Poetry & Listening: The Noise of Lyric 1789621798, 9781789621792

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Poetry & Listening

Poetry & … Series Editors

Ralph Pite University of Bristol Deryn Rees-Jones University of Liverpool Series Board

Peter Barry Aberystwyth University Neil Corcoran University of Liverpool James Longenbach University of Rochester, USA Jan Montefiore University of Kent Barbara Page Vassar College, USA Marjorie Perloff Stanford University, USA Adam Piette University of Sheffield Stan Smith Nottingham Trent University Also in this series

Poetry & Displacement Stan Smith Poetry & Language Writing David Arnold Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible Peter Robinson Science in Modern Poetry John Holmes Poetry & Geography Edited by Neal Alexander and David Cooper Poetry & Responsibility Neil Corcoran Poetry & Barthes Calum Gardner Poetry & the Dictionary Edited by Andrew Blades and Piers Pennington Poetry & Money Peter Robinson

Poetry & Listening The Noise of Lyric

Zoë Skoulding

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published 2020 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU

Copyright © 2020 Zoë Skoulding

The right of Zoë Skoulding to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available

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Contents

Acknowledgementsvii Introduction: Listening to Lyric and Noise

1

Chapter 1: Song: Denise Riley’s Lyric and Rock Echoes 

22

Chapter 2: Noise: Sean Bonney’s Resistance 

43

Chapter 3: Acousmatics: Sounded/Silent Text in Caroline Bergvall’s Drift 

64

Chapter 4: Synaesthesia: Tuning in to Carol Watts and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge 

80

Chapter 5: Echo: Claudia Rankine and Vahni Capildeo 

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Chapter 6: Improvisation: Tom Raworth’s Intuition 

118

Chapter 7: Performance: Listening Bodies 

134

Chapter 8: Resounding: Peter Hughes, Jeff Hilson and Tim Atkins

159

Conclusion175 Bibliography178 Index190

v

Acknowledgements

First, I am grateful to the poets whose work I have discussed here, and whose listening has provided a stimulus to my own. I would like to thank them for discussions during the process of writing this book, and for permission to quote from their work. This book relies on the principle of fair use in quotation of copyright material. The authors’ rights are fully acknowledged, and every effort has been made to ensure that copyright has been honoured. Particular thanks are due to Boiler House Press, Carcanet Press, The Crater Press, Enitharmon Press (a division of Enitharmon Editions), Openned Press, Picador (Pan Macmillan), Reality Street, Unkant Publishers and Veer Books. If there have been any oversights, please contact Liverpool University Press, who will be glad to help. Bangor University granted me much appreciated periods of research leave in 2014 and 2017 that enabled me to work on this project. Valuable support was provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), who funded the network Poetry in Expanded Translation, 2017–18 – many thanks to my co-investigator Jeff Hilson and all who participated. I would also like to thank Les Récollets International Accommodation and Exchange Centre for a residency in 2014, supported by the City of Paris and the Institut Français. Likewise, the generosity of Jean-Hervé Peron and Carina Varain through the Schiphorst Avantgarde Festival enabled many encounters that helped with this book. I am grateful to Denise Riley, Peter Robinson, Carole Birkan-Berz, Vincent Dussol and Adriana Serban for their comments on and discussion of earlier versions of some of this material. The process of publication has been helped along by the anonymous reviewers of Liverpool University Press, who contributed extremely constructive suggestions, and by the efficiency and encouragement of my editor Christabel Scaife. Parts of the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2 were originally published in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Poetry (2013) edited by Peter Robinson, and have been reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. Chapter 3 was originally published in Poésie-Traduction-Cinéma/ vii

Acknowledgements

Poetry-Translation-Film (2019), edited by Vincent Dussol and Adriana Serban, and is reproduced by permission of Lambert-Lucas. Parts of Chapters 1 and 8 were originally published in a paper jointly written with Carole Birkan-Berz, ‘Translating Sound and Resonance in Experimental Poetry from the UK: A Cross-Channel Perspective’, published in Palimpsestes, 28 (2015), edited by Frédérique Brisset. Finally, love and gratitude goes to Alan Holmes, for sharing his deeply knowledgeable listening with me over the best part of three decades, and for his immense patience while I wrote this, which is dedicated to him.

viii

Introduction: Listening to Lyric and Noise

The complex swirls and cavities of the ear create a negative space in the body, an openness to the world and to language that is both actual and metaphorical. Listening might be considered the inverse of the poem, the silent reception that frames linguistic utterance, were it not for the listening that already infiltrates the poem, shaping its composition, its form and its relationship with the reader. As the ‘and’ of this book’s title might indicate, it is not just about listening to poetry, but about listening through and with poetry, and about how poetry listens. It argues that a number of contemporary poets are responding to an acoustic field that has been expanded by developments in recording technology and approaches to sound, and that this is enabling them to reflect and create new forms of lyric subjectivity as well as new relationships between bodies and environments. If work in sound studies, especially since John Cage (1961), reveals that silence does not exist, the ‘silent’ reading of poetry must also be reimagined in a continuum with acoustic and social environments. The inner voice with which poetry may be composed is increasingly understood by contemporary poets as one that is formed by listening, by forms of replay, echo and response that become embedded in compositional methods. Such listening takes place in the context of the vast availability of recorded sound, and it is inflected by the awareness of sound that comes from recording technologies. Noise, as sonic excess, as sound that escapes signification, as provocation, makes increasing claims on our attention, reframing relationships between contemporary poetry and the world of which it is a part. In the following chapters I examine the social, environmental and political questions that emerge from a consideration of the noise that surrounds, interrupts or informs lyric expression, and show how poetry creates nuanced forms of attention to the non-human world through the listening it helps to shape. With a substantial focus on poetry from the UK, linked and compared with poetries from the USA, the writers under discussion include Denise Riley, 1

Introduction

Sean Bonney, Caroline Bergvall, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Carol Watts, Claudia Rankine, Vahni Capildeo, Tom Raworth, Bob Cobbing, Henri Chopin, Emma Bennett, Jonathan Skinner, Holly Pester, Tracie Morris, Hannah Silva, Rhys Trimble, Peter Hughes, Jeff Hilson and Tim Atkins. My interest here is in poems in which voice is understood as social, resonant and material, rather than as an emanation from the private depths of an individual interior being. This is particularly evident in the work of Denise Riley, whose poetry and prose is pivotal in showing how often the inner speech of thought may be characterised by a replaying of language encountered in the externally sounded world, from fragments of lyric to verbal abuse. As I will show in Chapter 1, her sustained engagement with lyric and song, whether in poems that quote song lyrics or in her recent work that argues with and comments on its own use of traditional lyric forms, links the sounding of poetry with musical listening to articulate a position in which emotions are mobilised – with the urgency that word implies – rather than ‘expressed’. If lyric is understood in a social, collective context, it is also subject to noise and interference. Chapter 2 explores this question in relation to the poetry of Sean Bonney, whose important contribution to UK poetry, before his early and unexpected death in 2019, included channelling Baudelaire and Rimbaud in ways that recovered their revolutionary energies. Steeped in countercultural musical listening, from the saxophonic scream of John Coltrane to the violent abrasions of punk, Bonney’s poetry draws on the jagged edges, noise and interference of amplified and recorded sound as an attack on controlling perceptual frameworks. While the prevailing atmosphere of British translation of French poetry had previously tended to be respectful, academic and middle class, Bonney’s versions create political as well as linguistic friction. Where Rimbaud calls for ‘systematic derangement of the senses’, Bonney insists that this is not an invitation to individual hedonism but a call to reorder the social senses, which have been, as Marx observed, eroded by ownership and objectification (Bonney, 2011, 63–64). If the senses are socially mediated, but society is dominated by late capitalism, who owns what is heard? What forms of power are made audible and how? Listening, against the white noise of the neoliberal acoustic field, is the urgent political task to which Bonney’s poetry sets its readers. The listening of translation may be a noisy disruption of linguistic boundaries, particularly when it allows the sound of one language to resonate in another. Rather than accepting a particular language, in this case English, as a bounded entity, the UK-based French–Norwegian poet Caroline Bergvall positions her multimedia work Drift (2014) within the oceanic fluidities of linguistic and etymological change. Despite the passage over centuries and languages of her main source text, the anonymous Old English poem The Seafarer, the movement of contemporary migrants at sea is brutally constrained. This conflict is an acoustic paradox: if language is 2

Introduction

already resonant with the echoes of so many transitory pasts, how it can be used to sustain rigid identities and borders? In Chapter 3, I show how these questions of orientation and direction are posed in relation to acousmatic listening, where the source of a sound is not revealed, as well as through the affordances of collaborative sound and visual performance. Synaesthesia, whether physical experience or literary device, foregrounds the interconnectedness of the senses, to which I turn in Chapter 4 in a discussion of the Chinese–American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Carol Watts from the UK. The interplay between listening, sight and touch in their work becomes a means of challenging traditional forms of subjectivity, in relation to the non-human as well as the human world. Chapter 5 focuses on the echoing effects of harmful speech, as developed by Riley, and considers it in relation to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), while a contrasting approach to echo is suggested by the work of Édouard Glissant in relation to the Trinidad-born, UK-resident poet Vahni Capildeo. In Chapter 6, I discuss the poetry of the late Tom Raworth (a poet of complex identification, although ‘Irish–English’ is generally agreed), first alongside guitarist Derek Bailey’s writing on improvisation, and then in terms of its attention to sonic environments. Chapter 7 draws connections between poetry, performance and the embodiment of listening in technological, non-human, gendered and bilingual contexts. If the easy availability of recording technology in the 1960s allowed what Steve McCaffery describes as ‘a second orality predicated on a graphism’, that is, the ‘writing’ of the tape recorder, here I consider the ways in which listening changed by contemporary relationships between writing and embodiment (McCaffery and bpNichol, 1978). In the closing chapter, a discussion of Tim Atkins, Jeff Hilson and Peter Hughes explores their experimental approaches to translation, particularly of the sonnet, via the contrasting repetitions and temporalities of recorded song. As the voices of the dead come over the airwaves of their poems, the logic of the cover version makes temporality audible through difference and variation. Instead of narrowing in on myths of Petrarchan obsession, these translations turn outward to the peripheral sociality of song and the contexts in which it is heard. My argument concludes with this exploration of the generative possibilities of listening when poetry resonates across periods and languages. The American poet Forrest Gander’s video poem ‘Paleoacoustics’ (2013) explores the hypothesis that ancient pottery might retain the sounds that surrounded its moment of construction, and that it might be played like a vinyl record if the right technology could be developed. Despite experiments along these lines by Richard G. Woodbridge (1969), and more recently by Mendel Kleiner and Paul Åström (1993), the idea remains no more than an appealing fantasy. In Gander’s film, the technology has arrived, a spot of red light shining on a pot that rotates on a turntable, releasing the sound of an ‘ancient’ song in an unknown language. His spoken text imagines 3

Introduction

an archaeological site in which the material traces of the past provide such strong indexical links to its people that ‘our imagination of them is saturated with encounter’. Alongside the voice of the song, we hear barking of dogs, the sound of work and the grating rotation of the medium itself – the condition of being in a vibrating world of sound that connects us to other humans and non-human entities. It is the contemporary possibility of recorded sound that makes these continuities audible: recording has changed music, and therefore how one might understand the ‘musicality’ of poetry. Listening to a poem being read aloud draws attention to the deliberate sounding of language, although prosodic analysis of these sounds is not my primary focus in this book. Rather, I am interested in how a poem might reveal a wider acoustic environment, and how this might inflect poetry’s political and ethical encounters. Discussion of sound in poetry has often been focused on questions of form and metre, its relationship with music seen in terms of written composition or transcription. Douglas Oliver’s Poetry and Narrative in Performance (1989), for example, works painstakingly to describe poetic performance with a view to revealing the sonic richness and intellectual complexity of ‘the music of poetry’ (vii) by transcribing its sound patterns. However, just as the study of music – indeed music itself – has been revolutionised by approaches that acknowledge its context within a world of sound, so the musical aspects of poetry may be addressed within the wider material context of listening. Although I will discuss form in relation to specific poems, my focus is broader than prosodic analysis; my aim is not an exhaustive technical interrogation of poetic technique but rather to articulate an understanding of sound in the poem as it is experienced through the body, in social spaces and in the context of other environmental sounds. It involves thinking about the poem in acoustic spaces, seeing the poem itself as an acoustic space and thinking about how we attend to language in the context of other acoustic phenomena. Sound recording, as a capture of a time period that makes no distinction between the source of vibrations, whether voice or thing, might seem to be a metaphor for the pitfalls of writing about contemporary literature, where all the background noise of the present crowds in on the poem ‘itself’ – except that a poem is never just itself, but enmeshed in the social, political and material worlds within which it is produced. The kind of listening that concerns me here is one that is shaped by time and circumstance, and from the perspective of 2020s immersion in unlimited digital streams of recorded sound, one can look back on more than a century of rapid change. Walter Benjamin describes a crisis of listening as a result of the First World War from which men returned: ‘grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience’ (Benjamin, 1999b, 84). The social senses of the ‘community of listeners’ are, in his account of storytelling, damaged by modernity’s catastrophic rupture of the physical senses, in which ‘never has experience 4

