Picture one of those waist-high in plastic balls pools like they have in some of the playlands for children. But each ball has a word written on it like they put numbers on lottery balls. And each ball is wrapped with strips of Velcro hook fabric. The walls of the space are covered in Velcro loop fabric. Jump in, swim around, fling poems onto the walls.
A guy I used to work with back when I was in the restaurant business used to dream of opening a restaurant called Just Frickin’ Chicken. He planned to have a bank of broasters (pressure fryers), and three sauces (BBQ, Honey Mustard, Hot Wings Style), if you wanted them, or serve the chicken plain out of the broaster. No cole slaw, no mashed potatoes, no soda pop, no biscuits….just frickin’ chicken.
There’s a problem with the way the check gets dropped in most restaurants. The default behavior is the server sets down the check and says “I’ll take that when you’re ready.” and walks away. Even if I’m ready right now, and visibly scrambling for my wallet. What is really being said is, “I’ll come back later to take that when I’m ready, and hopefully you are too, as long is it isn’t right now, because that would be hugely awkward for some inexpressible reason.” This often leaves me sitting there a lot longer than necessary (and the server should want to turn the table, too). What needs to happen is for the server to say, “When you’re ready, I can take that.” and then pause for a beat to see if I’m lunging for my wallet because we need to get out of there.
I’ve been listening to a wide range of sound work for a couple of years, from the most experimental to the most basic. One thing I noticed is that there is a large expanse of territory that is not being mapped by people. On one border there are poets who are taking what are basically page-poems and recording themselves reading them. On the other border are sound poets who are working with pure sound at the syllable/phoneme and even completely non-lexical non-verbal levels (grunts and screeches and moans and whimpers oh my!). The territory that is in between these two extremes is both rich, varied, (I think) thrilling to consider, and, is surprisingly vacant. There aren’t very many talented poets doing experimental work with sound (some, not many). There are poets doing sound work, but it’s very conservative—straight voice recordings. There are experiments being done, but, it’s more pure theoretical experimentation than something connected with poetry. This is not bad, I think both groups are doing useful work, but, what I want to see and do is make some excursions into audio augmentation of poetry and into writing poetry specifically to leverage the possibilities of sound performance. I want the best of both worlds.
My first efforts involved weaving and simultaneity (because I’d been working with those on the page and so was really doing audio interpretations of visual tropes). This got me thinking about the full range of affects that are possible. Here’s a few, in no particular order, with some brief notes to sketch out what I mean by each. These are not discrete classifications; I think many aspects of sound work are shades of these in combination. Many are also admittedly similar, this is just a quick brainstormed list that I’m tossing out here so there’s a kind of vocabulary in place to talk about where my current interests are.
Layers—having multiple levels of sound going on. Can be many voices, voices and sound effects, same voice on an additional track to add depth, etc. I am hugely interested in doing things with as many layers as possible. Like Brian Wilson’s arrangements on the album Smile.
Choral—the specific effect of many voices in different tonal registers, in harmony our out of harmony. Layers of voices.
Simultaneity—when things happen at the same time. So far, my experience with your work has seen augmentive simultaneity (voices at the same time saying the same thing in different deliveries to add to the overall effect). My work has shown some narrative simultaneity where different lexical streams are run at the same time, so far they’ve usually been supportive more than augmentive of each other. I am very interested in doing work where the simultaneous elements are more radically augmentive. I’d like to write some pieces that augment through shaded semantic broadening in addition to emphasis adding restatement. Or, to say it more plainly, in addition to voices repeating a word in time with the main line reading I’d like to have fireworks of words not in the main line that burst and crackle in appropriate places (eventually maybe everywhere, throughout).
Emphasis—any effect (repetition, layer, etc.) that serves to direct attention to a specific point.
Augmentation—this means, to me, things that are additive. Multiple intonations of the same phrase augment each other. They add to the sum total. The word means all the things at once.
Multiple voices—refers both to literally more than one person’s voice as well as altered versions of the same voice, or even unaltered versions of multiple instances of the same voice.
