite; in no way prescriptive or exhaustive, offering no syllabi or lesson plans, it’s an exhilarating experience of the affective and processual inside of a pedagogy, one that makes space for the reader as both student and colleague. “The written is notionally not ephemeral, that is the point. But the acts themselves of reading and writing are live, and without those acts the written is no more than archived potential for renewed liveness” (48, Vol.1). This is a tremendously liberating way to think about the written, as always about to flick-flack, as well a wonderfully generous tribute to reading and readers, a generosity Hall’s own implicated readings enact.

Each book individually offers a rich engagement to the reader, with work known and unknown; indeed, redrawing the parameters of a textual artefact’s knowability. How many performances of this poem have you seen? How many readings have you made? Did you see it on the bridge? Together, they have a cumulative overwhelmingness of an intricate experimental poetics of almost infinite connective detail. That sense oscillates with a welcome open-endedness, a space for intervention. Or, how freeing to realise that “[t]he full stop has fragile authority once it has to leave the page” (Hall 58, Vol.1).

Contributor’s Survey

October 9, 2013ResidencyAdministrator

In June 2013 we asked the contributors to the Archive to answer some questions about their experience of making recordings, the role of performance and the voice in poetry, and how they’d like to see the Archive develop in the future. Here are some of their answers:

Please describe your experience of being recorded for the Archive. What do you remember about the day, the session, how you felt about your performance?

An intimate, slightly surreal but enjoyable encounter. To be asked to contribute felt like an important recognition of my work. (Scott Thurston)

Very helpful staff, and all pleasantly low-key. I prepared my ‘set’ quite thoroughly, which I think helped things along. I did wonder what would happen if a poet turned up in too much of an improvisatory mood! I asked to listen through the recording afterwards, which was a slight imposition, the kind of thing that might become problematic if contributors start expecting studio quality and interaction… but I felt the extra effort (to make some quite simple choices and adjustments) was vital to the final accuracy of my input. My throat happened to be dreadful on that particular day: it felt like the entrance to the Dartford Tunnel on a sleety November evening… it was, actually, quite a distraction from the text and I had to use every pragmatic knack I could muster to get through without sounding too strained. As for the technology and acoustic, perhaps the recording equipment could have been a little more advanced, but it seemed adequate to purpose. The room was pleasant but nondescript, though the limited means actually encouraged a more intimate, ‘internal’, homely reading rather than a ‘projected’ performance. (Mario Petrucci)

I organised the recording myself in a studio at work. I felt very happy with the whole experience and my performance. (David Kennedy)

It was a fine spring day (I think) and the recording was made easy by the professionalism of Inigo Garrido, who came to my home to record. I usually feel (after the event) that I could have read better, but on the day read well enough. (Gerry Loose)

Pleasant social experience at Andrea’s home, although there is something peculiar about doing a ‘performance’ to a microphone and audience of 2 in a domestic space. I did not feel wholly happy about my performance, but this is normal. Andrea I think was willing to let me have repeat goes – but one would not want take too much of the recordists’s time. (Elizabeth James)

I recorded my last session in the evening at Andrea’s house. I had been going through a very difficult time on a number of fronts and I remember thinking it would be nice to talk a little about poetry and life in general before I started and it was good to do that briefly with Andrea and Matt, so much so that I was a bit sad to then do the recording entirely on my own, with no-one there as an audience (it makes a difference), me just talking to the dark window in a room up the stairs at the back of the house. You can hear my self-pity creeping in even now! I brought a bottle of wine as a thank you but I caught folks as the wrong time and they didn’t want to drink. The poems are melancholy personal poems, in a way far from what I’d imagine the Archive of the Now might normally concern itself with (don’t get me wrong, I love the work of the Archive), so I felt a bit odd about delivering them just for aesthetic reasons, maybe it wasn’t the right thing for the Archive but it was all I had. And it felt very strange to be talking, talking, talking out into ‘nothing’. (Richard Price)

The recording was made at a friend’s house in London, with a small invited audience and Andrea holding the tape recorder. I enjoyed the experience, though I think I focused a bit too narrowly on the work that interested me at the time — I’m glad there are other recordings of me in the Archive, though the house recording is of the best sound quality. (Peter Manson)

A very enjoyable and carefully organised experience. (Peter Larkin)

Very informal, and low-tech, which was nice, but I think it meant my performance as a little flatter and under-directed than it might have been. (Peter Robinson)

I recorded it part of it myself; the rest was recorded by someone else at a festival, I think. (Neil Pattison)

