tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-262735412024-03-08T06:45:50.748-08:00Que saurai-je?Which began with a log of my reading during the month before my oral comprehensive (Ph.D.) exam, and now continues with excerpts from my dissertation in the months before its defense.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-52170202190295790082010-01-24T08:01:00.000-08:002010-01-24T08:01:37.687-08:00from "The Humble Listener" (in chapter 2)If spoken word is a public, communal experience, we still perceive it individually, and it is necessarily made up of private interpretive experiences. Many times I have sat, or stood, with a few other people, or in a huge crowd, as we listened quietly, or applauded loudly, as writers read, or recited from memory, their own words, or the words of others. And sometimes while I listened, not always but quite often, something peculiar has happened to me, or to my way of thinking. It has happened at events advertised as poetry readings, and also at events advertised as spoken word shows, and at poetry slams, cabaret shows, book or CD launches, lectures, sermons, panel discussions, anti-war rallies, and plenty of other events where single voices addressed a crowd. It has happened in bars, lounges, theatres, and galleries, in bookstores, malls, hotels and restaurants, in classrooms, auditoriums, libraries, churches and community centers, in apartments and lofts and suburban living rooms, in basements and on roofs, on street corners, on the lawn in parks, in tents, and once on a barge. And it has happened to me around the world, in big cities and in small towns. <br />
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What happens, when I listen to a voice addressing me as part of a crowd, is that my synapses start to spark: my mind begins to look for and draw connections, to wander in tangential directions, to churn productively. There is something about being spoken to without any expectation that I will respond—without even any necessity that I understand—that produces this lucid mental state in me. Or perhaps, when someone is speaking to me, my mind instinctively manufactures a response even if it is a non-sequitur that I keep to myself. This phenomenon—let’s call it “productive listening”—seems to me to be induced most frequently by performances of poetry, but then, my bias is that I have been studying performance poetry for some time, and it would make sense for me to become inspired while watching it. Still, I think it is a real effect, and I think I am not alone in feeling it. It is something quite different from the effect of being impressed by the work of a particular performer. David Groff, whom I quoted earlier saying that “a poem performed is no substitute for a poem read,” had this much positive to say about poetry readings in the same article: “there is undeniable power in simply having to listen to words that are measured out at a specific pace, don’t always make marketable sense, require you to sit still, summon only your ear and not your eye, and unfold, fleetingly, in the company of others.” It is hard to say whether this “power” might originate in the speech itself, or in the writing of the speech, or in the situation: perhaps simply sitting in a quiet crowd listening to any kind of white noise would have the same effect. I suspect, though, that it is a combination of the situation and the words. Groff argues, essentially, that one of the most valuable things about poetry is the intimacy of our interaction with it. This is no doubt true in some sense, but I would simply suggest that such a personal contemplative response can happen in public just as easily as in private and be inspired by performance just as easily as by text on a page.<br />
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More interestingly, the intensity of productive listening does not seem to depend on my judgment of what the voice is saying. It happens when I listen to texts that I find brilliant and fascinating, but it also happens when I listen to texts that I otherwise find banal, obtuse, confusing, boring or objectionable. Perhaps this only means that I have a short attention span and an active imagination; my intent here is not to analyze the workings of my own mind. Rather, what I want to ask is this: what exactly are the advantages in listening to performances of texts that we find appealing, and might there be benefits in listening to performances of unappealing texts? What are the differences between them? I want to weigh the value of listening to what you do not understand, what you do not enjoy, and most importantly, what cannot be easily laundered in the markets of cultural capital.<br />
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As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, for many people, at all cultural, educational, and economic levels, spoken word (and poetry readings in general, but particularly spoken word) falls squarely in the category of “unappealing.” Such anti-fans are often vocal about their dislike of spoken word, although when asked to explain it they may have a hard time. Typically, these are the words they use to describe it: Boring. Predictable. Formulaic. Cliché. Clique-y. Pretentious. Self-indulgent. Self-righteous. Unrefined. Juvenile. Hokey. Forced to attend a spoken word event, they roll their eyes, they fidget, they grit their teeth. I’m particularly fascinated by the intensity of this almost visceral reaction, and by the vehemence of aesthetic judgments generally. Is it really so painful to listen to spoken words? There is something peculiar about it, especially considering that in our daily lives we manage to put up with a constant barrage of spoken noise in the form of advertisements, announcements, sidewalk solicitations, sermons, speeches, and spiels.<br />
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It seems, in fact, that the disgust produced by hearing a bad performance far outweighs the joy produced by a good performance. This makes sense in light of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s well-known theory of taste introduced in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. “Tastes,” he writes, “are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgusts provoked by horror or visceral intolerance of the tastes of others” (56). Bourdieu describes tastes as the product of social influences: an individual’s habitus—the sum of the economic and cultural contexts in which the individual has become socialized—guides aesthetic choices within the boundaries of cultural fields. The real revelation of Bourdieu’s theory, though, is that tastes are not simply dictated by social status; they are also vital tools in our efforts to gain, maintain, and enhance social status. Rather than simply expressing natural preferences, our aesthetic judgments serve to identify us as belonging to certain status groups and not others. As he puts it, “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (6).<br />
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This concept of taste as a tool of social distinction also explains our anxiety over how our tastes are perceived. Music critic Carl Wilson has written an excellent book that undertakes a critical project similar to this one in many ways, except that his topic is a pop music icon he loathes. In Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, Wilson writes about his struggle to understand his distaste for Celine Dion, drawing on Bourdieu’s Distinction among other sources to explore the idea of individual “taste biographies” and communal “taste worlds” within the “taste universe.” He relates his discomfort with listening to Dion’s album in his thin-walled apartment, where he knows his neighbors will hear. “It’s a minor voyage of self-discovery,” he says: “it turns out that I am not so bothered by having strangers hear me have sex, compared to how embarrassed I am by having them hear me play Let’s Talk About Love over and over” (135). A poetry performance event is capable of producing a similar social anxiety, and this is particularly true of spoken word because its cultural status is so indefinite. The participant becomes interpellated into a social structure where the lines of cultural capital are indistinct and shifting, and the result may be resentment and fear – fear that one’s status might be jeopardized, or that one’s identity might be dismantled or commandeered.<br />
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Of course, this anxiety is also based on the idea that attending a particular event or listening to certain kinds of texts can be taken to signify approval. It is assumed, in other words, that a participant’s primary relationship to an aesthetic experience is evaluative judgment. Carl Wilson worries that his neighbors will assume that he is an avid fan of Celine Dion, rather than a music critic doing research for a book. Other people worry, on some level, that if they attend a spoken word event, others will assume that they are there because it’s their “thing”—they like it, and therefore it somehow defines them. However, part of the argument I’m making about spoken word is that it tends to undermine the assumption that evaluative judgment is the natural primary relationship to the performance: as I have said, spoken word de-prioritizes aesthetic judgment in favor of accessibility and diversity. <br />
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This, I think, is one of the most significant things that spoken word has to offer: by juxtaposing work of so many different styles and artists at many different levels of ability, spoken word helps to disabuse us of the notion that the only way to interact with a poem or artwork is by classifying it according to taste. I think that Bourdieu’s work accurately describes the function of taste within a socially, culturally, and economically stratified society, and it is true that “art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences” (7). However, I also think it is important to recognize that art has other powerful effects besides social classification, and that our relationships to it can be rich, multifarious, and sometimes contradictory.<br />
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I think that there is something uniquely valuable in exposure to forms that lay outside one’s usual aesthetic criteria. It is worthwhile, in other words, to hear “bad” poetry—or to hear poetry read “badly.” Is spoken word sometimes boring, cliché, pretentious, painful, absurd? Yes, it is, and the same can be said of most if not all poetry readings, because what we find to be “good” or “bad” poetry is dependent on context, on our level of engagement, and on the communities we belong to. The ability to listen productively to both appealing and unappealing texts requires a certain kind of humility, a suspension of disbelief in other people’s versions of aesthetic reality. It is somewhat analogous to John Keats’ notion of Negative Capability, “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-25664056544563024632009-12-15T14:30:00.000-08:002009-12-15T14:31:35.277-08:00from "Difficulty and Boredom" (in chapter 2)From the list of critiques commonly leveled at spoken word, I want to focus for a moment on one adjective in particular: boring. In popular culture, “boring” is usually reserved for aesthetic experiences that are relatively quiet, slow-paced, minimally stimulating and requiring persistent concentration — like the experience of reading poetry silently to oneself, for example — so it is with a degree of irony that the label is applied to spoken word, which is often loud, accelerated, short and snappy, and is always at least aloud and kinetic. Opinions may vary about whether spoken word is necessarily intended to be “entertaining,” but I think that when critics call it “boring,” they are reacting to it as failed entertainment. The implication is that the most attention-getting performative elements of spoken word — the musicality, the expressiveness, the “flash” — are in fact so cliché and so lacking in substance that they are devoid of interest for a connoisseur of language itself; hence, boring. Work that is less flashy and less eager-to-please, that requires a greater investment of concentration from its audience, is on the other hand referred to as “difficult” work, which among those same connoisseurs of language is generally used as an honorific term. It seems to me that the relationship between these two rather glib terms — boring and difficult — invites some examination.<br />
