Surrealist Doodle
This was used as the cover of Karawane in 2006 and I have included it in on a number of bags and postcards over the years. Someone on the subway asked me if it was a Miro. I was very flattered!
Showing posts with label spoken word. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spoken word. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 02, 2014
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Words Got Me the Wound
Part two, and the meat of my presentation, which also forms the crux of my argument. I still have to edit it down.
Words Got Me The Wound and Will Get Me Well
With some reservations in mind, Barthes explains how modern, anti-language poetry, occupying “a position which is the reverse of myth,” can intervene against the mythification of language.
[Poetry] tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the meaning of things themselves. . . . .The subversion of writing was the radical act by which a number of writers have attempted to reject Literature as a mythical system . . . some went as far as the pure and simple scuttling of the discourse . . . as the only possible weapon against the major power of myth.”
Looking to several different literary movements, including Russian Formalism, Surrealism, and more recently, Language Poets and the Umbra Poets, we can see wrestling with language in an attempt to confront these kind of forces. Formalism predates of course, Barthes and Debord, as does the heyday of Surrealism, although several of the founding Surrealist poets, including Breton, continued to practice into the 1960s and 1970s and there still exist a great number of surrealists worldwide who carry on the mantle of language experimentation.
The Formalists looked at poetry through the lens of linguistics, rather than the usually-employed analytic tools of psychology, history, culture or aesthetics. Without knowing what we now know about how the mind processes language, without a mediated culture like ours, they nonetheless saw the tendency for conceptual processes to fall into ruts, rather than original ways of thinking. One of their primary concerns was the way in which “as perception becomes habitual . . . our habits retreat into the area of the unconscious automatic.” The antidote as they saw it, was an estranged language that would keep one alert to perception. “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’ . . . to increase the difficulty and length of perception.” By doing so, “art removes objects from the automatism of perception.” “And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war.” “The language of poetry is, then a difficult, roughened, impeded language . . . attenuated torturous speech . . . poetic speech is formed speech. Prose is ordinary speech.”
Inspired by Freud’s work, Breton and the Surrealists were interested in the liberation of the imagination and toward that end, sought ways to circumvent rational thought and delve into subconscious.
“[T]he mind released from all critical pressures and from academic habits offered images and not logical propositions . . . in which we discovered a universe unexplored up to then.”
The Surrealists are best known for “psychic automatism,” which unlike the numbing “automatism” spoken of by the Formalists, was a method that “made possible informative reconnaissance into the poetic domain.” Breton made it clear that the object of his investigation included language itself. Despite its subsequent influence on visual art and virtual disappearance from literary history, Breton makes it clear in his manifestos that it is thought, first and foremost that Surrealism is concerned with. “Whoever says expression says, to begin with, language . . . you must not be surprised to see Surrealism place itself first of all almost exclusively on the plane of language.”
For the Umbra Poets and the Language Poets, what’s important is not a transparent language, but making obvious and transparent the self-conscious nature of meaning production. Andrews looks as the way in which “Political writing . . . unveils, demystifies the creation and shape of meaning.” Recognizing the struggle for meaning that occurs in the de-formation of myth, “reference . . . is to be seen as the result of a conflictual social process in which various interests compete with one another in order to assign particular values to particular signs.” Language Poets attempt to confront the trappings of myth and spectacle, of ideology and relationship, focusing instead on Barthes’ call for a “fissuring.” Identifying meaning itself as a construct encourages the reader or the audience (in the case of performed poetry) to challenge the universalized, naturalized assumptions behind the word, and consequently, the very social formations that they find themselves within. In Clarence Major’s work, “we see an insistence [also] on the ‘arrangedness’ not only of the poem, but of language inside and outside the poem as well as the reality to which language and poem are commonly said to refer.”
If spectacle offers slick surfaces, easy meaning, and commodified relationships, then a writing that implicates the reader in the process of making meaning is one that stands in opposition to spectacle. If the spectacle is ultimately the relationship itself, then the reader-writer relationship is critical, not merely the one-way transmission of meaning from writer/performer to listener/audience/receptacle. The audience cannot merely be a “fourth wall” on which to be splattered with meaning, like graffiti, a poster, a billboard. When not everything is given outright, then a relationship is created with respect for the reader or audience member who brings something to the relationship as well. The hierarchy is collapsed and reader and writer stand on an equal social footing. Bruce Andrews’ “Text and Context” emphasizes “unreadability” as an element that both requires and teaches “new readings.” These new readings, which must be computed, rather than being able to draw on stock images and prefabricated chunks, keep us awake to language, wake us from the sleepwalk of automatism and help to inoculate us from the de-formed and seemingly naturalized discourses of myth and spectacle.
