“We Are Primed for Patterned Language”: Listening Together
Category Archives: Arc
Cutting Up the Archive: Practice
[Theory to follow].
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!
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.
Girls Get Life
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) strangenessfor grace
goes: she has the gift analphabet
(girls) shine is from inside endless
… … little… …cuts… …thirst in her
big sister inventing my ownmythsreally 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.
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
Archive of the Here: Listening to Liverpool
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.
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.”
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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.”
“I am especially taken by the joy I hear in the written voices of my friends in the archives”
An Archive Should Not Mean but Be (Or, Thinking and Feeling in the Stacks: On Not Writing an Essay)
- with interjections
- and an Archive of the Now soundtrack
It began with an idea about poetry and archives: MOMA poet laureate Kenneth Goldsmith’s project of printing out the internet
- which raises the question: what is the internet? Presumably, Goldsmith plans to print out all the web content, not the source code for each page, nor the data analytics mined from the content, nor the energy consumption logs for each server farm. Presumably not gifs or videos or audio. The textual archive of Archive of the Now would be pretty minimal
- Peter Brennan reports from the Museum of Modern Art, asking exactly what is being collected and memorialised there:
while everyone talks past the poem
they argue and kiss it
assembles in the lobby shop
thought that too is new you
blow in to sell iPod pouches all the cool
detritus
Calvin Bedient weighed in with the assertion that lyric poetry = “strong feeling” & conceptualist poetry = intellection
- and we all know that dominant EuroWestern culture privileges affect as a mode of being and communicating, right? Or, wait, needs lyric poetry as its Greek urn in which to store and exhibit affect: Poetry, Writing Beauty and Truth (to Power) since 18whatever, So You Don’t Have to Deal With Either. (Which is not to say that Conceptualism has traditionally been welcoming to affect, embodiment, identity and other formations associated with feminist, queer and postcolonial poetics. But then there is I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, which wrestles with the rational/objectivist dualism of the conceptual. And it’s brilliant.)
- As Amy De’Ath asserts, this luxury of revelling in affect as a performance or rhetorical mode is “Poetry for Boys.”
I’m a weeping boy and a centaur caving in…
If I had the money to dip in being a boy,
if I was Anna O., & fallen into autism or
steeped in prelingual glimpses of Lena’s face,
I’d be living system: looped in my own elements.A system closing talking only to itself.
And lo, the wars were joined with the clashing of blogs and the clamoring to be in the Huffington Post. Susan M. Schultz‘ post, as/at the Tinfish Editor’s Blog, has the smartest rounding-up of the antis, and the best defence: she reads “Conceptualism as affect,” offering “a defense of both at once.” For Schultz, poetry is not a binary system where 0/1 indicate think/feel (as both defenders and detractors of Conceptualism have asserted). Persuasively, she connects Conceptualism’s affect to its frequent delving into (and/or inventing of) the archive. She listens in on “the joy… of [her] friends in the archives”: both friends working on archival material and, implicitly, the friends she meets in archival material.
- Words for it: the shock of the then, the encounter~frisson~zone of contact with some vanished-but-recorded material and/or psychic reality, future-of-past shock, reality bites
- Archive joy! In “No Guns, No Durian,” Susan Schultz makes friends with Angelina Jolie via her online diary of her journey through Cambodia: “there are these moments of objectivist precision that are incredibly moving, so I stole her language for this poem.”
In other words – in Yvonne Rainer’s words – “feelings are facts.” Rainer, a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater – Cunningham/Cage-influenced conceptual choreographers – and a feminist film maker, both emplaced herself in the archive of alternative culture, and curated her subjective archive, in the memoir that bears that provocative and useful title (borrowed by Olafur Eliasson and Ma Yansong for an installation in which the spectator is an integral part of the artwork. Rainer’s memoir is roughly co-eval with two other crucial (and affective) feminist interventions into the archive and experimental/alternative/resistant art practices: Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings and Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire, which are concerned with film and theatre respectively. The archival poetics equivalent awaits…
(Re)Search/Destroy? Or, Mistaking Poetry for Viruses
An arc of the arc of the Archive: hive report from Holly Pester’s Report on the Archive at Birkbeck, 5 July 2013, forthcoming.
Until then, here’s Twitter’s report on the #epoetry festival at Kingston University. And now: some e-xperiments with poetrynews.
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Poetry as News/Data (after the style of Ron Silliman), combined with Fluxuggestions (à la Yoko Ono, to mark the publication of Acorn, and its performance by Stacy Makishi, at Meltdown on 22.06.2013).
- Use Quiz III to think through a poem you’re writing or reading.
- Apply it to work by Archive of the Now poets such as Marianne Morris or Richard Price, whose “Channel Link” circles around lines, opening:
Even stations move.
Can I meet you fifteen years ago
by the sprung chainlink?
