Protosemiosis"The spaces, called 'womb rooms' by some researchers, are predicated on the obvious notion that the best place for a premature baby would be the exquisitely complex environment where, in the last three months of gestation, the neural connections in the baby's brain grow exponentially as it curls up in amniotic fluid, listening to the mother's heartbeat, breathing, intestinal gurgling and pitch of her voice" (from Christine Hauser's article in the 29 May 2007 Science Times). XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 19 June 2007 — permalink |
We to be. Once.Elisabeth Shimana & Ludwig Zeininger - "To Be" (5'19") from Patriarchal Poetry / Dance for Daisies: Eine Revue für Gertrude (2001). From the project note: "A software-synthesizer was driven by data gained through frequency- and amplitude-analysis of these passages [from Gertrude Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry"] read aloud, only small portions of which are audible in the final mix, thus forming what could be perceived of as the revue's formal backdrop, it's imaginary rhythm track. And from time to time patriarchal poetry becomes audible." • The "textscore" is here. • And a less beat-driven section, "Let it be," is here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 9 June 2007 — permalink |
So Much for that HotnessEileen Myles - Dear Andrea (3'03"; recorded 10 February 2007 at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the Queering Language group reading). The beloved chatters away, sometimes to her ex-lover, Andrea, a rival to the poet, Eileen, who listens and transcribes. This goes on for some time. Flash forward: the poet, Eileen, reads her sequence of poems, now titled "Dear Andrea," to an animated, interactive audience in New York. The beloved has become "a certain girlfriend of mine" (placing Eileen in the "ex-" slot). Words first lingered over in loving detail take on a different flavor. • The performance is bracketed by applause, a first burst after the exaggerated announcement of the name Eileen Myles, a closing burst following the quietly offered "thanks" by which the poet signals she's through. The performer-audience barrier is weak at this twenty-plus person group reading. Myles, taking the stage about fifty minutes into the event, leads with some teasing remarks to the crowd: "It's so great to be gay, right? It's like über poetry, gay poetry. It's like, a hot little room in poetry, where all the freaks are." A female voice from the crowd can be heard echoing the word "hot," and a second voice, with a tattle-tale lilt, announces "Emily thinks Eileen is hot." The pause is as short as the retort is immodest: "So does everybody." The audience response, registering the arrogance of the claim, drives her to a self-deprecating retraction: "So much for that hotness." The poems are brief, twenty-five to thirty-five seconds or so each. After the third, the poet pauses—between the title and the body of the fourth and last poem—to situate the sequence, its principal characters, her motivation in doing the project. She wraps up with that quiet thanks, neglecting to introduce the reader following herself (a small, perhaps charismatically-sanctioned, violation of the code the group has been asked to follow). • More about Myles at Syntax Is a Second Skin, Weird Deer, and Verse. Not to mention, here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 8 June 2007 — permalink |
Varieties of Aural ExperienceI know the poet through frequent face-to-face conversations but have never heard her perform. I have read all the books a poet has written so far, but not yet heard her voice. I have listened repeatedly and for many years to a particular tape of a poet, but have never experienced his conversational voice. I have heard the poet read live maybe a dozen times in fifteen years and have spoken to her for hours on end: if she called my cell phone, she could say, "hi, it's me." I have heard about a young poet, but neither read nor heard his work yet: when I click on the mp3 file, it's all news to me. I know only technologically-mediated versions of a poet's voice, never having been in her physical presence. I heard the poet read live once when I was young and he didn't have long to live; in my middle age, I listen for the first time to a tape recording of the event. I know the poet intimately enough to pick up inflections that would be lost on others—but when she performs, it's like there's a stranger up there. I struggle to read in the poet's native language and comprehend it even more poorly by ear; at the reading, I think a lot about his voice. I liked the work until I heard it read. I heard her read before she'd settled on a performance style and again, some years later, after she had: my estimation of the work didn't budge. When we were friends, I offered sincere praise for the performance style that, after our break, seemed the epitome of all that was wrong with both the person and the work. I once attended a reading of his: that was plenty. The poet lived long before me, and long before modern recording technologies; I still have the impression of knowing her voice. The emphysema had become an audible fact of his performance style; then, in the nick of time, a successful lung transplant: just imagining the new sound pleases me. To be continued... XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 5 June 2007 — permalink |