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In terms of boringness, no spoken word piece measures up to the work of Kenneth Goldsmith, the self-described “most boring writer that ever lived.” His “uncreative writing” has consisted, for example, of copying text from a newspaper (Day), transcribing his own daily utterances (Soliloquy), or describing his every movement in minute detail (Fidget). Yet in avant-garde circles a sizable contingent sees his work — with good reason, in my opinion — as some of the most <i>interesting</i> writing happening today. It is hard to imagine, furthermore, that Goldsmith would continue with his practice if he didn’t also find it interesting in some way. In his essay “Being Boring,” he draws a distinction between “boring boring,” which means doing something we don’t want to do or watching something we don’t want to watch (such as “having to endure someone’s self-indulgent poetry reading”), and “unboring boring,” which is a conceptual boredom with quite a few precedents in 20th-century art. John Cage, for example, famously had this to say about boredom: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” What this suggests, of course, is a voluntary surrender to boredom, and that is the significant difference for Goldsmith: the boring can become the unboring when we are not being forced to endure it. <br />
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The same attitude is also present in David Antin’s talk poems. While his practice of composing rambling personal stories on the spot is both innovative and daring, sooner or later his texts become boring, and he seems to anticipate this and even encourage it as an important part of his process. His stories are drawn out, constantly interrupted, and often essentially pointless: the definition of “bad” storytelling. In “The Noise of Time,” Antin says that “because what im doing is entertaining ideas not people im quite happy for people to feel free to get up and leave whenever they stop finding this entertaining and that’s how i know im a poet not an entertainer […] in my case i always imagine i should put a sign over the door that reads ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE." His declared indifference to entertaining the audience is hard to accept at face value, however. Many of his talk pieces make reference to particular people and scenes — often the same people and scenes for whom the piece was conceived — so his unique process actually makes it possible for him to tailor the “writing” to the audience, which would seem the opposite of the conceptual autonomy he wants to claim.<br />
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What makes “boring boredom” into “unboring boredom,” then, is the reader/spectator’s level of engagement; making something “unboring” simply requires that a bit more voluntary effort be expended. Another common way of saying this is that “unboring” work is more difficult. Usually, when poetry is described as “difficult,” it implies that the work is at a higher level of sophistication than the speaker can easily process; work lacking in sophistication is more likely to be called “boring.” But what the “unboring” work of Goldsmith, Cage, and Antin shows us is that even the most unsophisticated, the most semantically impoverished texts, can be transformed by a sufficient level of engagement. Kenneth Goldsmith’s uncreative writing, for example, is about as unoriginal, unsophisticated, and ungenerous to the reader as it gets; it can be considered both “boring” and “difficult.” These two terms, in other words, are not as far apart as they first seem: they are both categories of poetry that require a significant input from the reader.<br />
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Poetry is considered either boring or difficult when people don’t “get it.” Which label it receives, though, depends more on the attitude of the reader/spectator than on the inherent qualities of the text. When the speaker is engaged, the poem is “difficult”; when the speaker is not engaged, it is “boring.” Furthermore, the terms operate in opposition to one another, as tools of social distinction. Saying that a work is boring functions as a class dis-identification (“I do not belong to the cultural class that would be interested in this kind of art”); it effectively dismisses the validity of the criteria by which the work is valued in a different cultural context. Calling a work difficult, on the other hand, functions as a claim to identification and engagement, but also as a claim to cultural superiority. It says, “This kind of art can only be appreciated by the elite class to which I belong.” A poem is unlikely to be labeled “difficult” by those who actually find it difficult (they would more likely consider it “boring”); rather, the term “difficult” implies that the poem is difficult for others, those who do not enjoy the same level of cultural capital. A relational approach to criticism reveals that these two categories, like “sophisticated” and “unsophisticated,” have no empirical reality in the text; rather they are social constructs that reinforce a hierarchy of relationships to culture. <br />
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From this point of view, a criticism of spoken word as “boring” can be seen for what it is: an attempt to validate the evaluative criteria of one cultural community by invalidating those of another. My main point here is this: a spoken word performance perceived as “boring” is actually a source of unacknowledged difficulty, and the boringness may even be a form of difficulty itself, in the same sense that extreme length, arcane diction, or complicated syntax are commonly valued as forms of difficulty in traditional poetry criticism. What we call boredom is sometimes only an evasion of difficulty. Of course, literature, by nature of being composed of abstract symbols (whether letters or sounds), is inherently difficult: before we can get anything from it, we need to put in the work of deciphering the language. The only exceptions to this may be concrete poetry and sound poetry; in this sense, these avant-garde forms are the most “accessible,” least “difficult” forms of literature, although I suspect that few mainstream readers or auditors would say so. Performance implies spectacle, but when the performance is primarily text-based, it becomes a uniquely unspectacular spectacle. When we go to a reading or literary performance, on some level we anticipate difficulty; we are volunteering to be bored.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-58253410714090816152009-12-08T23:50:00.000-08:002009-12-08T23:50:33.298-08:00from "The Inevitable Question" (in chapter 1)Given all the variables involved, it is probably better to define spoken word as an activity or practice — something that one does — rather than as a class of literary product. I’d like to offer three basic criteria, which create a sort of framework for understanding spoken word, even though they are not universally applicable. The first one I have already mentioned: in spoken word, the performers are the writers. Occasionally a performer may present a text written by someone else, but this would be the rare exception to the rule. This is one indication that spoken word performers are appreciated, first and foremost, for their skill in composing words. Whether or not the text of the performance is ever written on paper, spoken word artists are primarily writers, not actors or singers. Another reason why spoken word performers don’t do more “covers” might be that spoken word events often have a cabaret atmosphere, with a relatively long list of participants, so that each performer is limited to a brief window at the microphone — typically five to fifteen minutes. With time so restricted, performers may be reluctant to spend it on the work of another writer. Furthermore, not only do spoken word artists use their own texts; they mostly perform them as their own texts: they inhabit themselves on stage — or at least, that is the effect of the performance.<br />
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The second criterion echoes my conclusions about the importance of the microphone in earlier in this chapter: spoken word is a communally interactive activity. In spoken word, there is usually a microphone for the performer to use, whether it is acoustically necessary or not, and if there is no microphone, there may be some other method of indicating that the participants will speak in turns. In most cases, the performers come from the audience when it is their turn and go back to the audience when they have finished, rather than staying in a backstage room separate from the audience, as in theatre. Furthermore, the performer nearly always addresses the audience directly, giving an introduction or some other informal speech that is ostensibly distinct from the work itself. All of these elements serve to establish that a spoken word performance is a collaboration between all the participants in the room.<br />
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If the first two criteria differentiate spoken word performers from actors, the third one differentiates them from writers who simply read their work: in spoken word, the performance is as important as the text. While a traditional reading is a performance, and I have heard it argued that any public reading of poetry should be considered spoken word, I think that these two activities demonstrate a fundamental difference in approach. Poets with more traditional (i.e. text-centric) attitudes towards performance commonly criticize spoken word by disallowing the performance as an evaluative criterion: “it may work in performance, but it doesn’t work on the page” (and therefore it’s not good poetry). From the point of view of spoken word this doesn’t make sense, since good performance is valued in itself — although most participants will agree that good writing is at least equally desirable. In a sense this last criterion presents a counterpoint to the first one: spoken word artists are not simply performers, but they are not simply writers either.<br />
