Wednesday, November 27, 2013

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]


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]
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