Thursday, Dec. 5th: Homophonic / Homolinguistic Translation, Mondegreens, etc.

We're closing the term out in somewhat irreverent fashion, but while our readings for today might seem more like fun and games, there are serious aesthetic notions at work beneath the humorous surface. 

First, we'll take a look at homophonic and homolinguistic translations. While the two terms are frequently used interchangeably, if we're getting technical homophonic translation describes transformative processes in which a text is translated from a foreign language into English — as Charles Bernstein explains on his infamous experiments list, "Take a poem in a foreign language that you can pronounce but not necessarily understand and translate the sound of the poem into English (e.g., French "blanc" to blank or "toute" to toot)" — whereas homolinguistic translation describes similar translations of "English into English."

You've already encountered a few examples, including Kenneth Koch's "Transposed Hamlet" ("Tube heat, or nog tube heat . . ."),  Ted Berrigan's "Mess Occupations," and Christian Bök's transformation of Arthur Rimbaud's "Voyelles" as "Veils" in our last class, and I thought we'd take a look at a few more examples for today.

First, here's Kenneth Goldsmith's "Head Citations" [read / listen], which elevates misheard song lyrics to found poetry. Then check out Bernstein's "From the Basque" [link], and Ron Silliman's discussion of the technique [link], which includes examples from Chris Tysh, David Melnick, and his own writing. You can find more examples on the Wikipedia page for homophonic translation, and those interested in far deeper (albeit optional) reading in the form should look at Six Fillious, an ambitious multilingual collaboration between six authors (including George Brecht), which was published in 1978.

This is an avant-garde technique that gets used a hell of a lot more commonly than you might imagine. For example:

or

A few more interesting examples include Italian songwriter Adriano Celentano's 1972 gibberish song "Prisecolinensinenciousol," which is intended to sound like American English:

And a more recent example in the same vein as Celentano's experiment is Skwerl, a short film by Karl Eccleston and Brian Fairbairn, which aims to capture how English sounds to non-English speakers:

If you find this technique interesting, you might also want to check out the related phenomena of Mondegreens and Anguish Language, and in a certain regard, I think this is the most beautifully commonplace poetry, since it infiltrates our everyday lives far more successfully than what we typically think of as poetry. Towards that end, it feels like a very appropriate way in which to end the semester.

Tuesday, Dec. 3rd: Sound and Subversion Outside the US

(right to left) Caroline Bergvall, Jaap Blonk, Christian Bök.

As we near the end of our semester's work, I wanted to take a little time to consider the work of a few non-American poets whose work pays special attention to sound and performance.

First, Caroline Bergvall, whose peripatetic lifestyle — born in Germany to French and Norwegian parents, Bergvall has lived in Geneva, Paris, Oslo, and New York before settling in London — plays an important role in the development of her poetics. Language is first and foremost a constructed thing, and a living construct at that, ripe for deconstruction, contradiction, reconfiguration and rediscovery. Specifically, in Bergvall's hands, the English language is a most malleable medium, which is brought into contact with its own roots (both Middle English and the Latinate and Germanic tongues that helped shape it), yielding spectacular results in her "Shorter Chaucer Tales," which reintent the Canterbury Tales in modern ways. One other idea to bear in mind is Bergvall's multidisciplinary approach to poetry. She bills herself as both a poet and a text-based artist, and the spirit of live performance, as well as a responsiveness to texts of various media (cf. "Untitled" and "Fuses," which respond to song and film, respectively) permeate her writings: [PDF]

• The Host Tale [MP3]
• The Summer Tale (Deus Hic 1) [MP3]
• The Franker Tale (Deus Hic 2) [MP3]
• Untitled (Roberta Flack can clean your soul — out!)
• Fuses (after Carolee Schneemann) [MP3]
• Doll (starts in PDF after "Fuses" on pg. 71, recording doesn't exactly match text) [MP3]

Next, Christian Bök, who's perhaps best known for his book-length Oulipian experiment, Eunoia, a lipogramatic text, that is one in which some sort of linguistic restriction guides its composition: specifically, each of the five chapters, named for one of the vowels, only contains words containing those vowels. In addition, Bök has instituted several other rules, including making use of at least 98% of all existing words featuring the given vowel, as well as specific tasks, including writing about the act of writing, a feast, a debauch, a nautical journey, etc. 