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These three identifying characteristics parallel Bob Holman’s three rules for the creation of spoken word, which I heard him recite at a talk at the Banff Centre Spoken Word Program. Holman was closely involved in New York City’s initial boom in spoken word, but he seems to have concluded that, for him at least, spoken word is just another way of saying poetry, which is the object of all his energies. His rules are: 1. “Write the poem yourself.” 2. “Immediacy of our work balances the literature-longevity dynamic.” 3. “If you call it a poem, it is.” The second rule is vague but intriguing; I think what he is suggesting is that spoken word happens in the present — somewhat akin to what Nicholas Bourriaud calls “time-specific” works (after “site-specific”) — in other words, it is specific not only to the location but also to the crowd and the moment in which it happens, and this means that it has different aims and uses different tactics than literature that aspires to a long life on the page. The third rule avows an omni-directional openness in terms of form and content that could be applied to poetry or spoken word — although in the same talk, Holman also suggested a more rigorous test for identifying poems, by quoting William Carlos Williams: “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.”Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-49552218032702804352009-11-30T23:43:00.000-08:002009-12-08T23:52:07.610-08:00from "The Death of Art" (in chapter 2)...There are a number of other complex and interesting issues that arise when the long-running border dispute flares up between performance poets and (for lack of a better term) page poets. To look at a few points more closely, I want to examine a particular skirmish in the war that took place online in 2008, on the blog of the Toronto poet Paul Vermeesch. It began with a post entitled “<a href="http://paulvermeersch.blogspot.com/2008/05/rant-why-i-hate-spoken-word-poetry.html">Rant: Why I hate ‘Spoken Word’ poetry</a>,” which I will do my best to briefly summarize: spoken word performers are often, if not always, poor writers who hide the ineptness of their compositions (which Vermeesch refuses to label poetry) with exaggerated, stylized vocal performances and hand gestures; the only appreciative audience members for these performances are the performers’ friends. Spoken word, he says, “does a disservice to actual poetry by calling itself poetry.” Furthermore, he advises that “if you want to read your poem to an audience, read your poem the way it is written.” He asserts, in short, that poetry is a written art form first and foremost, and that spoken word is not poetry: “The word ‘poetry’ means something, and that ain’t it.”<br />
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At first this “Rant,” and the subsequent pages-long debate in the commentary, appears to be a conflict without any real consequence: it is possible for “poetry” to mean and be many different and contradictory things at the same time, and Vermeesch’s conception of poetry is irrelevant to your decision about what to call your own writing/performing practice. As such, Vermeesch’s chicanery is pretty obvious: he declares that his definition of poetry is objective and universal, and that (guess what) your poetry doesn’t make the grade. This unsupported declaration is not inconsequential, however. Any attempt to define poetry in exclusive terms is a fundamentally conservative gesture and usually also serves, whether consciously or not, to reinforce a hierarchy of privilege. In the comments added to the post, including Vermeesch’s responses, it gradually becomes clear that the strong feelings on both sides of the debate are motivated, at least in part, by anxiety about the prestige of the brand “poetry” — among those who would like to seize it for themselves, and those who worry that it may be diluted by newcomers. Several participants in the debate demonstrate this anxiety, which is manifested most often in the assertion that the term “poet” must be reserved for those who have paid their dues: “People should not call themselves poets if they haven’t devoted themselves to studying the craft…”; “people confuse spoken word–slam–Chuck Barris–style–Gong Show ravings with the long humble apprenticeship and sharp longing to make true art that is poetry”; “there is a history and tradition, and skilled techniques and a studied craftsmanship that today’s spoken word ignores…” <br />
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The backdrop, of course, is the lament among the page poets that the general public, and in particular spoken word audiences, “don’t really read or buy poetry books,” which is also repeated almost as a taunt by some of the pro–spoken word respondents: “It just so happens that [spoken word] is a form that is more accessible and interesting to more people than page poetry is”; “In Toronto their [sic] are 3 monthly series averaging audiences of 50-150 bodies… does that sound like any of the ‘literary’ reading series?” This is a struggle over audience share, in other words, in an audience that is small enough to begin with: much of the enmity arises because spoken word is perceived as an amateur movement in a field where even the professionals do not get much recognition. Or, as the previously quoted Connecticut poet puts it: “the appreciation of serious poetry suffers when it is forced to compete for public attention with this kind of vulgar display of second- or third-rate work.” Occasionally, what is at stake is not just attention but money: for several years there was a pitched battle at the gates of the League of Canadian Poets over whether spoken word poets who had not published books could be admitted to the organization, and allowed access to the same funding opportunities as page poets.<br />
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Anxiety about labels, and the privilege or disenfranchisement they often represent, is one source of the discomfort I mentioned earlier. To me, it is reminiscent of rhetoric used by some of the more “tolerant” opponents of gay marriage in the US: go ahead and do what you like, but just don’t call it marriage, because if that word is applied to what you do, then it will have less meaning when it is applied to what I do. (“The word ‘marriage’ means something, and that ain’t it.”) Social status only has value to the extent that it is exclusive; one couple’s declaration of marriage doesn’t really prevent another couple from enjoying their marriage, but it does lessen the power of marriage as a tool of social exclusion and status accumulation. Similarly, calling spoken word “poetry” doesn’t prevent anyone from enjoying other kinds of poetry, but to those for whom poetry is their main signifier of status, it is very frustrating.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-39879075471930240332009-11-23T15:35:00.000-08:002009-12-08T23:52:31.580-08:00from "The Talking Stick" (in chapter 1)On the evening of our first group performance [at the Banff Centre for the Arts Spoken Word Program], I noticed that Rebecca, who comes from a theatre background, was the only one among us who took a bow while people were applauding at the end of her piece. It struck me, and I pointed it out to her later: spoken word performers do not bow. For her part, she was struck by the oddness of using a microphone, when she usually didn’t use one on stage and it didn’t seem to her to be really necessary. She wanted to know: why the mic?<br />
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The use of microphones became a sort of theme during the Banff program, partly because some of the participants, notably Moe Clark, were working on electronic voice looping techniques that require not only a high level of control of one’s voice and timing, but also a familiarity with the technical capacities of the equipment. Ian Ferrier, who has considerable experience as a poet, musician, and technician-producer for Wired on Words, the spoken word label he runs, led a workshop on mic technique that covered the different kinds of mics a performer might run into and guidelines for using them. I repeat some of the salient details below because I eventually came to the conclusion that microphones are more than just equipment for spoken word performers.<br />
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A fundamental concern with recording live vocal performance is echo and background noise, which is why mics are categorized according to their pick-up pattern (basically, the range of angles at which the mic will detect sound): there are, on the one hand, unidirectional or cardioid mics, which are only sensitive to sound from one direction, as well as hypercardioid, supercardioid, and shotgun mics, which have an even narrower directionality; these are all designed to minimize ambient sound. Live vocal performances are usually recorded with directional microphones, in order to prevent crowd noise from leaking into the mix, and particularly if there are musicians on stage that might get picked up by the vocalist’s mic. One problem with using directional mics, though, is that inexperienced users tend to make mistakes that affect the sound quality in obvious ways: standing too far from the mic or too close, or speaking off-axis—that is, outside the mic’s pick-up pattern. <br />
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On the other hand there are omni-directional microphones, which pick up sound from all directions at once. They reproduce the entire sonic environment, and they are very easy for anyone to use.<br />
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Perhaps it is already obvious, from the preceding description, how the nuances of microphone technology and usage suggest a rich metaphoric language for the conceptualization of spoken word’s social significance, and in particular its status within literary culture. Any expert in the field will agree that there are a variety of methodological approaches to sound engineering and a wide variety of microphones designed to work well in different contexts. There is no one “best” technique, and the trick is to choose the right device and the right methodology for the source. However, there are certain evaluative hierarchies within the field of sonic interpretation. Cardioid mics are favored for performance because they focus attention on the sound source and exclude extraneous signals. If you are recording a professional, distinctive voice—a canonical voice, let’s say—then your goal will be to eliminate, as much as possible, the distracting contextual noise. It’s best to do this in a controlled environment, such as the recording studio; it is easier to isolate the subject in this way rather than attempt to record them in front of an audience. But suppose that you are recording an open-mike poetry reading. You can’t move it into the studio without destroying the circumstances that make the event what it is. You could set up a cardioid mic on a stand to record each poet, but many of them will be inexperienced in mic technique and you may end up with uneven levels. You won’t want to use an extremely sensitive mic, either, since you know that it will get jostled every time someone adjusts the mic stand. An omni-directional microphone, then, would seem to be the best choice. It will be accessible, since no special expertise is required, and it will pick up the sounds of the audience—the applause, the laughter, the heckling, which, after all, are a part of the experience.<br />