Introduction

been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power’ (Benjamin, 1999b, 84). It is just this rupture, however, and the same historical context, that creates the kind of listening explored in ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’, the ‘simultaneous poem’ by Dadaists Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck and Marcel Janko in Zürich in 1916 (Rothenberg and Joris, 1995, 308–9). Its cacophony of overlapping languages, along with its conflation of sound poem and musical score, enables the listener to move beyond a singular narrative and into the shifting relations of juxtaposed languages. If Benjamin’s community of listeners cannot reach the absorptive state necessary for ancient traditions of storytelling to flourish, Tzara, Huelsenbeck and Janko reveal the development of new sensory relations. The very fact of non-communicable experience is what foregrounds the signifier, making it possible to listen in new ways to the sound of language. In the absence of trustworthy structures, the senses must be refocused in an orientation to future possibility. Listening to this work is not just a matter of responding to the aural event of its performance, but adjusting to a changed balance between signal and noise. Twentieth-century listening was influenced by the rapid growth of access to recorded sound. Edison’s phonograph with its wax cylinders (which could be used to make home recordings) gave way to the gramophone and the wide availability of mass-produced discs. The record industry was established globally by the beginning of the First World War, while radio was mainstream by the 1920s. The recorded voice was becoming part of daily domestic experience, and the popularity of the talkies in the 1930s brought a new acoustic dimension to cinema that brought the sounds of everyday surroundings into focus. Later, Cage would register the implications of this for music: Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles an hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and contain these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of ‘sound effects’ recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within and beyond the reach of the imagination. (Cage, 1961, 3)

The estrangement that comes from the recontextualisation of listening is experienced here as a liberation full of imaginative possibility. As I have argued elsewhere in relation to Welsh modernist poets Dylan Thomas and Lynette Roberts (Skoulding, 2018, 177–96; 2019, 138–54), the dislocation of sound from its source created the potential for reshaping sonic material 5

Introduction

and gave a new sense of how the voice might relate to environmental sound. Roberts’ modernist poetry was informed by a filmic sensibility that not only made her aware of soundscape, especially of birds and planes interweaving in wartime skies, but infused her language with sonic intensity, as in ‘Curlew’, a poem in which a bird caught indoors, ‘Captured, explodes a chill sky croon / Wail-íng… pal-íng’, echoing the sound of sirens or droning engines (Roberts, 2005, 15). Sound is malleable, the drama and violence of war brought into the domestic space just as it is brought close by newsreels in the cinema. The means by which modern music has absorbed and been shaped by the impact of recording provides some insights into parallel processes in poetry; a twentieth-century interest in the materiality of sound, which through recording can be isolated from its source, has an equivalent in understandings of poetry that emphasise the materiality of language. In his essay ‘Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol’ the American poet Nathaniel Mackey has commented on the shared etymology of ‘orphic’ and ‘orphan’ (Mackey, 1987, 29). Drawing upon writings on music by Steven Feld and Victor Zuckerkandl respectively, he explores music and poetic language in relation to social rupture, as ‘a music that turns on abandonment, absence, loss’, suggesting that ‘[m]usic is wounded kinship’s last resort’, and also in terms of the materiality of sound, since poetic or musical meaning cannot be separated from the physical existence of the signifier (Mackey, 1987, 29). Noting Octavio Paz’s ‘characterization of language as an orphan severed from the presence to which it refers and which presumably gave it birth’, Mackey points out that ‘[m]usic encourages us to see that the symbolic is the orphic, that the symbolic realm is the realm of the orphan… Poetic language is language owning up to being an orphan, to its tenuous kinship with the things it ostensibly refers to’ (Mackey, 1987, 31). Poetry’s point of connection with music undermines the referential character of language; while this intensifies lyric affect it also breaks the link between language and the subject as its originating source. A similar set of conclusions in music has been enabled by sound recording, notably through Pierre Schaeffer’s major contribution to contemporary music, his notion of the objét sonore or ‘sound object’ (Holmes, 2008, 45). For example, Schaeffer’s libretto for the 1953 opera Orphée 53, written with Pierre Henry, refers to the image of the beheaded Orpheus, the severed head that goes on singing. He describes a moment in the performance: Orphée chantait : On raconte — Que décapité — Orphée — L’appelait — L’appelait encore … Eurydice, Eurydice … Rien ne se passait plus sur scène. Pierre Henry déchaînait les haut-parleurs à coups de clavecin preparé, de tam-tam, de detonations, tandis que 6

Introduction

passait sur une bande pré-enregistrée une voix qui parlait grec, mais désarticulée, arrachée, criée, râlée. (Pierret, 1969, 103) Orpheus was singing: It’s said — that decapitated — Orpheus — called her — called her still … Eurydice, Eurydice … Nothing more was happening on the stage. Pierre Henry was unleashing blasts of prepared harpsichord, tom-toms, explosions from the loudspeakers, while on a pre-recorded tape there was a voice speaking Greek, but dislocated, torn, shouting and groaning. (my translation)

Memory is central to the image of Orpheus looking back, and to his repeated calling, but at the same time recorded sound is cut from its source to become the basis of new compositional possibilities. This is the starting point of electro-acoustic music; rather than proceeding from a written score, such music begins with sound phenomena that are manipulated into a composition. The notion of the orphan/orphic is closely tied to the question of affect, and an attention to phenomena in an environment insists on a public and shared dimension of both language and sound. As Trevor Wishart points out, ‘there is no such thing as an unmusical sound object’: with the advent of recorded sound, all sounds are equal, and equally capable of being regarded as music, so music is what is discovered through listening (Wishart, 1985, 6). There are productive contradictions in this area: work such as Schaeffer’s can tend towards the entirely non-referential, to a pure music, but sounds are often haunted by their sources as their recontextualisation results in a proliferation of new meanings. When contemporary poets quote from their own experience of listening, whether to song lyrics, speech or other poetry, an analogous compositional technique takes place based on sound phenomena within a given environment. This may be through musical references made in the poems, often, in the poetry I will be discussing, not the works of avant-garde composers like Schaeffer but the popular culture that saturates everyday life via the technology that is also part of it. Sampling is well established as a technique that recontextualises song fragments, creating new music while relying on a degree of hauntedness in the memory of its source recordings. Furthermore, recording levels out differences not only between different sounds but between different types of music, since, as Chris Cutler explains, ‘a record makes all musics equally accessible’; he goes on to describe the ‘sound intoxication’ of the 1960s in which the work of high-art composers such as Varèse, Schaeffer and Stockhausen influenced the cross-play of high and low art for a new generation of musicians experimenting with recorded sound borrowed from existing sources (Cutler, 2008, 147). Yet it was more difficult for classical composers to adapt to such possibilities because of ‘the non-negotiable concern with originality and peer status — and also 7

Introduction

with the craft aspect of creating from scratch’ (Cutler, 2008, 147). The mainstream of classical composition proved resistant to such techniques, but as Cutler writes: ‘To the extent that sound recording as a medium negates that of notation and echoes in a transformed form that of biological memory, this should not be so surprising. In ritual and folk musics, for instance, originality as we understand it would be a misunderstanding — or a transgression — since proper performance is repetition’ (Cutler, 2008, 141). In popular music, folk-derived practices such as the cover version, or making variations on a traditional form, meant that such concerns with originality have been less problematic, although there have been injustices when supposedly ‘anonymous’ songs have been appropriated and lucratively recorded by white musicians. Nevertheless, Cutler’s point about freedom from notation and the ownership of the written score points valuably to a new conception of the circulation of sound. Recording can be said in some senses to return modern music to social meaning and memory-based patterns of transmission that are as old as music itself. In poetry, this in turn emphasises the role of recalled listening as a form of recording, particularly in Riley’s emphasis on the materiality of remembered speech and lyric. Listening, as understood in this material context, enables critical juxtaposition between times and contexts, revealing itself in poetries that reject the idea of ‘creating from scratch’ in favour of an orientation to the collective and the sociality of language. It is not accidental that ‘sound intoxication’ should have happened in the 1960s, when portable transistor radios made a choice of sound available anywhere, while simultaneously defining communities of listeners. The sounds of pocket-sized radios filled public spaces but could also be listened to in private, or – as was often the case with rock and roll – shared between teenagers away from the ears of adults. Radios could either be tuned in to official broadcasting or the flourishing pirate stations that helped to bring about countercultural shifts in listening. While the story of radio is one of social connection, centred on sound emitted in social space or the wider reach of the radio signal, there have subsequently been contrary influences on technologised listening. The switch to use of headphones with the Walkman, launched in 1979, might seem to be a move towards isolation. However, Shuhei Hosokawa, writing in 1984, takes a more nuanced approach writing on ‘The Walkman Effect’, drawing on Michel de Certeau, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard to understand the listener as performer and participant within a network of urban relations, technology creating a ‘symbiotic self’ moving autonomously through the city. He observes: ‘It decontextualizes the given coherence of the city-text, and, at the same time, contextualizes every situation which seemingly does not cohere with it’ (171). While the Walkman was initially just a cassette player, a change in function rather than an advance in technology, it marks the beginning of 8

Introduction

a movement to ever more individualised experiences of listening that has been further intensified by the availability of digital recordings. Michael Bull comments: The ability of ‘sound’ to deliver what consumers want is increasingly wedded to the ability of consumers to create their own soundworlds. Privatised and mediated sound reproduction enables consumers to create intimate, manageable and aestheticised spaces in which they are increasingly able, and desire, to live. (Bull, 2005, 347)

The rapid expansion of streamed media in the 2010s has intensified this situation. Listening, in contemporary conditions, is not necessarily an experience of openness and connection, but often a private and privatised one that cuts out noise and sociality, removing a listener from the immediate environment. At the same time, the instant availability of media online places recorded sound alongside all other forms of content in the economy of digital attention. This is a different world from the one in which Cage heard sound in film both as a means of drawing attention to lived environments, and as a revolutionary freeing of sound from its habitual context (Cage, 1961, 3). Noise, heard as though in film, might become an as-yet unimagined music. However, the seemingly infinite range of listening offered by digital streaming services in the twenty-first century has the opposite effect, of flattening contextual difference, as individual users are guided to more of what they are predicted to like – that is, more of the same. In his critique of contemporary media’s embrace of the digital, Damon Krukowski observes that choice is minimised because ‘streaming services are anxious about leaving their users in that moment of indecision; endless choice means they might make no choice, and not use the service at all’. Boredom is held at bay, along with sounds of rain or traffic, by ‘streaming’ – and this word itself is a natural image of water that is used to mask the highly constructed environment of continuous listening, which is also continuous profit for the companies concerned. Listening, in this context, is meant to be absorbing, but it is also uncritical and passive. Krukowksi notices, ‘Digital streaming services treat the data on the back of an LP – the historical constraints of time, place, and people that created the music – as so much noise. The music alone is filtered through as signal, seemingly always in the present’ (2017, 180). His argument is that the shift to the digital, with its attendant focus on the elimination of noise of all kinds, leads to the impoverishment of communal experience. This is not simply because of the technology, but because of business models designed to extract maximum engagement. By contrast, ‘When we listen to noise, we listen to the space around us and to the distance between us. We listen below the surface. We listen each to the limits of our individual perceptions, 9

Introduction

and we listen together in shared time’ (Krukowski, 2017, 197). The poetry I will be discussing is concerned with just such forms of listening, with spaces and communities, and with different means of addressing human and non-human others. Poetry continues to offer a space in which listening can be made audible. Joan Retallack describes the continuing impact of Cage’s discovery of silence as ‘densely, richly, disturbingly full. Full of just those things we had not, until “now” been able to notice; or reluctantly noticing, had dismissed as nonsense or noise’ (Retallack, 2003, 111). The verge of noticing is the verge of knowledge; this is the point at which listening operates. ‘If silence was formerly what we weren’t ready to hear, silence is currently what is audible but unintelligible. The realm of the unintelligible is the permanent frontier – that which lies outside the scope of the culturally preconceived’ (Retallack, 2003, 112–13). If Retallack’s idea of a frontier suggests an active, pioneering form of listening, Tom Raworth, commenting in an interview in 1972, describes the listening of composition in more open and receptive terms: ‘I really have no sense of questing for knowledge. At all. My idea is to the other way, you know. And to be completely empty and then see what sounds.’ If there is an echo here of Keats’ ‘Negative Capability’, in which listening is a relinquishing of self that allows for doubts and uncertainties, but also a deepening of empathy and insight, what Raworth describes is an expanded attention that exceeds the habitual framing of the listener, enlarging what Retallack calls the ‘radius of interest and comprehension at any given time’, beyond which is silence (Retallack, 2003, 111). This kind of listening, like Cage’s 4’33”, has similarities with Buddhist ideas of emptiness, but it is also enabled by the neutrality of recording technology, where ‘what sounds’ is an event in the physical world that occurs independently of the artist. The accidental, contingent quality of the creative process, in this view, depends on the resistance of what lies outside the self. The multiple voicings and viewpoints of a Raworth poem look like distraction, but their openness is the opposite of the absorptive effects of social media, which is ego-driven. This is why listening matters, as a cultural practice, as it can be a means of thinking beyond existing cognitive frames. Since Cage, many composers have drawn attention to non-human or non-intentional sounds as part of a musical performance, but R. Murray Schafer’s Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1994) has been pivotal in establishing the environmental significance of soundscape. In Vancouver’s World Soundscape Project (WSP) in the 1970s, he and a group of acoustic researchers recorded sounds specific to particular locales and communities, both urban and rural. While the connection he makes between listening and ecology remains important, the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson has usefully criticised his emphasis on the nostalgic preservation of acoustic environments. Her essay ‘Disquiet’ (2012, 55–70), 10

Introduction

which I have discussed previously in the context of her writing on the city (Skoulding, 2013), argues that in seeking to exclude noise from the privileged cities of the West, it takes insufficient account of the fact that noise, like any other form of pollution caused by capitalist economies, has to go somewhere. If removed from traditional villages and city centres as Schafer would recommend, it would be sent to: an anarchically polluted and polluting productive beyond – Mexico, China, the oil-rich subarctic of Canada – while the freely circulating consumer of the North American or European city was to enjoy a healthful, hi-fidelity, noise-free, symbolically authentic landscape. (Robertson, 2012, 68)

Robertson’s focus on listening is one in which the senses are attuned not only to environmental aesthetics but also to the economic pressures that act on a given locale: ‘The urban experience of being within noise brings the frictive relation of bodies to economies right into perception’ (Robertson, 2012, 66). A critical understanding of noise as a revealing friction involves both an ethics and a politics of attention. The act of attention itself is a form of resistance. Hildegard Westerkamp, who worked with Schafer on the WSP, has more recently argued for ‘disruptive listening’: So, when I speak of disruption in the sense of stopping routines, habits, unconscious gestures, reactions and behaviours, I am not necessarily implying a violent disruption or a one-time shock. […] I am suggesting that our listening be an ongoing practice, so present and attentive that it asserts change inside us over time, and as a result eventually in the soundscape, in our communication with others, in society at large. It is a state of ongoing attention. (Westerkamp, 2015)

