Echo Locution: Aural / Environment / Body / Poetics - Part 1 /  by James belflower

Maryam Parhizkar, David James Miller & James Belflower

At the Disembodied Poetics Conference: Writing/Thinking/Being at Naropa University, in October, 2014 David James Miller, Maryam Parhizkar, and myself discussed the influence of music on our critical and creative writing practices in a panel titled "Echo Locution: Aural / Environment / Body / Poetics." The conversation afterward was very rewarding and there were many questions about the various textual and musical sources referenced. To say thanks, and to keep that conversation going, we've posted a brief summary of our talks and a list of resources from our papers. This is the first of three parts. We hope you enjoy!

To Know Noise Is to Know Another: Luc Ferrari's Sound Newspaper Far West News

James Belflower

The Italian-born French composer Luc Ferrari was pivotal in the musique concrète scene emerging in Postwar France, which was characterized by the use of found sound, tape manipulations, and extended instrumentation. From one of his first found sound experiments in Danse Organiques (1971-73), which recorded two women making love, to his extended aural travelogue of he and his wife’s tour through the Southwest in the late 1990s, Far West News (1998-99), Ferrari provocatively pulled intimate noise into an historical period where abstract methods of music composition dominated the European and American scenes. In Far West News, Ferrari employs found sound, minimalist editing, and a variety of innovative compositional techniques to create a Sound Newspaper, a haunting "ambiguous realism" composed from recordings of his sightseeing tours, conversations, and ambient audio during their trip. Contrary to the alienation noise typically provokes, Far West News suggests that an encounter with noise is instead a form of communication rich with intimacy. Ferrari's meticulous, sensitive, and hands-on approach to collecting and composing with found sound demonstrates that when we consider noise as deeply relational it allows us to practice non-referential and comparitivist approaches to reality through our senses. Ultimately, noisy encounters encourage us to understand how resonances of all varieties inflect materiality by engendering sonic affinities between human and non-human players in what Ferrari called the "dialectics of the everyday."

Microclimate Review: Che by Matthew Klane /  by James belflower

All text from Che by Matthew Klane, Stockport Flats 2013

 

                    Original cover art: Matthew Klane

Tag clouds are designed to show the frequency of word usage in a text by enlarging words based on how many times they occur. Microclimate Reviews, however, are hand-selected tag clouds that operate like weather systems, turbulent and resonate across the text. Frequency therefore becomes a microclimate in which one’s personal selection intuits a visual and spatial map of the verbal atmospheres entangled in the pages.

Matthew Klane is co-editor at Flim Forum Press. His books include B (Stockport Flats, 2008) and Che (Stockport Flats, 2013). An e-chap, from Of the Day, has recently been published by Delete Press (deletepress.org). Other new work can be found in Horse Less Review, Lit, Harp & Altar, and word for / word. He currently lives and writes in Albany, NY, where he co-curates the Yes! Poetry & Performance Series and teaches at Russell Sage College. See: matthewklane.blogspot.com. 

http://matthewklane.blogspot.com

Microclimate Review: My God Is This a Man by Laura Sims /  by James belflower

All text from My God Is This a Man by Laura Sims, Fence Books 2014

 

 Original cover art for My God Is This is Man by Alessandro Guttenberg

Tag clouds are designed to show the frequency of word usage in a text by enlarging words based on how many times they occur. Microclimate Reviews, however, are hand-selected tag clouds that operate like weather systems, turbulent and resonate across the text. Frequency therefore becomes a microclimate in which one’s personal selection intuits a visual and spatial map of the verbal atmospheres entangled in the pages.

Laura Sims is the author of three books of poetry: My god is this a man, Stranger, and Practice, Restraint (Fence Books); her fourth collection, Staying Alive, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2016. She edited  Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson, a book of her correspondence with the celebrated experimental novelist (powerHouse Books), and has also published five chapbooks of poetry.  Her work was included in the anthology, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, and individual poems have recently appeared in the journals:  Aufgabe, Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Crayon, and Denver Quarterly. She has published book reviews and essays in Boston Review, Evening Will Come, Jacket, New England Review, Rain Taxi and The Review of Contemporary Fiction.

Sims’s first book, Practice, Restraint, was awarded the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize, and in 2006, she received a JUSFC Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship to live in Tokyo. Sims is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. She received a Master of Fine Arts from University of Washington in 2000, and she is now an adjunct professor of creative writing and literature at NYU-SCPS. She has been a featured writer for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, and has been a co-editor of Instance Press with poets Elizabeth Robinson, Susanne Dyckman, and Beth Anderson since 2009. She lives with her family in Brooklyn.

Abner Jay: Sexuality in a Different Key /  by James belflower

Abner Jay courtesy of Charlie Vinz

Abner Jay courtesy of Charlie Vinz

Walter Benjamin said that there is no better trigger for thinking than laughter. Abner Jay, the self-proclaimed "last working southern black minstrel," takes this to heart on his album One Man Band when he asks such urgent questions as "What do you give an elephant with diarrhea? Answer, plenty of room!" Giggling at the moral ruts we often find ourselves in, Abner alternates short immoral anecdotes and one-liners about suicide by train, marriage, child rearing, venereal disease, The Vietnam War, Australia, rock n' roll, virility pills, bestiality, military history, cocaine use, along with jokes that both reinforce and swerve to critique the sexual assumptions they chew on. What I love about One Man Band is that although it is not quite in the goofy exotica genre, it maintains a comic drift between the sexual repression and the hyper sexism often associated with bible thumping movements. His scope of innuendo is impressive, but it is the odd and poetic stories between songs that trigger a downright awkward but self-reflexive chuckle, amplified by his bluesy bends.

Three highlights from this album: VD, I'm A Hard Working Man, and Wee Wee. VD is hilariously contaminated with the dangers of the "pre-honeymoon" in Abner's  impassioned diatribe against the dangers of sex before marriage. I'm A Hard Working Man grunts its way through a fusion of blues and eroticism (I'm still unsure which), and Wee Wee finishes by crooning us back to those wonderful days when urination was a pleasure in itself.

In the extended vein of early self-titled Scott Walker recordings and The Frogs' Made Up Songs, the iconoclastic Abner Jay is a performer who implicitly and explicitly mocks himself, along with poking at the normativity of male heterosexuality. Plucking, thumping, and inveighing, his humor and music provoke laughter as the initial stage of critique. He causes us to reconsider what can be done about those "TUUUUUUUURRRRRRRIBLE things" that may happen when you're caught "putting your things together!"

See more biographical information about Abner Jay here.

The Last Ole Minstrel Abner Jay plays his last gig at the Grassroots Festival in Trumansburg, New York.