Spoken word poetry sits in a very unique position as both a literary and performance genre. In Barthes formulation poetry is possibly the only genre that can take on myth, partly because of its imprecision and therefore its inability for its meanings to be stolen and deformed. As a performance form, spoken word is dynamic, able to be written and rewritten with every performance, either spontaneously or rehearsed. The meanings can be drastically altered and even interrupted within a performance. On the other hand, the immediacy of the performance can also bring about in the performer a desire to be liked, not to be rejected by the audience, which means the danger that the poet will play it safe. I have seen and talked to poets who will not do their more challenging literary work because they want to be liked, not to mention understood. They pull out tried and true audience pleasers, not works that will leave the audience scratching their heads. At a poetry slam I attended at the Nuyorican Poets Café, in fact, much time was spent encouraging the audience to “show their love” for the performers, rather than expressing themselves about the work. Where audience expression was encouraged, it was to show their dissatisfaction with the judges for not giving high enough scores. It wasn’t so much about challenging the audience, but getting the audience on the side of the poets. This can leave a poet wanting that positive attention all the time and thus play it safe, relying on humor and heavy on pop culture references, easy to identify (and identify with). When the work is more serious, it tends to be taken from the headlines or from the poet’s own personal experiences. There is, to be sure, a diversity of styles in spoken word poetry that range from the quotidian to the very wildly experimental, which is as it should be, for a variety of reasons. I don’t mean to proscribe exactly what poets should be writing about or in what style, or to suggest that all spoken word poets need to become Dadaists. But at the same time, there are pitfalls we should look at in spoken word, ways in which such work may play into the very thing that poets are so often fighting against.
It is precisely because of its immediacy of form, though, because it is a relatively unmediated form, and because it carries with it the freedom in language that poetry inherently has, that spoken word poetry has the power to challenge both myth and spectacle, to be imaginative, and to set off in the reader a creative or imaginative reaction beyond what we have ever experienced. The poet has the power, as Barthes said, to point not to the referent of language but to the thing itself. It also has the power to point to nothing itself, to nothingness itself, and moreover, to the unknown. It has the power to make connections that we may have never made before, and in doing so, to get us out of our ruts, our slogans, our clichés in thinking by encouraging to think, literally to use our brains, in entirely different ways. Not in the ways of lazy language, prefab chunks, but to use our brains in entirely different ways and to get out of our conceptual ruts and perhaps reconceive of the world. Avant-garde work has often been considered art for art’s sake. But Breton and many other avant gardists and experimental poets, have known for decades that it was not necessarily so. It was and is highly political in its desire to change consciousness—not just consciousness about a particular issue, but all of consciousness, consciousness in general. The fact that it may lack political content per se does not make it apolitical. Helene Lewis makes a spirited defense of the political side of Surrealism, for example, when she writes “[t]he Surrealists, in their collective and anonymous art forms, succeeded in creating an anti-elitist art that acquired a new social meaning. Their belief that talent is irrelevant and that everyone has creative potential in his unconscious could be a perfect vehicle for a truly revolutionary art.” This is anti-myth and anti-spectacle before Barthes or Debord and the goals of Surrealism, particularly as outlined by Lewis, are still current and relevant, even if some of the methods of contemporary Surrealists have changed.
Poetry is a literary genre, but also a visual genre, for the poet creates images in the readers mind. And the spoken word poet can not only create images, but sounds, both musical and bruitistic, in the ears of the audience. It also has the freedom from the constraints of story, character, and plot that other literary and performance genres have. Spoken word poetry works on us on a number of levels and carries with it the potential of its own genre, as a literary form, as well as other genres that act on other areas of the brain. It can give people what they already know, and thus fall back on familiarity and habitualization in language and thought, or the poetry can challenge them, literally, to think for themselves when they listen by offering what is unfamiliar and totally new.
Words Got Me The Wound and Will Get Me Well
With some reservations in mind, Barthes explains how modern, anti-language poetry, occupying “a position which is the reverse of myth,” can intervene against the mythification of language.
[Poetry] tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the meaning of things themselves. . . . .The subversion of writing was the radical act by which a number of writers have attempted to reject Literature as a mythical system . . . some went as far as the pure and simple scuttling of the discourse . . . as the only possible weapon against the major power of myth.”
Looking to several different literary movements, including Russian Formalism, Surrealism, and more recently, Language Poets and the Umbra Poets, we can see wrestling with language in an attempt to confront these kind of forces. Formalism predates of course, Barthes and Debord, as does the heyday of Surrealism, although several of the founding Surrealist poets, including Breton, continued to practice into the 1960s and 1970s and there still exist a great number of surrealists worldwide who carry on the mantle of language experimentation.
The Formalists looked at poetry through the lens of linguistics, rather than the usually-employed analytic tools of psychology, history, culture or aesthetics. Without knowing what we now know about how the mind processes language, without a mediated culture like ours, they nonetheless saw the tendency for conceptual processes to fall into ruts, rather than original ways of thinking. One of their primary concerns was the way in which “as perception becomes habitual . . . our habits retreat into the area of the unconscious automatic.” The antidote as they saw it, was an estranged language that would keep one alert to perception. “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’ . . . to increase the difficulty and length of perception.” By doing so, “art removes objects from the automatism of perception.” “And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war.” “The language of poetry is, then a difficult, roughened, impeded language . . . attenuated torturous speech . . . poetic speech is formed speech. Prose is ordinary speech.”
Inspired by Freud’s work, Breton and the Surrealists were interested in the liberation of the imagination and toward that end, sought ways to circumvent rational thought and delve into subconscious.
“[T]he mind released from all critical pressures and from academic habits offered images and not logical propositions . . . in which we discovered a universe unexplored up to then.”
The Surrealists are best known for “psychic automatism,” which unlike the numbing “automatism” spoken of by the Formalists, was a method that “made possible informative reconnaissance into the poetic domain.” Breton made it clear that the object of his investigation included language itself. Despite its subsequent influence on visual art and virtual disappearance from literary history, Breton makes it clear in his manifestos that it is thought, first and foremost that Surrealism is concerned with. “Whoever says expression says, to begin with, language . . . you must not be surprised to see Surrealism place itself first of all almost exclusively on the plane of language.”