SprezzaturaEileen Myles - Dear Andrea (3'03"; recorded 10 February 2007 at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the Queering Language group reading). On his way to some remarks about Lorca, Jonathan Mayhew writes:
Which sent me to PennSound to find a test case. And he's right, even when transcribing her girlfriend's conversations with an ex-girlfriend, Myles sometimes does and sometimes doesn't manage that colloquial effect, that artful appearance of artlessness, of which he speaks—and when she doesn't, when she sounds like she's reading a poem, it's usually because a pitch lands somewhere it just wouldn't in fast informal speech. Another discovery this morning: Maureen Granville-Smith, Frank O'Hara's sister and literary executor, has made some audio that used to be hard to get at available on-line. The poem Myles's poem reminded me of is "Metaphysical Poem," captured on tape in the September 1964 reading O'Hara gave in Buffalo. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 4 June 2007 — permalink |
Too Bad for You, Beautiful SingerPeter Gizzi - A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me (3'44"). Cueing this one up for commentary in the next few days. Meanwhile, you can read John Palattella's review of The Outernationale in the Boston Review, listen to a hand-cranked music box version of the Internationale and glimpse Juliana Spahr on the if device. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 2 June 2007 — permalink |
No Longer InertOn an idyllic late-April afternoon, I climbed the stairs to Al Filreis's second-floor office at the Kelly Writers House on the UPenn campus to chat with him about our mutual interest in making, gathering, listening to, interpreting, and teaching with poetry soundfiles. As we spoke, two microphones sent signals back to Al's computer, on the monitor of which waveforms danced in real time to our voices and all the noises environing them. A podcast is rumored to be in the works, but for now the unedited (except for the abrupt fade-out at the end) conversation can now be listened to here. (Thanks to Bathybius and Charles Bernstein for the recent links.) XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 1 June 2007 — permalink |
The Sniper SaysLeslie Scalapino - another segment from Can't is Night (0'37"). One of the major discursive changes in this soundfile comes at about the two minute mark (second 115), when the poet, after a brief (.325 second) pause—much briefer in fact than the scale of the topic shift would seem to demand—begins quoting the speech of an army sharpshooter stationed in Iraq. In the next twenty-three seconds, she weaves between directly reported speech (which I'll abbreviate DRS) and parenthetically inserted framing information about that speech's source (which I'll abbreviate F). The pattern, with time values in seconds, looks like this:
While Scalapino does not alter her pitch range when voicing the soldier's words—a strategy often used by storytellers and professional actors hired to recite poetry—she does increase her tempo considerably, moving from the crisply demarcated and carefully articulated words of her "poetic" mode into the connected, informal speech heard in the long middle instance of DRS. The pauses, filled with audible intakes of breath, on either side of the loudly delivered word "shot" contrasts with the rapid, linked speech leading up to it and can sound, on first listening, like an error (though on repeated listenings it seems an intentional act of emphasis). In the second instance of framing language ("Sharpshooter Sgt. Schrumpf remembering the woman going down"), another break occurs, this time probably unintentional: between "remembering" and "the woman" Scalapino inhales, pauses, and releases an "uh" before regaining her tempo. Even here, though, the performative "mistake" (if it is one) works expressively, offering a kind of acoustical equivalent to the downward movement of the bullet-struck civilian body. The fluidity of the DRS that follows ("the chick was in the way")—which Scalapino reproduces smoothly and without editorializing paralinguistic effects—is all the more startling (and sickening) by contrast. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 31 May 2007 — permalink |
Outside MovementLeslie Scalapino - another brief phrase from Can't is Night (0'11"). The utterance in the final eleven seconds of the Scalapino soundfile might be written "Is there a difference between the space of phenomena (phrase) and the space of planets (moon) outside movement?" Here's how it looks in a Praat TextGrid, with waveform in the top band, pitch in the middle, and lexical transcript below (click to enlarge). The semantic content of the utterance has an internally-nested structure abcb'c'a, where the c terms (phrase, moon) are offered as trunctated translations of the b terms (space of phenomena, space of planets), and the sets bc and b'c' are subjected to scrutiny along a difference/identity spectrum (term a) with a late-arriving condition ("outside movement," which I'm grouping as an a term because it