Devin King and I are collaborating for ReViewing Black Mountain 15!

This performance arose out of a discussion group pairing poets adjacent to the Black Mountain School with seminal sound studies texts to theorize the sonic materialism within Black Mountain poetry, field poetics, and serial poetry. Our live performance titled “I Have Done Nothing to Ring Out,” weaves text and sound together to explore the importance of voice and sonic materialism to Robin Blaser’s early theorization of serial poetry through his concept of the “Holy Forest” (essentially serial poetics). Blaser’s early series employ many literary/audio motifs and often portray them as non-verbal materialisms (tics, pops, and knocks), which destabilizes lyric identities founded on an identifiable speaking subject. This auditory materialism is contiguous with the development of Pierre Schaeffer’s concept of the “sound object,” an entity that arises in the experience of listening and often measures the uniqueness of the event. Taken together, the “sound object” for Blaser, enacts “a materialism that acknowledges the substance of objects as temporal processes, autonomous from human intervention and perception, but which become real for the subject through his/her temporal process of being substance simultaneously with other substances” (Voegelin n.p.) Our performance animates this sonic materialism by collaging spoken word, the auditory imagery of Blaser’s early poetry, and the vocal grain of tape hiss and room noise from his interviews in The Astonishment Tapes.