For the Umbra Poets and the Language Poets, what’s important is not a transparent language, but making obvious and transparent the self-conscious nature of meaning production. Andrews looks as the way in which “Political writing . . . unveils, demystifies the creation and shape of meaning.” Recognizing the struggle for meaning that occurs in the de-formation of myth, “reference . . . is to be seen as the result of a conflictual social process in which various interests compete with one another in order to assign particular values to particular signs.” Language Poets attempt to confront the trappings of myth and spectacle, of ideology and relationship, focusing instead on Barthes’ call for a “fissuring.” Identifying meaning itself as a construct encourages the reader or the audience (in the case of performed poetry) to challenge the universalized, naturalized assumptions behind the word, and consequently, the very social formations that they find themselves within. In Clarence Major’s work, “we see an insistence [also] on the ‘arrangedness’ not only of the poem, but of language inside and outside the poem as well as the reality to which language and poem are commonly said to refer.”
If spectacle offers slick surfaces, easy meaning, and commodified relationships, then a writing that implicates the reader in the process of making meaning is one that stands in opposition to spectacle. If the spectacle is ultimately the relationship itself, then the reader-writer relationship is critical, not merely the one-way transmission of meaning from writer/performer to listener/audience/receptacle. The audience cannot merely be a “fourth wall” on which to be splattered with meaning, like graffiti, a poster, a billboard. When not everything is given outright, then a relationship is created with respect for the reader or audience member who brings something to the relationship as well. The hierarchy is collapsed and reader and writer stand on an equal social footing. Bruce Andrews’ “Text and Context” emphasizes “unreadability” as an element that both requires and teaches “new readings.” These new readings, which must be computed, rather than being able to draw on stock images and prefabricated chunks, keep us awake to language, wake us from the sleepwalk of automatism and help to inoculate us from the de-formed and seemingly naturalized discourses of myth and spectacle.
Spoken word poetry sits in a very unique position as both a literary and performance genre. In Barthes formulation poetry is possibly the only genre that can take on myth, partly because of its imprecision and therefore its inability for its meanings to be stolen and deformed. As a performance form, spoken word is dynamic, able to be written and rewritten with every performance, either spontaneously or rehearsed. The meanings can be drastically altered and even interrupted within a performance. On the other hand, the immediacy of the performance can also bring about in the performer a desire to be liked, not to be rejected by the audience, which means the danger that the poet will play it safe. I have seen and talked to poets who will not do their more challenging literary work because they want to be liked, not to mention understood. They pull out tried and true audience pleasers, not works that will leave the audience scratching their heads. At a poetry slam I attended at the Nuyorican Poets Café, in fact, much time was spent encouraging the audience to “show their love” for the performers, rather than expressing themselves about the work. Where audience expression was encouraged, it was to show their dissatisfaction with the judges for not giving high enough scores. It wasn’t so much about challenging the audience, but getting the audience on the side of the poets. This can leave a poet wanting that positive attention all the time and thus play it safe, relying on humor and heavy on pop culture references, easy to identify (and identify with). When the work is more serious, it tends to be taken from the headlines or from the poet’s own personal experiences. There is, to be sure, a diversity of styles in spoken word poetry that range from the quotidian to the very wildly experimental, which is as it should be, for a variety of reasons. I don’t mean to proscribe exactly what poets should be writing about or in what style, or to suggest that all spoken word poets need to become Dadaists. But at the same time, there are pitfalls we should look at in spoken word, ways in which such work may play into the very thing that poets are so often fighting against.
It is precisely because of its immediacy of form, though, because it is a relatively unmediated form, and because it carries with it the freedom in language that poetry inherently has, that spoken word poetry has the power to challenge both myth and spectacle, to be imaginative, and to set off in the reader a creative or imaginative reaction beyond what we have ever experienced. The poet has the power, as Barthes said, to point not to the referent of language but to the thing itself. It also has the power to point to nothing itself, to nothingness itself, and moreover, to the unknown. It has the power to make connections that we may have never made before, and in doing so, to get us out of our ruts, our slogans, our clichés in thinking by encouraging to think, literally to use our brains, in entirely different ways. Not in the ways of lazy language, prefab chunks, but to use our brains in entirely different ways and to get out of our conceptual ruts and perhaps reconceive of the world. Avant-garde work has often been considered art for art’s sake. But Breton and many other avant gardists and experimental poets, have known for decades that it was not necessarily so. It was and is highly political in its desire to change consciousness—not just consciousness about a particular issue, but all of consciousness, consciousness in general. The fact that it may lack political content per se does not make it apolitical. Helene Lewis makes a spirited defense of the political side of Surrealism, for example, when she writes “[t]he Surrealists, in their collective and anonymous art forms, succeeded in creating an anti-elitist art that acquired a new social meaning. Their belief that talent is irrelevant and that everyone has creative potential in his unconscious could be a perfect vehicle for a truly revolutionary art.” This is anti-myth and anti-spectacle before Barthes or Debord and the goals of Surrealism, particularly as outlined by Lewis, are still current and relevant, even if some of the methods of contemporary Surrealists have changed.
Poetry is a literary genre, but also a visual genre, for the poet creates images in the readers mind. And the spoken word poet can not only create images, but sounds, both musical and bruitistic, in the ears of the audience. It also has the freedom from the constraints of story, character, and plot that other literary and performance genres have. Spoken word poetry works on us on a number of levels and carries with it the potential of its own genre, as a literary form, as well as other genres that act on other areas of the brain. It can give people what they already know, and thus fall back on familiarity and habitualization in language and thought, or the poetry can challenge them, literally, to think for themselves when they listen by offering what is unfamiliar and totally new.