Cumulative—a way to talk about the end result of complex layerings. For example, if a phrase were read by multiple voices in a variety of ways we might say that the cumulative effect of the various readings was pitched towards the angry, or the manic, even though some, most, or all of the individual layers don’t exhibit that effect. Another sense is that multiple layers of voices have a cumulative choral effect.
Alteration—one point at which the studio and the technology become an instrument in the performance. Altering is when something is done to the voice or the recording that is not present in the original. Raising the pitch, speeding it up, adding reverb, even looping would qualify, really. All post-production, too, for the most part.
Affectation—this is what the voice can do with stage direction and actorly talent, it can do an affected reading that is augmentive or oppositional to the main line, among other things.
Spatiality—mixing technology can place any given voice or effect within a fairly precise physical location in the audio space of the listener. Left/right, front/back, and everything in between, including motion through that space. I really want to explore this aspect.
Sound Effects—not voice things. Think radio plays, or, the whoosh sounds recorded from the fan.
Looping—taking any segment and repeating it at regular or irregular intervals.
Character Dialog—one interesting aspect of multiple voices and layers is the possibility for character dialog in a theatric fashion (or some other fashion). This is the boundary between experimental theater and experimental sound poetry.
Weaving—taking multiple threads of logic, textstream, semantic content, voices, whatever and running them concurrently. If no attempt is made to modulate which of the multiples is forefront the audience will attempt to do it on their own (with varying degrees of successs).
Opposing/Contrasting—the corollary to the augmentive, these are elements which oppose or contrast the main line in some way. If the main line says “yes, yes, yes” then a faraway “nooooo” would be a contrasting element. A cluster of faraway and approaching “nooooo”s might have the cumulative effect of actually semantically overpowering the main line.
What aspects have I missed? Many, I’m sure.
I am interested in doing pieces that are deeply layered and explore the possibilities of modulating poetic meaning by various effects and affectations through complex arrangements in time and space of augmentive and opposing semantic clusters that eventually so completely subvert the main line that time becomes the only real line.
I want poems that are like fireworks where word clusters burst in audiospace to form new, more complex, semantic units (two-dimensionally impossible “words”) that can be connected together by the line of time into lines, stanzas and poems that articulate the fullness of expression poetry has been trying to achieve all along.
I want to take the next step and be writing poems to take advantage of the new set of tropes studio recording with the help of like-minded others makes available.
I want to make poems that make people slip off their headphones, out of breath, disoriented, and muttering to anyone who’ll listen “now that’s a goddamned poem.”
Interrobang
It’s a punctuation mark that combines the exclamation point with the question mark. Looks like this: ‽
More info at the Wikipedia page for interrobang.
Have you ever seen one of those powers of 10 explanations that zoom out by powers of 10, then zoom in by powers of ten? If so, hold that visual.
I want to show all the layers of encoding and then decoding that occur when something simple and digital happens. An email, or, a keystroke sent in a chat, or an X-10 camera showing a gallery patron walking in. The *thing* is not as important as being able to show all the significantly different layers. I don’t even know them all, but, I know they are myriad. I hit a key, and it’s an electrical signal that gets converted many times before it even displays on my screen. Now send it over a simple network and think of all the transforms that are happening to get different parts of the network to handle it. I want the finest level of granularity that is possible/practical/interesting. Down to binary if possible. Realtime if possible. Imagine being able to type in an arbitrary text at a terminal in a gallery and then seeing on 57 different screens each discrete step involved in IMing it to another computer at the end of the exhibit. The original text shows up colored so that when it’s encoded it’s still discernible from the parts that are its envelopes, maybe.
This is an open ended project–it would be a series of short Flash films (or Java animations, or or or) all featuring the same character.
This is going to take some explanation, and very little of it will be linear. I just have some broad brush strokes of a concept, and I’m going to need to rely on your ability to connect the dots.
Concept:
“coyote” is a similar character, but Tada is not Coyote, or Loki.
similar in that Tada is potentially archetypal, cross cultural, universal.