This is necessary, she writes, because ‘the intense corporate push for us to succumb to a 24/7 time perception is threatening to disrupt deep and profound life rhythms in us and as an extension is also disrupting dangerously the earth’s biological, environmental and ecological conditions’ (Westerkamp, 2015). The role of the artist or poet is not just to listen, but to articulate that listening for others, and what we encounter, in listening openly and disruptively, is not only signal but noise and otherness. If the environmental listening foregrounded by Westerkamp is fundamental to perception of time, a more social form of listening is fundamental to the sense of community that is equally threatened by virtual hyperactivity. As Byung-Chul Han writes, 11

Introduction

The virtual world is poor in alterity and the resistance [Widerständlichkeit] it displays. […] In all the imaginary spaces of virtuality, the narcissistic ego encounters itself first and foremost. Increasingly, virtualization and digitalization are making the real disappear, which makes itself known through its resistance. (Han, 2015a, 42–43)

Part of the reason for this, in Han’s view, is the lack of a concrete addressee in many social media interactions. ‘Without the presence of the Other, communication degenerates into an accelerated exchange of information’, and in the absence of neighbourly relationship there can be no community since ‘Community is listenership’ (Han, 2018, 74, italics in original). Listening is a political act as ‘an active participation in the existence of Others’ that takes into account differing points of view and different experiences of suffering (75). However, the distinction between environmental and social listening is a false one, as it becomes increasingly urgent to extend a sense of community to the non-human world. Because listening happens in spaces, listening to speech is modified by matter, from the vocal chords producing sound to the amplification of a room: speech makes thoughts material, connecting the lived experience of community with that of a lived physical environment. This is not to return to a falsely nostalgic construction of face-to-face communication in an idealised community. An emphasis on semantic excess, and what is non-communicable, is often a feature of linguistically innovative poetry following in the wake of Language writing and the British Poetry Revival. Jeff Hilson suggests that the poem we absorb for information deploys ‘a language strategy germane to capital, another component in its armoury of speed and consumption’, arguing that a resistant poetics must counter such strategies (2012, 101). Drawing on Schafer’s distinctions between ‘hi-fi’ (rural) and ‘lo-fi’ (urban) soundscapes, he argues for lo-fi poetry with high noise to signal ratio, with an emphasis on signifier and the remainder. The poem is a cultural production in which the aural and informational aspects of listening meet and overlap, because it is neither wholly sounded nor wholly communicative, although both to some degree. Awareness of listening’s contemporary complexity has been growing steadily since Charles Bernstein’s pivotal essay collection Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (1998) brought critics together to explore expanded approaches to aurality, and has been affirmed more recently by Craig Dworkin and Marjorie Perloff (2009). Bernstein has a particular emphasis on experimental performance and sound poetry, while Perloff and Dworkin develop those interests in dialogue with new technologies, exploring the role of sound in translation and conceptual rewriting strategies. Building on that work, this book focuses on the ecological and 12

Introduction

political implications of listening within the practices of reading, writing and performing poetry, but differs from them in its focus on recent accounts of lyric. The origin of lyric poetry – a single voice with a lyre – establishes a mode that is both individual and musical, yet the notion of autonomous selfhood on which this traditional understanding of lyric has depended has been widely critiqued in contemporary poetry and poetics. The very terms of lyric expression as a singular transmission from mouth to ear, or from inner speech to inner ear, are changed by a view of both music and poetry as vibratory information circulating in a world of sound. The dispersal of lyric into noisier, more interrupted forms enables the expression of new subjectivities that encompass the non-human and post-human. The term ‘lyric’ has changed within linguistically innovative poetry, coming to refer to a set of questions about subjects and language as much as to a formal tradition. Lyric poetry has been seen by Perloff, Dworkin and others as tied to individualism and reactionary politics; plural and ‘noisy’ approaches have therefore been presented as a means of rethinking poetry in more inclusive and egalitarian terms. Just as ‘lyric’ refers to the sounding of a poem and the expression of a particular subjectivity, so noise is both acoustic and relational. Recent critical activity has engaged with what is meant by ‘lyric’, and what is at stake in it. In their thorough and informative gathering of texts, The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins argue that lyric, a contradictory set of genre expectations, has come retrospectively to dominate conceptions of poetry’s past through ‘a project modern literary criticism took from the nineteenth century and made its own’, as the self-absorbed privacy of the Romantic lyric has come to define the very idea of poetry (2014, 2). Although his work is included in their selection, Jonathan Culler takes a different approach in The Theory of Lyric (2015), which argues transhistorically for lyric as a set of structural possibilities. Pointing out the limitations of a mode of reading in which the lyric ‘I’ is treated, interpretatively, as a fictional character, he makes the case for a form of writerly listening that links generations of poets through the sounded patterns and performative gestures of the lyric. He emphasises the ‘triangulated address’ of lyric, that is, ‘addressing the audience of readers by addressing or pretending to address someone or something else, a lover, a god, natural forces, or personified abstractions’, so that the poem is ‘an event in the lyric present rather than a representation of a past event’ (Culler, 2015, 8). He observes, nevertheless, that Western lyric tends to be defined by ‘tension between the lyrical positing of an addressable and potentially responsive universe and scepticism about the efficacy of lyric discourse’ (Culler, 2015, 8). His attention to the materiality of form, as well as to lyric’s resistant anti-instrumentalism, is in line with a substantial reconceptualisation of lyric within the area of contemporary poetry that 13

Introduction

might broadly be understood as ‘innovative’, and that is my main interest here. This is poetry that both reflects and calls forth a form of listening that may be understood, through Jean-Luc Nancy’s (2007) work on resonance, as a turn from the individual to the shared voices of the collective, an openness to noise that breaks down boundaries between speaker and listener, and between subject and object. Following Theodor Adorno’s observation that lyric is already social, and ‘most deeply grounded in society when it does not chime in with society’ (2000, 218), I argue that lyric poetry, in its paradoxical and noisy relationship between the individual voice and society, retains the potential to forge new forms of language and thinking. The juxtaposition of lyric and noise touches on a larger debate about poetry’s political and ethical purpose: what happens to the intimate tensions within the voice of the poem when it is heard in a wider social and/or ecological space, or when it produces such a space as well as the interpersonal affect associated with lyric? John Wilkinson’s The Lyric Touch (2007) uses the metaphor of physical contact to describe lyric as the transformative encounter between poet and reader, while Riley’s The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000) and Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005) offer insights into how lyric embodies rather than expresses feeling. Lyric does not signal an uncomplicated personal expression in a formal structure, but a series of problems relating to language, affect and politics. Commenting on these and other perspectives, Laura Kilbride writes in her 2009 essay ‘Going for Broke: Tom Raworth and Lyric’ that the word has ‘taken on the status of a critical concept’, and that ‘“lyric” comes to function as a term for poetry which is uneasy about the limits which accompany working within the pre-existent categories of language, selfdescription, or poetic form’ (2009, 369). This would apply to much contemporary innovative poetry, and it is in this expanded sense that I use the term. Lyric’s original connection with the sounding of the poem needs to be articulated in this new sense. Discussion of sound has frequently been left to formalist interpretation or prosodic analysis that fails to account fully for the experience of reading or listening to poetry. Technology has changed reading habits and is changing poetry’s audiences, but the legacy of modernist poetry continues to inform new writing that anticipates such changes and adapts to new forms of listening. Poetry is therefore a site for investigating future subjectivities through language and its sounded spaces, a movement towards what is not yet known. While consideration of form is relevant, detailed prosodic analysis is not always the most helpful tool in this approach because it does not allow for the wider relationships that shape listening and poetry in particular contexts. In focusing on listening, I aim to connect the ‘touch’ described by Wilkinson with the material and physical aspects of form. This relationship 14

Introduction

is not entirely metaphorical: the poem, formed as a sounded object, can only exist in sound, even if that sound is hypothetical (in the ‘inner voice’) or remembered. Because it must in this way be connected with bodies and spaces, lyric expression always has an environmental as well as a social context. This can often be inferred or reconstructed from the text, but the availability of performances online creates a new area in which to consider lyric transmission. The ‘noise’ of lyric is that which interrupts lyric expectations as well as everything that surrounds or mediates it in particular spaces. Acoustic and informational noise are not necessarily the same thing, but in the context of a poem, which is both an acoustic and a signifying event, they may well be, and the process of listening is one of distinguishing between these often ambiguous signals. This tension may be configured in different ways. Poetry activates listening across boundaries, as Reuven Tsur argues in What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive?: The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception (1992). Drawing on studies that reveal how humans perceive speech and ‘nonspeech’ sounds differently, processing them either phonetically or acoustically, he makes the case for a third mode of poetic speech perception, in which language is heard partly as sound as well as speech (1992, 12). For listeners, then, poetry is the mode in language that most closely connects vocal sounding with the vibratory continuum of the material world. Responding to Tsur, as well as Roland Barthes and Roman Jakobson, Bernstein distinguishes between speech and non-speech modes of aural perception, showing how poetry returns language to its materiality, enabling a fusion of those two modes. He suggests that ‘poetry creates something of the conditions of hearing (not just listening to) a foreign language – we hear it as language, not music, or noise; yet we cannot immediately process its meaning’ (Bernstein, 1998, 18). While sceptical that orality offers any more authentic grounding in the material world than text, he argues that poetry can expand its listeners’ perception of the inanimate world as they ‘stop listening and begin to hear; which is to say, stop decoding and begin to get a nose for the sheer noise of language’ (22). Given that his landmark essay collection is called Close Listening, however, it is clear that this is a call for active perception through a fuller appreciation of interconnected senses. The twenty-first century has seen what Adrienne Janus describes as an ‘anti-ocular turn’ in critical thinking, in which the dominance of visual perception has been challenged by increased attention to the role of the other senses; she traces this movement back to Heidegger, whose critique of the visual etymology of ‘theory’ led to his focus on acoustic understanding (2011, 183). Nancy (2007) and Michel Serres (2008) develop this approach, emphasising the role of the senses, particularly listening and touch, in creating new forms of knowledge. Distinguishing between hearing and listening in an almost reversed sense from Bernstein, Nancy’s short book 15

Introduction

Listening emphasises ‘l’ écoute’ as a means of directing attention to the world and to the unknown: To listen is tendre l’oreille – literally, to stretch the ear – an expression that evokes a singular mobility, among the sensory apparatuses, of the pinna of the ear – it is an intensification and a concern, a curiosity and an anxiety. […] If ‘to hear’ is to understand the sense […] to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible. (Nancy, 2007, 5–6)

Nancy presents listening as a space of referral through which the subject is formed; the listener exists within a universe of vibrating matter, and subjectivity is formed in the relationship of the sensing self to those vibrations (2007, 8). Much hinges on the linguistic and philosophical contexts in which he uses these terms. Entendre in French means not only to hear but to understand (if not with the comprehensive comprehension of comprendre). While Nancy’s work has been applied helpfully to discussions of music, it is an intervention in a philosophical discourse that has tended to favour vision over hearing. Terms may shift in translation, but what carries over is a necessary tension between sensory apprehension and the deferral of signification. Janus draws attention to the difficulty of translating ‘sense’, which for Nancy resonates in three ways: ‘(1) “sense” as intelligible, signifying sense or meaning; (2) “sense” as perceptual, sensate or sensual sense, and affect; and (3) “sense” as sense of direction, impulse and movement’. She points to a difficulty in English versions of Nancy’s and other ‘otocentric’ writers such as Serres, in which the translation of ‘sense’ as ‘meaning’ tends to occlude the other possible resonances of the term in anglophone thought (Janus, 2011, 182–202). These interpretations offer different kinds of emphasis on the process of listening, and need to be distinguished. For example, for the anglophone reader, Nancy’s use of the phrase ‘the sound of sense’ (2007, 9) may recall Robert Frost’s use of it but means something entirely different. Frost uses the phrase when discussing the interplay of speech rhythm and metrical rhythm in poetry. He notes that voices in conversation heard indistinctly, for example, through a closed door, may demonstrate ‘the sound of sense’, and that the irregular rhythms of spoken language should fall across a metrical line in ways that enliven it. He uses ‘sense’ to refer to meaning straightforwardly conveyed in language, whereas Nancy is not referring specifically to language, and plays on the several possible meanings of the word sens in French (Frost, 1964, 80–81). Listening for signification or meaning is central to a language-based art form, but what of the other two kinds of sensing? Noise music is often discussed in terms of affect: following Deleuze, such music is described as 16

