Page 40 - Litteratteur Redefining World December issue

Litterateur redefining world December 2020

In an essay, I wrote this about the poem:

This poem, like much of my work, deliberately situates itself in the space between
performance and reading silently. William Burroughs’ idea of the “routine”--with its
suggestion of vaudeville--is relevant here. I want the piece to be read—but I want it
to be heard as well. (The cassette tape which accompanies my book Adrift—
Pantograph, 1993—contains a performance of the poem, as does the CD which
accompanies O Powerful Western Star: Pantograph, 2000.) Silent reading will give
you certain things which you could not get from a performance; a performance will
give you things you couldn’t possibly get from silent reading. Neither the silent

reading nor the performance by itself “is” the poem—which I would resist calling a
“performance piece.”

Robert Duncan, great poet that he was, did us all the service of attempting to make
an exact equivalence between the poem as “scored” on the page and the poem as
read aloud...The suggestion that the typewriter can “score” the poem comes from
Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay, but Duncan follows Olson’s suggestion
more strictly than Olson himself did. For Ground Work I: Before the War (1984),
Duncan persuaded his publisher, New Directions, to print a facsimile of his
typescript, so that his careful spacing could be reproduced exactly. Still, when we
hear Duncan read the poems, it becomes immediately apparent how little of his
voice the page can contain—though the page in itself has considerable interest. As
his work makes clear, there is, at best, only a limited connection between the

sound of the poem and its visual appearance on the page.

It is in this gulf between sound and print that my poem takes place.

The poem touches on a number of the themes I have been writing about in this
essay. When I wrote the poem, I had been thinking a great deal about the work of
the composer Charles Ives. Often Ives shifts keys so quickly that, by the end of the
piece, we have lost all sense of key signature: the next note can be, literally,
anything. Something analogous happens here. When we listen to someone speak,
we are usually listening primarily for content. It is only “secondarily” that we listen
for the sound of the person’s voice. In my poem we are given so many assertions,
so much “content”—and contexts shift so quickly—that finally we are “listening”
to nothing but the sound of the speakers, the “articulation of sound” which is
going on precisely at this moment. Content draws us away from the present; my
poem insists on what is happening right now, forces the listener into a present in
which she or he is immediately involved. And what is this “present”? It is the
intense perception of a poem being spoken in a room. The poem, directed into the
consciousness of its hearers, is in this sense transformational, shifting its

listeners out of content and context into the pure perception of sound. When the
two voices suddenly stop and pause before going on to conclude the poem, the

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