assists in the framing of the question). An audible intake of breath marks the caesura at the midpoint of this six-part pattern (another, much quicker breath can be heard between a and b, where the poet inserts a pause between the article "the"—lengthened to "thee"—and the noun phrase "basic shape of phenomena"—another of those enjambment effects mentioned in my initial post on this track). In the first 1.75 seconds of the clip, the poet races through eight syllables, virtually deleting two unstressed vowels and hitting a pitch peak of 248Hz at the transition into the second syllable of "difference" (here pronounced difrints). The next eight-syllable segment, by contrast, takes more than 3 seconds to voice and contains three stressed sylllables (written in all caps here): "BASic SPACE of pheNOMena." The long "a" in the first stressed syllable carries a pitch of about 218Hz, the second highest in the segment, with nothing comparably high heard again until the question-marking rise at the close. What happens next is interesting because it shows us something about the conjunction of pause and pitch-lowering that allows us to hear that an item is being placed in parentheses by a speaker. On each side of the word "phrase" the poet leaves a pause of about half a second, and, while keeping her volume levels consistent (peaking in the 75 to 85 dB range), she sharply decreases her tone (creating that "U" shape in the pitch transcript, see below). Having established this pattern with her voicing of "phrase," she reproduces it for "moon," placing a .325 second pause before and a .465 second pause after it, and dropping her pitch by about 100Hz while voicing the vowel. By contrast, when she voices the very similar vowel in the first syllable of "movement" less than two seconds later, she holds her pitch in the 160-170 level (her norm), rising toward 220Hz on the unstressed final syllable to realize the interrogative pitch pattern operative in English. Click image to hear a .wav file of the word: XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 30 May 2007 — permalink |
The Real Time Event, OccurringLeslie Scalapino - brief phrase from Can't is Night (0'3"). After posting some first impressions about this track a few days ago, I found myself getting interested in the tone movement in a phrase encountered about 22 seconds into the soundfile, so I switched from Audacity to the excellent, and free, phonetics software Praat to generate some more detailed images. The first, which you can click to enlarge, is of the poet voicing the phrase "The real time event occurring," with the familiar waveform information on top and a blend of spectrogram, intensity (yellow line), and pitch (blue line) information below. Next is a graph that isolates pitch a little more clearly, with movement in time indicated along the x-axis and frequency in Hz along the y. To hear the software's approximation of the tone pattern, click the image. And here are "close ups" of the linked segments of the phrase (again, click to enlarge; the red dots trace formant patterns). First, "the real": Then "time event" (with another of those aspirated /t/s I mentioned on Thursday shown at the right): Then, "occurring": The highest pitch (approximately 235 Hz) comes at the front of the sequence with the /i:/ of "real." On the low end, the second syllable of "occurring" starts at about 160 Hz and quickly drops to 100 Hz before dying away at about 60 Hz on the "ing" affix. This corresponds to Scalapino's typical range throughout the soundfile, which seems to be centered around 160-170 Hz, with reaches into the upper 230s and dips to nearly 50. The bracketing effect Scalapino produces here (and elsewhere in the soundfile) thus looks to be a combination of pause (about .3 seconds between the aspirated /t/ of "event" and the neutral vowel at the start of "occurring") and tone lowering ("occurring" opens low, around 130 Hz, rises only to mid-range, drops sharply and stays low to die off). XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 27 May 2007 — permalink |
In the WayLeslie Scalapino - from Can't Is Night (3'16"). Recorded 14 May 2007 by Charles Bernstein; three more tracks here (scroll down to "Close Listening: Private Edition #2"). There's a lot going on in these 196 seconds (open a pdf of the audia transcript here). I note especially the use of audible intakes of breath to produce enjambment effects, the strong aspiration after terminal plosives (listen to those /-t/s from second 11 to second 34 or so), the change from rapid colloquial speech in the introduction ("I'm gonna...") to the highly impeded and interrupted syntax of the poem, the possible false start at 10.3 ("rih...") and the hesitant voicings at 125.1 (at "shot") and 134.4 ("remembering...uh...the woman"), the atypical pronunciation of "lineage" at 105.7, the use of diminished pitch to bracket parallel terms (for example, "she...someone" between 43.8 and 45.1; also in the closing seconds of the excerpt), and the very noticeable shift to connected utterance beginning at 116 with the reported speech of a U.S. sharpshooter in Iraq (through about 139), the semantic content of which is rendered hyperlegible by contrast to the parse-resistant (though lexically and phrasally redundant) segments that precede and follow it. The most radical instance of enjambment? This word-internal one. • More on this track, 27, 30, and 31 May. Supplemental. Six instances of aspirated /t/ in a twenty second stretch toward the start of Scalapino's performance (click first image to enlarge; second image isolates the /t/s). Hear it here (words, followed by isolated /t/s repeated three times in sequence). XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 24 May 2007 — permalink |