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A poem by the NSA (list of keywords used as terrorist ‘flags’), ‘found’ by William Knowles.
- Run the list of keywords through Poetry Assessor (it receives a positive score, classifying it as a ‘professional’ poem). Run a sample text from Archive of the Now through the Assessor. Compare scores. Search Archive of the Now sample texts for NSA keywords: is the Archive “a market for riots online” (Redell Olsen) demanding surveillance?
- “The idea here is that if lots of people add suspicious words to their messages, the world’s intel agencies will be too busy with spurious input that they will have to give up reading it all… You might want to sprinkle some of these words into your X-headers for a little fun.” William Knowles. Apply to your own writing practice.
- Add an Archive of the Now poem (sample text or audio link) to every email you send for a day: imagine whether your NSA/GCHQ alert goes up or down. To make sure the poems are being surveilled, join ‘CC Your Emails to Theresa May Day.’
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In Ceasefire, Andrew Robinson reflects on Walter Benjamin’s ideas of art’s aura in the age of turbo-capitalism, asking what ‘political art’ might look like today, in an era of rapid technological change. “Perhaps this pattern of radicalisation followed by recuperation has even happened with each emergent technology – newspapers, novels, film, (pirate) radio, the Internet. Each time, the new medium has a progressive force, dehabituating people from expected relations, offering new channels for experimental activity, mediatised subcultures, and the spread of dissenting perspectives.”
- Contribute to the Archive’s Phono-Poetry Indiegogo campaign, and reflect on the auratic with your very own wax cylinder recording (or mp3 or mini-tape of that wax recording) of 3 Archive poets. What difference does the “crackle” of a material object make to the aura of a recording?
- How can we preserve and enlarge the Archive’s “dissenting perspective” – its resonant opacity to textual search, its contemporaneity and (therefore) instability), its accessibility? How can we extend the Archive to more listeners and recorders without making it textually transparent and available to surveillance? What kind of encryption/de-encryption keys might we generate?
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Given NSA/GCNQ surveillance, should the Archive of the Now be developing text-based metadata and search capability? Is/should poetry be a part of the semantic “web of data” or is/should poetry be a form of encryption?
- Write in CAPTCHAs: Completely Animated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart. The reCAPTCHA versions contribute to Google Books’ digitisation project by sampling paleographic queries in, for example, Shakespeare’s folios, and crowd-sourcing the most likely text via your input when decoding and entering the text. Digital analysis can offer statistical probabilities, but optical character recognition still struggles with both handwriting and printed text. What work can manuscript continue to do in digital poetics?
- Trrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnscribe: listen to Chris Goode’s “An Introduction to Speed Reading” or Caroline Bergvall’s “The Franker’s Tale.” Now transcribe their performances — words, breaths, spaces; pitch, tone, duration; variants, feedback, room tone. And/or use speech-to-text software such as Dragon Dictate to create a transcription; play the downloaded file through Transcriva at different speeds (from tortoise to hare). Post a link to your transcription here and/or re-record it.
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Voynich Entropics: According to New Scientist, 21.06.2013: “A mysterious and beautiful 15th-century text that some researchers have recently deemed to be gibberish may not be a hoax after all. A new study suggests the text shares quantifiable features with genuine language, and so may contain a coded message.” Scientists looked for “global patterns in the frequency and clustering of words” to determine individual words’ entropy, or the evenness of its distribution. The manuscript, housed at the Beinecke Library, Yale, “contains illustrations of naked nymphs, unidentifiable plants, astrological diagrams and pages and pages of text in an unidentified alphabet.” The plants and nymphs remain resistant to entropic analysis.
- Gather a random sampling of Archive poets: perform an entropic analysis, looking for global patterns. Maybe use the NSA/Prism keywords as a basis for analysis. Are these poems written in “genuine language”? Do they contain a “coded message”?
- Listen to Vahni Capildeo’s “Person Animal Figure” or Harriet Tarlo’s “Nab“: uncover the mythological figures (clothed or naked), unidentifiable plants and astrological diagrams present in the poems. Draw or collage them while listening. Convert illustrations into slideshow movie and combine with audio track.
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“It is best to copy and paste the text into the message body. High fire walls usually wipe out attachments mistaking poetry for viruses.” (Poems in the Waiting Room)
- Create/encode poetry-positive firewall settings. Write a virus using sample text from poems by Jennifer Cooke, Out to Lunch or Alan Halsey.
- Leave sample texts by these poets – or QR code links to their recordings – in doctor’s waiting rooms. Assess quantitative change in quality of life produced in patients reading or listening to them.
- Wipe out the poetry virus: download “The Frankenstein Franchise” (Halsey) or “Carciniogeneticide” (Cooke). Using Audacity, edit the tracks to remove any firewall triggers, producing medically-safe poetry. Copy and paste a transcription into the comments below.