Thursday, Oct. 10th: Automotive Transcriptions — Ginsberg / Myles

We'll continue looking at transcription poetry today, reading two works that not only make use of audio recordings as their sources, but also have a common thread of being composed by the authors while driving.

First up we have Allen Ginsberg's classic "Wichita Vortex Sutra," the best-known of a long series of "auto-poesy" pieces written by the poet with the help of a Uher tape recorder (purchased for him by Bob Dylan) as he drove across the U.S. in a Volkswagen microbus across the U.S. during the mid-1960s.  Here's Ginsberg's description of the process, as taken from the volume, Composed on the Tongue:

The way this was determined was: I dictated it on this Uher tape recorder.  Now this Uher microphone has a little on-off gadget here (click!) and then when you hear the click it starts it again, so the way I was doing it was this (click!); when I clicked it on again it meant I had something to say.  So—if you listen to the original tape composition of this, it would be 

          That the rest of earth is unseen, (Click!) 

                                                  an outer universe invisible, (Click!)

                                     Unknown (Click!) except thru

                                                  (Click!) language 

                                                            (Click!) airprint 

                                                                      (Click!) magic images 

                    or prophecy of the secret (Click!) 

                              heart the same (Click!) 

                              in Waterville as Saigon one human form (Click!) 

So when transcribing, I pay attention to the clicking on and off of the machine, which is literally the pauses, as words come out of my--as I wait for phrases to formulate themselves. . . . 

And then, having paid attention to the clicks, arrange the phrasings on the page visually, as somewhat the equivalent of how they arrive in the mind and how they're vocalized on the tape recorder. . . . 

It's not the clicks that I use, it's simply a use of pauses--exactly the same as writing on a page: where you stop, you write, in the little notebook, you write that one line or one phrase on one line, and then you have to wait for another phrase to come, so you go on then to another line, represented by another click. 

. . . These lines in "Wichita" are arranged according to their organic time-spacing as per the mind's coming up with the phrases and the mouth pronouncing them.  With pauses maybe of a minute or two minutes between each line as I'm formulating it in my mind and the recording. 

. . . Like if you're talking aloud, if you're talking--composing aloud or talking aloud to yourself.  Actually I was in the back of a bus, talking to myself, except with a tape recorder.  So everytime I said something interesting to myself I put it on tape.

You can read the complete text of the poem here, and listen to several recordings of Ginsberg reading the poem below:

Recorded in May 1995 at the Knitting Factory in NYC:

• Wichita Vortex Sutra I (3:14): MP3
• Wichita Vortex Sutra II (12:52): MP3
• Wichita Vortex Sutra III (5:51): MP3
• Wichita Vortex Sutra IV (5:41): MP3

Next, here's a rather breathtaking musical setting of a long portion of the poem by Philip Glass, part of his collaboration with Ginsberg, Hydrogen Jukebox (a term you'll recall from "Howl"):

And here's a very interesting recording I uncovered a few summers back, in the tape archives of the poet Robert Creeley, which sets a lengthy excerpt of the poem to musical soundscape including chanting, sound effects and a snippet of Bob Dylan's "Queen Jane Approximately," among other noises:

• Wichita Vortex Sutra (28:00): MP3

You can read my write-up of the recording (and several others released at the same time) here.

Jumping forward four decades, our other reading for Thursday is a sequence by Eileen Myles entitled "Myles/Driving," which was written in a fashion not unlike Ginsberg's compositional methods in "Wichita Vortex Sutra." As Myles explains:

I was leaving my job at UCSD and I gave a rather moving speech to a small crowd who had come to the going away party. I bought a little recorder to have in my pocket. I had some purpose for recording my own remarks like I thought of it as related to something I was working on or would be working on. I thought I might use it for a novel I would write in the future about the academy. I was bugging myself for art. But the little record- er didn't do what I intended. I don't know if I knew how to run it. After that I started occasionally flipping it on when I drove to LA from SD and vice versa. It was fun. I had no idea if anything had recorded until I visited the gathered family of Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein last summer in Provincetown and all of them except for Susan knew how to turn sound files into something I could hear. It happened.