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The predominant mode of poetry studies for at least the last half of the twentieth century might be referred to as the cardioid approach: the study of canonical texts, isolated from the context in which they were produced. But spoken word is a form that demands an omni-directional approach. It requires moving the analytical apparatus out of the studio and into bars, theatres, and cafés, and it requires listening to voices coming from more than one direction. In fact, every voice in the room needs to be heard in the final recording, not just the ones on the stage. The omni-directional microphone is an apt emblem of spoken word for many reasons: because of the multiple vectors of spoken word’s development, its generic instability, and its potential to evolve in virtually any direction, but mostly because spoken word scenes are polyphonic in the Bakhtinian sense: every voice is distinct, but no voice is isolated. Ultimately all the voices interact and influence one other as part of the same mix.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1148255661122851802006-05-21T16:44:00.000-07:002006-05-21T16:54:21.130-07:00Day SeventeenOkay, as is pretty obvious, it's not day seventeen. But I'm smart enough to figure out the next number in the sequence, usually. How do I know I'm smart enough? Well, the exam that I've been preparing for all this time took place at 1 pm on May 17th in the thesis room at the CUNY Grad Center, and when it was all over and the dust settled and the jargon stopped flying, I had passed with distinction. So I breathed a sigh of relief and left for Canada to perform at the conundrum press 10th anniversary anthology launch and then to start teaching at Bishop's.<br /><br />I may return to this site to discuss some of the books I haven't discussed or future readings as I work toward writing my dissertation, because I find this exercise useful, and because I like continuity in certain forms.<br /><br />Onward, as R. Creeley would say. But sideways this time.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1147823122485145602006-05-16T15:07:00.000-07:002006-05-16T16:53:50.756-07:00Day SixteenJack Spicer: San Francisco Renaissance poet (along with Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan) whom I find both delightful and sometimes misguided. In his After Lorca he talks (in one of his letters to Lorca) about creating poems out of things. Not in the W. C. Williams sense ("no ideas but in things") but in a much more literal, concrete sense, a Kurt Schwitters sense of pasting newspapers and lemons together to make a poem about newspapers and lemons. This would be better, he suggests, than using words, because the only usefulness of words is to bring the real into the poem. The words cling to the real and vice versa. Other than that, words have no value. The perfect poem, he says, has an infinitely small vocabulary. <br /><br />These letters to Lorca are obviously poems in themselves, more than they are serious attempts to theorize his practice, if serious means unambiguous. But Spicer seemed to be one of those writers - a true poet, if you will - who was incapable of distinguishing much between the poetic and the theoretical. His A Textbook of Poetry his explanations are surreal and concerned with things like ghosts. In his lectures, his apparently earnest - albeit intoxicated - attempts to explain his practice continually call on esoteric forces - whether ghosts or Martians, some external force - as the inspirational factor in poetry-writing. At first I thought this was a conservative sort of mythologization, an attempt to turn writing into a kind of transcendental, inexlicable religious experience, which in practice would only reify the exalted aura of the poet. It bears a resemblance to what Creeley talks about as poetry by dictation. However, taken another way Spicer's philosophy can be seen as a determined attempt to evacuate intentionality from the writing process. This is not so different from the thoroughly post-modern and (I think) progressive aleatory practices of John Cage or Jackson Maclow, or of the Oulipo writers, and not so unrelated to the Death of the Author. It may be just Spicer's way of saying, as Derrida does, that language is never entirely in our conscious control.<br /><br />Spicer also seemed concerned that poetry be an act of communication, although he thinks this is incredibly difficult and rare. Communicating with the dead seems to be the most he consistently hopes for. In the Lorca book he dedicates every one of the poems to someone he knows. This, he explains, is to ensure that each poem will be able to find an audience of at least one person.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1147817201309852622006-05-16T14:39:00.000-07:002006-05-16T15:06:41.316-07:00Day FifteenKenneth Rexroth, American poet once referred to as the father of the Beat Generation (he rejected the label): I read a couple of his essays that clearly demonstrate how wide-ranging and encyclopedic were his knowledge and understanding of the modern world. (The story goes that he read the Encyclopaedia Britannica every year, "like a novel".) One of them, "The Making of the Counterculture" (1969), is interesting in how adamantly it rejects the conservative notion which Rexroth thought was common in the 50's, that the age of experimentation in literature and culture was over. Instead he suggested that the political and aesthetic revolutions that were happening and would happen made Modernism look modest by comparison. He said that the culture - particularly the writing - that really mattered was happening not in the academy or in bookstores but in small copied magazines and readings, and was produced by and dominated by youth culture. He could have been discussing spoken word when he said that the vital poetry of counter-cultural readings "has no life beyond the immmediate occasion." The Beats, he said (he classified only four writers as Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso) were significant not so much as literature but as social history. <br /><br />"The most significant, if not the best by older critical standards, literature in America today is to be found, not in books, or even in the established literary magazines, but in poetry readings, in mimeographed broadsides, in lyrics for rock groups, in protest songs — in direct audience relationships of the sort that prevailed at the very beginnings of literature. The art of reading and writing could vanish from memory in a night and it would not make a great difference to the poetry, or even much of the prose, of the youngest generation of poets and hearers of poetry. This is the new world of youth which so disturbs the oldies. Rightly so, it is a world they never made. In it they are strangers and afraid — totally unable, most of them, to comprehend what is happening." —from "The Making of the Counterculture"Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1147062363000069732006-05-07T19:52:00.000-07:002006-05-07T21:26:03.023-07:00Day FourteenI want to mention a few writers here who are not on my reading list but perhaps should have been. <br /><br />Bob Kaufman, one of the few African-American Beat poets and the man sometimes credited with inventing the word Beatnik, is often dismissed as a minor figure because he was supposedly a bit crazy and his poems are pretty cliche-ridden and derivative - "unselfconscious" might be a kinder and perhaps more accurate word. But my interest doesn't stem from the supposed quality of the poetry but from the role of the poet in creating the social phenomenon. (If I were only interested in excellent poetry I probably would not go to many spoken word events.) Kaufman is a much-overlooked figure, a pure jazz-poet who insisted that poetry was primarily oral, who would recite his poems from memory on the streets (and often got arrested for it), and who lived a non-conformist life more than any of the other beats. Non-conformism may not have been good for his life, of course - he was a drug addict, was sometimes without a home, got put in jail and mental institutions and was subjected to shock therapy against his will. When Kennedy was assassinated he took a vow of silence which he kept for a decade until the Vietnam war was ended - and then his first words were a poem declaimed in a coffeehouse.<br /><br />Vachel Lindsay was a white American poet at the turn of the century who had an interest in black poetry and musical forms - he claimed to have "discovered" Langston Hughes when Hughes was working in a diner - but who today is usually seen as an example of the deep-rooted racism of his day. His most famous poem, "The Congo" uses racist stereotypes to glorify African music and culture - sort of like other primitivist movements in Modernism - but it's interesting in its use of abstract sound that prefigures sound poetry. He is sometimes cited as one of the first jazz poets, and he considered himself a sort of modern troubadour, selling his poetry on the streets and insisting on the oral and folk aspects of poetry - which apparently gained him the acknowledgement of W.B. Yeats.<br /><br />William S. Burroughs was of course connected to the Beat poets by friendship / habit / aesthetic outlook, and although you could say he was a novelist rather than a poet, the techniques he used (like the cut-up and fold-in) meant that he treated words in a much more plastic way than a plot-oriented novelist. He said himself that Naked Lunch was a work that you could start on any page. He was more obsessed with language than story. And if his prose work blurs the genre boundaries with poetry, his work as a spoken word artist is a reminder that spoken word isn't specific to verse forms. He developed many of his original techniques in collaboration with Brion Gysin, whom I will perhaps mention later.<br /><br />John Giorno is a curious poet / performance figure from New York - known as, among other things, the actor/subject in Warhol's film Sleep - who has done things like the Dial-a-Poem experiments. His improvisational energy - using various artistic approaches, a cultural tactician in Michel de Certeau's sense of the word - is really important to the spirit of spoken word today I think.<br /><br />There are many others, poets and artists, whose names come up and who ultimately I may want to acknowledge in writing. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carl Dunbar, Quincy Troupe, Jim Carroll, Laurie Anderson, Miranda July, Patti Smith. Right now I'm sort of focussing on Americans, because I'm in the United States of, and because I've been trying to flesh out my understanding of writing scenes in the 20th century in this country. Other people I think it would be interesting to look at in connection with everything else on my list: Tristan Tzara, Jerzy Grotowski, Abbie Hoffman, Leonard Cohen, Filippo Marinetti, and Annie Sprinkle.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1147041653025744202006-05-07T15:20:00.000-07:002006-05-07T19:47:07.213-07:00Day ThirteenAs the 17th gets closer I'm being slowly buried in a pile of books; the one I've been spending the last few hours with is The Collected Poems of Anne Sexton. Sexton is an interesting figure; she was very well known even in her lifetime even though her poetic output was concentrated in the last 18 years of her life. She's never associated with the New York-style avant-garde partly because she lived all her life in and around Boston, and partly because she was pegged as a confessional poet in the style of Lowell and Plath. Her poetry was not that formally experimental, but it was progressive in one important way: that she pushed the boundaries of what was considered appropriate subject matter for poetry by writing about the real traumas of her life - depression, suicide, abortion. In particular she opened up the possibilities for women to write about their lives - something that seems intrinsic to the style of much spoken word today. That's not the only reason she's on my reading list, though. She was also well-known partly because of her readings - which were mostly pretty traditional poetry readings, but which showcased her apparently impressive stage presence. I don't know what to make of the occasional suggestions I've read that her physical appearance figured in her popularity. It is always mentioned, for example, that for a time she worked as a model. She was tall, slim, and striking, and had a certain gravitas in reading her work. Mentioning this could be interpreted as either a sexist objectification or an interest in the role of the aura of the performer. In any case, Sexton liked performing and for a time she even fronted a jazz-poetry ensemble. Another interesting thing about Sexton - whose work developed intellectually without the benefit of any university degree - is that for a long period she would workshop her poems with her friend and fellow poet Maxine Kumin over the telephone (she had a second line installed in her house so that they could stay on as long as they wanted). This must have had an effect on the sound of the poems and the construction of her line breaks, as the work evolved in a purely oral medium.