Introduction

if it might be experienced as pure vibratory force that bypasses cognitive categories to produce ‘direct action on the nervous system’ (Deleuze, 2005, 37). This position appears to offer unmediated connection not just with a work of art, but with a material world beyond the reach of language. Brian Kane argues in Sound Unseen, his study of acousmatic listening, that it is ultimately unconvincing to suggest that any listening can take this pure, uncritical form, since perception is changed by what we understand about the source of a sound and its context; in poetry we must also address the specific context of sound in relation to language. However, as both Nancy and Kane emphasise, listening invites speculation as to the unknown and the future; as a cultural practice it may also change. The need to rethink relations with the non-human world may be producing new forms of listening. The Canadian poet Christian Bök professes that his favourite music is ‘by machines, for machines’, arguing that compared with other more contemplative art forms, including literature, music ‘induces in its listeners a whole spate of autonomic reflexes and emotional twitches, any of which can transform the audience into an unthinking prosthesis of the medium itself’ (Perloff and Dworkin, 2009, 133–34). In this view, physical sensation and affect combine to create a mode of sensing that encompasses the non-human, or the ‘transhuman’, as Bernstein has it (1998, 22). Bök’s comment is made in the context of his poetry in The Cyborg Opera, a piece that mimics the effects of recording technology while harking back to earlier experimental performances such as Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate. Noise, in this work, might be seen as a ‘relational ontology’, of the kind discussed by Greg Hainge in his Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (2013), and that I discuss further in Chapter 2. Placing the vibration of the poem in relation with the non-human world allows a reimagination of subjectivity in radical and necessary new relationships. These encompass the ‘posthuman’ as presented by Rosi Braidotti, the ‘chthulucene’ intertwining of human and non-human advocated by Donna Haraway (2016) and the political ecology of Jane Bennett outlined in Vibrant Matter (2009). Far from positioning the listener as ‘unthinking prosthesis’ of its medium, poetry provides a means of thinking music, thinking noise and feeling language as an oscillation between the two as well as in its signifying capacity. If sens also refers to direction, listening must always be understood in social and physical spaces: listening locates the listener. This is the perspective explored by Eric F. Clarke in Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (2012), which draws on cognitive psychology to present an ecological approach to musical listening by focusing on reciprocal relationships between observer and environment. Following Timothy Morton’s concept of ‘dark ecology’ (2007), I explore listening as an approach to ecological thinking that does not recognise a distinction between nature and culture, but that works towards a posthuman subjectivity that is attentive to all materialities and their relationships. The poetry I discuss is 17

Introduction

not only linguistically experimental, but also experimental in its approach to subjectivity, which, as Braidotti observes, is increasingly technologically mediated. Its listening and noise allow us to explore the potential of ‘an expanded, relational self’ that counters and resists advanced capitalism’s tendency to co-opt human and non-human matter to its own profit-driven, commodifying agenda (Braidotti, 2013, 61). To insist on the meaningfulness and complexity of the senses is to work against a reductive current of thinking, but one that is encouraged by the English language in which ‘common sense’ points us back to a history of shared reference to empirical self-evidence. It is for this reason that poets working in more experimental contexts, who are the most likely to work against the grains and the givens in their language, offer particularly useful approaches to considering sound and its relationships with other senses. Furthermore, it is in such poetry that the materiality of language tends to be foregrounded most strongly. Robert Sheppard proposes a ‘poetry of saying’ as opposed to a poetry of the said, emphasising the active engagement of a community of listeners. His discussion of ‘British poetry and its discontents’ in the later part of the twentieth century brings the sounded materiality of poetry to the fore (Sheppard, 2005). By switching the focus from saying to listening, I want to extend that community into the non-human world, which cannot speak but to which we can attend through and alongside language. Morton argues for an awareness of human participation in and connection to the rest of the material world, replacing the idea of ‘nature’ with that of the ‘symbiotic real’, an intrinsically noisy relationship: ‘If solidarity is the noise made by the uneasy, ambiguous relationship between 1 + n beings (for instance, the always ambiguous host–parasite relationship), then solidarity is the noise made by the symbiotic real as such’ (Morton, 2017, 14). Listening, in such posthuman configurations, takes into account a recognition of ourselves as hosts for exterior entities such as technology as well as the microscopic multitudes that comprise a bodily existence. The French sound poet Henri Chopin, whom I discuss in Chapter 7, gives the most literal demonstration of this in his thunderous amplification of the body’s hidden sonorities. Angela Leighton draws attention to the sounding of language on the page, an inner listening and attentiveness to poetry that is conceived as a form of thinking. Rather than creating an abstract conceptual framework, she meditates on poetry’s capability to reach new forms of knowledge that differ in their mode from the more generalised insights of philosophy. Her aim is to explore ‘the many ways in which lending an ear to the literary text, finding its “hints at voicing” or “effects of voicing,” might reshape the nature of what we mean by literary understanding’ (Leighton, 2018, 18). Her technique is to listen to texts in order to discover ‘how writers manage the extraordinary expressivity of sound in their silent writings, how 18

Introduction

readers might hear those sounds in their heads, and how each text might be said to listen to itself, as if to a hollow cave of echoes which opens up from within’ (Leighton, 2018, 18). In particular, she is interested in how writers write about listening, given their close awareness of the work of the ear. The influence of Heidegger is revealed through a quotation from his essay ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, which describes the relation of speaking to the ‘appeal’ of language listened to, commenting: ‘the responding in which man authentically listens to the appeal of language is that which speaks in the element of poetry.’ Leighton notices that ‘he muddles the listening speaker and the listening writer in this passage, but that muddle […] often lies at the heart of other poetic accounts of listening’. Heidegger’s description of how listening opens the writer to the unexpected, removing poetry from ‘mere propositional statement’, is in her view ‘a fine definition of poetry […] as a kind of writing which contains the space of listening within itself’ (Leighton, 2018, 11). Her reading of Nancy continues this line of discussion, showing how his comments on the musicality of texts point to a ‘self-involved listening’ full of reflexive resonance. This is part of what happens when we listen, and when we listen to texts, but Leighton’s focus on the silence of the page is paradoxical given that silence, as she admits, is simply an effect of the narrow range of the human ear. Beyond the text, she listens to the sea in Sicily, reflecting on its rhythmic presence as a metaphor for literature. While the focus of her work enables close attention to the resonances of lyric poetry, and the communicative space it establishes between poet as listener and reader as listener, the threshold of listening in her view is a limit that excludes noise and interference. Another way to read Nancy’s work on listening is to view the difference between entendre and écouter as the point at which the ear opens to what cannot be assimilated into a semiotic structure. This element of resistance, or noise, is not just present as part of the world to which the text refers, but an intrinsic part of what the poem is. Leighton’s close readings reveal as much, for example when she describes the echo of Tennyson’s cadences through the work of later poets, including Paul Muldoon’s response to hearing Tennyson reading on a wax cylinder recording. Quoting Muldoon’s lines about a voice that ‘quavered into the Ansaphone. / “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall …”’ she describes how literary language listens to its own voice, bordering on a madness that ‘might end up ignoring the needs of human communication altogether’ (Leighton, 2018, 52). Rather than implying a pathological condition, however, one might consider recording, remembering and revoicing as linked processes that connect the lyric voice with technologies that place it beyond the individual subject so that different relationships can be imagined between humans and all that surrounds them. The ‘decay’ of Muldoon’s poem, read as a sonic decay, places the materiality of the recorded voice in a temporal context that is contiguous with the thematic concerns of 19

Introduction

Tennyson’s poem: the trees, the voice and the wax cylinder alike are matter affected by the passing of time. The echoing lyric voice, bouncing back off other voices, is also heard and hears itself through woods and recordings. This places the poem on the side of matter, since ‘[t]he evidence of much of Tennyson’s poetry is that moans, murmurs and hums have […] lost their necessary connection with the human subject but still sound on and on, like a wayward soundtrack cut off from the story’ (69). At the same time, the boundary between humans and non-humans is sustained through metaphor. In Leighton’s analysis the transpersonal ‘hum’ of language across generations is, intriguingly, analogous to the collab­orative work of bees as they produce both honey and sound. While the buzz of bees in poems ‘tends to carry a sense of literal sound’, it is carefully framed, in her analysis, within a representational context. Reading any contemporary poetry now, with the wide and easy availability of recordings, is difficult to separate fully from performance; the page is less silent and rarefied than it once was. The poetry that is the focus of my discussion is part of a trajectory out of modernism in which the materiality of both page and voice has been more strongly foregrounded. My approach diverges from Leighton’s in my interest in the poem’s material, continuity with a vibratory world, the ways in which its sound reflects different kinds of embodied experience, and how listening through and beyond the poem can be a means of attending to other-than-human entities. Nevertheless, I fully agree with Leighton’s conviction that poets can offer particular insights into the work of the ear, and in many cases, like her, I have chosen to reflect on poems that reflect directly on listening. Some of the most important thinking in this area has been articulated in poems rather than criticism. For this reason, many of the poems I will discuss are about listening as well as drawing particular kinds of listening from the reader; as someone who is both a practitioner and a critic, I recognise that poetics may be most effectively explored within a poem. I examine forms of resistance present in contemporary poetry, not by opposing an avant-garde to a mainstream, but by focusing on how noise reveals systems and relationships when we listen across boundaries, whether geographical, cultural or technological. There would, of course, be many more boundaries that could be investigated in further study. Since my interest is predominantly in the noise of poetic language, I have not dealt here with the more direct forms of poetic address that lie on the cusp between rap and performance poetry, although these too would be worth exploring. The poets under discussion are working in response to a broadly modernist legacy, which is itself linked to earlier twentieth-century technological revolutions and their effect on listening. The historical link between poetry and music is one that has been shaped by forms of transmission, as a shared legacy in orality and performance gave way to different forms of dissemination via the written word and the written score. Subsequently, 20

Introduction

the advent of recorded sound has changed not only the composition and reception of music, but also the spaces in which it is encountered. What does contemporary poetry, in turn, draw from sonic experience? If listening is at times difficult to pin down, this may be because, as David Toop writes, ‘sound’s boundaries lack clarity, spreading in the air as they do or arriving from hidden places’, a formlessness that creates perplexing relationships between the properties of states: inside and outside, material and immaterial, the way thoughts become sound through speech, and external sounds become sensory impressions that may be thoughts as they pass through the ears and outer membrane into awareness. (Toop, 2011, 36)

The sound of a poet reading a poem might imprint itself in the ear in such a way that it changes all subsequent silent readings of that poem. Given that listening involves a delay of sound signal arriving in the ear and a further delay in the processing of that signal into intelligible language, these two experiences, of hearing the poet’s voice and reimagining that voice through memory, are less far apart than one might imagine. Both are echoes after the fact, changed by the space of the encounter and its resonances. The logic of this is that the voice, too, is an echo speaking back to other voices, that listening begins before the poem exists and that the poem cannot be isolated from the communities and continuities of sound that precede and surround it.

21

CHAPTER 1

Song: Denise Riley’s Lyric and Rock Echoes

While the poetry of Denise Riley reached wider readerships in the UK with the 2016 publication of Say Something Back, followed by a new Selected Poems from Picador in 2019, it has been central to the reframing and investigation of lyric’s contemporary possibilities since the late 1970s. Her interest in song spans lyric poetry, quotation of pop lyrics and hymns, all of which echo through Riley’s work as a sounding out of intertextualities and a sustained investigation of song’s effect on language. Along with poetry, she has published a series of prose works on topics ranging from motherhood to the difficulties of linguistic identity: War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (1983); ‘Am I That Name?’: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (1988); The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000); Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005); and, most recently, Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012), which explores the experience of time during bereavement. If such works, which blend philosophy, political thought, sociology and literary criticism, are difficult to categorise as a single oeuvre, this is in keeping with the problems of naming, identification and address that lie at the heart of Riley’s project. From the outset, her engagement with the lyric poem has been equally paradoxical and questioning. Sam Solomon’s (2013) detailed survey of her early poems asserts the importance of reading them in the context of her feminist activism in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as her critical work that never allows language to escape close political scrutiny. Her lyric, he rightly argues, does not belong to a ‘pre-political, ethical realm of pure intersubjectivity’, but exposes the struggle to articulate what Riley calls a ‘socialized biology’ – that is, questions of lived experience cannot be separated from the social and political discourses in which they are framed (Solomon, 2014, 194). In conceptions of lyric as ‘the essence of poetry, a poem at its most poetic’ (Jackson and Prins, 2014, 1), such discourses may be experienced as noise or interference in lyric 22

Song

transmission, but this friction is what makes Riley’s work so vital to contemporary poetic enquiry. Allied with an interest in song is an acute attention to the practice of listening and its role in poetry. This is understood in material terms; in her writing, whether poetry or prose, sound and response to it are radically embodied. One of Riley’s most direct thematic engagements with listening, ‘Affections of the Ear’, is drawn from the story of Narcissus, but distinguishing it from its associations of narcissism it ‘returns him back to his roots in Ovid and his roots as a dried bulb once used for healing “affections of the ear”, afflicted hearing’ (2000, 93). This long historical view of affection as affliction is played out through the story of Echo and Narcissus, articulating a listening, in the context of writing, that is both painful and coercive, in which: ‘My inward ears will jam wide open to internal words that overlying verbiage can’t smother’ (Riley, 2019, 120). The violence of this image comes from the unexpected reversal: rather than being an expressive medium, language is a solid, stony object that is liable to overpower the speaking subject. As well as being a dialogue with inner voicing, poetry is a repetition of the language of others and a form of thinking driven by sound: ‘As I am made to parrot others’ words so I am forced to form ideas by rhymes, the most humdrum’ (Riley, 2019, 121). Parroting and rhyming both involve repetition, but they have different relationships with time, since the parrot’s citation involves a fixed text, whereas rhyme projects forward within a sequence of patterned sound. This contrary movement is borne out by Riley’s description of the action of inner listening as an obstructed stream: For inner speech is no limpid stream of consciousness, crystalline from its uncontaminated source in Mind, but a sludgy thing, thickened with reiterated quotations, choked with the rubble of the overheard, the periodically dusted down then crammed with slogans and jingles, with mutterings of remembered accusations, irrepressible puns, insistent spirits of ancient exchanges, monotonous citation, the embarrassing detritus of advertising, archaic injunctions from hymns, and the pastel snatches of old song lyrics. (Lecercle and Riley, 2004, 20)

This scene of a choked river is a metaphor for the kind of listening that informs Riley’s poems, but it also provides a model for the process of her writing, in which a propulsive forward movement, whether generated by the cadences of speech or more traditional patterns of metre and rhyme, is interrupted by multiple layers of often fragmentary quotation. Listening to inner speech results in autoventriloquy, in which the speaker becomes ‘a self formally distanced from itself ’, but at the same time the ear opens to wider relationships in and through language (Lecercle and Riley, 23

