Tuesday, Nov. 5th: Anne Waldman and Hannah Weiner

Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan at the Naropa Institute, 1976.

We're staying in New York City for our second day on poetry in performance, and while the time period's the same, we're shifting aesthetic tribes from the Fluxus-inspired performance poetry scene to look at two poets who came to prominence as part of the New York School's later permutations: Anne Waldman and Hannah Weiner.

We begin with "Memorial Day," a collaborative work by Waldman and Ted Berrigan written especially for a joint reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in May 1971.  You can listen to their sole performance of the poem in its entirety here [MP3] and read more about the poem (and the convoluted history of this lost and recovered recording) here.  I've also chosen a small group of poems by Waldman that demonstrate that while performance considerations have been a key part of her poetics from the very beginning, her approach to form and the poem's appearance on the page have evolved over her long career.  The first five poems are from 1970's Baby Breakdown, while the remainder are from her selected poems, Helping the Dreamer, and date from the 70s and 80s.  Certainly, the voice remains an important center in Waldman's writing in the 21st century (cf. more recent poems like "Rogue State": MP3).

Selected poems by Waldman: [PDF]

• "Hi Everyone!"
• "Non Stop"
• "* Baby Breakdown *"
• "Night Poem"
• "* & Now It's Time *"
• "Fast Speaking Woman" [excerpt: MP3]
• "Mirror Meditation"

Waldman reads from "Fast Speaking Woman"

Waldman's New Wave anti-nukes pop song, "Uh Oh, Plutonium"

Moving forward just a few years, we'll take a look at the work of Hannah Weiner (right), who emerged in the cusp between the New York School's second and third generations, but ultimately aimed for a different aesthetic, starting with Mac Low-esque performance pieces and staged happenings before moving into forms that prefigured Language writing of the mid-to-late-70s, specifically her "clairvoyant" style (in part originating in her schizophrenia) through which she experienced aural and visual hallucinations of words and phrases that she transcribed into poetry.  To authentically render these multi-vocal texts, Weiner had to devise unique styles of layout, making use of all-caps text and italics, along with super- and sub-scripts.  First, we'll take a look at a few pieces from the marvelous Hannah Weiner's Open House: [PDF]

• "Hannah Weiner at Her Job"
• from Code Poems: "Romeo and Juliet" (see below)
• "The words in CAPITALS..." (an explanation of Weiner's "clair-style")
• "The Zero One"
• "Radcliffe Women and Guatemalan Women"

Then, from her best known work, Clairvoyant Journal we'll look at excerpts from March and April — you'll find a reproduction at the link above — which correspond to recordings of these sections performed by Regina Beck, Sharon Mattlin, Peggy De Coursey, and Hannah Weiner released on a 1978 New Wilderness Audiographics cassette: March [MP3] / April [MP3].

Additionally, you can watch a performance of "Romeo and Juliet" by Kaplan Harris, Rodrigo Toscano, and Laura Elrick about a third of the way through the first video on this page.

Thursday, Oct. 31st: Jackson Mac Low and Ann Tardos, Susan Sontag

Anne Tardos and Jackson Mac Low in Rhinecliff, NY, 1981.

After our two days spent on song, we'll start a multi-class unit on poetry and performance (or better yet, poetry in performance), and while we'll see that idea made manifest in many different ways by many different poets, there's perhaps no better place to start than with Jackson Mac Low.

While we do no harm in calling Mac Low's ambitious hybrid works poetry, there's a lot more going on in them than what we typically think of poetry. There's a significant compositional emphasis placed upon aleatory procedures, a lá John Cage, with many of his pieces being written through chance operations (things like coin flips, cards drawn from a deck, tossing the I Ching, etc.) or conceptual games (like anagrams and acrostics), and this spirit of randomness carries over into the live realization of these works, which frequently give reader/performers a tremendous amount of interpretive leeway. At the same time, we also see very careful attention paid to scoring the performance of other pieces, with intricate instructions concerning the tempo, pitch, and duration. I've selected a number of Mac Low pieces, often presented with explanations and/or instructions, to give you a sense of the breadth of his poetics, and provided PennSound recordings (of work in the PDFs or similar pieces from related series) as well.  In some cases, I've reproduced sections covering certain series from two different volumes — the earlier Representative Works (published in 1985), and a later posthumous collection, Thing of Beauty (edited by Mac Low's widow and frequent collaborator, Anne Tardos) — so there might be some overlap. (n.b. each linked title below is a separate PDF)