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1146990298451258332006-05-07T00:54:00.000-07:002006-05-07T01:24:58.460-07:00Day TwelveIt's not really day twelve, of course - I've lost track and been too busy this week marking papers. A problem with this whole endeavour, with the particular lists I devised for myself, is that I find it hard to shift from the mindset required for reading theory to the mindset required for reading poetry. In a way, it is just hard to read poetry for an exam. With the prose and theory, there is something recognizable to be got, and I need go only slow enough to get it. With poetry slowness is part of the point.<br /><br />I've been trying to slow down and focus on poetry this week (hard to do when my deadline is getting nerve-wrackingly close). Some poets are easier to focus on than others, of course. I've just been perusing Donald Allen's anthology The New American Poetry, from 1960, which is a kind of who's who of American poets of a certain progressive avant-garde breed, encompassing the Beat poets, the New York School, the Black Mountain poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance, as well as others. It does not include confessional poets, many academic poets, the ones that would be seen as more traditional. It includes the inheritors of Pound and Williams, but not those of Eliot or Frost, let's say. Its appearance marked the establishment of a clear dichotomy between two competing fields of American poetry.<br /><br />So far, I find it easiest to slip into the rhythm of the Beat poets (Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti are all in there) and I find the New York School (O'Hara, Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler, Guest) witty and strangely light-hearted. Ashbery and Ginsberg were among my favourites before I embarked on this review. The parts I'm having more trouble slowing down enough for are the Black Mountain parts. Creeley is crisp and serene but still cryptic; Duncan and Dorn are a little more clear but quirky; I like some Levertov, but Olson, the granddaddy of the bunch who is the first poet in the collection, continues to seem mostly pompous and esoteric to me. I feel like given the amount of reverence shown Olson I am exposing myself as an impatient philistine by saying that. But while I sense a lot of wisdom in his writing - each line is thick with allusion and archetypes, and also thick with an overwhelming sense of grandiose life-affirming philosophy - I don't sense much ability or desire to connect or to share the comedy and pathos of human life, as it's found in the NY School. Alas, my reading list is crowded with BM poets more than anything else. One of the best things about this collection is the section of theory/poetics statements at the end. One thing that I feel like re-reading is Olson's Projective Verse essay, a massively influential document, although I don't think his theory is really of much help to me.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1146961098065137072006-05-06T16:56:00.000-07:002006-05-07T00:54:12.536-07:00Day ElevenOne of the difficulties of writing about spoken word is also one of the more interesting aspects of it as a genre: the fact that it's not obvious which artists, writers, or performers should be included. I've been focussing mainly on poets in my research, partly because many spoken word artists identify themselves as poets, and partly because it's just easy that way. But it makes sense to include theatrical traditions in the history of spoken word as well, and for me the artistic development that is most significant to spoken word is performance art. In fact I think that much of the work done by spoken word artists I know has more in common with that tradition than with poetry. But there more definitional questions arise because not all or even most performance art is text-based, so where is the word to be spoken? Also there is the issue of populist vs. "serious" work, which somehow seems to be more easily dealt with in poetry. Spalding Gray and Eric Bogosian, for example, are theatre practitioners whom I would include, and I would include a performer like Laurie Anderson, who uses speech, but other artists like Vito Acconci or Carolee Schneeman or Jenny Holzer for example fit only partially. It demonstrates, perhaps, that spoken word is not a category but a behaviour (sort of like homosexuality?) So there are many examples of performance which we might consider as spoken word under certain circumstances. Lenny Bruce should be cited, for sure, but are all stand-up comedians a part of it? Why not? Is it Bruce's subversiveness that is important? There is also the entire category of the rock-star spoken word artist, like Lydia Lunch, or Henry Rollins, whose approach is so different from the "seriousness" of performance art - his approach is quite serious too, but aimed at a different audience.<br /><br />All of this is a preface to mentioning Karen Finley, whose book, A Different Kind of Intimacy, I've just been reading. The thing that makes Karen Finley's work related to what we normally see as spoken word is not that she writes and uses spoken text in her performances, but that there is an identification between her work and herself as the artist figure, which separates it from traditional theatre. Finley doesn't always speak autobiographically (although she uses autobiographical elements), and she certainly plays characters, but at a Karen Finley performance it is still Karen Finley on the stage. At the same time, her career is an interesting example of the blurriness of serious art performance and entertainment. She says in her book that early in her career she took what she did very seriously and had not much of a sense of humour about it - especially when it came to defending her work against censorship. Later on, it's not that she doesn't take it seriously anymore, but she starts to see that it was always a form of entertainment as well - that is, she realizes that her "fuck you" to the audience was also a kind of seduction. She goes from insisting that if she takes off her clothes and pours chocolate all over herself, that shouldn't be construed as sexual, to making erotic performance central to her work. One of my favourite parts of her book and her career is her piece that parodies the entire saga of going to the Supreme Court to challenge the NEA's revocation of her grant under pressure from conservative politicians like Jesse Helms. She portrays the conflict as a long abusive relationship based on Helms' sexual harassment of her - coming to grips in the process with her own complicity in the abuse. I think an awareness of the reciprocal attraction of performer and audience, and of the implications of that for the art as entertainment, is an important insight to be gained from performance artists, something that poets often overlook.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1146380544885672412006-04-29T22:05:00.000-07:002006-04-30T00:02:24.920-07:00Day TenI've been trying to consolidate what I know about performance theory this week, and I've found Marvin Carlson's Performance: A Critical Introduction provides a good overview, in particular in its comparison of the influences of anthropology (via people like Victor Turner), sociology (Erving Goffman), and linguistics (speech-act theory) on what came to be performance theory. Many of the theorists involved can't easily be pegged in one category, of course, which indicates how intertwined these theories are. Also important are various writings by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (especially his concepts of the utterance and the carnivalesque), cultural historian Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), anthropologists Clifford Geertz and Richard Bauman, literary theorists Kenneth Burke and Umberto Eco and Shoshana Felman and Mary Louise Pratt, reader-response theorist Stanley Fish, psychoanalysts J.L. Moreno and Eric Berne, Jesuit scholar Michel de Certeau (whom I will discuss later), philosopher Jacques Derrida, and of course Richard Schechner, who might be considered the father of contemporary performance studies, not to mention a whole range of theatrical theorists such as Artaud or Brecht. Carlson, by the way, is in the Comp. Lit. department at the Grad Center. It's all rather a lot to try to keep straight, so while I want to have a basic grasp of each of these theorists, I'm going to focus more on some of the issues brought up by their disagreements. <br /><br />As a side note, Carlson also illuminated for me one of the sources of the basic confusion of performance and performativity and the wide range of meanings and uses of these terms (as pointed out by Sedgwick, for example), which lies in the different fundamental meanings of the verb "perform": first, in the sense of a theatrical performance, a citational utterance, or a "restored beahviour" as Schechner calls it — to perform like an actor — and second, in the broader sense of an act that accomplishes something, such as when we say a car performs well on the highway. While performance theory focusses on the first meaning, speech-act theory is really about the second: how language performs (succeeds) or not. The trick, though, is that on re-examining speech-act theory (which Austin supposedly wanted to exclude the theatrical kind of performance) with a poststructuralist understanding of meaning, we see that in language the performative is always infected by performance. The theory of gender performance, which could be seen as combining the two meanings, developed out of the same understanding.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1146028656836454442006-04-25T21:00:00.000-07:002006-04-25T22:17:36.846-07:00Day NineFor the rest of this week, in between my dabblings in various poets including John Cage and Eileen Myles and Robert Creeley and etc., and readings of Dada texts from Robert Motherwell's Dada anthology which I finally got my hands on today, I will be mostly focussing on theories of orality and literacy. This means writers such as Eric Havelock, Walter J. Ong, Jack Goody, Gregory Nagy, and Paul Zumthor. I've read all of them before: I had a great class in my first year here with Catherine MacKenna, focussing on this topic. But I need a refresher course.<br /><br />Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word is probably one of the best known and most influential books in this field; it came out in 1982 and gives a sort of overview of the development in the 20th century of the received understanding of the differences between orality (that is, purely oral culture) and literacy (culture affected by writing). Ong makes it clear that he thinks the study of language over the last few centuries has had a prejudice against oral culture: written literature has been taken seriously by scholars while oral art forms have been seen as not worth the trouble. He suggests that this is part of a long-standing trend instigated by the historical switch from oral culture to literate culture and the effects that the switch had and has on the way we think. Once a society is literate, it can no longer think in terms of orality, he says, and therefore literate communication takes precedence. This is not what his book is mainly about, but it is the fundamental premise of the book. It's interesting to apply this to the neglect of performed poetry in literary studies, of course: the fact that the kind of work I'm doing - seriously studying spoken word - is a bit of an anomaly in an English department. The very term literary studies excludes that kind of work. Ong sets out to rectify this state of affairs, and starts by insisting not just that oral culture is worth study, but that oral culture is primary and therefore more fundamental to humanity than written culture. He wants us to return to our oral roots, in essence.