Long NightAram Saroyan - Crickets (1'59"). View the page from the eponymous volume Aram Saroyan (Random House[!], 1968) as archived on Ubuweb (stretch your browser as far lengthwise as it will go: the fifty-third and final iteration of the word "cricket" should sort of fall off the bottom of the page). • A track to help celebrate Ugly Duckling Presse's new edition of Saroyan's Complete Minimal Poems, which I've been reading with great pleasure this weekend. Among many other things, the book is a surprisingly thick—for all its principled thinness in other respects—description of the acoustic environments frequented by Saroyan, on and off the various attention-enhancing substances those mid-1960s made themselves known for. • Addendum, 22 May - College radio dj Brian Kelley's amusing account of putting this track to terrific use. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 20 May 2007 — permalink |
Flee, You SayJoseph Ceravolo - Drunken Winter (0'24"). I'm excited about Eric Baus's new blog project To The Sound, where the author of The To Sound will be documenting his interactions with and interpretations of poetry sound files from his own and other collections (thanks, Noah, for the tip). Here's a snippet from Baus's "about" page: "As I post clips and comments, I’m working under the assumption that everything is somehow significant and meaningful in an audio recording. Many times it will probably seem like I am making too much out of something like a throat-clearing or a skipped groove in a record or a cough from the crowd, but I’m hoping that this level of attention will pay off in ways I couldn’t have predicted had I stuck to the more overtly marked parts of the sound environment." The benefits of this "paratextual" approach are readily apparent in Baus's subtle, context-sensitive reading of two poems by Joe Ceravolo in this 11 May post. • A few additional notes: The recorded female voice whose melancholy aria is heard "behind" Ceravolo's own in "Drunken Winter" doesn't so much compete for our attention as create a sonic bed from which his gentle, mostly monosyllabic, /r/-less, highly echoic recitative arises. The voiced title admits an ambiguity not present in the printed version, with the unstressed second syllable of "drunken" shearing off to become the preposition "in." The /k/ in "drunk" recurs in "oak" (twice) and "like" (twice), though the lexical identity dominating the opening seconds of the poem is disrupted by noticeable differences in voicing (intensity, aspiration). There's a mic bump (or record skip) at about 9 seconds that falls into (or marks out) a gap between phrasal clusters. Combinations of /l/ and /d/ occupy the next, and to my ear, densest, segment of the poem (cold, wild, paddle), after which the long e attains prominence in "flee" and the repeated "geese." The "boy" at 16 seconds is to "June" what the (drunken, aging) "man" (our speaker) is to the "winter"? A kind of slant palindrome closes the poem, as the long vowel plus plosive "oak" reverses into the consonant cluster plus long vowel "sky." • Three voicings of "oak." An audia transcript (pdf). XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 15 May 2007 — permalink |
No Head to FitTom Raworth - Nothing (0'41"). Recorded 22 September 2005 at Miami University in Ohio; audio and video of whole set available via Mesh Works. • Previously on Lipstick of Noise, Raworth's Catacoustics. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 12 May 2007 — permalink |
Snark Eggs in the ArmoireMichael Gizzi - Caedmon Cud to Venerable Bede (1'04). All twenty tracks of Gizzi's excellent Cured in the Going Bebop disk (limited release, Utopia Productions, 2000) are now available via PennSound. "Shit so good they call it cueball." • The sequence is collected in Gizzi's 2001 volume My Terza Rima, published by The Figures and available through SPD. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 2 May 2007 — permalink |
Wait a MinuteRobert Grenier, with Martin Richet - Twelve Days of Blue Sky (1'23"). More Grenier on the excellent cipM site; check out especially the phonotèque. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 17 April 2007 — permalink |
Visibly MovedBill Berkson - Dream with Fred Astaire (0'31"). Recorded live on 11 October 2001 in the UMaine New Writing Series. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 16 April 2007 — permalink |