Asymmetries

• Asymmetry 1 [MP3]
• Asymmetry 4 [MP3]
• Asymmetry 12 [MP3]

Gathas

• Milarepa Gatha [MP3] (Mac Low / Tardos) / [MP3] (Mac Low)
• Free Gatha 1 & 2 [MP3] (Mac Low / Tardos)
• Free Gatha 1 [MP3] (Mac Low / Charles Bernstein / Nick Piombino)
• see also: The 8-Voice Black Tarantula Crossword Gatha  [MP3]

A Vocabulary for Annie Brigitte Gilles Tardos
Is That Wool Hat My Hat?
Daily Life
Night Walk
More Recent Things

I don't want to overwhelm you with readings, but did want to present one standalone piece by Anne Tardos that I find particularly charming: 1975's "Refrigerator Defrosting": [MP3] / with vocal improvisation [MP3]

Tardos' drawing of the recording setup, "the score as it were."

Finally, to give some framing to today's readings — and our unit on performance in general — I'd like you to take a look at Susan Sontag's groundbreaking essay, "Happenings: an Art of Radical Juxtaposition," from 1966's Against Interpretation: [PDF]

Tuesday, Oct. 29th: Song 2 — Brown, the Fugs, Sanders, Carroll

We start off today by continuing to look at poets' use of the ballad form, and other song-inflected poetic forms, with Lee Ann Brown. Specifically we'll look at a number of poems from her 2003 book, The Sleep that Changed Everything, including several that also appear in her song cycle, 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Links to PennSound MP3s are provided when available, and the readings are here: [PDF]

• Ballad of Amiri B. (60's)
• Ballad of New Orleans
• Ballad of Vertical Integration [MP3]
• Ballad of Phoebe Steele [MP3]
• Ballad of Susan Smith [MP3, followed by "Ballad of Vertical Integration"]
• Red Fox [MP3]
• 3 Rings [MP3]
• Vision Crown [MP3]

You should also listen to some of the other tracks from 13th Sunday at your leisure — specifically the suite of Girl Scout songs in the middle — to get a broader sense of the materials from which Brown is drawing in the sequence. You can read my 2008 write-up of the song cycle here.

The Fugs play in New York City, 1967.

Next, we'll shift gears a little bit with two projects involving poet and publisher (most famously of the notorious Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts), Ed Sanders. First, a selection of tracks from the Fugs, the poetry-rock band Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg founded with members of the Holy Modal Rounders (and a variety of other musicians) in 1963, which continues to perform to this day. Their repertoire included both original compositions — which placed an emphasis on political messages and sexual liberation — and settings of classic (and contemporary) poetry:

"I'm Doin All Right" (with lyrics written by Ted Berrigan)

"Kill for Peace" (can't be embedded, but click through to witness Tuli Kupferberg tormenting New Yorkers)


"Morning, Morning"


"Super Girl" (live, studio version here)


"I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Rock" (a setting of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl")


"Ah, Sunflower" (a setting of William Blake's poem, which Ginsberg also "covered")


"Dover Beach" (a setting of Matthew Arnold's poem)

In 1992, Sanders conceived of a wide-ranging poetic projecting centered on the hymn "Amazing Grace," written by British poet and clergyman John Newton in 1779. He wrote to many of his poet friends, asking them to contribute their own reworkings of the piece, which is not only a fine example of traditional ballad meter, but also what's known as "Protestant hymn meter" — basically, alternating iambic lines of four and three feet (this is the form that the vast majority of Emily Dickinson's poetry is set in, by the way). The end result is The New Amazing Grace, which was first publicly performed in 1994 in New York City. I'd like you to read Sanders' introduction and the sequence itself — the appendix with letters from the contributors is interesting, but not essential (though feel free to read if you'd like). Here are a two poets performing their contributions to the collection:


Allen Ginsberg's "New Stanzas for 'Amazing Grace'"

Lee Ann Brown, "Three Graces" (includes Brown's "Amazing Grits" and two variations by Bernadette Mayer)  [MP3]


Finally, we'll look at a few videos by Jim Carroll, the New York School poet and memoirist (cf. The Basketball Diaries, made into a film in the late 1990s, and its follow-up, Forced Entries), who had a sideline gig leading the punky new wave Jim Carroll band:


"People Who Died" (watch a live version at punk mecca Mabuhay Gardens here; also cf. Ted Berrigan's "People Who Died" [MP3], which inspired Carroll's track)


"Catholic Boy"

Thursday, Oct. 24th: Song 1 — Blake/Ginsberg, Koch/Ginsberg, Adam, Bernstein

While Enlightenment verse reached an almost-rococo focus on metrical perfection, that came at the cost of emotion and energy, producing work that was smart but somewhat bloodless. It's not until the Romantic period that we see a truly unbridled emotional poetry emerge, and not surprisingly, the name that they gave this verse was often "song."

Perhaps the finest early example of this are William Blake's companion volumes Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.  You've almost certainly encountered these works before in your academic careers — if nothing else, then "The Lamb" and "The Tiger" — but we're going to consider these works in a different fashion, namely through a record released by Allen Ginsberg in 1970, Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, Tuned by Allen Ginsberg. Featuring musical settings of 21 poems by Ginsberg and performed by an all-star group of jazz and folk musicians including Don Cherry, Elvin Jones and Bob Dorough, this album was recorded before a live audience in December 1969. We've put together a page for the record at PennSound, where the individual tracks are accompanied by links to lithographs at the Blake Archives so you can read along as you listen.

While the Ginsberg/Blake album will be our main focus, I'd like to take a look at a few more examples of poets working in a more traditional fashion with song and balladry, starting with Kenneth Koch and Allen Ginsberg's "Popeye and William Blake Fight to the Death," a live improvisation at the St. Mark's Poetry Project on May 9, 1979 [MP3] (n.b. Koch's instructions to Ginsberg regarding the proper metrics of the ballad at the beginning of the track). You'll also want to take a look at a more contemporaneous example of the form in Charles Bernstein's "The Ballad of the Girlie Man" [MP3].

Finally, we have San Francisco's marvelous and mystical Helen Adam, who's perhaps best known for her wonderfully eccentric lyric opera, San Francisco's Burning, first performed on stage and then memorably produced by Charles Ruas for WBAI-FM's "The Audio-Experimental Theater" in 1977. We'll take a look at two pieces by Adam with audio accompaniment: "The Fair Young Wife" [MP3] and "Cheerless Junkie's Song":

Tuesday, Oct. 22nd: Projective Verse — Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Paul Blackburn

Charles Olson (left) strikes a pensive pose.

We'll start the second half of our semester — which will move away from mechanical and concrete manipulations of text into considerations of the sonic characteristics of poetry as rooted largely in performance (whether in person or upon the page) — with an era-defining manifesto by Charles Olson, "Projective Verse," in which he lays out his ideas concerning the composition of modern poetry, including "composition by field" and the relationship between the breath and the poetic line. As a complement to Olson's essay, we'll also take a look at a little of his poetry, along with selections from two of his Black Mountain school peers, Robert Creeley and Paul Blackburn.

Charles Olson

• Projective Verse

• the Kingfishers [MP3]
• I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You [MP3 (n.b. draft read here quite different from final version)]
• Maximus, to Himself [MP3]
• The Songs of Maximus: Song 1 [MP3 (starts around 3:00 and follows with Song 2)]
• The Songs of Maximus: Song 2 [MP3 (Song 1 and 2 at the beginning)]

Robert Creeley

• I Know a Man [MP3]
• A Wicker Basket [MP3]
• The Rain [MP3]
• For Love [MP3]
• The Answer [MP3]
• Sing Song [MP3]
• The Invitation [MP3]
• The Language [MP3]

Paul Blackburn

• 7th Game : 1960 Series [MP3]
• Brooklyn Narcissus [MP3]
• Ritual VIII
• Ritual X : the Evening Pair of Ales

Tuesday, Oct. 15th: Objective Transcriptions — Warhol, Goldsmith, Cotner & Fitch, Kupferberg

We're wrapping up the first half of our class, which has largely focused on the mechanical transformation and/or generation of texts, with perhaps the most objective, "un-authorial" readings of the semester.