<br /><br />If the idea of orality being "primary" or fundamental sounds a little vague it's because Ong is dangerously unclear about what he means by this, aside from the fact that historically spoken language precedes written language. It seems to be an article of faith for him that in losing touch with oral culture we lost something that we should be trying to regain. Ong's ideas resonate strongly with Marshall McLuhan's (who was Ong's teacher at one point in St.Louis), in the sense that both think of the evolution of communication in a fairly strict diachronic way: first, we made noises and gestures. Then we spoke. Then we drew pictures. Then we wrote. Then we had print. Then we had radio, then television, and now other kinds of electronic communication which have engendered a "secondary orality". And in each transition, while we gained many abilities, we also lost certain capacities for thought. In Mcluhan it makes a lot of sense for me, I think because he is not overtly judgmental about the changes. Ong, though, is sort of chauvinistic about orality, characterizing it almost as the victim of literate culture. In his introduction to Zumthor's book, he even uses words like "magical" and "sacred" in talking about the power of using the human voice. This reminds me of certain strains of spoken word where the performer acts like some kind of fiery shaman empowered by the very use of his or her voice.<br /><br />It's really interesting to read this theory, then, in parallel with Derrida's ideas in Limited inc. (and in Of Grammatology as well), where the perceived bias against spoken language is inverted: Derrida's concept of logocentrism is based on phonocentrism, the idea that spoken language is given preferential treatment as a form of communication closer to the true intentions of the sender. Writing therefore is relegated to the status of a parasitic imitation of speech. Of course, Derrida goes on to say that writing can not be expected to convey meaning transparently but neither can speech; both are susceptible to - in fact inevitably characterized by - a disconnect between thought and communicated meaning. Neither is purely representational. It would seem that Ong and Derrida are saying opposite things, but in his book Ong addresses Derrida (along with what he calls the "textualists" - structuralists and post-structuralists, who he says are obsessed with textuality) and manages to suggest that they are actually in agreement, although Derrida doesn't go far enough in his historical analysis. Where does logocentrism come from in the first place? he asks, and then answers his own question: it's a product of literate culture and the thought processes it creates. Ong is glad for Derrida's theory because he says it shows how writing is not speech. I can't help feeling that Ong has seriously missed the point in some of his analysis of Derrida; he seems to suggest that Derrida is basically just saying what McLuhan said - "The medium is the message." McLuhan seems to be Ong's prescription for everything. <br /><br />I find Ong's writing extremely interesting, and his basic idea that orality and literacy promote different kinds of thought is a valuable one. But at the same time I feel that his project is fundamentally conservative. By claiming that literacy has become dominant over orality he is at the same time asserting the (unacknowledged) primacy of speech, and in the very ways that Derrida would identify as logocentric: speech as voice, speech as presence.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1145948438796019682006-04-24T23:43:00.000-07:002006-04-25T00:00:38.803-07:00Day EightWhen my advisor Wayne Koestenbaum suggested that I should add some texts by John Cage to my lists, I reflexively came up with some sort of excuse for why I hadn't in the first place - I had thought about him, of course - he was influential on so many of the poets I'm reading. But I suppose I thought of him foremost as a composer, and that's what I told Wayne: I was trying to stick to poets. Of course, John Cage wrote poetry, so I have to admit he was a poet. So I ordered A Year From Monday and today it came in the mail, a paperback edition from 1969 containing poetry and essays that are hard to tell apart. I am convinced, Wayne. I haven't read all of it yet, but I want to: some of it collage of text from various sources, some of it beautifully surreal prose poems, some of it "diaries" of random eloquent thoughts, some hand-written notes. In the introduction he announces that he is basically done being a composer, which after all simply involves telling other people what to do. Now he is more interested in improving the world. One of my favourites bits, though, is the dedication, which reads: "To us and all those who hate us, that the U.S.A. may become just another part of the world, no more, no less."Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1145947299540158242006-04-24T22:59:00.000-07:002006-04-24T23:41:39.550-07:00Day SevenToday I read I Never Knew What Time It Was by David Antin, a collection of his talk pieces. Like Jackson MacLow with whom he was friends (it seems like he was friends with everyone), David Antin is another poet from the 60s and beyond whom I saw speaking before I realized who he was exactly or what he did. I saw him at a memorial event for Kathy Acker at NYU a few years ago - he was also a good friend of Kathy Acker. At the event, he did what he has become known for: he talked. His pieces are not planned, but neither are they improvised; they are quite obviously distinct from MacLow or Cage's non-intentional writing - they are more like hyper-intentional writing, in that he can evidently be swayed in his intentions during the actual performance. Intentions may crop up that he didn't realize were there. One way to describe what he does is as an attempt to dramatize the actual process through which writing becomes imbued with significance. Aside from that one time I saw him speak when I didn't realize that what he was doing was what he always does, I haven't seen him perform. But I imagine that as you watch him speak, knowing that he is speaking extemporaneously, you imagine that in his head is going on something very similar to what is going on in your head: the process of words igniting ideas that weren't there before. It demonstrates how similar the process of writing is to reading, and speaking to talking. Antin had a great idea - or rather he had a certain sort of chutzpah - that I'm quite jealous of: he realized that performance (ie. speaking to an audience) is one of the best compositional states of being, and hewasn't afraid to use it that way. I see this when I'm teaching, when I walk into class not knowing what I'm going to say about a certain text, and leave wishing that I had brought a tape recorder.<br /><br />Antin does take a tape recorder along when he does a talk piece, and later he transcribes the pieces (maybe this is not a standard practice for him, I don't know), adding to them and editing a bit as he sees fit, although he says that the original performance is essentially respected. Some of these transcripts make up the book. He tells stories for the most part, although one story will run unannounced into another story, and there may be only a quirkily tangential relationship of the story to the subject of the talk. One of my favourites is titled "The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism," but it's really a rather drawn-out story about buying a mattress. Or, in a story about time he will talk about his son trying to hire a prostitute for an elderly poet friend and ultimately failing to find anyone who is willing to listen to poetry for money. Some of these stories are surprisingly sentimental, but they are presented in such a nonchalant way that there is at the same time a rather detached, critical flavour to them. I should correct myself when I say "story" and say "narrative" instead because in one piece Antin draws his own distinction between these two: stories have a plot, like what you read in a newspaper, but narratives are really about desire and may not actually have much of a plot. His pieces may be made up of stories, but they are really narratives.<br /><br />The other thing that sort of fascinates me about Antin's texts is that even though I enjoy his style and I was excited by the practice, in reading them I actually got bored sooner or later - this wouldn't be remarkable in itself, except that Antin seems to anticipate this and even encourage it as an essential part of his process. The stories are drawn out, get interrupted, and often seem to have no point: a catalogue of characteristics of a bad storyteller, in fact. But Antin says this is because he is entertaining ideas (in the sense of nurturing them), not entertaining people. I am both impressed by and skeptical of this resistance to entertaining the audience, and I'm not sure I accept his claim at face value. He says: "im quite happy for people to feel free to get up and leave whenever they stop finding this entertaining and thats how i know im a poet and not an entertainer" And then later: "in my case i always imagine i should put a sign over the door that says ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE." And yet because so many of his talk pieces address the art world or make reference to particular people and scenes and practices, it seems clear that his unique process makes it possible for him to tailor the "writing" to the audience. Which would seem the opposite of the conceptual autonomy he wants to claim for himself in saying that he doesn't entertain.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1145774840225378682006-04-22T22:31:00.000-07:002006-04-22T23:47:20.263-07:00Day SixThe Nuyorican Poets Cafe is one of the most amazing poetry phenomena of the late 20th century: amazing because it made poetry cool and current in a way that even the Beat poets didn't (wouldn't?). Not all alone of course - the Nuyorican was and is a symbol of a larger movement that included strange bedfellows such as MTV and made the performance of poems not just accessible but popular. There have always been high and low culture elements in poetry, of course, but this movement created a unique blurring of the registers, a move that has been both celebrated and criticized. The poetry slam, which originated at the Green Mill in Chicago as the well-worn story goes, found its New York home at the Nuyorican, where it's still going strong. The Cafe was originally founded by Miguel Algarin and a circle of other poets around 1973, beginning in Algarin's living room, and survived in a few locales including the present one until 1982, when it was shut down. Algarin, in his introduction to Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (co-edited by him and Bob Holman), which I spent some of tonight reading through, says that when one of his co-founders Miguel "Miky" Pinero died in 1988 and his ashes were scattered across the Lower East Side in a rowdy poetic procession, he knew it was time to reopen the Cafe. It had always been a place for community - especially the community of Nuyoricans (New York-born Puerto Ricans) - but in the 90's it became something extraordinary, a place that would inspire a wide cross-section of young poets to speak their writing aloud, and that would in the process upset the mainstream paradigm of a dominant white culture and an alternative black culture, replacing it with a more accurate picture of the demographic of the city encompassing mixed cultures: a living subversion of the concept of race. <br /><br />I visited the Cafe for the first time in something like 1994, on my first ever visit to New York City, and I remember being surprised - I sheepishly confess this