Earlier—a few years ago—I was caught in a park in SD without pen and notebook and left a poem on my cellphone. I called it in. So I've been imaginatively involved with the idea of transcripton since then. Really always. I use a digital camera a lot, or did, and would compose texts as I walked and thought that it felt like a fleshing out of the idea of a poem as a score. A talky instead.

We'll continue our focus on transcription poetry with one more class next Tuesday, when we'll read work by Kenneth Goldsmith, Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch, and Andy Warhol.

Thursday, Oct. 3rd: Transcription Poetics 1 — Jack Kerouac and Lew Welch

Jack Kerouac and Lew Welch

We're returning to our old friend Jack Kerouac, but the work we'll be looking at this time is radically different than the jazz-influenced poetry and prose we read earlier this semester.  We'll be reading two excerpts from his posthumously-published novel, Visions of Cody (1972) — one of the finest sustained examples of Kerouac's "spontaneous bop prosody" taken to its most punishing extremes.  Specifically, we'll be reading from the novel's long center section, which consists of transcriptions of taped conversations between Kerouac and Neal and Carolyn Cassady (among others): one section from the first night, and another selection from the fifth and final night (you'll be able to tell the break by a jump in the page numbers): [PDF]

I'd also like you to read "Sea," Kerouac's attempt to onomatopoeically document the sounds of the Pacific Ocean during his retreat at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in the summer of 1960.  "Sea" was published as an appendix to Kerouac's novel, Big Sur, which describes its composition. [PDF]

One of Big Sur's main characters is a young poet named Dave Wain, who's more than willing to play chauffeur to Kerouac during his mental breakdown.  The real-life Dave Wain was Lew Welch, who gave up a promising career in the ad industry to dedicate his life to poetry, playing a key role in the San Francisco poetry scene's transition from 1950s bohemianism to the 60s summer of love-era counterculture. Welch published several books, collected in a recently-reissued volume titled Ring of Bone, before he (presumably) committed suicide in 1971. Music played a major role in Welch's poetics — the long recording on his PennSound author page has some marvelous passages about taking his stepson (who'd grow up to be Huey Lewis [of "and the News" fame]) to see James Brown in concert — as did an ear finely attuned to the peculiarities of American speech.  Here's a breakdown of the Welch readings, with audio when available:

• Din Poem [introduction: MP3 / poem: MP3 / "Supermarket Song" intro: MP3 / poem: MP3 ]
• You Can't Burlesque It Anymore, — 1956 
• Taxi Suite
• Circle Poems
• Graffiti [introduction: MP3 / poem: MP3]

You should also take a look at the short excerpt from Welch's essay, "Language as Speech" that's on his EPC author page.

Tuesday, Oct. 1st: Collage Poetics — Berrigan, Bernstein, Hills, et al.

Ted Berrigan, Charles Bernstein, Henry Hills.

In today's texts, we're still operating under the general aesthetics of the cut-up, but expanding it a little into work whose composition is more consciously done in the spirit of collage (instead of foregrounding the cut-up process itself). We'll have three main "readings," though in actuality one's a written text, one's an audio text and one's a short film.

First up is a healthy selection of poems from Ted Berrigan's magnum opus, The Sonnets (1964). Guided by the work of Tzara, Burroughs, and Gysin, Berrigan created a sequence of eighty-eight poems that stand alone as independent texts, while also functioning as a cohesive whole.  A spirit of appropriation guides the endeavor, with the young poet borrowing and recontextualizing lines from friends and peers (like Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, and Joe Brainard), New York School poets he admired (including John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara) and older writers like Arthur Rimbaud and Henri Michaud.  He also effectively samples himself — poems written before the start of The Sonnets, but also poems written as part of the sequence — and thus one of the great joys of reading the book in its entirety is seeing how quickly it starts to digest itself, how lines and images reappear time and time again over its course.