Song

2004, 21). In one of Riley’s recent poems, ‘Listening for Lost People’, the speaker describes herself as ‘unquiet as a talkative ear’ (2019, 163). The ear’s unquiet is disquieting, since it creates an uncanny isolation from the listening subject. In this sense the image recalls the opening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, in which the protagonist Jeffrey discovers, lying in grass, a severed ear. ‘It had to be an ear because it’s an opening,’ Lynch comments on this scene. ‘An ear is wide and, as it narrows, you can go down into it. And it goes somewhere vast…’ (Lynch, 1997, 136). The ear is so often imagined as a portal to the innermost self that isolating its existence or activity is a troubling exercise. For the musician Peter Szendy the ear is differently isolated as belonging to another body, which is that of musical experience: [To] lend an ear is also a matter of a loan. Or even a graft. I sense that these pinnae I turn and turn back in me like antennae are to a large extent determined, in their internal movements, by a whole body of laws, by a corpus of which I am neither the master, nor the proprietor, nor the inventor: rather I inherit them, I receive them, I borrow them without even having chosen them. This ear that I lend is certainly above all lent to me. (Szendy, 2008, 12)

The denaturalising of listening, in his argument, is not an approach to interiority but to the structural relationships that shape music, and, by extension, language (Szendy, 2008, 50). This is closer to the estrangement of Riley’s poem, in which: ‘The souls of the dead are the spirit of language: / you hear them alight inside that spoken thought.’ While the reanimated presence of the dead may be desired and looked for, it is a presence in language rather than a haunting, and what is animate here is not ethereal or metaphysical mystery but the physical, audible fact of language as the material sediment of voiced thought. The ‘talkative ear’ is that part of the subject that joins the corpus of language, which is a solid body. ‘Meditating on inner speech,’ writes Riley, ‘far from drifting towards verbal ectoplasm, throws us hard back on the materiality of words, including the aural quality of the sotto voce’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004, 39). Lyric Objects

Peter Riley (no relation) comments, with reference to one of Denise Riley’s poem titles, that her approach may be described as ‘awkward lyric’, in that ‘the song-like mechanism is undermined, perverted, concealed, exaggerated, fragmented, parodied… and the phrases it speaks rendered strange or disconnected’, so that song-like qualities are kept in play without surrender to song’s ‘alluring, anti-thinking substance’ (Peter Riley, 2016). 24

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The word ‘lyric’ ties Western contemporary poetry to its memory of music even now that it is read, heard and appreciated in a largely separate context. As the French poet Jacques Roubaud insists, having traced the origin of Western poetry back to the troubadours, ‘A song is not a poem and a poem is not a song … It’s an insult to poetry to call it song. It’s an insult to song to call it poetry’ (Perloff and Dworkin, 2009, 18). However, contemporary poetry has registered the changing experience of song since the advent of recording technology through particular understandings of relationships between environment, context, memory and lyric voice. The musicality of poetry is often seen as relating to musical notation, for example, in terms of rhythm, but the use of recording rather than notation as a compositional tool in certain areas of contemporary music has parallels with memory and quotation of song lyrics in poetry. The use of popular lyrics and musical references in poetry can offer a critique of authorial authority, since while writing has historically occupied a culturally privileged position, response to shared sound is part of everyday life in social spaces. Song has traditionally circulated in a group setting, just as poetry in its oral form would have done; but writing and reading have become more solitary acts. Recorded song maintains its social aspect because until the widespread use of headphones it had to exist in a physical space – on the radio, in the supermarket or leaking through the floorboards of the room upstairs. Popular song lyrics, therefore, tend to be socially experienced, defining generations and groupings within shared cultural memories. When poets quote song lyrics, the different contexts of poem and song are brought into a productive clash, since quotation is, as Walter Benjamin has noted, always an interruption of context (1999b, 148). This enables new understandings of lyric subjectivity and its relation to the collective, and therefore political, domain. Furthermore, song lyrics are more than just language, as they emerge from the sound mesh of a musical context. Recalling lyrics involves the memory of sound, a replay of melody and sonic texture that cannot be dissociated from the words themselves. The use of quotation from song lyrics in poems points to a relationship between memory and lyric expression that is related to these changing possibilities in music. In particular, the song encountered as recorded sound, itself a repetition, is repeated and manipulated as source material in the poem. Quotation of song lyrics is a form of remembering, yet it inevitably involves change when the mass-produced song, as Benjamin puts it, meets ‘the beholder or listener in his own particular situation’, instead of retaining an aura of uniqueness (1999b, 215). If poetry has often been read as the unique expression of the lyric self, pop lyrics produce temporarily inhabited identifications where the emphasis is more on the listener than the writer. In Riley’s poem ‘A misremembered lyric’, which quotes both The Cascades’ ‘Rhythm of the Rain’, written by John Claude Gummoe, and Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway’s ‘Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart’ as sung by 25

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Gene Pitney, the poet is that listener: ‘Something’s gotta hold of my heart / tearing my soul and my conscience apart, long after / presence is clean gone and leaves unfurnished / no shadow’ (Riley, 2019, 72). There is a play between presence and absence in the poem, the speaker stating: ‘I don’t want absence to be this beautiful’ (Riley, 2019, 72). This echoes the melancholy of The Cascades’ song, which is in turn invoked as an absence within the poem. Yet Riley’s quotation of song lyrics does not imply mourning of a lost connection with the lyrical directness of song but an exploration of the process of misremembering. The substitution of ‘gotta’ for ‘gotten’ suggests a mishearing that subtly anglicises the phrase, giving the song a physical and social context as language that has lodged in the ear, via a 1960s radio in Britain, rather than the eye. The more obvious alterations here, ‘tearing’ for ‘dragging’, and ‘soul and conscience’ for ‘soul and senses’, emphasise the dislocation that takes place in the original song. The action of the ‘something’ that gets hold of the heart is mirrored by the song itself, which is also an external entity that acts on the body, the speaker’s sense of the song as it ‘whirrs’, suggesting a machine. That machine is cadence, the onward propulsion of a phrase that drives it towards resolution, even if that resolution is kept in doubt and suspense. ‘Something’ is both language and affect. The interruption of the quotation signals the point at which the communally recognised text and melody of the song is appropriated by an individual memory and subject to its distortions, the dactylic rhythm of the song giving way to the hesitations and repetitions of inner speech. In her prose writings, Riley posits an understanding of language that starts from the collective, and in which private consciousness is the internalisation of public linguistic intercourse, rather than the reverse. Much of Riley’s argument in this and other works concerns the internalising of negative speech, but she points out here: It’s true enough, though, that not only imperious accusation is apt to indwell. So can lyric, gorgeous fragments, psalms and hymns; beautiful speech also comes to settle in its listeners. There is an unholy coincidence between beauty and cruelty in their verbal mannerisms; citation, reiteration, echo, quotation may work benignly, or as a poetics of abusive diction … perhaps the happily resonant indwelling of lyric may be explained in ways also fitting the unhappy experience of being mastered by hard words far better forgotten. (Riley, 2005, 13)

Language operates as a force, fused with affect that runs unwilled through the body and through memory. Remembering is the process by which ‘speech comes to settle in its listeners’, through repetition and reiteration. Sound, equally, in a process that is intensified by the repetition and memory of recording, comes to inhabit its listeners. It is true that verbal 26

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abuse, being ‘hooked’ by a hook line or absorbing a line of poetry involve different degrees of force and different degrees of consent and collaboration on the part of the listener. Yet the parallels between violent and beautiful language might be seen, for example, in hymns or religious liturgy, in which a powerful ecclesiastical patriarchy is sustained through the interpellation of worshippers as guilty sinners. Popular song, perhaps more invitingly, may situate the listener within a discourse of romantic love, which might at certain times be willingly inhabited, yet precisely because it cannot fully embody the speaker’s presence its promises and intensities are ultimately experienced as a form of linguistic wounding. As Riley writes: If we compare the aftermath of hearing ‘I love you’ with the aftermath of hearing ‘I hate you,’ in both instances the speaker may fight to sever the utterance from its vanished utterer. With the former declaration, the struggle is to find compensation in the teeth of impermanence (those words were definitely said to me, so at least I can be sure that once I was loved even though their speaker has gone). And with the latter, to find protection from the risk of permanence (those words were directed at me, but it wasn’t especially me who was hated, I just accidentally got in that speaker’s way). (Riley, 2005, 27)

This is inconsistent, however, and Riley suggests that a saner response is to acknowledge ‘my own sheer contingency as a linguistic subject’ and to acknowledge ‘language’s powerful impersonality’ (Riley, 2005, 27). In ‘A misremembered lyric’ the speaker distances herself from guilt via a line from a 1920s music hall song by The Two Gilberts: ‘Do shrimps make good mothers? Yes they do’ (Regal, 1924). She is also distanced from the absences within romantic language by becoming ‘a walker in language’ who recognises her own impersonal status as ‘someone who is herself accidentally spoken’ (Riley, 2005, 27). This sense of contingency is crucial to Riley’s use of lyrics, which plays on their iterability, and the way in which both singers and listeners take them for their own. Susan Schultz sees this tendency in relation to adoption (Riley is herself adopted), although there are differences between adopting a child who takes one’s own name, and ‘adopting’ a line from another text, which emphasises the fact that it was written by someone else. Schultz’s point is that Riley’s use of quotation denies the organicist notion of the poem or song as a whole, ‘natural’ entity, and foregrounds intertextual relationships that are constructed like those of an adoptive family. She continues: Unlike many poets, including John Ashbery, with whom Riley has a poetic relation, Riley does not mock the pop song or simply incorporate its form into her own lyric. Instead, the pop song is 27

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an integral part of the texture of her own poem, revealing naked emotions that she cannot, while being restrained within the highly controlled syntax of her own sentences, lines. […] Further, through her use of citation at the back of the book, she not only covers her copyright duties, but also makes it clear that these quotations come from particular places and moments in history. Her adoption, in the lingo of this day, is ‘open’, even as the frequent lack of quotation marks diminishes the differences between Riley’s language and that of the pop lyricists from whom she borrows. (Schulz, 2007)

To consider quotation not simply as interruption of context but as adoption entails an outward-looking and social aspect to lyric, and to language itself, yet importantly, as Schultz notes, this does not diminish the importance of emotion to Riley’s work. What emerges is an articulation of emotion within a series of social and historical frames. The recorded song lyric is a form of public language, often heard in public spaces, that is internalised to become part of the ‘inner speech’ that constitutes the familiar terrain of lyric poetry. As Riley suggests, the topography of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ is unsettled by the notion of a linguistic unconscious (2000, 15–16) and ‘it’s conceivable that the unconscious is better imagined not as a deep pouch of self, but as something outside of it, and hanging between people’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004, 36). This understanding of the exterior self places the poem in the realm of the social more explicitly than confessional lyric, while also accommodating affect. It is also how one might imagine the music that pours out of radios and loudspeakers, becoming both a physical presence and a shared pool of expression in countless pubs, supermarkets and cars. The question of environment is further explored in ‘The Castalian Spring’; Riley draws on the Greek myth of Castaly, the fountain that is the source of song. Her treatment is full of ironic comedy: the speaker, having drunk from the spring, turns into a toad and wonders, ‘What should I sing out on this gratuitous new instrument?’ (Riley, 2019, 112). Her new voice remains stubbornly external, a music that is heard as part of the physical environment around her rather than an expressive emanation from the self. The voice is, above all, a sounding out: The voice hears itself as it sings to its fellows — must Thrum in its own ears, like any noise thumping down Anywhere airwaves must equably fall. (Riley, 2019, 114)

As soon as a voice sounds it is meshed into other sounds, into what for the information theorist is interference in transmission. It is exactly this interference that places music in the realm of the social. As the toad sings, 28

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there is a fusion of voice and instrument, body and environment that deconstructs the notion of poetic source: ‘Into the cooling air I gave tongue, my ears blurred with the lyre / Of my larynx, its vibrato reverberant into the struck dumb dusk’. The sonorous density of the lines accentuates the way in which words fall through the ear into memory, the repeated sounds echoing to the point that they sound familiar despite the unexpected inversion of ‘struck dumb dusk’ (88). The poem is a sounding out of poetic possibilities, as the toad weighs up the respective merits of ‘girlish hellenics’ and the ‘responsibility to / Speak to society’. Written in the context of a bitterly oppositional UK poetry scene, the poem playfully considers alternative approaches to poetic community, yet its concerns have a wider reach in terms of cultural memory: I fished for my German, broke out into lieder, rhymed Sieg with Krieg, so explaining our century; I was hooked On my theory of militarism as stemming from lyricism. (Riley, 2019, 113)

Quotation of German lyrics relates, as Riley suggests, to ‘the language of early nineteenth-century song cycles, in which words and notes hang intimately together’, but this evocation is simultaneously troubling, with its pun on hook lines, because ‘it’s not yet possible to use the German language to talk about group emotion and identity without recalling, in Reich’s contentious phrase, a mass psychology of fascism’ (Riley, 2000, 104–5). Of course the role of lyrics in ideological coercion is far more widespread; the poem’s reference to the Bob Marley song ‘One Love’ evokes not only 1960s communal optimism but also the way in which advertising has co-opted such sentiments, for example, as Riley notes, Coca-Cola’s ‘one world’ television adverts (Riley, 2000, 104). The song lyrics both evoke and question linguistic affect. Cutting the lyrics from their musical source and resituating them in a poem reveals the machinery at work in collective memory, and demonstrates how ideas adhere to remembered sound. The recorded song is a single performance, evoking a social and historical context; it is not abstracted and timeless. As a result, we can see the interruption of different periods: Riley’s evocation of 1960s music in a poem written many years later draws attention to the social formation of the lyric voice and an awareness of the poet’s own role as performer in it. In her influential work ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History, Riley playfully adapts Sojourner Truth’s famous rhetorical question ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ to ‘Ain’t I a fluctuating identity’ (Riley, 1988, 1); exactly how this identity fluctuates over time is charted in her poems’ reflexive response to verbal–musical environments. The poem allows us to hear listening, not as sustained attention to a single musical work authorised by copyright law, but as a form of making and arranging 29