now, on behalf of my 22-year-old self who had so little urban experience - at how different what I saw was from what I suppose I expected from poetry performance in a literary capital like New York. Maybe I was expecting some kind of modernized beatnik scene, but what happened was more Latino and more African-American, more influenced by rap, more inflected with Spanish, but also blending all traditions of poetry and performance from troubadours to sonnets to sound poetry - a scene that was intensely aware of its roots in history and in the community. It was also more bluntly political and angrier, more direct, funnier sometimes, less stylish. If you attend the long-running Friday night slam now, you'll see it still attracts a diverse range of people and poets, although the subject matter and styles that come up are usually within a fairly narrow range. Perhaps because the problems that people find most important to write about don't change that much, and the mode of expression - suggestive wit, sardonic indignation - is the one that presents itself most obviously or works most quickly. In the anthology there are some talented poets, and many whom I've seen perform in various places and who have developed reputations that stretch well beyond the Nuyorican or the National Slam or wherever they made their names: Regie Cabico, Maggie Estep, Reg E. Gaines, Tracie Morris, Willie Perdomo, Edwin Torres, Wanda Coleman, Sapphire, Patricia Smith, Emily XYZ, Ntozake Shange, Nicole Blackman, and Eileen Myles, to name just a few of the most well-known, whose careers have gone in as many different directions. But the really interesting thing about this book is how it reverently reproduces the democratic immediacy of the Nuyorican open room: it includes MTV and Broadway stars as well as poets with serious academic reputations along with the steadfast personalities of the community, the absolutely local celebrities, along with some of those who were just passing through and got on the mike one night after a few beers. The Nuyorican became internationally famous as a poetry venue, but what happens there remains a local phenomenon, the community in discussion with itself.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1145650359044818432006-04-21T12:31:00.000-07:002006-04-21T13:12:39.100-07:00Day FiveToday I received in the mail the CD Kenneth Patchen Reads With Jazz in Canada, so I put it on and continued my immersion in the Beats. I had heard these tracks before - my friend Patchen, who was named after the poet, used to have an LP of Patchen's jazz poems. Released in 1959, this recording is widely considered one of the earliest records of jazz poetry - something Patchen had been doing live for a couple of years already, predating performance efforts by the other Beat poets. Kenneth Patchen's popular appeal hasn't had the longevity of Kerouac's or Ginsberg's or Ferlinghetti's (I've heard Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) described as the best-selling book in contemporary poetry, or sometimes as the best-selling book by a living poet. Of course, Ferlinghetti has outlived most of the other Beats.) He was an influential and well-known poet in his lifetime, but he had a Blakean (Patchen sometimes illustrated his own books), out-of-time, world-of-his-own quality that ensured that he never had much of a reputation in academic circles. His career is reminiscent of the status of spoken word today, actually: often political, often schlocky, not taken seriously by some, inspiring to others. He died the year I was born.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1145516713382719542006-04-19T22:37:00.000-07:002006-04-20T00:05:13.406-07:00Day FourToday had limited time for reading, but the project was to immerse myself in the Beats. I didn't do this in a subtle way: I spent the afternoon with Ginsberg's Howl and Kaddish, and flipping through Kerouac's On the Road. I also read bits of a memoir called Minor Characters by the novelist Joyce Johnson, who was living with Kerouac when On the Road came out. The objectification of, the need for mastery over, women surfaces again and again in Kerouac's writing, but as my friend Vince pointed out to me in discussing these texts, it's too easy to say that the Beats (I slipped and typed Beast) were all about virility—Kerouac struggles with it; it seems that Johnson, who would be in a position to know, also thinks it's too simple a take. When I get a copy of Diane Di Prima's memoir I'll return to this.<br /><br />Also, tonight I started reading Irving Goffman's The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, the classic 1956 work of sociology that tried to look at people's social interactions in terms of performance, using a theatrical metaphor. I wasn't sure that this book would be useful to me at all, but it's quite interesting to read in tandem with How to do Things with Words; it's a sort of theory of performatives expanded to encompass all social behaviour. Interestingly, it is structurally so similar to Austin's theories that it is open to the same critiques that Derrida had for Austin. Goffman relies, not surprisingly, on the same notions of communication as coherent expression of stable feelings and ideas (which can be counterfeited, of course, but the idea of counterfeit expression simply confirms that there is a "true" or original form to whatever is being expressed). He is also is careful to explicitly preserve the hierarchical distinction between performance as it happens in the theatre, and performance in real life. But his text is significant in that it creates the beginnings (if only metaphorical) of a blurring between theatre pure and simple and the ways people perform their lives, their rituals: a new way of thinking "performance" which would eventually develop into performance studies.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1145428091363854202006-04-18T22:30:00.000-07:002006-04-18T23:28:13.360-07:00Day ThreePoets House is a great and somewhat astonishing institution located in Soho. It has various aims, but most of all it's a repository of poetry, and a quiet place where anyone can go and read poetry, surrounded by poetry. Their collection is immense, very America-centric, but that's to be expected and useful for me in any case because my reading list #1 is largely made up of the American poets I felt I should become more familiar with. So spending lots of days there has been a part of my exam-prep plan. It has the added advantage that my Australian poet friend Tim works there so we can step out for a coffee now and then.<br /><br />Today, though, was a bit of a reading disapointment. For various reasons I left the apartment late, and didn't get to PH until around 4, and upon arrival was saddened to discover that they are currently displaying a showcase of new books in the reading room, making it impossible to access the stacks to find the old books. Most of the poets I wanted to browse - Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Frank O'Hara, Amiri Baraka, Jerome Rothenberg, Anne Sexton, Charles Bernstein, Langston Hughes, etc. - were inaccessible, and I'm told will remain inaccessible for another couple of weeks. So I guess I'm back to hunting for things in libraries until then.<br /><br />One book I had wanted to find was available because it is a new book (2005), and I spent two hours reading it until I was kicked out for an event. It's quite a treasure in itself: Jackson Mac Low's Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces, a big collection of his works from the 50s right up until his death in 2004, that comes with a CD. Mac Low was an original and influential NYC poet/artist/performer (he effectively blurred the distinctions) who was best known for pioneering "non-intentional" writing, using various aleatory techniques in order to empty the influence of the ego from the compositional process. He did this in a way that no one had done it before (notwithstanding the activities of the Dada poets, for example), but he was influenced by John Cage and actually studied with Cage for a time. His writings often came in two forms: concrete word collage or chaotic sound performance, and it was not necessarily clear if the collage was a score for the performance or if the performance was an interpretation of the collage: neither the oral nor the visual were privileged.<br /><br />I managed to meet Mac Low before he died, briefly, one Saturday afternoon in 2002 I think it was, shortly after I moved to New York, when I saw him perform at the Bowery Poetry Club. At the time I had heard of him, but it was without realizing what an innovative and interesting figure he was. My gradually increasing awareness of the New York poetry scene(s) has produced numerous experiences like that for me: the generation of poets discussed in All Poets Welcome, including some very influential writers, are dying off just as I get to know them. Kenneth Koch, one of the original New York School poets, died the month before I moved here, and Larry Rivers, the pop artist who collaborated with Frank O'Hara and other New York poets, died shortly after. Barbara Guest died just two months ago, which leaves John Ashbery as the only main "1st generation" NY school poet still living. Robert Creeley died last spring, and I attended the memorial reading held for him at St.Mark's Poetry Project, where I had also seen him read before he died. He had an amazingly distinctive voice, and although I wouldn't say his poetry affected me deeply, I can still clearly hear his voice in my head. And of course every time I go to teach a class at Brooklyn College I am reminded that it wasn't very long ago that Allen Ginsberg was riling up students in the same classrooms. I seem to be vulnerable to the postmodern (or is it universal?) suspicion of having been born too late. At the same time, although this sounds like a horrible thing to say, perhaps it is just as well that these formidable figures have passed from the world. It creates space for newness.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1145347030808988202006-04-17T22:05:00.000-07:002006-04-18T01:04:05.166-07:00Day TwoOne of the ways to get easily confused when jumping into the kind of theory represented on my third list has to do with the multiple uses of the term "performativity." I've already mentioned the performative utterance in speech act theory; that use of performative does not on the surface correspond to a study of performance in the traditional sense of theatrical art—and in fact Austin deliberately excludes theatre from his study of the performative. But in addition to Austin's use, the word has accumulated other theoretical uses as well as considerable cachet. There is the deconstructive use of the word (Derrida's critique of speech act theory and contributions by Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, for example) which lays the groundwork for the popular way Judith Butler used the word in Gender Trouble to explain the construction of gender (the performance of gender relies on iterability just as Derrida says speech acts do). And then there is its centrality to the ever-expanding field of performance studies, which, also inspired by iterability, has taken up ritual and ceremony and everyday performance of all types in addition to the traditionally theatrical. So all these theoretical projects—speech act theory, deconstruction, queer theory, performance studies—make use of the word, but not necessarily in the same way. What does any of it have to do with getting on a stage and performing a poem, for example? It seems that around the word "performativity" there has developed what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls a "carnivalesque echolalia of extraordinarily productive cross-purposes."