In an interview with Tom Clark, Berrigan describes his collage aesthetic: "I often think of my words as sort of bricks. But the bricks then are underneath the words, sort of. I use the words a lot of times to disguise the fact that it's a brick underneath, or to make the brick float. And then there'll be a key-word or rhyme to put the brick right there." He expands upon this in another interview (with Anne Waldman and Jim Cohn):

I had a lot more variables to work with and a lot more possibilities of structures. It was just like cubism. I was totally influenced by what my take on cubism was. Take all those planes, put them flat up like this, and they're different. They go this way and they don't go. They turn into optical illusions.

You can listen to Berrigan read The Sonnets in its entirety, as part of a residency at San Francisco's New Langton Arts Center not long before his death, on his PennSound author page (use the segmented tracks to follow along with your reading). Our readings can be found here: [PDF] 

Next up, you'll be listening to several tracks from Class, a cassette of audio-poetic experiments that Charles Bernstein recorded in the mid-1970s. Specifically, I'd like you to listen to "My/My/My," "Class," and "Goodnight," all of which were recorded in 1976.  On PennSound's Class page, you can read Bernstein's introduction to the pieces and a description of the techniques at play in the various tracks.  He also provides a link to the published version of "My/My/My" and a PDF version of Asylums, the book in which it appeared.  Finally, you can read excerpts from an article I wrote on Class for The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein at Jacket2 (it's also linked on the PennSound page).

Our final main text for today is Money, a 1985 short by Henry Hills, a filmmaker who had close connections with both New York's avant-garde poetry scene as well as its downtown music scene during this tumultuous (but very exciting) era.  Here's Hills' description of the film: 

Money (1985) is a manic collage film from the mid-80s when it still seemed that Reaganism of the soul could be defeated. Filmed primarily on the streets of Manhattan for the ambient sounds and movements and occasional pedestrian interaction to create a rich tapestry of swirling colors and juxtaposed architectural spaces in deep focus and present the intense urban overflowing energy that is experience living here. Money is thematically centered around a discussion of economic problems facing avant-garde artists. Discussion, however, is fragmented into words and phrases and reassembled into writing. Musical and movement phrases are woven through this conversation to create an almost operatic composition. Give me money! Starring: John Zorn, Diane Ward, Carmen Vigil, Susie Timmons, Sally Silvers, Ron Silliman, James Sherry, Peter Hall, David Moss, Mark Miller, Christian Marclay, Arto Lindsay, Pooh Kaye, Fred Frith, Alan Davies, Tom Cora, Jack Collom, Yoshiko Chuma, Abigail Child, Charles Bernstein, Derek Bailey, and Bruce Andrews.

More information and stills from the film can be found here, and you can watch the film below:

Finally, as contextual tangents, you can see how the collage techniques at play in these various pieces prefigure much of our contemporary remix culture. While you're probably well-acquainted with artists like Girl Talk, I thought I'd share a few earlier milestones along the way:

Double Dee and Steinski, "Lesson 1 (the Payoff Mix)"

Steinski and the Mass Media, "The Motorcade Sped On"

EBN (Electronic Broadcast Network), "Electronic Behavior Control System"

the Evolution Control Committee, "Rocked by Rape"

Thursday Sept. 26th: Cut-Ups / Iteration 2 — Stein, Giorno, Eno, Padgett

Gertrude Stein: three portraits by Andy Warhol.

Today, we'll begin by looking at another precursor to the cut-up technique from the early 20th century: Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914).  Stein's work is highly repetitive, employing not only anaphora within individual pieces but a more complex interweaving of certain words and phrases throughout the book as a whole.  Moreover, while we see straight iteration, in Tender Buttons we also see these phrases mutate as they're repeated, not unlike what happens when you play the game "telephone" (or "whisper down the lane").  What's most impressive is the way in which Stein prefigures highly-technical methods and tropes like Tzara, Burroughs, and Gysin's cut-ups without in any way shape or form being mechanized — it's all the stream-of-consciousness product of a highly recursive (and disinhibited) mind.  You'll find the Stein readings here: [PDF]

John Giorno photographed by William S. Burroughs, 1965.