Monday, February 01, 2010
The Liberation of the Imagination as a Political Act and Spoken Word Poetry: Introduction
This is one possible intro to what will be my dissertation/book on the liberation of the imagination as a political act in spoken word poetry. Please feel free to comment liberally, tell me what I've missed/overlooked, what's not clear, etc. I've tried to answer all of the criticisms my committee has made of my work and I'm a little bit fighting for my academic future here.
Thank you. Please drive through.
Many artists and writers want their work to be political in some fashion, to change the world, to have an impact. Moreover, most, if not all, artists and writers, want their work, their art form, to be relevant. There have all kinds of warnings over the past 15 (or 300) years that poetry is in danger of becoming irrelevant. No one reads anymore, no one reads poetry anymore, etc. etc. These questions – of the relevance of poetry, of the political relevance of poetry, have been one of my major obsessions of the past 15 years. What is it that poetry offers that no other artform does? Why read and write poetry in an age of novels, short fiction, flash fiction, of creative nonfiction, memoir or autobiography, biography, journalism, etc. What separates poetry from these forms in and what way poetry can poetry do something that no other artform is capable of doing make it a) relevant and b) political, ie, c) politically relevant?
Over the past 15 years, I have devoted myself to studying these questions, both formally in graduate school, and informally, through my own studies, through talking to poets in person at open mics and online through blogs and email exchanges.
I don’t mean to proscribe creativity here, although I’m going to inevitable sound like I do. There are a lot of good and useful goals to poetry. There are many reasons and many arguments for all kinds of poetry. I myself like the occasional love poem, lyric poem, or epic poems. But what I am going to discuss here is how poetry can liberate the imagination and in so doing, make itself politically relevant. I feel strongly about this and so I will at times make pronouncements (which I will try to back up with theory) which may sound exclusionary, showing work which fails in specific ways. For example, work that is easily read. While some may argue that such work has layers of meaning to it, which it no doubt does, it is on the surface easy grasped and most people will not delve any further into it, simply enjoying it on a surface level. This is doubly so when the work is read outloud or even performed, as in spoken word poetry, which is the style or incidence of poetry that I am investigating.
Some may argue that spoken word poetry itself does not have “a” style, something with which I am also inclined to agree. However, I will argue here that spoken word poetry has a “dominant style,” particularly that which has been influenced by poetry slam. As the dominant style of spoken word poetry, then, I will deal in part with poetry slam and poetry slam style as it tends to show itself, recognizing, once again, that are always exceptions to the rule. It will be some of these exceptions that I will be exploring, in contrast to the rule.
What I will be arguing for instead, is work that automatically, immediately confounds rationality and may or may not be something that the reader can “figure out,” but cannot be immediately grasped in any way at all. As such, I am not really interested in what the message or meaning of poetry is, but the way in which it subverts expectation in meaning, either in the writing of it or in its performance. Thus, for example, much of Tracie Morris’ work may seem to be straightforward and “readable” on the page, but in performance, she disrupts those meanings. It is the disruption of meaning that I am interested in, rather than the meaning itself. Edwin Torres’ work, which I will be investigating in some depth, is a particularly rich site, as both writes work that is not immediately graspable and performs it in a sometimes equally befuddling manner.
One of goals is to suggest one future path for spoken word poetry in general, for spoken word poets who desire for their work to have a political edge. And part of that is to identify what is and to point out how the past (in the form of these avant gardes) may be prologue in terms of what could come next in spoken word poetry. One of the mythologies of spoken word poets is that they are “street poets,” unschooled in formal or “academic” poetry. This is most heavily promoted by Bob Holman of the Bowery Poetry Club and Marc Smith of the Green Mill in Chicago. The truth is that there is both truth and falsehood to the premise. Many many poetry slam participants, past and future, either had their MFA’s at the time they were competing in slam. Many others went to school to get an MFA after being introduced to poetry through the slams and so did not study poetry initially but were turned on to it through the slams. And still others remain “street poets” eschewing any kind of training or education in poetry, preferring to learn from other poets “on the scene”. Whatever the case, I would encourage spoken word poets to investigate these avant gardes. Tracie Morris herself has said that she was introduced to Kurt Schwitters, author of the Ur Sonate, by Torres and found Dadaism to be particularly fruitful as a spoken word performer.
In the course of my work I am going to refer to several avant-garde schools of poetry, including Formalism, Surrealism, and the Language Poets. I have been challenged and asked why these avant-gardes and why subject yourself to the baggage that the avant-garde carries. My response is that these particular avant-garde poetry movements have articulated things which are useful and yet which have not been fully employed or investigated. It seems that every 20 or 30 years a group of writers goes back and tries to rehabilitate the avant gardes that came before them, never really gaining widespread acceptance and remaining a marginalized voice in the wilderness, crying out for revolutionary poetics and making moderate headway at best. I’ve always been interested in what I consider to be incomplete revolutions in literature, asking myself what aspects of this or that particular theory of literature has failed to be “pulled forward,” or put another way, what was ignored or left behind, but which still has relevance. This has been my quest for probably 20 years or more and continues to be the focus of my work.