We begin with the artist who's perhaps most radically embraced this aesthetic: Andy Warhol. In addition to Warhol's groundbreaking visual art and films, he's also the author of several books, including 1968's a, A Novel, which we'll read a little of for today's class. Framed as the taped documentation of an uninterrupted twenty-four hours in the life of Factory Superstar, Ondine, the contents of a were in reality recorded over the span of two years, with the novel's subdivisions (from 1/1 to 24/2) representing the individual cassettes sides.  These tapes were transcribed by a total of four typists, including Velvet Underground drummer Maureen Tucker (who famously refused to print any profanities) and two high school girls (one of whom got in trouble when her mother realized what she was working on).  Aiming for an unpolished feel, Warhol kept the stylistic inconsistencies between the four transcriptionists, along with any typos.  We'll read the first tape's worth of transcriptions for Tuesday [PDF], and here's a very brief comment by Warhol on the book's composition taken from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol [PDF]

Next up, we'll take a look at a few pieces from poet and UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith, who's helped usher hyper-conceptual poetry into unexpected venues like the White House and the Colbert Report. Transcription and documentation of various sorts have played a key role in Goldsmith's writing process, from his latest book, Seven American Deaths and Disasters — which employs media reports on the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and John Lennon, 9/11, the Challenger disaster, and more — to early works like Soliloquy (which documents everything he said during one week) and Day (which transcribes every word in the September 1, 2000 New York Times, reading across the columns).

We'll look at two of the three books from Goldsmith's "on the ones" trilogy, which focuses on transcriptions of radio broadcasts, and includes Sports (an August 2006 Yankees/Red Sox game that was, at the time, the longest nine-inning game in history, running for five hours), Traffic (a day's worth of traffic reports from New York's 1010 WINS-AM), and The Weather (a year's worth of weather reports from the same station).  For Tuesday, we'll look at the first two in the series: Traffic, and The Weather, and I encourage you to read as much or as little as you desire.  Goldsmith himself has said that it's unnecessary to read his books in their entirety (and he himself falls asleep while proofreading them): the most important thing is to grasp the concept at play in each book.  You can read Goldsmith's Traffic here, and listen to him reading the book here; The Weather is here, and a complete reading can be found here.

Next up is "Dinner and Opera" by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch, an excerpt from their book Conversations Over Stolen Food. Their approach to composition is described in the introduction to the piece:

Between December 2006 and January 2007, we recorded forty-five-minute conversations for thirty straight days throughout New York City. Half of these talks took place at a Union Square health-food store which we call "W.F." Other locations included MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera House, Central Park, Prospect Park and a Tribeca parking garage.

Finally, we'll conclude this day's readings, and this phase of the class, with Tuli Kupferberg's 1966 album, No Deposit, No Return, which is introduced in its first track as "a nightmare of popular poetry." Kupferberg continues on the back cover copy:

An album of Popular Poetry, Pop Poetry. Real Advertisements. As they appeared in newspapers, magazines, in direct mail, a company info bulletin, as a schoolroom flyer. No word has been added. Parts of some have been repeated. Parts of some omitted. But these are the very texts. These are for real!

We'll hear more from Kupferberg later this term when we listen to select tracks by the Fugs, the poetry rock group he founded with Ed Sanders in the mid-60s. A few suggestions if you can't listen to the whole album: "Pubol," "Social Studies," "The Hidden Dissuaders," "The Hyperemiator," "The Sap Glove," and "No Deposit, No Return."Also, take note that the actual ads for The Hyperemiator and The Sap Glove are displayed on the back cover of the album: front cover  /  back cover  /  liner notes 1  /  liner notes 2