From Stein, we'll jump forward to the 1960s for our other main reading of the day: selections from John Giorno's Subduing Demons in America (ed. Marcus Boon).  Giorno was an acolyte and lifelong friend of both Burroughs and Gysin, and in his early poetry, we see him employing both the appropriation of found source texts and the collaging of these materials, however his great innovation would be in how these diverse sources would be juxtaposed: first through typographical presentation on the page and later, in live performance and on record albums, through the assistance of multitrack recordings and tape delays.  You'll read a variety of poetic materials from the 1960s and 70s as well as a brief description of the "ESPEs" or "Extra-Sensory Poetry Environments" Giorno staged in the late 60s in New York City and elsewhere.  Your Giorno readings are here: [PDF] and you might also want to check out his page at UbuWeb for a ton of recordings made over his long career.

We've already heard from Tzara, Burroughs and Gysin about the cut-up procedure, and as we move from cut-ups and iterative processes into our next class on collage (and from that on to the use of recording and transcription as creative processes) another useful perspective on the philosophies and attitudes that guide artists who work objectively and manipulatively with text/audio/video/imagery is provided by our old friend, Brian Eno — specifically, his groundbreaking 1979 essay, "The Studio as Compositional Tool."  While Eno's speaking exclusively about music here, I think that the ideas at the heart of his argument are easily applicable to text, along with the rawer sonic materials of poetry.

We'll round out our readings by looking at a few mid-60s pieces by Ron Padgett that show the influence of Andy Warhol's artistic innovations: "Nothing in That Drawer," "Sonnet for Andy Warhol" and Two Stories for Andy Warhol (n.b. the detail show on the linked page is one of ten identical pages from Padgett's book).

And speaking of Warhol, if you're not familiar with his work, you might want to check out this gallery that focuses specifically on his grid-based screenprint paintings.  The same postmodern ideologies of theme and variation, emphasizing subtle differences over time, also greatly influenced the development of minimalism within American contemporary classical music during this era (c.f. Philip Glass or Steve Reich, who we'll be looking at later this term).

Tuesday, Sept. 24th: Cut-Ups / Iteration 1 — Tzara, Burroughs, Gysin

Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs flooding their brains with alpha waves
via Ian Sommerville's Dreamachine (read more about it here).

This is the start of a six-class unit focused on a series of interrelated techniques and aesthetic ideologies that will find us leapfrogging from fragmentation and collage through iterative (or repetitive) and juxtapositional processes and into composition via transcription (which itself takes several forms).  Today we begin with the cut-up.

While the cut-up is often attributed to Beat novelist William S. Burroughs and artist and writer Brion Gysin during the 1950s, its true origins lie in the aesthetic methodologies of Tristan Tzara, formulated in the 1920s:

To make a Dadaist poem:

• Take a newspaper.
• Take a pair of scissors.
• Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
• Cut out the article.
• Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
• Shake it gently.
• Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
• Copy conscientiously.
• The poem will be like you.
• And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

Still, Burroughs and Gysin did a great deal to further refine its procedures, including moving beyond text-based methods to work with both audiotape and film (and the repetitive nature of cut-ups would also greatly influence Gysin's painting).  Here's a brief video clip of Burroughs describing the discovery and development of the technique:

Burroughs would use the technique in Naked Lunch as well as the three novels of his Nova Trilogy: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express, and collaborations between the two would be published in the late 1970s as The Third Mind.  These excerpts from Naked Lunch's "Atrophied Preface" give a sense of how well the cut-up meshed with Burroughs' aesthetic worldview:

Why all this waste paper getting The People from one place to another? Perhaps to spare the Reader stress of sudden space shifts and keep him Gentle? And so a ticket is bought, a taxi called, a plane boarded.  We are allowed a glimpse into the warm peach-lined cave as She (the airline hostess, of course) leans over us to murmur of chewing gum, dramamine, even nembutal.

"Talk paregoric, Sweet Thing, and I will hear." 

I am not American Express.... If one of my people is seen in New York walking around in citizen clothes and next sentence Timbuktu putting down lad talk on a gazelle-eyed youth, we may assume that he (the party non-resident of Timbuktu) transported himself there by the usual methods of communication... [...]