To critics who would say the avant-garde is a white institution, I would argue that is more a “whitewashing” of literary history than anything, on “both” sides of the literary aisle. There have been a number of people of color involved with the goals and practices of these avant garde movements, as I will show. Clarence Major and Russell Atkins were doing work that was very similar to what the Language Poets were doing. There were any number of artists, particular in Latin America and the Francophone Caribbean (such as the negritude poets) that were in line with the politically liberatory aspects of Surrealism. And contemporary poets like Edwin Torres continue to keep alive the work of the Russian Formalism while working within the framework of “spoken word,” having come up through the Nuyorican Poets Café in the 1990s.
It has taken me a long time to realize what my methodology was, to see what it was that I was doing instinctively, and make it conscious. My methodology is multivarious, with one part being less prominent than the others. First, I am looking at the claims of these three avant-gardes, particularly through the lens of Barthes and his piece “Myth Today.” Next, I am looking at specific poems and poets, adding to Barthes, Kristeva and her four types of signifying practices: the metanarrative, which is close to Barthes’ conception of myth, the contemplative, narrative, and the text. Along the way, I will be referring to theories of how language is processed, drawing on theories of cognition, both linguistic and psychological, to think about how disrupting the normal processes of language and understanding can, in fact, get us out of what is known and easily processed and move us forward in our imaginations. Sometimes I will be taking, for example, cognitive theories of how language does work and thinking about how we might subvert the working models of language and understanding and what that might accomplish. It is not my goal here to undertake new experiments at this time, but to work with what currently exists and apply to semiotic understandings of language.
Finally, I will be to a very small degree, reporting on “ethnographies” of the dominant places of spoken word poetry. It is not possible to be at every poetry reading on every occasion, but having attending the seminal, or germinal, if you will, places of poetry (the Bowery Poetry Club and the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York and the Green Mill in Chicago) as well as a number of other site in Minneapolis, Chicago and New York, I feel that I can report on what are some dominant streams of Spoken Word poetry and some aspects of the hosting and the audience reactions, as well as how those two things work in tandem with each other. This is the limit, however, of my ethnographic inquiry and I make no claims, nor do I find any claims possible, as to the “completeness” of this research.
Thank you. Please drive through.
Many artists and writers want their work to be political in some fashion, to change the world, to have an impact. Moreover, most, if not all, artists and writers, want their work, their art form, to be relevant. There have all kinds of warnings over the past 15 (or 300) years that poetry is in danger of becoming irrelevant. No one reads anymore, no one reads poetry anymore, etc. etc. These questions – of the relevance of poetry, of the political relevance of poetry, have been one of my major obsessions of the past 15 years. What is it that poetry offers that no other artform does? Why read and write poetry in an age of novels, short fiction, flash fiction, of creative nonfiction, memoir or autobiography, biography, journalism, etc. What separates poetry from these forms in and what way poetry can poetry do something that no other artform is capable of doing make it a) relevant and b) political, ie, c) politically relevant?
Over the past 15 years, I have devoted myself to studying these questions, both formally in graduate school, and informally, through my own studies, through talking to poets in person at open mics and online through blogs and email exchanges.
I don’t mean to proscribe creativity here, although I’m going to inevitable sound like I do. There are a lot of good and useful goals to poetry. There are many reasons and many arguments for all kinds of poetry. I myself like the occasional love poem, lyric poem, or epic poems. But what I am going to discuss here is how poetry can liberate the imagination and in so doing, make itself politically relevant. I feel strongly about this and so I will at times make pronouncements (which I will try to back up with theory) which may sound exclusionary, showing work which fails in specific ways. For example, work that is easily read. While some may argue that such work has layers of meaning to it, which it no doubt does, it is on the surface easy grasped and most people will not delve any further into it, simply enjoying it on a surface level. This is doubly so when the work is read outloud or even performed, as in spoken word poetry, which is the style or incidence of poetry that I am investigating.
Some may argue that spoken word poetry itself does not have “a” style, something with which I am also inclined to agree. However, I will argue here that spoken word poetry has a “dominant style,” particularly that which has been influenced by poetry slam. As the dominant style of spoken word poetry, then, I will deal in part with poetry slam and poetry slam style as it tends to show itself, recognizing, once again, that are always exceptions to the rule. It will be some of these exceptions that I will be exploring, in contrast to the rule.
What I will be arguing for instead, is work that automatically, immediately confounds rationality and may or may not be something that the reader can “figure out,” but cannot be immediately grasped in any way at all. As such, I am not really interested in what the message or meaning of poetry is, but the way in which it subverts expectation in meaning, either in the writing of it or in its performance. Thus, for example, much of Tracie Morris’ work may seem to be straightforward and “readable” on the page, but in performance, she disrupts those meanings. It is the disruption of meaning that I am interested in, rather than the meaning itself. Edwin Torres’ work, which I will be investigating in some depth, is a particularly rich site, as both writes work that is not immediately graspable and performs it in a sometimes equally befuddling manner.
One of goals is to suggest one future path for spoken word poetry in general, for spoken word poets who desire for their work to have a political edge. And part of that is to identify what is and to point out how the past (in the form of these avant gardes) may be prologue in terms of what could come next in spoken word poetry. One of the mythologies of spoken word poets is that they are “street poets,” unschooled in formal or “academic” poetry. This is most heavily promoted by Bob Holman of the Bowery Poetry Club and Marc Smith of the Green Mill in Chicago. The truth is that there is both truth and falsehood to the premise. Many many poetry slam participants, past and future, either had their MFA’s at the time they were competing in slam. Many others went to school to get an MFA after being introduced to poetry through the slams and so did not study poetry initially but were turned on to it through the slams. And still others remain “street poets” eschewing any kind of training or education in poetry, preferring to learn from other poets “on the scene”. Whatever the case, I would encourage spoken word poets to investigate these avant gardes. Tracie Morris herself has said that she was introduced to Kurt Schwitters, author of the Ur Sonate, by Torres and found Dadaism to be particularly fruitful as a spoken word performer.