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that proliferates further listenings. ‘To listen without any wandering, without ever letting oneself be distracted by “the noises of life,” is that still listening? Shouldn’t listening welcome some wavering into its heart?’ asks Szendy (2008, 122). Listening is not absorption, but a discourse that encompasses changing social and physical contexts. The introduction of a visual element in ‘Lure, 1963’ adds a further dimension, as the orphaning of lyric from its expressive source is placed in the context of painting (Riley, 2019, 71). The poem enacts a double ekphrasis, describing a painting by Gillian Ayres while simultaneously rechannelling 1960s song lyrics. The line ‘I roam around around around around’, adapted from the 1960 song ‘The Wanderer’ by Ernest Maresca, encapsulates the wandering of the lyric ‘I’, dislodged here from an anchoring selfhood. The lack of figurative reference in the painting becomes a means of exploring the poem’s proximity to music, the question being not about whether a poem, painting or song can ‘express feelings’ but a severing of the subject from fixed reference points that allows meaning to proliferate. The simultaneous affect and materiality of the painting’s surface evoked by a phrase such as ‘Flood, drag to papery long brushes / of deep violet’ is paralleled by the quotations from lyrics where apparent emotional directness (‘When will I be loved?’; ‘it’s in his kiss’) sings without direction through the fractured surface of the line. Reference to other art forms than poetry makes possible the intensity of affect in Riley’s poetics, which proceed from Merleau-Ponty’s assertion, ‘I am from the start outside myself and open to the world’ (2002, 530). Rather than becoming a lament for the lost lyric source, the poem allows a circulation of fragmented references that were outside to begin with. ‘You Principle of Song, What are You For Now’

Riley’s use of quoted lyrics in her poems both denies and recuperates the possibility of the poem as song, a tension that is evident in Say Something Back (2016). In these later poems there is a shift in concerns related to listening. ‘A Part Song’ returns to the orphic roots of lyric poetry, calling out to the poet’s son Jacob after his sudden death in young adulthood. The title, along with its more general implications of loss and incompleteness, suggests not only that it is a song in parts – either simultaneous as vocal harmony or linear as in a poem sequence, but also that it is ‘partly’ song. The sequence begins by asking, ‘You principle of song, what are you for now’, and moves through a range of voices that circle this question in rage, despair, comic irony, passionately focused memory and calm reflection, including adapted quotation from other texts: ‘She do the bereaved in different voices’ (Riley, 2019, 138, 146). The lost son is figured as Orpheus 30

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‘Airily flirting with Persephone’, yet the poem cannot retrieve the dead, and must, in that sense, fail: It’s all a resurrection song. Would it ever be got right The dead could rush home Keen to press their chinos.

(Riley, 2019, 145)

At the same time, the poem reverberates with ‘the thought / Of me being sung in by you’, since it is through lyric’s exteriority and its absences that the possibility of music is created. The autobiographical aspect of the poem is documented in Riley’s prose text Time Lived, Without Its Flow, where in describing the suspension of time in bereavement, she writes: [Y]ou find yourself camped on a threshold between inside and out. The slight contact of your senses with the outer world, and your interior only thinly separated from it, like a membrane resonating on the verge between silence and noise. […] If it were to tear through, there’s so little behind your skin that you would fall out towards the side of sheer exteriority. Far from taking refuge deeply inside yourself, there is no longer any inside, and you have become only outwardness. (Riley, 2012, 19)

This is a development from Riley’s earlier work and from Merleau-Ponty’s perspective of a self open to the world; rather than liberating, as it was almost, if not uncomplicatedly, in the early poems, this position becomes dangerously vertiginous. In Time Lived Riley explores new tensions in her thinking. She recounts the physical difficulty of saying ‘disposal of his ashes’ when in her head the thought had been ‘clearly if silently voiced’ (Riley, 2012, 39). She goes on to comment, ‘Previously I hadn’t believed that speech is simply the translation of something already formulated in thought. Now I was faced with the evidence that sometimes it is, but that the translation can fail’ (Riley, 2012, 39). This does not mean that interior thought is experienced more strongly in grief, but, on the contrary, that the complete disappearance of interiority changes the body’s relationship with speech. In the inarticulacy of grief, the body and its attempted utterance are equally estranged: ‘“Ah-aassh-aashhes”, came a dry stammer’ (Riley, 2012, 38). Drawing attention to language’s exteriority and its failures of transmission, Riley’s poetry similarly foregrounds the role of aurality as a phonic property of writing. From the emphasis in the first line, ‘You principle of song, what are you for now’, or the syncopation of ‘Neither my note nor my critique of it / Will save us one iota. I know it. And’, to the quotation of ‘Not so hard 31

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/ To imagine what her mother had gone through’, the polyrhythmic effects of performance are marked in the written text to create the ‘maximum inflexion of different, possibly dissonant, voices’ (Bernstein, 1998, 15). The influence of more than one generation of the New York School is an element in Riley’s handling of voice, in which, as in the case of Frank O’Hara or Alice Notley, speech rhythms are the malleable substance from which the poem is made. ‘A Part Song’ is not so much a process of expressing grief as of articulating it, that is, separating it into distinct audible elements. This resonates with Riley’s view of affect as already audible, in the inner ear, as the external action of language through which emotion becomes intelligible. In interrogating the ‘principle of song’, Riley sets fragmented verse, sometimes hymn-like or mythological, alongside speech-like idioms to create a dense aural patterning. The replay of heard or imagined voices is a central theme of her prose work on the coercive and harmful internalising of speech (Riley, 2005). Such voices surface in this poem as the background noise of guilt: What is the first duty of a mother to a child? At least to keep the wretched thing alive – Band Of fierce cicadas, stop this shrilling.

(Riley, 2019, 138)

Song may be an effort to replace that persistent and uninvited noise with a more willed and deliberate shaping of sound, yet it cannot be expressive freedom. ‘She do the bereaved in different voices’, itself a half-quotation of Eliot quoting Dickens, signals the extent to which the poem presents enunciation as integral to the writing process. There is also a link with performance, in the sense of ‘part’ as a role:    Yet might there still be some part for me To play upon this lovely earth? Say. Or Say No, earth at my inner ear.

(Riley, 2019, 140)

‘Earth’ here suggests both the Shakespearean image of world-as-stage and, the second time, the material substance to which death returns us. The resistance of ‘earth at my inner ear’ places the process of listening within that context of separation, the material fact of the body’s finality a noisy interruption to the redemptive possibilities of song, which will never offer the pure transmission between living and dead to which it reaches. The voice of the dead son, ‘echoey’ and ‘tuned out by the noise’, is ‘not like hearing you live was’. In this case, ‘live’ could be a verb or an adjective, although the second possibility (Riley’s own choice in her reading of the text), implying live versus recorded music, would heighten the sense of the 32

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lyric mechanism through which the voice is now heard. If not live, the voice is mediated through the ‘recording’ of memory. Nancy writes, ‘Sound is also made of referrals: it spreads in space, where it resounds while still resounding “in me,” as we say’ (Nancy, 2007 [2002], 9). The echoing calls of the lost son draw the lyric subject into a heightened sense of listening, but also reveal subjectivity as a space of referrals, expanding on MerleauPonty’s view of the subject as exterior to itself. The tension between live and recorded sound, along with the poem’s other shifting perspectives, may also be understood in the light of Culler’s discussion of the temporality of elegy, which ‘replaces an irreversible temporal disjunction, the movement from life to death, with a reversible alternation between mourning and consolation, evocations of absence and presence’ (2015, 227). In the event of the poem, time can be restructured, its linearity ruptured and reimagined. The relationship between sound and time is a preoccupation of Riley’s poems in the wake of bereavement. In ‘Death makes dead metaphor revive’, in which the metaphor in question is that of stopped time, the temporality of mourning is explored through song: Death makes dead metaphor revive, Turn stiffly bright and strong. Time that is felt as ‘stopped’ will freeze Its to-fro, fro-to song I parrot under feldspar rock Sunk into chambered ice.

(Riley, 2019, 195)

The form was chosen, Riley has said in an interview, ‘with an eye to the kind of affect that rises up from Isaac Watts’ boxy hymn quatrains. I was wondering about the “automated” nature of the feeling that can shine through rhyme’ (Riley, 2014). The first line has a stop–start quality, with the repetition of ‘Death’/‘dead’ opposed by the concept of revival. However, the following line, with its odd juxtaposition of ‘stiffly’ with ‘bright and strong’ suggests that it is mechanical movement rather than vitality that we are encountering here, the life-like rather than the living. What propels the poem forward is the rhyme and the ‘to–fro’ rhythm, which are in marked contrast to the inflections and cadences of speech in much of Riley’s previous poetry. It explores the way in which, as Riley comments, ‘rhyme, both anticipated and recurring, acts as a guarantor of continuing and perceived time, and of human listening, attuned to that faithfulness of sounding language’ (2014), yet it does so uneasily, ‘coming to life’ as a poem, to use another cliché, not through its relationship to the patterns of speech but through the tensions of an internal argument. The world of spirits, to which the poems in this collection frequently 33

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return, is not a supernatural one but the logical extension of a view that sees language as an external, shared unconscious. ‘Language, the spirit of the dead, / May mouth each utterance twice’, because repeating voices, endlessly plural, are what ‘live on’ in personal and collective memory. The interest of the poem is not in how the speaker hears these voices, but in how ‘each word overhears itself / Laid bare, clairaudiently’ (Riley, 2019, 195). Contact with the dead is not achieved through the special sensitivity of a medium, since language itself is the medium in which voices survive and co-exist. The capacity of language to echo and repeat sound is what makes it part of our understanding of time; this is fundamental to all language use and not just poetry, since repetition is what allows language to become meaningful in the first place. In Time Lived, Without Its Flow, Riley makes the following claim for sound’s role in the experience of temporality: There’s an obvious association of sounds and sequences; with a passage of music or simply a scale, one note implies a next. Any first sound will lean towards a coming second sound, even if to say so relies on retrospect. Even the harshest concatenation of discordant notes is still a sequence, in the sense of a succession pulled together on the ear. (2012, 65)

Although she places this in the musical context of passage or scale, her focus is on a broader range of sound towards which the listener turns effort and attention. Nancy’s definition of listening as ‘straining toward a possible meaning’ is reflected in Riley’s use of ‘lean’, since it is not, strictly speaking, the sound that leans but the ear of the listener that is inclined, with a kind of effort that is also implied in ‘a succession pulled together on the ear’. The poem exacts this effort from a listener through the tension between a regular rhyme scheme and the unexpectedness of the imagery, thick with personification. The painfully physical dimensions of thought are measured in a way that is reminiscent of Emily Dickinson, a poet who was herself influenced by the hymns of Isaac Watts. Riley’s comments on sound and sequences in Time Lived are prompted by her reading of Dickinson’s quatrain: The thought behind I strove to join Unto the thought before, But sequence raveled out of sound Like balls upon a floor.

(Dickinson, 2000)

In this case, Riley notes, ‘[S]ound, embodied as a vessel that would usually hold sequence, is divorced from it.’ Reflecting on Dickinson’s choice of ‘sound’, rather than an earlier draft where ‘sequence raveled out of reach’, 34

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Riley comments on the profound implications of this rupture for listening, and for the experience of sound and temporality. ‘If sequence were truly to fall apart from sound, then the hearer could no longer expect any future unrolling, or discern any principle of successive sounds… The separation of sound from sequence would chip away at consecutive thinking’ (Riley, 2012, 66). The use of hymn-like common metre to explore this idea in Dickinson’s and Riley’s poem points to another aspect of this particular type of sound-vessel, which is to hold together, performatively, a collective belief through shared and repeated rhythmical expression. The Protestant emphasis on the individual spiritual life is a fiction sustained, ironically, by massed voices. The strangeness and power of both poems comes in part from the way they make us listen to the fragility of individual temporality in a form that is designed not to be listened to but to be a participatory affirmation of eternity. The symbolic landscape of ‘Death makes dead metaphor revive’ is inhabited by abstract figures, ‘Death’, ‘Time’, ‘Language’ and ‘Spirit’ all appearing prominently at the start of capitalised lines, but it also has topographical features, including feldspar rock and melted ice, which provide a tenuous unity of location. This might be compared with one of Watts’s best-known hymns, ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’, which presents a traditional view of time as flowing through fields and hills: ‘Time, like an ever-rolling stream, / Bears all its sons away’. The setting of Riley’s poem, however, is disorientating. Although ‘parrot’ is a verb, an emulation of speech rather than a living creature, the suggestion of a tropical bird flits, in a troubling ecological distortion, across the enclosing ice. The poem does not present an untouched sublime but a world melting under the pressure of human construction, where ‘An orphic engine revs but floods / Choked on its ardent weight’. From the choking of grief to the choked engine, lyric is shifted away from confessional experience and into the experience of language; this does not resolve grief but it places it in a global context of uncertainty, in which ‘Disjointed anthems dip and bob / Down time’s defrosted spate’ (Riley, 2019, 1950). Whether an anthem is a song rallying its singers to a cause or a setting of a religious text, its disjointedness signals a loss of identity, although identification is something about which Riley’s work, whether prose or poetry, has always been sceptical. Language has become a physical object, as real as anything else in the landscape, but to accept language as ‘natural’ or in any way exempt from human pressures of politics and history would run counter to Riley’s poetics. Rather, language and landscape are presented as intertwined; landscape is subject to the human time of song and also polluted by ‘orphic engine’ of grief. ‘[T]ime’s defrosted spate’ is oddly domesticated, since freezers and windscreens are defrosted but seas and rivers thaw. However much the speaker seems to withdraw from the scene, hidden by passive construction (‘Time that is felt’) or the drama of non-human characters, a human perspective saturates the scene, not only unavoidably but pointedly. 35

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Time’s frozen song recalls François Rabelais’s story of the frozen sounds of an ancient battle encountered by Pantagruel and Panurge in Gargantua as they defrost: He then threw us on the deck whole handfuls of frozen words, which seemed to us like your rough sugar-plums, of many colours  […]; and when we had somewhat warmed them between our hands, they melted like snow, and we really heard them, but could not understand them, for it was a barbarous gibberish. (Rabelais, 2005 [1532/1534], 564)