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer... 

We'll read a variety of texts by these two authors for today's class:

William S. Burroughs (from Word Virus: the William S. Burroughs Reader, ed. James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg) [PDF]

• Atrophied Preface (Wouldn't You?)
• Quick . . .
• Operation Rewrite
• The Invisible Generation
• The Exterminator
• The Future of the Novel
• Notes on These Pages
• Technical Deposition of the Virus Power

Brion Gysin (from Back in No Time: the Brion Gysin Reader, ed. Jason Weiss) [PDF]

• First Cut-Ups
• Minutes to Go
• CUT ME UP * BRION GYSIN ...
• Permutation Poems (intro and poems)
• About the Cut-Ups

On UbuWeb you'll find a complete set of the cut-up films made by Burroughs, Gysin, and Antony Balch in the 1960s and 70s (perhaps look at "Towers Open Fire" and "The Cut-Ups").  You can also listen to a variety of Gysin's audio cut-ups here.

Thursday, Sept. 19th: A Crash Course in Audio Editing

Spend long enough editing audio and you'll have the same blank stare John Cage has here.

On Thursday we'll take a brief detour from our studies to spend a little time going over the basics of audio editing.  In particular, we'll be discussing the very powerful freeware editing software Audacity (which you can download here; you'll also need to download the LAME encoder here to be able to process MP3 files), though you can use any other method or program for editing audio that you're comfortable with.  This will hopefully give you enough of a foundation to start playing around on your own in preparation for your midterm audio projects (described below), which will be due just shy of a month from Thursday's class.

As part of your audio experimentation, you might want to use some of Audacity's built-in effects, and I encourage you to play around with them.  You'll find Wikipedia pages for various effects here and more detailed descriptions of some of the basic types of effects you'll encounter here.  Another helpful resource is Audacity's own tips wiki, and of course, you can and should also feel free to use our Facebook group to troubleshoot any obstacles you face.

I've been editing audio and recording digitally for more than six years now (through Adobe Audition, Audacity and Apple's Garageband), and before that spent many years working on 4-track recorders and regular tape decks.  Programs like Audacity are relatively user-friendly, but that doesn't mean you won't run into difficulties along the way, especially if you've never worked with audio before.  A few general pointers before you get started:

• The best way to learn is through trial and error.  You will make mistakes, accidentally erase tracks, and maybe even lose projects, and it's better to do that this weekend than a few hours before the midterm project's due.
• Always be sure to save backup copies of your recordings, work with safety copies, and export new mixes as new versions rather than overwriting your originals.  Copy rather than cut, and open a new project or window if necessary.  Redundancy is key here, but don't forget that you can always download a new copy of online recordings (from the sources below or your SoundCloud account) if needed.
• Thoroughly document your efforts: use descriptive file names and keep a log of the various steps you take while manipulating your audio, including settings for effects, filters, etc.  This will make it easier to recreate processes if you want to apply them to multiple samples or to start over when needed.
• Undo (ctrl/command+Z) is your best friend.  If you screw something up (and you will), it's better to undo it and try again rather than take further steps to try to fix it.
• Wear headphones while working and remember that you have the whole stereo field to work with.  You can go a long way towards making cleaner, uncluttered recordings if you aim for dynamic range and balance: pan two voice tracks left and right for separation, keep higher and lower frequency sounds apart for greater definition, give quiet sounds room to breathe away from louder signals.
• Try to have fun with the process and remember that nobody expects perfection.

Your Midterm Audio Project (due Thursday, October 17th)

You'll create your own 30 second audio project that's inspired by the techniques employed by the writers we'll be reading during weeks 5–8 —namely cut-ups, collage, repetition, found sound, etc. — using Audacity and/or any other audio recording and editing software or hardware that you like.  You have a tremendous amount of leeway here, both in terms of source material and techniques employed, however your finished projects should show some signs of being guided by "poetic" processes (what exactly that might mean will be in large part determined by our upcoming classes) and it should also demonstrate some manner of complexity, juxtaposition, texture, grain, etc.  More importantly, it should embody a sense of discovery and experimentation (or show that you've gotten your hands dirty working with your source audio) though it need not be polished or perfect for it to be worthy and interesting.  Your audio project should be uploaded to our class SoundCloud group prior to the start of class on the 17th, with [Poetry and Sound Midterm] added at the end of the filename and your name at the start (for example: "Michael Hennessey, (title), [Poetry and Sound Midterm]").