In the course of my work I am going to refer to several avant-garde schools of poetry, including Formalism, Surrealism, and the Language Poets. I have been challenged and asked why these avant-gardes and why subject yourself to the baggage that the avant-garde carries. My response is that these particular avant-garde poetry movements have articulated things which are useful and yet which have not been fully employed or investigated. It seems that every 20 or 30 years a group of writers goes back and tries to rehabilitate the avant gardes that came before them, never really gaining widespread acceptance and remaining a marginalized voice in the wilderness, crying out for revolutionary poetics and making moderate headway at best. I’ve always been interested in what I consider to be incomplete revolutions in literature, asking myself what aspects of this or that particular theory of literature has failed to be “pulled forward,” or put another way, what was ignored or left behind, but which still has relevance. This has been my quest for probably 20 years or more and continues to be the focus of my work.
To critics who would say the avant-garde is a white institution, I would argue that is more a “whitewashing” of literary history than anything, on “both” sides of the literary aisle. There have been a number of people of color involved with the goals and practices of these avant garde movements, as I will show. Clarence Major and Russell Atkins were doing work that was very similar to what the Language Poets were doing. There were any number of artists, particular in Latin America and the Francophone Caribbean (such as the negritude poets) that were in line with the politically liberatory aspects of Surrealism. And contemporary poets like Edwin Torres continue to keep alive the work of the Russian Formalism while working within the framework of “spoken word,” having come up through the Nuyorican Poets Café in the 1990s.
It has taken me a long time to realize what my methodology was, to see what it was that I was doing instinctively, and make it conscious. My methodology is multivarious, with one part being less prominent than the others. First, I am looking at the claims of these three avant-gardes, particularly through the lens of Barthes and his piece “Myth Today.” Next, I am looking at specific poems and poets, adding to Barthes, Kristeva and her four types of signifying practices: the metanarrative, which is close to Barthes’ conception of myth, the contemplative, narrative, and the text. Along the way, I will be referring to theories of how language is processed, drawing on theories of cognition, both linguistic and psychological, to think about how disrupting the normal processes of language and understanding can, in fact, get us out of what is known and easily processed and move us forward in our imaginations. Sometimes I will be taking, for example, cognitive theories of how language does work and thinking about how we might subvert the working models of language and understanding and what that might accomplish. It is not my goal here to undertake new experiments at this time, but to work with what currently exists and apply to semiotic understandings of language.
Finally, I will be to a very small degree, reporting on “ethnographies” of the dominant places of spoken word poetry. It is not possible to be at every poetry reading on every occasion, but having attending the seminal, or germinal, if you will, places of poetry (the Bowery Poetry Club and the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York and the Green Mill in Chicago) as well as a number of other site in Minneapolis, Chicago and New York, I feel that I can report on what are some dominant streams of Spoken Word poetry and some aspects of the hosting and the audience reactions, as well as how those two things work in tandem with each other. This is the limit, however, of my ethnographic inquiry and I make no claims, nor do I find any claims possible, as to the “completeness” of this research.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Tupac Shakur and Kurt Schwitters
In challenging the "canon," Ishmael Reed poses the question "why can't Tupac Shakur be studied alongside T.S. Eliot?" [ii] I would ask why we don't study Tupac alongside Kurt Schwitters.
Re-appropriating the Avant Garde
One of the most potentially fruitful avant garde movements for spoken word practice is Dada. A collection of artists throughout Europe during and between the two world wars, Dada's literary and performance aspects were deeply intertwined and are difficult to speak of as separate entities, much like current practices of spoken word and performance poetry.
e.g. bailey, writer, performer and one of the founders of the Minnesota Spoken Word Association (MnSWA) once said to me that all spoken word comes from the African diaspora. Obviously any blanket statement like that requires skepticism, and the traditions of performed poetry in Ancient Greece and in Japan, as well as Native American storytelling refute his blanket assertion. But within contemporary practices, built on jazz and bebop in America, and the European avant garde's affinity for African art, there is an idea worth considering here.
"Dadaists recited so-called 'negro songs' . . . Mostly sacral texts from indigenous African and Oceanic cultures meticulously collected from anthropological literature in an attempt to guarantee the highest grade of authenticity" and also "from the slums of the North-American metropolis: Afro-American rag-time, cake walk and jazz." [i]
While poetry slam and hip hop borrow from African (American) rhythms, including bebop and jazz, as well as dealing with issues of ethnicity and racial heritage, we rarely see in contemporary practice the kind of language experimentation of Hugo Ball or Kurt Schwitters or linguistic explorations of the sources mentioned above. In challenging the "canon," Ishmael Reed poses the question "why can't Tupac Shakur be studied alongside T.S. Eliot?" [ii] I would ask why we don't study Tupac alongside Kurt Schwitters. Given the tendency and desire of early literary avant gardes such as Dada and Surrealism to borrow from (what they perceived as) African Art and rhythms, an art practice that works more directly those traditions would have much to offer contemporary practice, tied in as it often is with hip hop. And with criticisms these avant gardes as "appropriating" from other cultures, it would seem natural for those coming from a diasporic aesthetic to revisit those techniques and ideas and reclaim them for themselves.