Tada is the bellyflop
Tada is that lock or shock of hair that springs up or out
Tada is the first tree to turn bright brilliant red in the middle of a mountainside of trees that are all still green.
Tada is a flamboyant bow before the crowd accompanied by the sound of ripping pants.
Tada is the dive into the empty pool
but Tada is not just silly or comical, Tada is the spirit of boldness incarnate, and Goethe tells us:
Whatever you would do, begin it now. Boldness has a greatness all its own.
Tada is the one ear of corn that’s 8″ above the genetically engineered carpet-even height of the rest of the field.
Tada steals the stone from the masters hand while the master is still explaining the challenge
Tada is the running squirrel
Tada was Minnesota Fats, not Willie Mosconi
What does Tada look like?
Maybe he’s a walking jangle of letters in the shape of a person, but with swagger for sure.
Maybe he lives in a world where all the objects are composed of their spellings:
c
o
ooo
ooooo
ooooo
r ooooo r
rooooor
rooooor
rooor
N
N
N
N
Maybe he himself is made up of the letters T a d a
Maybe he walks around and his shape is defined by the limits of his never quite stopped motion.
Tada is like a jangle of springs wound too tight and occasionally Tada BOINGS into being in just the right, or sometimes just the wrong, place.
So, what I’m thinking is a series animated cartoons with this character of Tada. I see Tada all around me, every day. I can give as many scenes of Tada at his best as you can animate. We could start with one or two and just keep adding to them. The key would be for there to be as much latitude as possible in what Tada looks like, so Tada can look like anything. That’s why my original thought was a jangle of letters in a world built out of letterforms. But it doesn’t have to be that. We’d just need to capture this essence of the character of Tada in some way that would allow Tada to be recognized in a wide variety of situations. Always different, always identifiably the same. He goes “sproing”, and is slightly unkempt.
Tada is Gene Wilder’s Willie Wonka when you first see him and his cane gets stuck in the sidewalk and he falls….into a somersault.
Tada is the Emcee who pulls back the curtain with a sweepingly proud gesture to reveal the set crew still at work setting up.
Tada is a bit of Popeye and bit of Crocodile Dundee.
Tada is what it means to make a crazy wild guess and be right.
Tada knew it all along.
Andy Warhol once said: Nothing looks cooler than someone completely unafraid of looking uncool.
Tada is beginner’s luck.
Tada is irrepressible.
Tada doesn’t always win, but Tada never gives up.
The key is this Tada-ness is something we see all the time, and it’s this mix of bold, confident, foolish, often right, sometimes wrong, always enthusiastic.
This idea is for a way of more effectively responding to businesses whose practices are objectionable. Don’t simply not give them your money, which doesn’t have much effect because those businesses have little way of measuring what it is they lost, because they never know what they lost. Instead, almost give them your money, and then cancel your transaction and state explicitly your reason for canceling.
For example, instead of not shopping at a merchant’s website because the merchant has a privacy policy you don’t agree with, place a very large order, and then immediately cancel it (or, actually, these days you can just load it all in your shopping cart and then exit the website–they track abandoned carts), and tell them in an email WHY you canceled that order.
A thousand customers who didn’t walk in the door won’t register on any decision-maker’s reports. A large amount of cash money that almost got spent, and then didn’t, absolutely will show up.
This is an idea for a group blog literary journal called (in my idea) subgenre. It would be built by editors willing to provide content in their chosen narrowed range, but it would be open to a nearly unlimited set of narrowed ranges–if what the editor does puts in them contact with a steady stream of some particular kind of poem and they felt they could manage to select one for featuring every month or so, then they’d be qualified. As a starting point, consider the following: concrete poetry, visual poetry, lyric poetry, formal poetry, haiku, doggerel, digital poetry, poetry in translation, language poetry. But do not
be limited by these. The editor’s ability to provide an example a month would be sufficient to declare it a viable category.
This idea is for a web journal called (in my idea anyway) Instantiation. It would looking to publish statements of poetics, manifestos, mission statements, or even loosely structured goals for the finished pieces side-by-side with examples of poems which realize (or attempt to realize) the statements.
People Pointing Here