riding off ron
How you hear a poem & how you hear a reading are two different things, unless of course the reading consists of a single long text (which may be why I’ve given so many readings that have been just that). Some of the tracks on Smith’s CD are as short as 23 seconds. They echo in the mind, but by the time one absorbs the words, the poem itself is long gone. (This may explain why such diverse poets as Robert Bly & Bob Grenier have a tendency to read a short poem multiple times during a reading.) With a longer reading, on the other hand, the reader settles in, begins to hear nuances & themes, tonal changes, as well as whatever content might be flowing past. With a longer reading, you can almost hear the moment at which the audience relaxes into the text – it always occurs somewhere after the 15-minute mark, sometimes after the 30 (and, often, you’ll hear two such moments). At 40 moments or thereabouts, I’m so tuned into a reader’s sense of time & the formal scope of the text that it is as if a vista opened up. Only from that point forward can I really hear pretty much everything the poet is doing.
And no two poets, at least no two decent ones, have anything like the same timing – it’s as particular as fingerprints. If I find that I resonate with some aspect of that timing, a reading can act like a spell – I’m totally enveloped. But if I find that I don’t resonate, sometimes the reading itself can seem very alien, as if we’re translating across not just languages but beings or species. That can be even more interesting if I can tell that the writing is very good, but operating on planes that don’t feel at all familiar or intuitive to me. Indeed, some of the readings that have had the most lasting impression on me – Alice Notely as well as the late Douglas Oliver – fall into exactly this category.
-rON sILLIMAN, tuesday's blog.
It is SO RARE to hear a poet read for the lengths Ron is writing about here. At Naropa, during the "featured reader" evenings, we would have the chance to hear writers like Pierre Joris or Creeley open up and dive in for 45 minutes to an hour or more. Even with a distracted mind, this still gives an audience the chance - the neccessity, really - to enter into a prolonged, ongoing conversation with the reader and their work. If Pierre Joris had read for only 20 minutes, I might no even remember the event today. (Although the shock value of some of Joanne Kyger's shorter readings (say 5 or 6 minutesTOPS) also resonates)
Analogically, I'm thinking about walking. If one goes for a 15 minute walk, they may feel refreshed, they may have a few moments of contat or confrontation with the environment they pass through / are in. Now, stretch that out: by 30 mintues, the walk has totally enveloped them, they are going. At an hour, the desire to stop has risen more than once - perhaps they have stopped, and are walkign again. I agree with Ron that if the participant is willing, at that hour mark, the intimacy and immersion factor in the act of listening, or walking, or fucking, or sitting (or vacuuming - not to dis the prosaic) is far higher. Of course, if I am a 21 yr old lone wolf who digs Miller and Kerouac and Rollins and I sit down and my teachers parade before me Mullen, Silliman, even Collins or Heaney, well, that intimacy is likely to be one of resistance - if I can call such "intimacy".
But lets trust that we're all adults here, and that we are choosing wisely what to do with our time, and that we're mature enough to even engage our unexpected detours, the so-called "mistakes" that may be more like surprises, really. I like this idea of an hour long reading, it seems gritty and expansive (and quite frankly a little daunting). I gave a 20 minute reading on saturday, one of three readers, and it went
I'd like to interrupt this blog to consider how the persistence of mistypings and mispellings in blogs provides an uncanny and delirious postmodern echo of the pre-dictioanry days of printed texts and manuscripts, where regional dialect and who you learned from dictated your spellings of words far more than any central, hierarchical authority. Once again the word becomes as multiple when lettered as it can be when said (but with a quite distinct route - lack of formal education and keyboard dyslexics - into this).
well. Well standing in for I found certain rythms, tangents, routes, followed them through, and on to the next, in a satisfying matter - so that I was practicing my reading, really getting into it - okay, sad here, critical here, joyous and silly there, a mournful echo here, anger there, tight and fast here, slow and chopped there. I appreaciate orality, esp. at a reading, a writer who engages the specifically oral nature of their delivery - I understand most of the writers I know and go to see are primarily writers, not readers/performers, but an attention to, a practice of the reading of a text - it feels like good work, and it attunes my ear to what is going down it. Mastery, is a powerful thing to witness. It was said well in the first Harry Potter book, when the wizard who sells wands finds the right one for Harry, and explains how the only other wand of this class is owned by Voldemort:
"For he did great things. Terrible, yes, but great"
A little terror really sparks a reading, esp. if one is fairly certain that Taylor Brady, or Melissa Benham is not, in fact, a spawn of Satan hell-bent on world dominaion and the elimination of four-eyed muggles who ride bikes and garden like yourselves.
-
The reading went well, but 20 minutes is a fairly early exit point. In the case of Artifact, it makes sense. The audience is there usually for one or two of the three featured readers, and Artifact is a reading series cum party - its social side is consciously invoked. A 60 minute one -reader blowout makes for a very different evening. What most triggers me in considering this is how we as writers and organizers can maximize the diference and variety of our venues and performances, to make for more possibilities, for fruitful complexities where my desire for an occassional hour immersion sits easily beside the sampler mentality of another evening. If its all the latter, and none the former, aren't we just feeding our culturally emergent ADD?
So who is setting up readings where we can "go long"? Are there any such series in the Bay Area? Do they have comfortable seating? Light shows? If not, perhaps RPS will have to set that up too, right after we get our lecture series and salon off the ground.