In addition to the audio composition, you'll also write up a brief analysis of your project (approximately 300-500 words) in which you discuss the specific source materials and techniques you used and frame your work through your readings during weeks 5–8 as well as our foundations readings (Chion, Cage, Barthes, etc.).  You'll hand this in at the start of class on the 17th.

We'll spend our class session on the 17th doing very quick round-robin sessions listening to each student's composition in turn with two minutes for comments after each.  We'll have to be succinct, but this will give everyone a chance to share their work and get feedback from their peers.  For this reason, you'll also want to make sure you stick to the 30 second limit, because any time you run over will come out of your comment time.

My hope is that this project won't just be a great way to wrap up the work we'll have done during the first half of the semester, but also will help you get comfortable editing audio in anticipation of your finals, where you'll be producing a longer and more involved version of this sort of audio project/essay combo.

Sources for audio:

• UC's Elliston Project
• PennSound
• UbuWeb Sound
• the SFSU Poetry Center Online Archives
• the Internet Archive Community Audio
• the Library of Congress' National Jukebox
• the Alan Lomax Archives at Cultural Equity

Tuesday, Sept. 17th: Jazz Poetry 2 — The Beats on Jazz

clockwise from top left: Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Ken Nordine

You'll find the majority of Tuesday's readings in a ZIP archive here: [ZIP]

As we continue to explore the influence of jazz upon contemporary poetry, we'll shift our focus to members of the Beat Generation, including Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman and Gregory Corso, along with some poems and musical tracks by fellow travelers of a similar mindset.  As was the case with Langston Hughes' The Weary Blues, here we'll see quite a few collaborations between poets and musicians,  as well as a wide variety of poems that seek to transmute the sounds, the energy and the ethos of jazz as an art form.  Here's a breakdown of our readings:

Jack Kerouac (PDF name  /  track name)

• from The Subterraneans  /  "Excerpts from 'The Subterraneans'"
• from "The Railroad Earth"  /  "October in the Railroad Earth"
• "The Beginning of Bop"  /  "Fantasy: the Early History of Bop"`
• "Some Western Haikus"  /  "American Haikus"
• from Mexico City Blues (choruses 239–241)  /  "Charlie Parker"
• from "San Francisco Blues" (choruses 1-21)  /  "Poems from the Unpublished 'Book of Blues'"
• from "McDougal Street Blues" (Canto Uno)  / "McDougal Street Blues"
• from "the Bowery Blues"  /  "Bowery Blues"

Additionally, it might be helpful to take a look at two brief craft essays by Kerouac that describe the creative process behind his "spontaneous bop prosody": "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" and "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose."

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

• "In Memory of Radio"
• "Way Out West"
• "Symphony Sid"
• "Notes for a Speech"
• "Short Speech to My Friends": MP3
• "Black Dada Nihilismus": MP3
• "A Poem for Speculative Hipsters": MP3
• "A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand": MP3
• "Tone Poem"
• "Poem for HalfWhite College Students": MP3
• "Pres Spoke in a Language"
• "AM/TRAK"

Bob Kaufman

• "Round About Midnight"
• "Jazz Chick"
• "On"
• "O-Jazz-O"

Gregory Corso

• "Requiem for 'Bird' Parker, Musician"

We'll call those our main readings for the class, but here are a few supplemental readings/tracks/etc. that will give you additional perspectives on this particular track of jazz-influenced poetry.