The outsider stance of the poetry slam aesthetic also has much in common with a movement such as Dada, which was very critical of and reacting against the literary and artistic "establishment."
"The Dadaists' disenchantment with the cultural and political status quo was so fundamental and deep-seated that they felt they could no longer express it within the boundaries of existing artistic and communicative conventions." [iii]
One of the hallmark activities of the Dadas was the performance cabaret, most famously, Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The cabarets were designed to push the endurance and tolerance of the audience and challenge their ideas toward art. They would include sound poems composed of "nonsense" verse and syllables, declaim their many incendiary manifestos from the stage, perform skits, and in one instance, created a riot by creating and then erasing an artwork by Francis Picabia on a blackboard. [iv] Confrontiation was the hallmark of their work, and confrontation is necessarily a face-to-face, live endeavor. And so while they published their own journals and pioneered visual poetry as well, Dada poets were meant to be heard!
At the same time that Dada was meant to be performed and performative, one of the methods to the madness was to challenge norms by challenging normal thinking, which meant challenging the modes of language in which thought is possible.
"The avant-garde, by means of several devices, tried to create a realm based on three forms of novelty: 1. new forms of perception from the point of view of the subject/author; 2. new forms of communication by placing words and objects in a different order for reception; 3. new forms of reception and perception, from the point of view of the recipient." [v]
Dada shared with Formalism its disdain for "subjectivity" "understood as a solipsistic individuality in art and social life." [vi] Like the Formalists, they too sought a denaturalized language, deconstructing representation in language the way it was being deconstructed by the visual artists in their midst. The Dadaists' goals was to "try to trigger and stimulate change within the individual, hoping that they could get the audience . . or readers . . . to rethink their positions, to make them confront habitual thinking structures, to question their attitudes toward literature, convention, and perhaps even social order." [vii] So deep was their "disenchantment with the cultural and political status quo . . . that they felt they could no longer express it within the boundaries of existing artistic and communicative conventions." [viii]
As I talk with people about Dada writing and performance and its application to contemporary practice, it's fairly common to hear things like "Well, Dada was great, but it's over now," or "Dada was out of its own time . . ." Interestingly, this discussion most recently came up with Bob Holman, director of the Bowery Poetry Club, who was at the same time, scheduled to read Dada poetry at MoMA the day after I met with him, as part of their Dada exhibit. Holman has also been quick to invoke the spirit of Dada, for example in his manifesto-like introduction to Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets'Café:
"Hear this book with your eyes! When the Mouth marries the Eye, the Ear officiates (see Tristan Tzara's "The Gas Heart." Better yet, perform that tiny masterpiece!)" [ix]
There is, in fact, unfinished work to the literary avant gardes. Language has not been fully deconstructed the way the image has. In fact, poet Bryon Gysin is famously noted for declaring that "writing is 50 years behind painting." With the stranglehold on language that we see in phenomena like myth, spectacle and simulacra, we cannot declare the experimentation of Dada, 'zaum, Formalism, Surrealism irrelevant until they have fully borne fruit. There is still, as Michael Moroni calls it, "an unfulfilled project,"
" . . . the possibility of art participating in social-cultural processes, understood in the widest sense (social emancipation and the transformation of language and of perceptive modalities of reality) . . ." [x]
Charles Olson's calls for post-modern poetry to go back to its origins and come forward again down a different path, "beyond Melville and Romaticism . . . To go back is not to seize the origin, to recuperate some paradisal space, but to begin the 'deed and misdeed' signified by writing. Olson's new beginning rejects (figuratively) everything that lay between Homer's writing and Melville's . . ." [xi] In our time, perhaps we need not to reject everything that came between Homer and Melville, or even between Tzara and Bernstein, but it is certainly a call to revisit the possibilities of the past, to look for unfinished revolutions and business left undone, and see where those threads can be incorporated into our own work.
[i] van den Berg 33
[ii] Ishmael Reed, 3.
[iii] Schaffner, 118
[iv] For particularly good descriptions of Dada events and cabarets, see Annabelle Melzer's Latest Rage: The Big Drum and Dada and Surrealist Performance as well as RoseLee Goldberg's history Performance Art: Futurism to the Present.
[v] Moroni, 9
[vi] Moroni, 4
[vii] Schaffner, 125
[viii] Schaffner, 118
[ix] Algarin and Holman, 1
[x] Moroni, 21
[xi] Riddell, 162
One of the most potentially fruitful avant garde movements for spoken word practice is Dada. A collection of artists throughout Europe during and between the two world wars, Dada's literary and performance aspects were deeply intertwined and are difficult to speak of as separate entities, much like current practices of spoken word and performance poetry.
e.g. bailey, writer, performer and one of the founders of the Minnesota Spoken Word Association (MnSWA) once said to me that all spoken word comes from the African diaspora. Obviously any blanket statement like that requires skepticism, and the traditions of performed poetry in Ancient Greece and in Japan, as well as Native American storytelling refute his blanket assertion. But within contemporary practices, built on jazz and bebop in America, and the European avant garde's affinity for African art, there is an idea worth considering here.