I really enjoyed it. I became quite emotional. Loved it, brilliant experience. Delightful person recorded me which helped. (Elaine Randell)

I enjoyed the experience of being recorded for the Archive, and the person doing the recording was sympathetic and interested. I tried to read a range of poems covering quite a long period of time and that was slightly more difficult than reading a ‘set’ of poems written for a particular project, as I tend to do when I am performing. (Frances Presley)

The recording was personalised, at the convenor’s house. The performance may be considered to be at once intimate and straight forward. It of course did not have the potential expansiveness that a ‘public’ performance might have encouraged. (Allen Fisher)

I was recorded in a London flat, a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. I chose some poems that represented my work at that time and I think I read them perfectly well. That situation wouldn’t produce my best performance but there was nothing to hinder a reference recording. (Tony Lopez)

A typical London day, cold and grey; spectral. Recording in Andrea Brady’s study in Stoke Newington — connecting to London’s creative and politically radical history in that area. Feeling of “coming home” to (a transnational) British experimental poetics after 6 years in Canada. Reading new poems from emerging projects — very bold in their sexuality — to the window of ‘will anyone hear these?’, but also ‘do they work?’ A fascinating space at once echo chamber of the skull and distinctive sense of relation or network, opening out. Being part of something, but at the same time as if reading in my head. (Sophie Mayer)

It was a relaxed session at Andrea’s home and I felt I read well. (Robert Sheppard)

I remember walking through the streets of Islington to find the venue. Several people were being recorded during the morning, so I felt unable to do more than one take of my material. I mispronounced one word, ‘winds’, which I mis-read. (‘Twists’ not ‘breezes’).

If you read in a domestic room in someone’s flat, you are going to speak differently from when you are in a hall with people sitting a long way away from you. Public space might just need more calories and more distinct diction than intimate space where the microphone is catching every whisper. (Andrew Duncan)

Are the relationships between the written text, performance, live and/or recorded voice significant for your poetic practice? If so, how?

Yes – although the relationship varies. Earlier open-field work was using the page-space as a scoring device. In other work I am conscious of playing the reading against the written text: the written text is following certain rules – number of words per line or syllables per line – while the performance deliberately overrides line-ends so that (for me at least) there is a tension between the visual and performed versions. Some pieces foreground performance: ‘beginning with a few words from steve mccaffery’, for example, is to be read from top-down and then back up again (and is marked up this way); the poem for cobbing in an explanation of colours breaks from the pattern used everywhere else in the series and had three columns of three stanzas – which can be read in any order in performance – and any number of times … The live performance of the written text has been something I have assumed as part of my practice since the start – and the presence of an audience – so that the effect on the audience and the dialogue with an audience is part of my working assumptions. (Robert Hampson)

I am preoccupied by the relationship between these elements all the time in my practice – particularly in my latest collaborative work with movement, voice and text. I think new recordings will much more likely reflect the changes that have taken place. I think the fact the archive exists could shape practice, as it is a form of publishing recordings. (Scott Thurston)

Very much so. This question requires a treatise if justice is to be done. I co-founded the co-vocal performance and collaborative writing group ShadoWork precisely to explore certain aspects of it and put then into practice. In my own, singular writing (but what composition is really ever ‘singular’?) the use of breath, pause, intonation, stress, rhythm, pace, cadence, etc. are all vital components. I suppose just about every poet would claim something similar to that for their own work too; but in my more recent ‘i tulips’ poems I’ve often been told that hearing them contributes much to understanding and perceived meaning. It’s almost as if the poems ‘develop’ in the listener’s ear when they’re spoken aloud, particularly by me, perhaps like a photograph in its darkroom tray. (Mario Petrucci)

I increasingly think that poetry on the page has little importance. Recent readings (inc some accompanied by Polish translation) have convinced me that overall sound and tonal variation is much more important. (David Kennedy)

My written texts are all sounded by me; I sometimes ad lib, treating them a little like a score I can give grace notes to. (Gerry Loose)

Central. I “write” by recording my speaking voice. I write about speaking as writing. The best poets have “an ear”. I work in performance and in poetry. I work with multiple voices. (Fiona Templeton)

I have in the past made radio / audio works with poetry and for instance one would amend the written text if necessary to achieve the best performance; also some passages were layers of voices in different audio / conceptual spaces. In reading poetry to an audience, I have been interested in the moments where one might puncture the ‘reading’ with something impromptu (struck by how performers like cris cheek do this) and how to be open to the deformations of error (like e.g. Allen Fisher). Never developed these much in my own readings though. (Elizabeth James)