<br /><br />That phrase, so apt and so exquisite, is an example of why Eve Sedgwick is one of my favourite writers. It comes from the introduction to a book she co-edited with Andrew Parker, published in 1995, Performativity and Performance. Some of the essays in the book approach Austinian theory directly; some of them are more affiliated with the broad scope of performance studies and talk about theatre, performance art, or AIDS epidemiology; they include an essay by Judith Butler that I will come back to later; the introduction, though, gives a sparkling clear outline of some of the connections between those various uses of the word, and what we are to do with it in the real world. At the end of the intro (which is co-authored by Parker and Sedgwick, but which I can't help reading as Sedgwick's voice because of its inimitable style and diction, because it reminds me of Epistemology of the Closet, because I know Eve Sedgwick (she teaches at the Grad Center) and because it deploys words like "wussitude" and "nonce"), it is pointed out that perhaps even more interesting than the over-worked epistemological questions related to speech acts (how can we really know intentions, truths, or identities?) are the more practical concerns of how we can actually do things with words. <br /><br />Sedgwick also emphasizes that Austin's original efforts to exclude or even stigmatize the theatrical and fictional are tellingly overdetermined: not only does he call them "parasitic" uses of language, they are also "ill" and "etiolated" (unnaturally pale, sickly, weak). This resonates with de Man's characterization of the performative as "aberrant". It is enough for Sedgwick to suggest a few other adjectives: abnormal, effete, perverse, to drive home that performance may always in one way be queer performance. Another interesting thing she does is to suggest the rich possibilities available in discussing the agents involved in any performative speech act: not just the speaker and the addressee but the interpellated witnesses. She examines, for instance, how Austin's most re-iterated example — that of the utterance "I do" at a wedding — necessarily implicates not just the bride and the groom and the minister but the entire audience as well — and therefore has a forcibly normative function.<br /><br />There's more to come on speech act theory, and much more to come on performance theory: I want to mention J. Hillis Miller's Speech Acts in Literature, which is much clearer and more engaging than I expected for some reason and which synthesizes some of these issues; Benjamin Lee's book also gives an overview and talks more about the linguistic side of the debate; and next up I plan to talk about Judith Butler's Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Later I will get into the theorists of performance studies: Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Peggy Phelan, and so on. Tomorrow, though, I plan to spend the day at Poet's House in SoHo, taking a break from theory and just reading poetry.Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26273541.post-1145243876144058382006-04-17T00:48:00.000-07:002006-04-16T21:50:58.483-07:00Day OneThis marks the beginning of an exercise in book-logging which I intend to pursue between today (April 17th) and one month from now (May 17th), which is the date of my much-anticipated, anxiety-inducing Second Comprehensive Exam ("the orals"). It is the final hurdle I face before my advancement to doctoral candidacy (if you don't count my dissertation prospectus, or that grade of incomplete that I have to get cleared up before June). It is a "fields" exam, meaning that it is meant to establish my expertise in certain subject(s), my familiarity with the landmark books in the domain(s) that I intend to make my scholarly bailiwick. There are one hundred and eighteen books (more or less) on the three lists I have established in collaboration with the three professors who make up my examination committee (they are, for the record, Ammiel Alcalay, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Steven Kruger). Of course, my plan is not to read all of those books in the next thirty days: most of them I have already read. This last month, though, will be an intense period of reading, re-reading, making notes, and rehearsing arguments, and this blog is meant to help me be systematic in doing that. In addition, it may ultimately be a help to me in deciding which of these texts will be of the greatest help to me in the next step: writing my dissertation. On May 17th, in the Thesis Room at the English Department at the Grad Center in midtown Manhattan, I will sit in front of my committee and talk about these books and answer questions for two hours. When it is all over I will have either passed or failed, but without question I will have a better understanding of these fields. What will I know? Or, if this were a pocket-sized French reference book, Que Saurai-Je?<br /><br />The three lists are titled: 1. Poets who perform (from the Beats to the Present), 2. Poetry Communities and Contexts, and 3. Performance, Performativity, Speech Acts, and Related Theory. The titles are to varying degrees inaccurate, but they're only meant as rough labels. If you want to see the entire list, you can peek at it <a href="https://wfs.gc.cuny.edu/CFrost/www/OralsLists.pdf">here</a>.<br /><br />So, in the last week I've been going over speech act theory and the various reactions and objections to it. This is a branch of ordinary language philosophy which was quite hot in the 60's, and which continues to some degree to be significant, especially to performance theory, because of its central endeavour: trying to establish what a "performative" utterance might be. That is, which kinds of speech acts make things happen simply by saying them? What is it, more generally, that speech acts do? Do they declare, describe, persuade, judge, confess, create? And what is the difference between these actions? They are what would be described as illocutionary acts by J.L. Austin, whose lectures entitled How to Do Things With Words are the foundational text of Speech Act theory. He gave the lectures in 1955, and they are actually very funny to read, mostly because they utterly fail to do what they set out to do: define performative utterances. He initially differentiates between performative and constative utterances - the latter state something that is true or false, while the former make something happen (successfully or not), such as when the bride says "I do" at a wedding, or when a judge says "I sentence you to one month of literary theory." This distinction, though, barely survives the first few chapters. The reasons that it turns out to be so hard to do it are complex and illuminating, and have formed the basis of a lot of theoretical exchange since then. <br /><br />John Searle is a philosopher who established his reputation by taking up where Austin left off (Austin died young) and taking speech act theory to what seem to be ridiculous extremes of distinction-tweezing, ridiculous because he attempts to handle "natural" language - how we speak everyday - with rigorous rules of taxonomy which necessitate outlandish simplifications. He says, for instance, that fictional language is a completely different species from "serious" language, and basically the difference is that in fiction one is only "pretending" to commit speech acts. No one need take them seriously. Even I can intuitively understand that it's not that simple. This turns out to be a very significant part of the debate, because Austin self-consciously - almost anxiously - excludes fictional language from his study, calling it "parasitic" on ordinary language. A lot of people since have found this rather curious and perturbing, including Jacques Derrida. <br /><br />In "Signature Event Context", Derrida critiques Austin's theory on several levels, saying for one thing that it's crazy to subordinate fictional language to "serious" language, or to try to demarcate "use" and "mention". He says that it may be true that speech on stage or in a poem is a "citation" of other utterances, but he points out that citation is essential to the utterances Austin would call "ordinary" as well. Utterances are always an impure repetition of other utterances; language does not work without what he calls "iterability." Taking this point even further (although this comes first in his essay), Derrida also finds fault with the idea that writing can be set aside in this discussion based on the assumption that it comes "after" speech. Writing is based on the potential absence of the sender or the receiver, which in the classical view makes it different from speech, which relies on the presence of both. This is misguided, says J.D. Speech too can only work if is it iterable, capable of being repeated. Even in the absence of the speaker. Therefore speech and writing are fundamentally similar in this way; they are both "graphemic." This is of course one of Derrida's big ideas, one of the ways he attacks the classical philosophical reliance on a "metaphysics of presence."<br /><br />Searle rather clumsily attacked Derrida's critique - his response is clumsy because he insists on sticking to the very same classical assumptions that Derrida is questioning. It is as though Derrida said, "you know, speech is perhaps not quite as simple as you speaking your thoughts and me interpreting your intentions. perhaps we are not as in control of language as we would like to think," and Searle responded with, "don't be silly. of course it is that simple." Derrida's rejoinder, though, an essay called "Limited Inc.," is brilliant and illuminating but petulant in its own, haughtily continental way, as it basically pokes fun at Searle and Anglo-American philosophy for a hundred pages or so.<br /><br />All of this is relevant to my project - spoken word - for several reasons, the chief being that the questions of "serious" vs. fictional language and citationality are crucial to understanding what goes on at spoken word events. When someone performs a spoken word piece, are they actually committing speech acts, or simply pretending to? Is the performer really talking to the audience, or simply reciting a previous utterance in quotations? And importantly, is it a performative utterance?Does it do anything?<br /><br />Today I've also been reading Daniel Kane's All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s, which is both a great way to learn about the various poets of the multiple schools involved in that scene (the Beats, the New York Schools, the Black Mountain school, the "Deep Image" poets, etc.), and a superb illustration of how poetry communities come into being, which involves everything from real estate trends to fashion to philosophy, everything from sexism, racism and homophobia to petty jealousy and mistrust, and everything from fervent dedication to inspired idiocy. Today, it seems like the kind of community which apparently existed on the L.E.S. in the 1960's is hard to come by. If artists and writers colonize a neighbourhood like those poets colonized the East Village, they most likely aren't seen as revolutionary bohemians but as the bourgeois outriders of gentrification. And no one really believes anymore in the alternative-academic distinction that was the driving force behind so much of the innovation of that time. Simple social subversiveness doesn't have the same credibility either. Getting high and sleeping around will usually get you labelled an asshole, not a poet. Of course, today poetry communities find themselves on the internet, editing online journals and writing blogs. Which is both better and worse, I think. Efficient, but lonely somehow.<br /><br />Tomorrow: maybe some J. Hillis Miller, maybe some Judy Butler. Eve Sedgwick? Perfomativity? Or maybe I do my taxes?Corey Frosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15027993447189156924noreply@blogger.com0