I Prefer You in the PluralJohn Ashbery - A Blessing in Disguise (1'20"). Online audio of Ashbery is surprisingly scarce relative to how ubiquitous his print presence is. This track (number 16, or, side B, track 9) of the Giorno Poetry Systems record Biting Off the Tongue of a Corpse (1975) was originally recorded for NET-TV's Poetry: USA (1966) and is now archived on Ubuweb. Arising from and receding back into the gentle crackle of needle on vinyl, the poet's unemphatic voice speaks of desire and even, in the great out of nowhere ending, exaltation, while holding the high diction of eros in check with a syntax of bewilderment and the sheer steadiness of minimalist inflection. The understatement, and the abrupt exit, leave one in a state of unresolved tension at poem's end: that's the blessing? or the disguise? ("The blackbird whistling / Or just after"). XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 12 April 2007 — permalink |
SleeplessEzra Pound - Cantico del Sole, 1939 (0'58") and 1958 (0'49"). To Richard Swigg's invaluable edition of the audioworks of William Carlos Williams the PennSound editors have now added Richard Sieburth's smaller, but equally impressive, edition of Ezra Pound's recordings, prefaced by a long essay on "The Work of Voice in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which looks to be a major contribution to the emerging body of scholarship on poetic phonography. The 1939 recording of "Cantico del Sole" has been familiar to me for years (I first heard it while preparing my oral exams at Brown in the early 1990s, when I would fall asleep to cassette tapes of various poets on my reading list: talk about troubled sleep!), but the quicker, more voluble, altogether hammier take of twenty years later I'd never heard before this morning. Gone is the complicit giggle shared at the end of the Cambridge recording, and the shifts in tempo and phrasing pretty much eliminate the trace of melancholy still audible in the earlier version, leaving sarcasm the dominant tone of the Caedmon track. Needless to say, Ezra's too-deep slumber needed troubling of a more serious sort than this little ditty documents. For evidence of that, check out my colleague Benjamin Friedlander's "Pound's Invective: A Sampler." • A gloss on Luke 2.29, alluded to in the poem. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 11 April 2007 — permalink |
Odd Old OdeJackson Mac Low and Anne Tardos - Phoneme Dance in Memoriam John Cage (5'00"). I played this on the first installment of my shortlived radio show last fall, but somehow never posted it here. Robert Kelly's mention of Mac Low's exacting standards for performance, in yesterday's post, spurs me to remedy that omission. I find these five minutes to be a perfect respite from the tedium of comprehensible utterance: a release into another register, one more plural and joyful than is common. This track is from the commercially-released Open Secrets, now fully accessible via the recently-updated Jackson Mac Low page at PennSound. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 10 April 2007 — permalink |
Poetry Served Him Well, and He Poetry WellRobert Kelly - Remembering Paul Blackburn and his reel-to-reel player (5'30"). During his snow-extended visit to Maine last week, the poet Robert Kelly had occasion to recall his friend Paul Blackburn's legendary commitment to capturing the sounds of poetry—his own, that of others—on the reel-to-reel tape recording technology available in the 1950s and '60s. • Reports of Kelly's 4 April 2007 reading at the UMaine can be read here (with pictures) and here (with full set-listing). XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 9 April 2007 — permalink |
You Answer to My Taste ExactlyKeith Waldrop - Translation of Danse Macabre by Charles Baudelaire (4'35"). The text of Waldrop's translation (in versets), preceded by Baudelaire's original (in quatrains), can be found in the most recent issue of Circumference: Poetry in Translation. "Carrion," another track from the same recording session—which will soon be available in its entirety on PennSound—was featured here on 11 December 2006. The Wesleyan edition of Waldrop's new translation was reviewed by Joshua Clover in the New Year's Eve edition of the NYTBR. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 24 February 2007 — permalink |
You have a little, uh, thingy, er, yeah, on your, er, thingy, uh huhBrian Kim Stefans - The Umm-Uh Poem (4'01"). A version of the text circa October 2002. Suggested b-side: this BKS collaboration with Alan Licht (and Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy). Paul Dutton's "Ummm" also makes sense, but looks like the UBU link (track 19) is broken. • Listen to the whole set, recorded 16 January 2007 at Kelly Writers House, here. • For more Stefans, visit Arras (his website) and Free Space Comix (his blog), also Ubu and Rhizome. And here for his newish book of collected criticism, Before Starting Over. • Previously here on Lipstick of Noise, Stefans as British Creeley impersonator. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 15 February 2007 — permalink |
Hearings And Peripheral HearingsTracie Morris - From Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful (3'40"). Handing the mic over to poet Christine Hume, whose interesting discussion of this track I'm delighted to have stumbled upon this morning:
Those with access to Project Muse materials can read Hume's "Improvisational Insurrection: The Sound Poetry of Tracie Morris" (Contemporary Literature 47.3 [2006]: 415-439) in its entirety. • Learn more about Morris on PennSound, Wikipedia, and Here Comes Everybody. • A March 2006 Lipstick of Noise entry on another track by Morris is archived here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 13 February 2007 — permalink |
I, Too, Have a Reputation to MaintainSueyeun Juliette Lee - Buck Fu (0'55"). The four emphatic "hey!" phrases round off with a hilariously understated "hyuh" ("an angelic chop"), after which a more intimate register is established and the lexical action shifts to the meticulously rhythmed lists. A nice introduction to a poet I'd not known before. • Listen to the rest of Lee's 16 January 2007 reading at Kelly Writers House here. Lee pens a paragraph a day at Korean Hell (clever pun). Her press is called Corollary. Looks like she's doing doctoral work at Temple. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 12 February 2007 — permalink |
Due to a Perfect TechniqueAlice Notley - from In the Pines 14 (2'57"). Listen to full track here (7'40"). Recorded 6 November 2006 at the Kelly Writers House and archived on PennSound. Watch video here (requires RealPlayer). Event audio here. • This poem is included in Notley's highly recommended Grave of Light: New & Selected Poems 1970-2005. • Notley on EPC, Wikipedia, and LibraryThing. • The Wikipedia page on "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" (aka "In the Pines" and "Black Girl") includes a snippet of Leadbelly's version of the song. Other versions of the tune can be heard in the Max Hunter Folk Song Collection. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 9 February 2007 — permalink |
The Dumbest DesignTina Darragh - Collective Lament for Banishing Animals from History (2'20"). As the lexical surface perforates, and smug assumptions about our species, its history and boundaries, dissolve, the noises of the one big animate union steal through, creaking and buzzing and clucking. Great performance of an amazing poem. • Recorded 25 January 2007 at the University of Maine (some ambient office sounds audible, appropriately enough). • Darragh on Wikipedia. NWS Event Report. More sound files from same session. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 8 February 2007 — permalink |
Go Where?Rae Armantrout - Make It New (0'43"). A track in celebration of Armantrout's new book from Wesleyan, Next Life (the title poem from which was featured here back in May of 2006). • More Armantrout on PennSound. Armantrout according to WikiPedia. And on EPC. The new bok on LibraryThing. Commentary by Ron Silliman here and here. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 7 February 2007 — permalink |
To Protect in FollyRobert Duncan - Not Far from Circe's House (1'46"). Recorded on reel-to-reel audiotape at the University of Maine on 5 May 1971; preservation copy digitized 2005. This is Duncan's second go ("see if I can get those measures a little more jazzy") at the opening poem of a set that also includes, between the many remarks, "Rites of Passage: I," "From The Mabinogion," "Santa Cruz Propositions," "The Multiversity," and other poems mostly from Ground Work and Roots & Branches. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 6 February 2007 — permalink |
ElsewhereRecently added to the invaluable Archive of the Now, numerous soundfiles from the Contemporary Experimental Women's Poetry Conference organized by Emily Critchley in Cambridge last fall. Readers include: Tim Atkins, Caroline Bergavall, Andrea Brady, Kai Fierle-Hedrick, Kathleen Fraser, Susana Gardner, Carol Mirakove, Geraldine Monk, Marianne Morris, Wendy Mulford, Redell Olsen, Maggie O'Sullivan, Camille PB, Tom Raworth, Lisa Samuels, Kaia Sand, Leslie Scalapino, Susan Schultz, Catherine Wagner, Africa Wayne. XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 5 January 2007 — permali |
ElsewhereMónica de la Torre picks a dozen tracks for January from Ubuweb's sonic archives, including Henri Chopin, María Sabina, Alvin Lucier, and an interview with Gertrude Stein. 4 January 2007 — permalink |
Site NoteI've been archiving some of the earliest posts to this site here. So far: A project note, plus Erica Hunt's Ecstasy, Linh Dinh's Acoustics, John Wiener's The Garbos and Dietrichs, Jaap Blonk's Flux-de-Bouche, Ange Mlinko's Poem Bejeweled with Proper Names, Elizabeth Willis's Kiss Me Deadly, Gary Sullivan's Hello and Welcome to Poetry Phone, Sawako Nakayasu's Capacity, two poems by Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett's Bob Creeley Breakthrough, and Brian Kim Stefans (as Roger Pellett) doing I Know a Man. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb, links. late December 2006 — permalink |
The DeadTom Devaney has provided liner notes for his winter 06/07 picks at PennSound. For a podcast of his selections, click here. Says Devaney: "I did not set out to cull 'death poems' from the expansive audio achieve. Instead I only discovered this connection after the fact when the feature was posted 'live' on PennSound. At that point, apprehending the emerging motif, I replaced two of the selections to better play into my passing theme-driven thoughts. So death was not, and is not, the main focus of the poems, but is a focus." XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. Thursday — 21 December 2006 —permalink |