Frozen language may eventually thaw, but heard in a different temporal context it becomes strange, a co-existence of the speech of the dead with that of the living. It is not possible, in the present context of environmental catastrophe, to read about thawing ice without considering other ways in which arrested time starts moving again, causing meteorological chaos, sea levels or the revival of ancient bacteria hidden in the ice. Riley’s poem might be read in the light of Timothy Morton’s ‘ dark ecology’, as a rendering of time as wholly inflected by human intervention (2016). The rhyming structure provides a means of examining the stopped time of a personal grief, but it also has a relevance to the ways in which planetary time has already been disrupted. The end of the poem is uncertain despite the penultimate line’s forceful triple internal rhyme: ‘To make rhyme chime again with time / I sound a curious lilt’. The italicised words take their place in the landscape, where non-human elements seem assertive against the doubtful, estranged voice of the speaker. To ‘sound’ may be to pronounce or to test; it also contains the possibility that the ‘I’ might be a sounding vessel, a vibrating body in a landscape rather than a centred subject. The ‘curious lilt’, perhaps questioning, allows for the mysterious ‘persistence of hope’ that Riley finds in song, but this is the product of sounded language and it goes beyond the personal. There are no easy answers in Time Lived, Without Its Flow to the atemporality of grief, but the essay does reach a conclusion that illuminates Riley’s practice of listening. Having described how the sense of a lifetime, which would have encompassed her son’s life, is differently extended and augmented by his death, the impasse of stopped time leads her to reflect on how its singular line of successive events, now ruptured, might be reconfigured as plural: How to think historically about all those myriad lived temporalities that find themselves increasingly resonant and densely layered because they’ve come to include the times of others? Any nominally single life, be it female or male, may in practice be thickened by the work of carrying and preserving the times of its dead, while it may 36

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also be holding the times of its still-living children. Such generational temporalities may sustain or erode their bearers. As these temporalities are intermingled within each person, they’ll also run across and between people, so to speak, to become transpersonal. (Riley, 2012, 74)

These transpersonal temporalities work their way into Riley’s poems as they have since her earlier work, where a consciousness of ‘the live, the dead who worked through me’ contributed to its multiple subjectivities (Riley, 2019, 68). The words in ‘Death makes dead metaphor revive’ overhear themselves ‘clairaudiently’ because language is thick with social and historical echoes, and therefore irreducibly plural (Riley, 2019, 195). Clairaudience, the psychic ability to hear voices from the spirit world, is in part a metaphor for Riley’s technique, which is a materialist practice of tuning in to the traces left by other voices, but as it literally means ‘clear hearing’, it functions more precisely as a description of the kinds of attention that her work brings to language. The final poem series of the collection takes its title from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s statement on spiritualist contact with the dead from the First World War: ‘All that I can do is be a gramophone on the subject’ (Riley, 2019, 201). In the context of the filmed talk that provides the source, Conan Doyle uses the gramophone as an image for broadcasting and publicising his belief in spiritualism, but in Riley’s poem the line ‘I am a gramophone on the subject’ is given to a mother whose son has been lost at war in France, preceded by, ‘So many gone that you can’t take it in. / Whatever I say is bound to sound flat.’ The gramophone in this instance is a voicing beyond the personal, a subjectivity defined not by individual experience but by the voices speaking through it. The black humour of the trenches echoes through ‘Tucked in where they fell’, as the activation of dead soldiers’ voices, in the anapaestic jog–trot of a music hall song, forms a critique of the euphemisms of war and the ideology they continue to sustain in the present. The poem explores the ‘transpersonal’ in a further sense in the final two stanzas: So we’ve formed our heavenly choir Composed of our melded limbs Each voices his part in the singing We can’t disentangle our hymns. We get noisy as larks in the sunshine. Your leg’s with his head over there. My fist’s stuck upright from a dugout And its clutching a hank of his hair.

(Riley, 2019, 198) 37

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The unflinching physical detail recalls Riley’s descriptions of her son’s body, both in ‘Cardiomyopathy’ and in her prose description of his autopsy report, or wiping the last traces of his hair from the washbasin, which presents: ‘the puzzle of what “animation” is; of exactly what it is that’s been crushed’ (Riley, 2012, 15). In the extract here, the angelic voices of the dead cannot be disentangled from one another, but neither can they be separated from other species, or from their remaining body parts. Orphic song continues after dismemberment, but it is part of the material world that encompasses the noise of animate and inanimate matter. Morton draws on a term from robotics, the ‘uncanny valley’, which describes the uneasily overlapping territory between the human and the apparently human, to describe ecological awareness in which: Everything in your world starts to slip into the uncanny valley, whose sides are infinite and slick. It’s more like an uncanny charnel ground, an ER full of living and dying and dead and newly born people, some of whom are humans, some of whom aren’t, some of whom are living, some of whom aren’t. Everything in your world starts to slip into this charnel ground situation, including your world. (Morton, 2013, 131–32)

This poem, like much of Riley’s recent work, repeatedly crosses the boundaries of the uncanny. It brings the living and dead into discomforting proximity, acknowledging and refusing a linguistic history of spiritual consolation. The dead soldiers’ unnerving vitality is there in the ‘larks in the sunshine’, where ‘larks’ hovers between two meanings, birds or (with pitch-perfect historical accuracy) playfulness. Birdsong, which might have created a reassuringly normal background to the scene, is brought into the foreground, and into an unexpected relationship with death. However, the larks are perhaps also mediated by their appearance in Isaac Rosenberg’s First World War poem ‘Returning, We Hear the Larks’, where they are incongruously oblivious to the threat of the dark with which they rhyme (2003, 100). Rock Echoes

To read Riley’s listening through the filter of Morton’s dark ecology or Jane Bennett’s ‘political ecology of things’ might seem to be a step away from the philosophical traditions in which she eloquently asserts the position of her work (Morton, 2016; Bennett, 2009). As Peter Riley (2016) observes, song is inherently social: ‘Song (actual, sung song) is collective. It is sent out into the world in search of auditors and to form or confirm a body of felt mutuality.’ The reassurance of ‘felt mutuality’ is often missing, incomplete or questioned 38

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in Denise Riley’s work. Yet might not a mutuality encompass inanimate objects? This question points to further implications of Riley’s transformation of song and speech into sound objects. If this process began as a strategy against linguistic harm in childhood, it takes on a new importance in the context of bereavement, where the spiritual and therapeutic consolations on offer are resisted through the same ironic detachment: ‘A short while only, then I come, she carols’ (Riley, 2019, 140). The dead, the poems consistently stress, become inanimate matter. At the same time, their response is so fervently desired that the poems continue to address them, lyric’s orientation towards absence becoming a means of listening to silence and noise. If the dead are evoked, it is in a conditional frame. They may ‘still flicker bluish’ as in ‘Still’, a poem in which the speaker announces her own ambiguous resolve on the one hand to ‘turn stolid, go blocky, be granite’, with ‘no welling up after my death in the mouths of the living’, and on the other, entertains the possibility that ‘something self-driven that no-one could plan for’ might still put up a ‘fight to stay animate’ (Riley, 2019, 156). The listening of rocks is a recurrent motif in Riley’s work, from the transformation of Echo into rock to Orpheus’s ability to charm even the stones with his music. In her discussion of ‘bad words’ or harmful speech, she explains that to disable its capacity to harm, her strategy is to refuse the natural tendency to see the hurtful word as a ‘token of exchange and recognition between speakers’ and instead to ‘petrify’ it, that is, ‘assert its stony character’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004, 58). Removing language from communicative relationships is what makes it audible as part of the material world, although the ambiguity of ‘stony character’, hovering on the edge of personification, keeps the human context in play. Riley comments: ‘I have abandoned all my earlier humanist strategy of seeing the bad word as a hurled stone and therefore not as true language. Instead I’ve begun to understand that the bad word is an indifferently speaking stone’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004, 6). The stone, here, is a metaphor for a type of listening that detaches language from its immediate context but allows it to be heard in its indifference. Listening is central to the way in which Riley’s poems cross the border between the living, the dead and the inanimate, for example in ‘Silent did depart’, where an uneasy configuration is evoked by ‘a living creature tapering itself to an obelisk’ (Riley, 2019, 160). This prompts the exclamation: ‘Rocky mute, life’s too serious for this not speaking!’ The transformation of a human into an ‘ardent pillar’, whether tombstone or corpse, recalls the imagery of petrification in Riley’s prose but takes it in a different direction. There is a recognition of a kinship with the non-living elements of the material world, as in the opening poem of Say Something Back: ‘When I was a child I spoke as a thrush, I / thought as a clod, I understood as a stone’, which creates a non-human, material origin for thinking and perception (Riley, 2019, 137). At the same time, it contains a rhythmical echo of St Paul (and, later, Yeats), petrified words 39

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that reveal their impersonality in the following phrase ‘when I became a man’. In Riley’s work on inner speech, Language is the ventriloquist, while its ‘apparently spoken puppet’ is the echoing inner voice, ‘circling through a linguistic authority which does not reside in me’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004, 20; 22). Recognition of one’s own partial status as thrush, clod, stone or puppet is not an abdication of responsibility but a means of exposing the political forces at work in inner listening. The lines by W.S. Graham that form the epigraph of Say Something Back, and from which the collection’s title is taken, point to the reciprocity of speech, as if hearing is folded into to the act of speaking, even if nothing is said: Do not think you have to say Anything back. But you do Say something back which I Hear by the way I speak to you.

(Graham, 2004, 247)

Such a post-Hegelian view of language’s sociality is discussed in Riley’s chapter ‘Bad Words’, where she quotes Lacan: ‘What I seek in speech is the response of the other. What constitutes me as subject is my question. In order to be recognized by the other, I utter what was only in view of what will be’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004, 56–57). Although the absence of the addressee underpins lyric expression, as is made clear here by the use of the imperative, the relational quality of speech is audible, if only as an echo returning. The speaker simultaneously does and doesn’t need a reply, while the equally ambivalent, contradictory response of Graham’s interlocutor is created by the line breaks, for example after ‘But you do’, which also turns the following line, and Riley’s title, into a supplication on the part of the speaker. Referring to Culler’s ‘triangulated address’ in relation to this poem, Peter Robinson notes that published addresses to the dead are also inevitably to the living, they being the only ones who may be known to have read or heard them. What’s more […], they can and do say something back by their ‘uptake’ in enabling the lines – which are what Graham calls ‘the way I speak to you’, and thus ‘say something back’, even to the long dead poets whom they are reading. (Robinson, 2018, 189)

This understanding of potential listening places the elegiac mode of the poem – Riley’s as well as Graham’s – within continuing relationships, as part of what Robinson argues is the ‘sound sense’ of poetry that plays an active role in shaping the world and our experience of it. However, the absence that pervades Say Something Back is that of 40

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Jacob Riley, who is addressed, listened for and often cajoled for his silence throughout the collection. ‘Under the answering sky’ expands that conversation to a wider set of relations with the inanimate world. It begins with a fragile statement of self-sufficiency, recalling Graham, ‘I can manage being alone’, an apparent confidence undermined by strained listening to absence. This does not draw the speaker’s attention to the spirit world of traditional clairaudience but instead brings it up sharp against the resistance of the physical: I would catch, not my echo, but their guarantee that this bright flat blue is a mouth of the world speaking back. There is no depth to that blue. It won’t ‘bring the principle of darkness with it’, but hums in repose, as radiant static.

(Riley, 2019, 158)

The wish is for something more than an echo, for something to come back from beyond the speaker against isolation. The synaesthesia of a blue that speaks signals the intensity of that wish, and also of what might be speaking, which is nothing less than ‘the world’. If the sky does indeed answer, it ‘hums / in repose, as radiant static’. Humming, as a muted, wordless form of singing, is a telling counterpoint to the kinds of song that inform many of her other poems. As well as not fully being song, it is antithetical to speech, underlining the difficulty in communication that gives so much of Riley’s work its precision and force. The dead, still present in remembered voices, can act as guarantors because they belong both to language, along with the human perspective it makes possible, and to the inanimate material of the universe that can only be addressed and that cannot respond. The quotation from Goethe’s Farbenlehre is part of a reflection on the colour blue in which Goethe observes ‘a kind of contradiction of excitement and repose’ (1840, 310). As the colour of distant landscapes, ‘a blue surface seems to retire from us’, while at the same time it attracts: ‘But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it’ (Goethe, 1840, 311). This suggestion of distance, and of a shadowy world beyond, is what the poem both evokes and rejects. The ‘principle / of darkness’ is brought into the poem by the fact of it being mentioned, even if it is not observable in the flat surface of the sky. We are brought up against the immediacy of the senses in the final two 41

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lines. This wordless humming is not an encounter with transcendent nature or the ‘song of the earth’ as Jonathan Bate (2000) would have it, but the noise of sky crackling with communication systems. The setting of a failed conversation creates an expectant listening that directs our attention to the dark ambience of the bright, screen-like sky, its hint of radiation as well as static revealing it as suffused with the effects of human technology; it is a visual and sonic background that is brought into the foreground. The refusal of neutral background is part of what makes the poem unsettling. The sky’s shut-mouth humming is clearly not an answer, but a noisy silence, a withdrawal that invites renewed listening.