We'll look at two chapters in their entirety, and then a few selections from the companion "Oiseau" section, including several variations on Arthur Rimbaud's "Voyelles," which synesthetically ascribes colors to each of the vowels. [PDF]

• Eunoia, chapter A [MP3]
• Eunoia, chapter O [MP3]
• Voyelles [MP3]
• Vowels [MP3]
• Phonemes [MP3]
• Veils
• Vocables [MP3]
• AEIOU
• And Sometimes [MP3]
• Vowels [MP3]
• H (for bpNichol)
• Voile [MP3]

Finally, we'll look at a few pieces by the modern-day avant-garde troubadour, Jaap Blonk, whose aesthetic journey began as a free-jazz saxophonist and evolved into musical/textual performances involving electronics before he came to a performance style focused solely on the voice, and his voice is an astounding instrument, fully matching his imposing six-and-a-half foot frame.  We'll look at three pieces by Blonk, along with a few performances of others work.

• Let's Go Out (text with audio, another recording here [MP3])
• Sound (text with audio)
• What the President Will Say and Do [MP3]

• Kurt Schwitters' "Sonata in Primordial Sound" or "Ursonate" [MP3]
• Theo van Doesburg's "Letter Sound Images" [MP3]

How I Made a Podcast

This weekend, I was tasked with a project not unlike the audio documents you'll be making as part of your finals: put together an "audio essay" to be shared as part of PennSound's 10th anniversary celebration, which is taking place tonight in Philly. The resulting piece, the product of maybe 6–8 hours' work, ran just over nine and a half minutes, and you can listen to it below:

I thought I'd share some notes on my process with the hopes that it might be helpful for you as you get started on your finals.


1. Outline your basic concept

I wanted my piece to generally break down into two basic sections: first, a short discussion of how I came to work at PennSound and some of the notable discoveries I made during my early years there, and second, discussion of a few memorable sessions I'd recorded with a few favorite poets.


2. Gather and prep raw materials

I decided upon the recordings that I wanted to use for my piece and downloaded them from PennSound, then used Audacity to make the smaller cuts I'd be using. Note that I've used simplified yet descriptive file names for the cuts I've made, distinguishing the order I want to use them in, or just their contents.

For the section mimicking several Christian Bök tracks playing simultaneously, I made a sub-mix to export as its own MP3 file. The blue shape under the last track is contouring its volume level to create a fade-in. Thought it's not easy to see, I've also stereo-panned the two beatboxing tracks relatively hard left and right, while the "lead vocal" goes closer to the middle.

Here, while trimming down a short snippet from the Ashbery/Lauterbach "Litany," you can see that I've left  room tone (i.e. "silence;" the noise floor of tape hiss) on either side, so that I can seamlessly integrate it with my own voice-over when stitching the track together.

 

3. Prepare your script

It's much easier to record your voice-over when you're reading from a pre-prepared script, so take the time to write things down in advance, and mark out where your insertions will go as well (as you can see below). Even though you're free to improvise when recording, it'll help you work around tricky diction if you have clear reading copy to work from.

4. Record and edit your voice-over

For my piece, I used my little Tascam portable on a tripod right in front of my laptop, then copied the file to my computer so I could edit it in Audacity.  My preferred method is to record everything linearly in one long take, then go through and pull out the individual files as needed. You're bound to make mistakes, and when you do, just leave a sufficient pause and then start again. It's also not a bad idea to give a second take when in the moment you feel less than enamoured of a certain reading. Try to record sections of voice-over in as continuous sections as you can, but leave sufficient pauses between sections so you can trim down, and/or make splices with enough room tone to cover the gaps.

Here, you can see that I've cut a section of voice-over very closely at the head, to eliminate the sound of me inhaling before I start speaking, but left a silent tail that I can use to overlay another voice-over section.

Organize your voice-over sections in a similar fashion as your samples: I've numbered them in order of their appearance (n.b. two pieces that have alternate takes) and added a few words to clue me in to their contents.


5. Final construction

I opted to use Garageband, since that's the software I'm most comfortable using, to lay out my final podcast. Here's what the full piece looks like in the editor:

You'll notice I've used two tracks for voice-over and two tracks for the inserted samples (which are ducked, i.e. the software will always make the voice-over tracks louder than the samples), plus one track for music (I eventually ended up ditching the backing music).  I use two tracks for each section so that I can put together tighter edits using that room tone before and after the sound snippets without cutting any one track short (i.e. those sounds overlap on adjacent tracks so they can play out through the edit point). Edits often need to be fine-tuned by moving a sample back and forth little by little, sometimes just a fraction of a second to get the right pacing, the right pauses, and natural speech-like flow. You can also use fade-ins and fade-outs to make pieces fit together more smoothly.

Here, you can more clearly see the interplay of tracks on a section from the middle of the piece. The second and third tracks are my own voice-over, while the fourth and fifth are samples of other poets. Originally the last track was just for samples that needed fade-ins (namely the Tardos) but I wound up doing a fade-in on the Bök as well.