Yes. Really in too many ways for a survey like this. The performance is very important for me, but just because that is so I do not believe the poet’s performance is ‘definitive’ or somehow ‘fixes’ it in one place – I think the written text and the culture heading its way offer many many interesting choices for performance. (Richard Price)

Most of what I do is written with an ear to my own way of reading, and has to work well with the sounds of my own accent. I’ve never worked with recorded voice in performance. (Peter Manson)

Increasingly significant – performative qualities interest me more and more, with their transitory & evanescent nature, linked with the live aspects of performance (Peter Philpott)

The poem is composed with the voice and to be read out loud for its full embodiment to be felt. (Peter Robinson)

For me the written text is always the primary source, but over the years I have become increasingly interested in performance, both live and recorded. Some of my work has also been collaborative, with poets such as Tilla Brading and Elizabeth James and this has also made me think much more carefully about performance and the complexity of multiple voices. Some of my texts work better in performance than others, either because of deliberate qualities of sound or of theme. Others, including some of my landscape poems, are more reflective. (Frances Presley)

The answer varies and is contingent on the work being read. Sometimes the work benefits from a live and pubic performance, which permits improvisations of emphasis, volume and even, sometimes, content or ‘asides’. Sometimes these advantages do not apply and the work benefits from not being heard by the author’s ‘voice’. (Allen Fisher)

I feel that the prospect of performance, an imagined performance based on the experience of previous performances, is the most important factor in shaping poems. I read my work aloud to myself when composing. I need to be able to read a piece convincingly for it to work. (Tony Lopez)

Yes. First of all, in relation to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, dis/ability and the body, and the politics of the voice and the word, and their relation to public space — who gets to speak/write? Why and when is speech gendered as feminine/intimate and as masculine/public, or as Other/excessive (Other/defective) and as dominant/stable/correct? What do speech acts do to listeners’ bodies — to hear is to be open and vulnerable, to create the possibility of connection and of wounding. I’m interested also in how that embodiment makes its marks, and what effects this stability, permanence or encodedness has for the fungibility of live speech. More recently, my practice has been involved with digital archiving, so becoming part of the Archive — having worked on a single-author digital archive for four years — was fascinating. (Sophie Mayer)

Poetry (maybe not all poetry, but most) is an auditory experience for the audience (bodily for the writer). I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I write for performance but I would say I would find it odd not to consider performance. (Some texts, such as those for the dancer Jo Blowers, are for performance.) The recorded voice is important, and recordings of poets important, not as definitive documents, but as guides to various rhythmic, sonic and semantic devices. (Again, with sound poetry, it might be more important, but still not definitive.) Video is distracting; I agree with Charles Bernstein on that one. (Again, performances with action in require documenting beyond the capturing capacity of a mechanical ear.) (Robert Sheppard)

No. I assume that live readings are going to be rare and that print is the primary realisation of the poem. I don’t think there is any close relationship between my voice and the poems. Readings are primarily a realisation of what is on the page. It already exists – subjectively, I prefer discussions to reading poems aloud, because I am creating new utterances and on new ground. I like talking to the audience. Reading aloud is not good listening, the mechanics of speech production get in the way – hearing my poems read aloud by someone else is very emotional, I would like to hear more of that. ‘I have never heard this before’ and similar feelings. (Andrew Duncan)

Did your performance for the Archive change your thinking about those relationships in any way?

Yes, the whole tone was intimate and domestic, unlike a public reading, and I was able to interrupt myself with occasional comments and make improvised alterations. I found this a valuable experiment which I developed later in the CD+booklet publication XIV PIECES. This was not exactly a change in “thinking”, more an extempore performative venture, and the uncovering of a different tone. (Peter Riley)

It allowed me to consolidate and make vital one particular sonic interpretation. I could well read those poems quite differently today or on any other day, though certain undertows would probably remain fairly constant. I wasn’t looking to give a definitive reading, just an enlighteningly typical one? (Mario Petrucci)

Because many of my texts are tonally ambiguous, they can be both tragic or comic or both, if anything the Archive encouraged me to think of re-recording in a different way. (Richard Price)

The reading that’s archived there was one of the most important events of my life, and has informed much of my experience and reflection on poetry and other matters since then, but I didn’t record it “for” the archive as such. (Neil Pattison)

I don’t think it did, as I treated it more as an historical record. Performance is usually defined as part of the creative process, whether alone or with a collaborator. I had also, by that stage, been performing for many years. (Frances Presley)