-
Speaking of RPS (thats Rock Papier Sizz, San Francisco's #1 poetry and writing collective) welcomed honorary member Sean MacInnes to town last weekend, and dove into the MINI series project, producing 9 small 8 - 16 page collaborative texts (although 2 or 3 are uncredited solo ventures) and, within 24 hours, writing, editting, printing and assembling them, through salvaged and recycled material, into a set of 27 handmade, saddlestapled, 3x4 books. 9 more remain to be made. So, en toto, 3 books, 4 copies each. All books were given away at readings that weekend, and, by the way, literati Martha Stewarts, they make great party favors and introductory gifts.
I hope to post some covers up tonight, and if you're curious, email me and I'll send you a PDF of our text.
And no two poets, at least no two decent ones, have anything like the same timing – it’s as particular as fingerprints. If I find that I resonate with some aspect of that timing, a reading can act like a spell – I’m totally enveloped. But if I find that I don’t resonate, sometimes the reading itself can seem very alien, as if we’re translating across not just languages but beings or species. That can be even more interesting if I can tell that the writing is very good, but operating on planes that don’t feel at all familiar or intuitive to me. Indeed, some of the readings that have had the most lasting impression on me – Alice Notely as well as the late Douglas Oliver – fall into exactly this category.
-rON sILLIMAN, tuesday's blog.
It is SO RARE to hear a poet read for the lengths Ron is writing about here. At Naropa, during the "featured reader" evenings, we would have the chance to hear writers like Pierre Joris or Creeley open up and dive in for 45 minutes to an hour or more. Even with a distracted mind, this still gives an audience the chance - the neccessity, really - to enter into a prolonged, ongoing conversation with the reader and their work. If Pierre Joris had read for only 20 minutes, I might no even remember the event today. (Although the shock value of some of Joanne Kyger's shorter readings (say 5 or 6 minutesTOPS) also resonates)
Analogically, I'm thinking about walking. If one goes for a 15 minute walk, they may feel refreshed, they may have a few moments of contat or confrontation with the environment they pass through / are in. Now, stretch that out: by 30 mintues, the walk has totally enveloped them, they are going. At an hour, the desire to stop has risen more than once - perhaps they have stopped, and are walkign again. I agree with Ron that if the participant is willing, at that hour mark, the intimacy and immersion factor in the act of listening, or walking, or fucking, or sitting (or vacuuming - not to dis the prosaic) is far higher. Of course, if I am a 21 yr old lone wolf who digs Miller and Kerouac and Rollins and I sit down and my teachers parade before me Mullen, Silliman, even Collins or Heaney, well, that intimacy is likely to be one of resistance - if I can call such "intimacy".
But lets trust that we're all adults here, and that we are choosing wisely what to do with our time, and that we're mature enough to even engage our unexpected detours, the so-called "mistakes" that may be more like surprises, really. I like this idea of an hour long reading, it seems gritty and expansive (and quite frankly a little daunting). I gave a 20 minute reading on saturday, one of three readers, and it went
I'd like to interrupt this blog to consider how the persistence of mistypings and mispellings in blogs provides an uncanny and delirious postmodern echo of the pre-dictioanry days of printed texts and manuscripts, where regional dialect and who you learned from dictated your spellings of words far more than any central, hierarchical authority. Once again the word becomes as multiple when lettered as it can be when said (but with a quite distinct route - lack of formal education and keyboard dyslexics - into this).
well. Well standing in for I found certain rythms, tangents, routes, followed them through, and on to the next, in a satisfying matter - so that I was practicing my reading, really getting into it - okay, sad here, critical here, joyous and silly there, a mournful echo here, anger there, tight and fast here, slow and chopped there. I appreaciate orality, esp. at a reading, a writer who engages the specifically oral nature of their delivery - I understand most of the writers I know and go to see are primarily writers, not readers/performers, but an attention to, a practice of the reading of a text - it feels like good work, and it attunes my ear to what is going down it. Mastery, is a powerful thing to witness. It was said well in the first Harry Potter book, when the wizard who sells wands finds the right one for Harry, and explains how the only other wand of this class is owned by Voldemort:
"For he did great things. Terrible, yes, but great"
A little terror really sparks a reading, esp. if one is fairly certain that Taylor Brady, or Melissa Benham is not, in fact, a spawn of Satan hell-bent on world dominaion and the elimination of four-eyed muggles who ride bikes and garden like yourselves.
-
The reading went well, but 20 minutes is a fairly early exit point. In the case of Artifact, it makes sense. The audience is there usually for one or two of the three featured readers, and Artifact is a reading series cum party - its social side is consciously invoked. A 60 minute one -reader blowout makes for a very different evening. What most triggers me in considering this is how we as writers and organizers can maximize the diference and variety of our venues and performances, to make for more possibilities, for fruitful complexities where my desire for an occassional hour immersion sits easily beside the sampler mentality of another evening. If its all the latter, and none the former, aren't we just feeding our culturally emergent ADD?
So who is setting up readings where we can "go long"? Are there any such series in the Bay Area? Do they have comfortable seating? Light shows? If not, perhaps RPS will have to set that up too, right after we get our lecture series and salon off the ground.
-
Speaking of RPS (thats Rock Papier Sizz, San Francisco's #1 poetry and writing collective) welcomed honorary member Sean MacInnes to town last weekend, and dove into the MINI series project, producing 9 small 8 - 16 page collaborative texts (although 2 or 3 are uncredited solo ventures) and, within 24 hours, writing, editting, printing and assembling them, through salvaged and recycled material, into a set of 27 handmade, saddlestapled, 3x4 books. 9 more remain to be made. So, en toto, 3 books, 4 copies each. All books were given away at readings that weekend, and, by the way, literati Martha Stewarts, they make great party favors and introductory gifts.
I hope to post some covers up tonight, and if you're curious, email me and I'll send you a PDF of our text.
posted by Kyle at 10:26 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home