It certainly takes a lot of trial and error — and by no means would I call myself an expert — but I hope that this might be of use to you as you start thinking about your final projects.

Final Project Guidelines (Due Thursday, Dec. 12th)

Scope and Components

The concept behind your final project is relatively simple: you'll choose one idea/technique/author that we've covered during the semester and undertake a more in-depth critical investigation, which will have both a written and audio component.  In terms of the scope this might take several forms:

• You might choose to do deeper reading/listening within the assigned texts for a given topic (i.e. including the assigned work that we did cover as well as those texts we didn't).
• You might choose to do deeper reading/listening outside of the assigned texts for a given topic (i.e. read more widely within a certain assigned author's work and/or find other authors to include in your analysis).
• You might choose to make ideological/aesthetic/technique-based connections between authors/topics — ideally ones not explicitly made during our class discussions — working within or outside of the assigned readings.

The key point here that you don't want to lose is that you'll be making an argument, taking a stand, tracing aesthetic threads and/or lineages (i.e. the development of ideas), and not just compiling a greatest hits list, or rehashing points that we've made as a class, or that I've made through the organization of the class. Likewise, in terms of outside readings, I can make suggestions but also welcome you to do your own research on the topic(s) of your choosing.

As for the audio component of the final, it might also take several forms:

• It will very likely be something following the podcast model, establishing a dialogue, of sorts, between your recorded voice-over and samples of recordings by poets themselves (taken from archives like PennSound, the Elliston Project, UbuWeb, etc.) or of you reading their work (if recordings don't exist). In essence, this would be more like a distilled version of your paper that's augmented by actual recordings of the poets.
• It could be an audio artifact that critically demonstrates some key point from your essay, which is then set up by the essay itself, however it's important to be mindful of the fact that this shouldn't be a creative endeavor like the midterm sound collages. If you want to pursue this route, we should discuss your plans before I greenlight your project.
• It could be a largely textual endeavor in which micro-edits of recorded audio are embedded throughout, serving the same function as, and accompanying, quotations. A fine example of this possibility can be found here, in Bob Perelman's "A Williams Soundscript," an analysis of William Carlos Williams' "The Sea-Elephant." Again, we'll need to discuss your plans in advance to make sure you're on the right track.

As for podcast models, there are a great many to follow as inspiration, including PoemTalk, Al Filreis' PennSound Podcasts, Charles Bernstein's Close Listening, This American Life, Garrison Keillor's the Writers Almanac, and several from the Poetry Foundation: Poetry Off the Shelf, Essential American Poets, and Kenny Goldsmith's Avant-Garde All the Time, among others. Ideally, you'll want to aim for something more finely interwoven and dialogic than the DJ model — i.e. you talk for a little bit and then play an entire recording.


Facts and Figures (i.e. deadlines, page count, formatting, etc.)

I want you to do your best work without feeling constrained, but at the same time I don't want to set minimum length requirements that are impossible for the average student to reach. Therefore, I'm setting minimums that I expect many of you will greatly exceed, and I welcome you to do so.  Your written essay should be at least six (6) full pages long (and by six pages, I mean that the text of your essay itself makes it to the very bottom of the the page, or better yet onto a seventh), and written in MLA style (including a proper header, parenthetical in-text citations and a works cited list, which doesn't count towards your page count, at the end), double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman, no tricked-out margins, etc. Your audio component should me a minimum of three minutes, though I could very easily see students producing pieces five, ten, even fifteen minutes long.

While six pages seems like an endlessly long paper, I can assure you that it's not really a lot of space to discuss these topics in great depth, therefore I wholeheartedly encourage you to dispense with any and all filler, including bloated rhetoric and lengthy five-paragraph-style introductions that ultimately say very little while taking up a lot of word count. Don't hover over the surface of the issues — dive right in and get to the heart of your argument from the start. I also recommend that unless you have compelling reasons to do otherwise, organize your essay around the topics (characters/techniques/etc.) you've chosen to discuss, rather than proceeding chronologically or dealing with each author individually, and also that you write through the source texts themselves, as demonstrated in the "Making Effective Arguments" post I put up at the start of the term. Finally, make sure that you are following the conventions of MLA formatting (which can be found in numerous places on the internet; a link with guidelines can be found on the right-hand sidebar as well).