Yes: I started to think about the contingency and imperfections of the archival asset, of how they record a moment in all its complexity rather than a stable ‘fact’ or ‘truth,’ redefining the documentary (or deathly, pace Derrida) function of the archive into something more lively and intervenable. I also started to think about one emerging project (represented in the Archive by the poems ‘Incarnadine,’ ‘Mass’ and Statuesque’) as having a specific sonic dimension — possibly taking shape as a radio or stage drama, which has changed the project’s development completely and usefully. (Sophie Mayer)

No, because I’ve recorded a lot. I played with recorders as a child. But I do remember that initial strangeness of hearing one’s voice disembodied. (Robert Sheppard)

Do you use the Archive as part of your writing or performance practice, or do you plan to in future (eg: remixing your own work, studying other poets’ performance styles, sampling)?

I find it a wonderful asset to have sonic versions of some of my poems online. It can save so many words when you’re attempting to demonstrate or explain how a poem might be approached when read out loud. It’s also functional (in terms of PR and a wider, stronger, more plural reception for one’s work). In terms of the community of writers in the Archive, it’s a refreshing alternative to some of the more obvious lists, with the poets all acting as wonderfully provocative and fascinating context for each other. I wish we were in a culture where browsing such an Archive would be far more common than it seems to be. (Mario Petrucci)

If I had more time, I would do this more, but I have occasionally done so to get one take of a particular poet’s work. I certainly refer poets and researchers to it (in general, not just for my work). If I could break free from other commitments I would be very interested in remixing, sampling and so on. I record my poems with musicians sometimes and have been contemplating this for sometime but just haven’t managed it. (Richard Price)

I have used it in teaching creative writing and critical theory, and I have used it in my writing practice, both for information on vocal styles and as a way to sample new work by poets I know and discover others. I am very interested in performance style(s) and how they might shape or reshape text on the page. So far I haven’t sampled or remixed, but (with the technical skills, which I have seen used by, e.g., Dell Olsen and Drew Milne) it’s definitely something I’d like to do. (Sophie Mayer)

Archive of the Here: Listening to Liverpool

October 9, 2013Arc, Residency, ResponsesSophie Mayer

On 15th August 2013, I went up to Liverpool to record five poets based in or originating from the north-west for the Archive of the Now. The Other Room: Experimental Poetry in Manchester reading series has an extensive audio-visual archive on its homepage, bearing witness to the prolific and creative trans-generational poetry scenes centred on Manchester and Liverpool. We recorded in the University of Liverpool School of Music‘s production studios – a first for all of us except for first reader, Fiona Curran, an experienced sound designer.

What struck me, from the other side of the glass, was the weirdness of listening as a live audience in the now of the recording studio, and simultaneously as time traveller from the future audience – you – to which the recordings were aimed. Adding to the sense of science-fictonal doubledness were the sonographic indicators projected on the wall in the image below: I could only see them on the sound engineer’s screen (for a hand-drawn illustration of early visualisation for vocal dynamics, see Norman McLaren’s amazing animation Pen Point Percussion). Even when readers employed vocal dynamics, the black Rorschach that indicated sound volume and pitch wavered close to the centre of the spectrum.

You can listen to the recordings in the order that they were made to get a sense of the flow of words through the day:

Below, you can also read my chronological account from outside the booth, and two accounts from inside the booth (and outside the studio) by Sarah Crewe and Richard Barrett. What they both note is the significance of the location of the booth in the north-west, its relation, despite the thick sound-proofed walls and pass-card locked doors, to the city around it. I found myself very conscious of locational and psychogeographical references when listening to the readings.

For example, to the ambiguity of the riverine and financial Banks that coalesce in Fiona Curran’s poem, or to the dizzying sense of words being sent from a known place into an unknown future in the ‘Postcards Series‘, where the materialities of St. Ives, Arran and Rome were layered by the presentness of Fiona’s voice in Liverpool right now (then), with the black box of the studio as the white rectangle of the postcard. Three Stories about My Mother had a different kind of address and containedness of form. “It has to be read as a oneness,” Fiona said on re-reading the second story, “The Coat,” which zeroes in on a specific incident in time and space, but works its ramifications through three generations. That oneness is a keynote of Fiona’s work: its intensity, its sense of spatial as well as sonic volume.