Strange MusicA Lipstick of Noise exclusive (for now) — Poet Keith Waldrop reads from his major new translation of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil. "Carrion" (2'45") is one of eleven tracks I recorded in late November 2006 at Waldrop's home in Providence. The full set list: Benediction, The Life Before, Don Juan in Hell, Giantess, Carrion, Posthumous Remorse, Invitation to the Voyage, Spleen ("When the sky..."), Danse Macabre, A Voyage to Cythera, and To Her, Too Merry. • I'll update here when a permanent online home for the set has been arranged. In the meantime, I have the author's permission to burn a limited number of copies: just drop a line. Read Lucas Klein's review of Waldrop's translation here. Charles Bernstein's quick take. Check out Burning Deck, the press Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop have run for more than forty years, here. A lovely thought: Wolgamot in Orange County. • XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. 11 December 2006 - Monday - permalink |
From the Dream of a Shadowy BookstoreKimberly Lyons - Fear of the Future (0'54"). I hear twenty-three audias in this tightly-constructed poem: the first eight or nine trace out an analogy between returning to writing and recovering from an illness (note the subtle riff on patient, impatient, in patient); the soup recipe in the seventh audia and the free-floating description of the fourth are lovely detours in the unfolding simile. The oneiric middle section sets a scene in which two questions can be posed (Stalker, Kursk): listen for the way the "u" sounds preponderant in audia fifteen sneak into and transform the word "thimble" one line earlier. A major rest occurs between audias fifteen and sixteen. The scene resets in a more naturalistic manner (exterior shot, presumably urban, in autumn), but the theme of invasive voices carries on and the title reappears as the penultimate line. The final word of the poem, "sickness," brings us full circle, though the scale has shifted from individual to collective, from physical to psychic, from a recovery of writing to the irreparable losses of war. • I like the timbre of Lyons's well-miked voice and admire her phrasing, especially in the crucial closing lines, which, misdelivered, would slip into sententiousness. Stray noticings: A slight break in the transition from vowel to nasal in "ants," a pop on the terminal plosive in "soup," a micro-hesitation before the preposition "from" in audia ten, an audience laugh after the Kursk reference. More of Lyons's 11 November 2006 Segue series reading. Her recent book Saline. An earlier one, Abracadabra. A little biographical info from Small Press Traffic. The Kursk. Tarkovsky's Stalker. • XML feed here. • Elsewhere on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. Saturday — 9 December 2006 — permalink |
Wet and UglyRod Smith - Moist Feelings: A Love Poem (0'38"). Smith's title elicits giggles from the audience, one person even lets out a mock-sympathetic "awww," to which the poet responds with an insouciant straw slurp before intoning his short text in a clipped, quavering, early-Creeley manner, something sincere and vulnerable held briefly aloft on the breath of an imperfectly-stifled laugh. Rod Smith's 4 November 2006 reading (misdated 11 November) in the Segue series has just been added to PennSound. His blog is Ghostbrain. His press is Edge. His cd, Fear the Sky, is available through Narrow House. • XML feed here. • Also on Third Factory: index, ensemble, nb. Wednesday — 6 December 2006 — permalink |
Une Usine à SonsDelighted to discover that Damon Krukowski has curated a sonic accompaniment to the Super Vision show opening at ICA/Boston on 10 December. I went straight for the excerpt from Henri Chopin's demonstration of the fact that "the human body is a factory of sound," but there are twenty-three other tracks to explore as well (eight selected by Bhob Rainey, sixteen by Kenneth Goldsmith). • I also owe my recent exposure to, and instant admiration of, Tomokawa Kazuki's stunning voice to Damon and Naomi's connoisseurship of "international sad hits." The track "Kasai Zenzo" can be heard on the 20|20|20 homepage, reviews of the whole cd are digested here. Tuesday — 5 December 2006 — permalink |
Oh So QuietBreaking an overlong silence with the words: Joan La Barbara. Fell in love with her voice and phrasing on the "It's Easy" aria of Robert Ashley's Dust. Now I read on her website that I may have first heard her while watching Sesame Street as a child (something to research). At least seventy-three ways to hear her online: I chose 44 and heard the "eros" in "zero" (but maybe you voice the "h"?). Speaking of Björk, I would love to see her remake, à la van Sant's Psycho, any of the Barbra Streisand tv specials of the mid-60s, but maybe especially the second ("Color Me Barbra"), with its romp through the Philadelphia Art Museum and long lame circus animal number. Monday — 4 December 2006 — permalink |
Upper Limit Music VIIPlaylist for seventh (and last for a while) show, 16 November 2006, 1-3pm, wmeb. Motifs: Love and happiness; ice & snow (again); Coco Chanel; some clapping. Links are mostly to PennSound and Ubuweb pages where mp3s can be found.