You'll e-mail your papers to me (at hennessey [dot] michael [@t] gmail [dot] com) no later than 7:00 PM on Thursday, December 12th. Please include a link to your audio piece on Soundcloud in that e-mail and feel free to share it with our class group. Because e-mail is an imperfect delivery medium and the UC system is prone to collapse, take note that I'll reply to each paper received, letting students know that it's arrived safely, so if you don't receive that e-mail, get in touch with me, and should you have any questions or concerns prior to the deadline, don't hesitate to drop me a line.

Also, please don't forget that tardy projects will be docked a full letter grade for every day they're late and that papers that are less than the stated limit of six full pages will automatically receive an F.

Class Feedback

Finally, because I consider this course an organic and malleable construct, I'd greatly appreciate it if you took the time to answer these questions in a separate document. Please don't feel the need to flatter me or the course materials either — I respect your honest opinions about the class and what did or didn't appeal to you.

• What 10 authors/class topics were most useful/interesting to you?
• What 5 authors/class topics were least useful/interesting?
• Are there any authors/topics you wish we had covered that we didn't?
• Are there any activities (i.e. audio work) that you'd have liked to do? (Or, should the class involve more audio work?)
• Are there any authors you're eager to investigate further after the term is over?

Tuesday, Nov. 26th: Dada Poetics and the Indecipherable

(l) Hugo Ball performs "Karawane" at the Cabaret Voltaire in "a cubist costume"
(r) Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven strikes a provocative pose.

As the end of the semester nears, we're coming full-circle, returning to the Dadaist poetics of Tristan Tzara and his peers, however whereas before we simply considered his instructions for creating Dada poetry as a precursor of Burroughs and Gysin's cut-up techniques, today we'll actually take a look at the work he created through those methods.

A potent international multimedia movement with roots in Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, Dadaism emerged in reaction to the horrors of the First World War. While its aesthetic far too often gets reduced to formulas like "the world didn't make sense so their art didn't make sense," there are far more complex ideological underpinnings that took issue with nationalism and colonialism, bourgeois politics and aesthetics, and the destructive potential of modern industrialism.  That having been said, Dadist ideology was largely centered on shock value and the opportunity for critical rethinking that came with it.  One key way they achieved this was through the use of unconventional materials (cf. Marcel Duchamp's readymades) and multiple media; another frequently used method exploited the malleability of language, and this was perhaps inspired by many of the artists being conversant in multiple languages.

We'll look at selections from Jerry Rothenberg and Pierre Joris' Poems for the Millennium, including a brief critical intro and work by Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Kurt Schwitters: [PDF].  Through the readings below, we'll look at greater depth at interpretations selections from "The Complete Sound-Poems of Hugo Ball" 

"Karawane," perhaps Ball's best-known poem.

First, here's the one and only Marie Osmond(!) discussing Ball on the old Ripley's Believe It or Not television show and reciting "Karawane":

And here's Canadian conceptual poet Christian Bök performing the piece [MP3] along with "Seahorses and Flying Fish" (Seepferdchen und flugfische) [MP3] and "Totenklage"[MP3]. Dutch composer and sound poet Jaap Blonk offers a take on "Seahorses and Flying Fish" here: [MP3] (we'll be listening to more from Bök and Blonk next Tuesday, by the way). Next, here are two takes on "Karawane" by Jerry Rothenberg, one with musical accompaniment by Bertram Turetzky [MP3] and a solo vocal performance here [MP3].

While working on Talking Heads' third album, Fear of Music (1979), David Byrne found himself unable to come up with words for an evocative polyrhythmic track the band pulled together at the end of the sessions. Producer Brian Eno suggested he try singing lines from Ball's poem "Gadji beri bimba" over the track as a way around his writer's block, but rather than simply use them as placeholder lyrics, the band wound up keeping Ball's gibberish, and the finished song, "I Zimbra," was not only given prominent place as the album's opening track, but served as a blueprint for the musical experimentation they'd do on future records like Remain in Light (1980) and Speaking in Tongues (1983). Here's a particularly incendiary version of "I Zimbra" (paired with Byrne's solo track, "Big Business") from the concert film Stop Making Sense ("I Zimbra" begins at 4:52):

For comparison's sake, here are the lyrics to "I Zimbra":

I Zimbra

Gadji beri bimba clandridi
Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
A bim beri glassala glandride
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

Bim blassa galassasa zimbrabim
Blassa glallassasa zimbrabim

A bim beri glassala grandrid
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

Gadji beri bimba glandridi
Lauli lonni cadora gadjam
A bim beri glassasa glandrid
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

As an interesting intertextual complement to these contemporaneous Dada poems and later interpretations, I'd also like you to take a look at a few selections from Rothenberg's 1983 collection, That Dada Strain [PDF].  Audio for certain poems is posted below:

• on That Dada Strain [MP3]
• That Dada Strain [MP3]; with musical accompaniment [MP3]
• A Glass Tube Ecstacy (for Hugo Ball): [MP3]; with musical accompaniment [MP3]

Finally, let's consider two more contemporaneous experiments in asemic writing. First, our old friend Charles Bernstein's provocative poem, "Lift-Off" [link, click "next page" for the end of the poem] from 1979's Poetic Justice, which transcribes the contents of the correction (think Wite-Out) ribbon on the poet's typewriter. You can hear Kenny Goldsmith's performance of the poem at a celebration of Bernstein's new and selected poems, All the Whiskey in Heaven, here: [MP3]. Also, here's David Melnick's PCOET [link], a book of 83 deeply fragmented micropoems.

Thursday, Nov. 21st: Catch-Up Day

On Thursday, we'll take a brief pause in what's been a beautifully busy term and spend one class period tackling two important tasks:

• We'll start class with a brief discussion of the requirements for the final projects and answer any questions students might have about the assignment.  The guidelines will have been up for a little while — it's my intention to post them this week — so you should take the time to digest them and come to class with a preliminary sense of what you'd like to work on.

• Our four(!) student respondents will be responsible for starting our discussions of texts from the second half of the semester (i.e. from Projective Verse all the way through Tuesday's class on Poets Theater and Indigenous Poetics) that didn't get enough attention during our regular class discussions.  Please take advantage of the class Facebook group to post what you're doing to be talking about in advance of that day's class so everyone can brush up on the texts under consideration.  Ideally we'll make each of these four sessions relatively brief (roughly 15 minutes each) so we'll have twenty minutes to talk about the final.

With so much forward momentum this term, I think this retrospective look back will be a useful way for everyone to take stock of how much we've covered, provide another opportunity to make connections between texts, and start thinking seriously about the ideas and topics they want to cover in their final projects.  After today, we'll just have three classes left until the end of the semester, and I've saved some of the wildest and wooliest texts for last!

Tuesday, Nov. 19th: Poets Theater / Indigenous Poetics

In our last class before we take a day to catch-up on sleeper readings from the second half of the term, we're going to take a look at two very different poetic modes, largely for the sake of adding these styles to our ongoing discourse and giving students more diverse topics to choose from for their final projects.

First, given the great enjoyment we've all had collaboratively performing texts by Mac Low, Giorno, and Wieners, I thought that it would be worthwhile to spend a little time focusing on poets theater, which is a fascinating, if somewhat undefined genre. In one conception, it's simply dramatic, happening-like events written by authors who predominately work in the poetic mindset.  To others, the genre has certain aesthetic baggage, including simplicity in staging and props, low or non-existent budgets, embracing its amateur nature, and a certain spontaneity and occasional-ness. If you'd like to delve more deeply into this topic, you can read a few statements from poets involved with poets theater here.

We'll take a look at five very short plays taken from the excellent Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater 1945–1985, edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil: [PDF]

• Lew Welch, "Abner Won't Be Home For Dinner" (1966)
• Joe Brainard, "The Gay Way" (1972)
• Rosmarie Waldrop, "Remember Gasoline?" (1975)
• Ted Greenwald, "The Coast" (1978)
• Leslie Scalapino, "leg, a play" (1985)

As well as a handful of microdramas taken from Kenneth Koch's 1988 volume, 1000 Avant Garde Plays [PDF]. You can watch a brief video of selections from a somewhat precious staging of Koch's plays below:

Next, in keeping with the original topic for today's class, I wanted to spend a little time looking at the pioneering work in the field of ethnopoetics done by Jerry Rothenberg. Specifically, I'd like to look at his work with Native American poetries and songs, both as an anthologist (via selections from 1972's Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas and later work with Navajo horse songs) as well as his own poetry influenced by his firsthand experience of these works and communities, including A Seneca Journal, based on his time living on the Allegheny Seneca Reservation in the 1970s.

Native American Poetries and Songs: [PDF] (MP3 selections below)

• 12 Songs to Welcome the Society of Mystic Animals [MP3]
• Shaking the Pumpkin [MP3] (includes "A Song of My Song, in Three Parts," "Caw Caw the Crows Caw Caw," "The Owl," "Three Ways to Screw Up on Your Way to the Doings Three Ways," among others)
• the Thirteenth Horse Song of Frank Mitchell [MP3]

from A Seneca Journal: [PDF]

• Seneca Journal 1: "A Poem of Beavers" [MP3]
• Old Man Beaver's Blessing Song [MP3][MP3]

If you're interested in learning more about Rothenberg's "total translations" of Navajo horse songs, here's an article on the Poetry Foundation's website: [link].