"Dadaists recited so-called 'negro songs' . . . Mostly sacral texts from indigenous African and Oceanic cultures meticulously collected from anthropological literature in an attempt to guarantee the highest grade of authenticity" and also "from the slums of the North-American metropolis: Afro-American rag-time, cake walk and jazz." [i]
While poetry slam and hip hop borrow from African (American) rhythms, including bebop and jazz, as well as dealing with issues of ethnicity and racial heritage, we rarely see in contemporary practice the kind of language experimentation of Hugo Ball or Kurt Schwitters or linguistic explorations of the sources mentioned above. In challenging the "canon," Ishmael Reed poses the question "why can't Tupac Shakur be studied alongside T.S. Eliot?" [ii] I would ask why we don't study Tupac alongside Kurt Schwitters. Given the tendency and desire of early literary avant gardes such as Dada and Surrealism to borrow from (what they perceived as) African Art and rhythms, an art practice that works more directly those traditions would have much to offer contemporary practice, tied in as it often is with hip hop. And with criticisms these avant gardes as "appropriating" from other cultures, it would seem natural for those coming from a diasporic aesthetic to revisit those techniques and ideas and reclaim them for themselves.
The outsider stance of the poetry slam aesthetic also has much in common with a movement such as Dada, which was very critical of and reacting against the literary and artistic "establishment."
"The Dadaists' disenchantment with the cultural and political status quo was so fundamental and deep-seated that they felt they could no longer express it within the boundaries of existing artistic and communicative conventions." [iii]
One of the hallmark activities of the Dadas was the performance cabaret, most famously, Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The cabarets were designed to push the endurance and tolerance of the audience and challenge their ideas toward art. They would include sound poems composed of "nonsense" verse and syllables, declaim their many incendiary manifestos from the stage, perform skits, and in one instance, created a riot by creating and then erasing an artwork by Francis Picabia on a blackboard. [iv] Confrontiation was the hallmark of their work, and confrontation is necessarily a face-to-face, live endeavor. And so while they published their own journals and pioneered visual poetry as well, Dada poets were meant to be heard!
At the same time that Dada was meant to be performed and performative, one of the methods to the madness was to challenge norms by challenging normal thinking, which meant challenging the modes of language in which thought is possible.
"The avant-garde, by means of several devices, tried to create a realm based on three forms of novelty: 1. new forms of perception from the point of view of the subject/author; 2. new forms of communication by placing words and objects in a different order for reception; 3. new forms of reception and perception, from the point of view of the recipient." [v]
Dada shared with Formalism its disdain for "subjectivity" "understood as a solipsistic individuality in art and social life." [vi] Like the Formalists, they too sought a denaturalized language, deconstructing representation in language the way it was being deconstructed by the visual artists in their midst. The Dadaists' goals was to "try to trigger and stimulate change within the individual, hoping that they could get the audience . . or readers . . . to rethink their positions, to make them confront habitual thinking structures, to question their attitudes toward literature, convention, and perhaps even social order." [vii] So deep was their "disenchantment with the cultural and political status quo . . . that they felt they could no longer express it within the boundaries of existing artistic and communicative conventions." [viii]
As I talk with people about Dada writing and performance and its application to contemporary practice, it's fairly common to hear things like "Well, Dada was great, but it's over now," or "Dada was out of its own time . . ." Interestingly, this discussion most recently came up with Bob Holman, director of the Bowery Poetry Club, who was at the same time, scheduled to read Dada poetry at MoMA the day after I met with him, as part of their Dada exhibit. Holman has also been quick to invoke the spirit of Dada, for example in his manifesto-like introduction to Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets'Café:
"Hear this book with your eyes! When the Mouth marries the Eye, the Ear officiates (see Tristan Tzara's "The Gas Heart." Better yet, perform that tiny masterpiece!)" [ix]
There is, in fact, unfinished work to the literary avant gardes. Language has not been fully deconstructed the way the image has. In fact, poet Bryon Gysin is famously noted for declaring that "writing is 50 years behind painting." With the stranglehold on language that we see in phenomena like myth, spectacle and simulacra, we cannot declare the experimentation of Dada, 'zaum, Formalism, Surrealism irrelevant until they have fully borne fruit. There is still, as Michael Moroni calls it, "an unfulfilled project,"
" . . . the possibility of art participating in social-cultural processes, understood in the widest sense (social emancipation and the transformation of language and of perceptive modalities of reality) . . ." [x]
Charles Olson's calls for post-modern poetry to go back to its origins and come forward again down a different path, "beyond Melville and Romaticism . . . To go back is not to seize the origin, to recuperate some paradisal space, but to begin the 'deed and misdeed' signified by writing. Olson's new beginning rejects (figuratively) everything that lay between Homer's writing and Melville's . . ." [xi] In our time, perhaps we need not to reject everything that came between Homer and Melville, or even between Tzara and Bernstein, but it is certainly a call to revisit the possibilities of the past, to look for unfinished revolutions and business left undone, and see where those threads can be incorporated into our own work.
[i] van den Berg 33
[ii] Ishmael Reed, 3.
[iii] Schaffner, 118
[iv] For particularly good descriptions of Dada events and cabarets, see Annabelle Melzer's Latest Rage: The Big Drum and Dada and Surrealist Performance as well as RoseLee Goldberg's history Performance Art: Futurism to the Present.
[v] Moroni, 9
[vi] Moroni, 4
[vii] Schaffner, 125
[viii] Schaffner, 118
[ix] Algarin and Holman, 1
[x] Moroni, 21
[xi] Riddell, 162
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