Thursday — 16 November 2006 — permalink |
Upper Limit Music VIPlaylist for sixth show, 9 November 2006, 1-3pm, wmeb. • Motifs: spookiness; presidents and political platforms; noise; the tomato as weapon of geo-political domination; poets & composers; snow & ice, Adirondacks and Ktaadn. • Links below are mostly to the PennSound and Ubuweb pages from which mp3s were selected. • I bought Thiefth from iTunes on a recommendation from Lori Emerson. If you do emusic, John Cage and David Tudor's Indeterminacy is a steal (two one-hour long tracks!).
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Upper Limit Music VPlaylist for fifth show, 2 November 2006, 1-3pm, wmeb. Motifs: The composer Steve Reich at 70, lexical loops and the impossibility of repetition, memoir and truth (welcoming the arrival of the Grand Piano project), Desert Music, canonical modernists, getting ready to hear a talk on Stein.
Saturday — 4 November 2006 — permalink |
Upper Limit Music IVPlaylist for fourth show, 26 October 2006, 1-3pm, wmeb:
Thursday — 26 October 2006 — permalink |
Upper Limit Music IIIPlaylist for third show, 19 October 2006, 1-3pm, wmeb:
Thursday — 19 October 2006 — permalink |
Upper Limit Music IIPlaylist for second show, 12 October 2006, 1-3pm, wmeb:
Thursday — 12 October 2006 — permalink |
Upper Limit Music 1Playlist for debut show, 5 October 2006, 1-3pm, wmeb:
Friday — 6 October 2006 — permalink |
Next in Line for the French ThroneEugene Ostashevsky - "DJ Spinoza Talks to Flipper" (1'02"). Sort of like Lee Ving taunting the audience for Fear in the Decline of Western Civilization, only it's Spinoza taunting a dolphin, with a dash of Russian accent, a penchant for tweaked end rhymes (snorkle, circle), a Fiddler-on-the-Roof flashback, some rockin' tautologies, and a big boast about the Bayou to close. Well roared, lion! Listen to (or look at) the whole reading courtesy of Lunch Poems. Four poems from the DJ Spinoza sequence in Germ 6/7. Two poems from the same sequence in Octopus 4. "The Premises of Glass" and "The Origin of the Specious" in the Boston Review. "Dear Owl" from Jubilat 7. Northwestern UP page for Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism. Brian Kim Stefans includes Iterature in a recent omnibus review. The visually-absorbing verse drama Infinite Recursor, or the Bride of DJ Spinoza awaits you as well. • Lipstick of Noise tracklist. XML feed. Wednesday — 4 October 2006 — permalink |
Strangeness of the World UniteListening notes - Robert Grenier - Reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project - 8 April 1981 - on PENNsound (mp3, 52'30"). Grenier reads from and comments on Sentences (02'00-30'00), does the 1980 Tuumba chapbook Oakland in its entirety (30'00-43'50), and closes with an unidentified sequence that includes the poems "Pelicans" and "Contempt" (44'00-52'30). Tuesday — 3 October 2006 — permalink more |
The Lipstick of Noise is a product of the Third Factory • Inspired by the music blogs • And by Paul Blackburn's reel-to-reel deck. Intending to make good use of PENNSound and other sources of digital audio files of poetry • Comments welcome. |