Richard Barrett’s work had a hereness – “the heart as A-Z page torn” in Fragment – but also a nowness, whether in references to Megan Fox or the contemporary post-crisis ConDemNation city in The Rushes: a psychoeconomy of queues, debts, headlines, rather than a psychogeography. “That clock is fast, isn’t it,” notes Hard Shoulder 8 – but not as fast as Richard, whose sonograph bunched and crowded and piled with the incredible density of postmodernity and its thought/language processes. “the sponsored event / against the blog post” proposes Rushes 15, measuring linguistic change. There’s a mercurial energy in this reading that both keeps time with, and calls time on, the ever-faster clock of “progress.”

In contrast to Fiona’s shifting accent and Richard’s Mancunian intonantion, Sandeep Parmar’s North American torque connected Liverpool to its Atlantic and imperial history. Vivienne with Household Goods awakens this connection, speaking of “an unctuous industrialist” in relation to a “slave girl, cinder girl / girl of a different color,” and Dido, the African queen. Like Fiona choosing her Postcard Series, Sandeep chose to read three from her series after Ovid’s Heroides, the male poet’s letters from abandoned women to their perfidious lovers, written while he himself was in exile on the Black Sea: Tartarus, Imbracia, and Ephyre. Like Archive for a Daughter, these poems are about the lonely necessity of relational location, insisting on the interconnection of there and here, even where that connection is one of conquest, colonialism, and/or exile.

Sarah Crewe, as she notes below, is the home poet: psychogeographer of a city where “Wendy James stalks witchhunt graffiti.” Redoubling the doubling of performance – or perhaps creatively managing that sense of doubling – Sarah read eight poems in her flick persona. flick’s sense of embedded embodiment in Liverpool – wavertree, the necropolis and newsham park – peeled back the black walls so the city rushed in like flick’s horses. The city transforms into discourse: “horses speak in snapshot” and Ulrike Meinhof debates “action vs. discourse / spit vs. swallow” (Nightshade). Red politics thread through Sarah’s selections, whether in the name of a female Jesus – Irina – or Clara Zetkin, who “write[s] in the language of sisterhood / adhesive … cleavage as class division,” or the defiant final series about Meinhof. This defiance spikes high on the sonograph.

Tall Tom Jenks requires Michael, the sound technician, to adjust the mike for the first time that day, but is softly and slowly spoken. “My ink’s favourite emotion is melancholy,” he anatomises in Anatomy of Melancholy, 5. His chosen readings all build by repetition: melancholy figures as a mode of critical apprehension, of rewriting (not only Burton’s book, but his own work), of reviewing one’s ideas, that again adds to that sense of double-listening. It is melancholy to imagine that the day of readings is nearly over, and also – somehow – to imagine them as recorded for the future, as if they are disappearing into themselves in the moment of recording, as if I have been displaced by the microphone and the computer. At one point in Items, he says “null” as if he too has become a computer, one that’s just made a system error. “Don’t write anything that could hurt your future career,” he warns, then cheers us up with 99 Names for Small Dogs, a melancomic tour-de-force of a peculiar Englishness.

flicksville — Flicksville, by Sarah Crewe

Sarah Crewe: “I want to say how important it was to my own praxis to record in Liverpool, given that the bulk of my psychogeographic work is based on home turf. I felt able to record in my own voice and not have to worry about how it would translate, because I was speaking with that sense of place. I also wanted the recording to have the energy of the new (especially with it being Archive of the Now!) so for that reason, the bulk of my choices workwise were recent poems.

I was surprised by how much energy went into recording, and i really enjoyed that aspect of it. I felt able to deliver the poems just as though I was giving a reading. It made me realise that my performance is a far more physical entity than I thought. What struck me was the richness and diversity of poets present, in both content and sound. Several textures and layers occurring that i can’t wait to listen to myself on the website.”

Richard Barrett: “Poem choice for me was about wanting to try and show some of the range of what I do: an excerpt from a long sequence which deals with, at least in part, the 2008 economic crisis; a poem addressing Megan Fox; a couple of love poems; and, finally, a long-ish poem which, besides all else that I hope it does, acts as a statement of where my poetics currently are. I also wanted to present the work chronologically – just to try and give a sense of my poetic development and the interconnectedness of what I do and am interested in.

On the day of recording I got the train over from Manchester – arriving early as I wanted to walk from Lime Street to the University and I wasn’t sure how long that would take as I wasn’t sure of the way. As it happened I ended up with a bit of time to kill so had a walk round the University’s grounds and sat for a while in a beautiful park just near the music department. When I arrived at the recording studio it took me quite a few minutes to orientate myself to studio etiquette; I mean, I initially wondered if any noise we made in the room where we were might be picked up on the recordings. I remember stepping outside to cough.