First up, a few tracks by Ken Nordine, purveyor of the "somewhat new medium" of "word jazz": 

"Hunger is From"

"Reaching into In"

"Yellow" (from the album Colors, which offered up beautifully absurd portraits of 34 different hues)

Next, a few tracks by Kenneth Patchen, an early experimenter in musical collaborations.  Compare the minimalist "The Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon-colored Gloves", which you can listen to below:

to "The Lute in the Attic," which was a favorite of New York School poets like Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett:

At the end of this clip of the John Coltrane Quartet performing "Afro-Blue," legendary jazz critic (and Rolling Stone founding editor) Ralph J. Gleason talks about the relationship between jazz and poetry:

The thing that a modern jazz musician does — and which you should really keep in mind when you see him in concerts, or see him in jazz clubs — is somewhat similar to looking at a poet standing in the middle of a supermarket improvising poetry. They are called upon by the discipline of this art form to go into public places where people are gathered informally and spontaneously create music.  Unlike a poet, unlike a writer of a novel, unlike a painter, they have no opportunity to take this product that they have created and reform it and correct the mistakes that they might have made or change the way in which they approach it — what they do is done for all time right then when they do it.  This is a very unique thing about jazz and it's one of the things that gives it a particular quality of aliveness that makes it one of the most interesting and vital of all contemporary art forms.

Finally, as another tangential approach to the overlap of jazz and poetry, I offer up a few select tracks by legendary bandleader and songwriter Slim Gaillard, an influence on Beat author like Kerouac, who took scat singing to a new dimension with his invented hipster language, Vout (you can browse a "Vout-o-Reenee Dictionary" here):

"Yep-Roc-Heresay" 

"Cement Mixer (Put-Ti Put-Ti)"

Thursday, Sept. 12th: Jazz Poetry 1 — Jazz, Blues and Beyond

(l-r): Langston Hughes, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Fred Moten

You'll find the majority of Thursday's readings in one archive here: [ZIP]

Jumping forward from Walt Whitman into the 20th century, we'll begin with jazz, America's first unique native art form, and a selection of poets who were inspired by it.

We'll start with a healthy selection of work by Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance's poet laureate, taken from Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (Vintage Classics, 1959).  Because I've scanned these two pages at a time, there are extra pieces of poems thrown into the mix, but here are the titles I'd like you to read:

• The Weary Blues
• Hope
• Reverie on the Harlem River
• Morning After
• Genius Child
• Song for Billie Holiday
• Fantasy in Purple
• Trumpet Player
• Midnight Dancer
• Misery
• Dream Boogie
• Projection
• Flatted Fifths
• Dream Boogie: Variation
• Harlem
• Good Morning

You'll also want to take a look at Hughes' essay, "Jazz as Communication" and browse through his 1958 album, Weary Blues (which features musical collaborations with both Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather).

In addition to Hughes, we'll look at two more recent poets who are working within the shadow of Hughes' influence while also transforming the sounds and syntax of more contemporaneous musical forms.  Our selections from Thomas Sayers Ellis come from his wonderful first collection, The Maverick Room (Graywolf, 2005), and will include the complete title suite.  We'll also read a handful of pieces by Fred Moten, taken from two recent books, Hughson's Tavern (leon works, 2008) and B. Jenkins (Duke University, 2010).  You'll find several full-length readings by Moten on his PennSound author page, including segmented tracks for many of the poems we'll read for today.

Thomas Sayers Ellis

• A Pack of Cigarettes
• Sticks
• The Maverick Room (complete sequence)

Fred Moten (Hughson's Tavern marked "HT," all others from B. Jenkins)

• jazz (as ken burns (HT) [MP3]
• trumpeters (HT)
• bebop (HT)
• billie holiday/roland barthes
• fishbone/joseph jarman [MP3]
• elvin jones, malachi favors, steve lacy [MP3]
• yopie prins
• sherrie tucker, francis ponge, sun ra [MP3]
• william parker/fred mcdowell [MP3]
• cecil taylor/almeida ragland [MP3]
• charlie parker

Finally, for another variation on mid-century jazz poetry, here's "The Clown" by Charles Mingus with improvised narration by Jean Shepherd:

In our next class we'll focus on jazz-inflected work by Beat Generation authors and their contemporaries.