After my reading I was, as I always am after a reading of any length, drained. Plans were made for a visit to the pub later but after a lovely lunch in a nearby café my tiredness triumphed and I returned to Manchester. I was very proud to be asked to contribute to the Archive, and am very pleased with my recordings which have now been uploaded. It also feels important to me that the current thriving north-west scene has been recognised and acknowledged in the recordings that took place that day.”

Free Verse, or Freeing Free

September 10, 2013Hive, ResidencySophie Mayer

It was the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair in London this Saturday, 7th September. The all-day reading programme included Archive of the Now poets Geraldine Monk, Alan Halsey and Drew Milne (and forthcoming AoNners Chris McCabe and Tom Jenks), alongside tables from some of the UK’s most exciting avant-garde poetry presses, many of whose authors and publishers have been Archived. The spectacle of people exchanging cash for poetry led me to think about the ‘free’ in free verse: not only because the material on the Archive is free to all (and provided free by the recording poets, in the manner of so much poetic labour garnering social capital). What doe sit mean that all of our recordings can be accessed for free (“free,” access conditions apply).

The Poetry Archive defines free verse as follows:

What free verse claims to be free from is the constraints of regular metre and fixed forms. This makes the poem free to find its own shape according to what the poet – or the poem – wants to say.

Free verse revels in both positive and negative freedoms: it is free to engage in experimental mise-en-page, prosody, and syntax; it is free from a fixed relation to tradition. While many AoN poets practice constraint-based writing, they don’t feel constrained to follow pre-twentieth century traditions of form and metre – although some formal aspects of free verse have themselves become traditions, after Modernism, never mind the question of the constraints of the Enlightenment subject, and of concepts of meaning, that inform the idea of the poet or poem being shaped by what it “wants to say.”

restraint — Constraint-Based Writing by John Shea, from Literal Latte

But the word free is itself beholden to these philosophical constraints, in ways that impinge directly on poetry: on the one hand, the Enlightenment ideals of human rights that are expressed in the complex ideal of freedom of expression; on the other, the semantic slippage – or rather, ethical/value slippage – in the word free as it figures in the phrase free market (restraint of trade). This Orwellian drift has been traced brilliantly by architectural theorist Keller Easterling in her work on extra-statecraft, in which capitalism can be rephrased as the movement from free ports to free trade zones – free from the rule of law, and indeed, from any kind of freedom. In an linguistic anti-dérive, a central tenet of revolutionary language has been entirely co-opted by economic discourse. Or, poetic language is born free, and is everywhere in chains of capital. None of the books at Free Verse were, after all, free.

zone_1 — Zone 1, Free Ports to Free Trade, Keller Easterling

So, as part of my drift through Free Verse (its tables arranged in regular stanzas), I asked publishers, poets, and other drifters how they understand the word free in free verse in relation to political and economic ideas of freedom – apposite, given the fair’s location this year in Conway Hall, home of the free-thinking Ethical Society. We discussed the need to ‘liberate’ the word free from the free market, free trade, from Free From (TM) food, freedom fries, freebies, and indeed the hegemony of a popular understanding of ‘free verse’ that omits constraint-based, structuralist and conceptual writing.

A search of Archive of the Now’s text for “free” formed this (potentially ever-evolving) found poem, pasted in (its current) two visual ‘stanzas’. Thus, AoN brings you three free poems: this vispo, “freely above signifieds,” to borrow Simon Smith‘s phrase for the title, and two recordings: Robert Hampson’s Free at Last and Ed Luker’s Rocking the Free World Here.

But perhaps the most striking found poem might be made, on John Shea’s model, by consulting the dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary entry for free (v.) (not freely accessible: subscribing library or individual sign-in required) gave (me) the (utterly unexpected) information (not to anyone who studied Old English) that to free is cognate with old Frisian, Dutch and Saxon verbs that mean to woo, court, marry, make love to, cognate to the Sanskrit “prī,” to please or delight. As well as tallying with Kathleen Herbert’s argument in Peace Weavers and Shield Maidens: Women in Early English Society that, pre-Norman invasion and Salic Law, marriage was more equal, relationally and economically, it adds an urgency to reclaiming the word from its association with hyper-capitalist exploitation, not least in association with lyric poetry and its relational, affective focus. So freeing free verse from capitalist linguistic drift might necessarily be entwined with the feminist project of liberating lyric from patriarchal constructs.