42

CHAPTER 2

Noise: Sean Bonney’s Resistance

The untimely death of Sean Bonney in 2019 deprived British poetry of one of its most urgently radical voices, although he had not lived in the UK for some time, having spent his final years in Berlin. His work drew together a set of oppositional relationships between cultures, languages and art forms, as is demonstrated by the following mention in the conclusion of Daniel Kane’s survey of relationships between poetry and punk in New York: The 2000s find contemporary British writers such as Sean Bonney, who has written extensively on Amiri Baraka and whose book Happiness: After Rimbaud proves the ‘Rimbaldian script’ is still being scripted, drawing directly on the histories of punk to stage their provocations. Bonney’s poems in the influential British online magazine onedit, for instance, are composed out of a series of willfully sloppy typewritten pages on which phrases including ‘ok here’s 3 chordS’ rub messily against other fragmented refrains aimed aggressively at the police/late-capitalist state. (Kane, 2017, 226)

The dirty typographical effects of Bonney’s Baudelaire in English (2008) are prefigured in the sequence mentioned here and its explicit reference to punk. While a relationship with music in his work is articulated partly through quotation of song lyrics, it is also part of an anti-aesthetic, anti-lyric stance that draws on punk and its Dadaist precursors. My first encounter with Bonney’s work was at the Cambridge Poetry Summit in January 2004, where his performance brought a physicality to the event that contrasted with the tendency of other readers towards flatter and more neutral foregrounding of the text and its openness to interpretation. The poet and publisher Dylan Harris, observing Bonney’s reading on that occasion, noticed angry, short stabbing phrases, punching consonants at complacency. The hall’s resonance required the speaker to be stage central to 43

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reflect sound properly, so Sean’s non-stop movement gave his voice an ever-changing timbre. But that’s not all; he constantly moves his head (a comparison with a clapper in an upturned hand bell is wrong, but I can’t shake it), creating a vibrato effect. Furthermore, his work uses the techniques of sound poetry, such as a staccato rhythm of consonants. (Harris, 2004)

The post-Dada influence of sound poetry is also evident in later readings, as I will discuss, but so is the influence of punk rock, less the theatricality of the Sex Pistols than a strain closer to the bleakly sarcastic humour of The Fall’s Mark E. Smith. By turn conversational, darkly witty, abrasive and interruptive, voice in Bonney’s work is inflected by a noisy relationship between speech and music, as well as by the contexts in which performances take place. An early statement on his work makes clear that its relationship with noise is deliberate and politically targeted: I make poetry […] to make some fucking noise. Noise, not as an addition to the consumerist traffic hum of ‘the way we live today’, but as a counter to Baudrillard’s shameful quietism in the face of the 1991 Gulf War. Noise as unwanted information from within the system. Noise as the etymological relative of nausea. Noise in the face of every snivelling apologist for corporate reality. (Pores, 2002)

Bonney’s poetry poses the question of how noise in an aesthetic sense relates to a political context; if it disrupts systems of communication, does it also have the capacity to disrupt or challenge the systems of neoliberal capitalism, and, if so, how does it do this? Although this is not a new question, it is one to which Bonney’s work has provided some of the most convincing answers. In particular, his work brings together various kinds of noise by locating aesthetic interference in lived and embodied spaces, and it reflects on noise in distinctive ways that link the making of the poem with specific forms of listening. This work also demands a particular kind of listening from its reader, who is simultaneously drawn in by the intimacy of the ‘lyric touch’ (Wilkinson, 2007) and redirected from the personal through echoes of past revolutionary moments through clashing signals that disrupt the present. In performance, this clash may be seen as dramatised and embodied, becoming noisy on an acoustic level. However, the connection between informational and acoustic noise is not only metaphorical. If, as I argue here, noise is relational, its frictional pressure on lyric operates at every level of the poem’s construction, form, performance and environment, both material and political. A noisy reading of Bonney’s work must be one that allows for reciprocal interferences between text and world. Here, it is useful to turn to Jacques 44

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Attali, whose theorisation of the avant-garde focuses on the clash of the new with that which is currently dominant. In Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977), written just at the moment of punk though spanning the entire history of Western music, noise and power are closely connected through four stages: ‘Sacrificing’, in which celebratory ritual and oral traditions bring the violence of nature under control; ‘Representing’ in the age of notation and printed music, where music becomes a commodity; ‘Repeating’, in the age of recorded sound; and a fourth stage in which he looks towards future developments, a newly emerging social order enabled by new approaches to composition. Describing the first three as ‘zones’ or ‘strategic usages of music by power’, he writes: In one of these zones, it seems that music is used and produced in the ritual in an attempt to make people forget the general violence; in another, it is employed to make people believe in the harmony of the world, that there is order in exchange and legitimacy in commercial power; and finally, there is one in which it serves to silence, by mass-producing a deafening, syncretic kind of music, and censoring all other human noises. (Attali, 1977, 19)

While the final stage is not fully articulated, his project is oriented to the future, aiming ‘to trace the political economy of music as a succession of orders (in other words, differences) done violence by noises (in other words, the calling into question of differences) that are prophetic because they create new orders, unstable and changing’ (Attali, 1977, 19). Attali’s significance is, as Fredric Jameson explains, to explore the potential of music to prefigure political change as well as responding to changes in the means of production. He is, Jameson writes in his foreword, the first to point out the other possible logical consequence of the “reciprocal interaction” model—namely, the possibility of a superstructure to anticipate historical developments, to foreshadow new social formations in a prophetic and annunciatory way. (Attali, 1977, xi)

Attali sees ‘sound matter as the herald of society’ (Attali, 1977, 5). In his account, the history of music is the history of attempts to control noise, which ‘destroys orders to structure a new order’, while his awareness that ‘[l]istening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political’ (Attali, 1977, 6) resonates with Bonney’s listening, which is sharply attentive to the political implications of sound matter. Juxtaposed song lyrics, the sound of the police knocking on the door, background music in the Job Centre and the sounded structures of the poem are conflicting sonic elements that 45

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delineate and unsettle power relationships. In this, they allow the reader to envisage future change in those relationships in the ‘prophetic and annunciatory way’ described by Jameson. Although Attali does not present an exclusively linear history, and allows for ‘simultaneity of multiple codes’ (Attali, 1977, 19), Greg Hainge has found his model unsatisfactory because its temporal structure signals eventual recuperation by the mainstream. If noise does not remain noisy, but presages and merges with a new structure, is it still noise? How does noise stay noisy? While information theorists such as Abraham Moles have described noise as ‘any undesirable signal in the transmission of a message’, this definition presupposes an agreement on the centrality of a singular ‘message’ and also on what is ‘desirable’ in terms of how that message is received (Moles, 1968, 78). Hainge, by contrast, argues that noise must be viewed as a relational ontology, its capacity to resist similar to the resistance found in electrical circuits, where ‘any expression, which is to say any material entering into expressive relations (which is to say, of course, everything) necessarily enters into a systemic process with its own material ontology (read medium)’ (2013, 17). Hainge follows Michel Serres in seeing noise as ‘primordial and foundational’ (Hainge, 2013, 18), and refers back to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza in order to make the case for ontology itself as inseparable from a conception of the world in which everything is ‘expressive, arising out of the movement or force of differentiation through which all being expresses itself in existence’ (Hainge, 2013, 14). Hainge stresses that he is not describing a viewpoint similar to Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) where ‘the medium is the message’. Rather, noise arises from an event or process within an ‘expressive assemblage’ that includes the person perceiving it. In relation to a poem, this means viewing the text as event or process within a particular context, rather than as a message to be decoded, an approach that has affinities with the constellations of Benjamin and Adorno. It also means thinking about expression as embodied, encompassing relationships of affect that link the human and non-human. Emotion in the listener, who may also be the writer, is a physical response to the noisy interactions of politics, history, technology and place as mediated by a poetic subject. By considering this concept of the ‘expressive assemblage’ in relation to readings of Bonney’s poems, I will examine the forms of listening that his poetry enacts and invites. In The Commons (2011a) there is an identification with lyric’s effects in the quotation of song lyrics, but also a tendency to break and disrupt patterns of citation and repetition. There is listening across languages in translation, but also, particularly in Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (2011b), a refusal of the equivalences sedimented in previous literary interactions. Finally, in his more recent work, attention to the rhythms and temporal patterns of state control is allied with an emphasis on the prose poem or letter, where initial publication on his 46

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blog foregrounds personal informality and deviance from metrical limits. Although Hainge’s definition of noise is not necessarily acoustic, Bonney’s distinctive performance style allows us to trace connections between noise as systemic interference and the audible noise of embodied language. While not the same thing, these become fused, in Bonney’s poetry, in the moment of political protest. Although noise is present in all systems, his writing deploys noise consciously and deliberately as a revolutionary tactic. Informed by acute listening, his poems are strategically detonated within expressive assemblages, rather than written as messages to be delivered. They might be read in the light of William R. Paulson’s helpful remark that literature is not primarily message or object, but instead ‘a source of differences’ within culture (1988, viii). The literary quality of texts is exactly that which cannot be reduced to dominant systems of organisation, which is why they remain powerful: ‘Noise causes a loss of information in transmitted messages, but in organized systems in which message transmission is but a component function, the variety introduced by noise can come to be informative and meaningful in another, emergent context’ (Paulson, 1988, iv). Following this reasoning, Niall Martin acknowledges that ‘all literary texts are, after all, “noisy” to the extent that they are polysemous and thus have the capacity to sustain multiple and competing interpretations. Every poem is noisy insofar as it illustrates the potential of indeterminacy to generate meaning’ (Martin, 2015, 9). Martin presents a description of noise that is ‘generated in the contradiction between neoliberalism’s avowed commitment to the promotion of the free and frictionless circulation of information and the neoliberal subject’s increasing sense of surveillance and restraint’ (Martin, 2015, 9). While he makes these comments in relation to Iain Sinclair, they are also relevant to Bonney’s work, in which noise may be seen as ‘simultaneously an obstacle to and a prerequisite of communication’ at a given political moment (Martin, 2015, 9). The Commons

In Bonney’s The Commons (2011a), London is the point at which political tension becomes manifest, a site of encounter between past and present where the question of what is held in common is continuously posed. As Martin writes, noise is closely linked with the metropolis: An important part of the common […] is located precisely in the noise endemic to the metropolis, and just as language can maintain its communicative function only through the operation of noise, so noise, the return of the unselected, the possibility of going astray, is necessary to constantly recreate the common […]. Noise as the 47

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language I do not speak becomes the condition of the common which is itself predicated on the possibility of encounter. (Martin, 2015, 53)

Unlike Sinclair, whose psychogeographical approach responds to the city discovered and renewed through walking, Bonney’s poetry draws on quoted lyrics from folk, blues and punk, often violently juxtaposed in a way that registers both the sonic textures and the lyrical qualities of wide-ranging sources, as it searches for – and then destroys – viable forms of public language against a background of economic and social urban collapse. His performance style was insistently disruptive, in line with a poetics that resists synthesis and pitches language against itself, as can be heard in the opening lines of The Commons: ‘The cuckoo is a / - BANG - / he was a big freak’ (Bonney, 2011a, 1). The folk song’s interruption by the explosive interjection of Betty Davis suggests the gleeful cartoon shooting of the cuckoo and a shattering of the respectful frame within which folk music can often be placed by the elevation of tradition. In performance, Bonney marks time with his head, while breath comes in gasps, syncopating lines and making their textual dislocation a physical act of dissociation (Voiceworks, 2011). The citational technique of the poem is one that works through the ear of a music listener; the poem embodies violent juxtapositions, and these remind us that although recorded music moves freely between times and places, the moment of its reception is sharply contextualised. Bonney’s poems work improvisationally with folk and blues music’s performance mode of transmission rather than acknowledging the textual authority of recorded versions; in this, his work responds to the dynamic of these traditions and their political possibilities. He notes how ‘the singer would incorporate shreds of the already existing tradition, thus forging an individual voice from fragments of a collective culture extending physically and temporally through history’ (Voiceworks, 2011). The single voice, therefore, contains a strongly social element that emerges through a process of listening to other versions; the voice is not a unique source but the product of plural feedback. In traditional music, songs have developed through lines of transmission that can be traced geographically, as embellishment has been added in various communities or regions, but Bonney’s sources do not suggest a musical community as much as they do an extensive record collection and an idiosyncratic navigation of it. This is not to diminish the ways in which the poem articulates a social poetics, but it is worth noting that it does so in ways that are both related to and distinct from the oral transmission of traditional song. The question of ownership of music is raised ironically: ‘my record collection / all these colonised note / kill little birds like me’ (Bonney, 2011a, 18). This last line, from the ballad ‘Henry Lee’ can be read as a comment on the violence of recontextualisation as songs are ordered in recorded form – preserved, but also therefore in some 48

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sense trapped and dead outside a lived social performance. The experience of listening to music from disparate periods out of context is increasingly commonplace in the twenty-first century as digital streaming, even more so than records, tends to flatten out distinctions between different genres and contexts, yet the impression of reading Bonney’s poem is of sharp clashes, stops and starts, rather than seamless continuity:                                          

black is the colour of my gestural forthrightness gently drops the rain cold blows the wind: in May 1968, most young people were working in Woolworth’s, the cosmetics counter was so adventurous, a cloister of learning & trust, all was represental cold / blows the future ballads of the - blank my true love

(Bonney, 2011a, 13)

There is a sonic continuity through ‘gestural’ and ‘gently’ that wrenches together a gesture that is presumably far from gentle with the traditional lyric image of ‘drops the rain’ a cretic rhythm paralleled in the following line by ‘blows the wind’. Despite the song-like feel of these structures on the page, Bonney’s delivery is flat, almost spat-out irony, the shift of tone to the Woolworths cosmetics counter darkly comic. In juxtaposing lyrics from ‘Black is the colour of my true love’s hair’ and ‘The Unquiet Grave’ with reference to an anglicised (and de-romanticised) May 1968, the poem places the past in the context of political unrest, following Benjamin’s concept of historical materialism in which memory is appropriated ‘as it flashes up in a moment of danger’, from the perspective of the present (1999b, 247). The process here is of violently reordering memory to create new and potentially revolutionary connections with the past. The cutting of lyrics from their sources, which are multiple and anonymous to begin with, thus has a double function in the poem; on the one hand, it creates continuities between communities by drawing on collective memory, and on the other it ruptures familiar connections to create new meanings in the present. There are risks in this approach, particularly in the case of blues music, which emerges from a particular history of racial oppression. Rey Chow has suggested that Benjamin’s violent recontextualisation is ‘as much a precise description of imperi49

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alism’s relentless destruction of local cultures as it is a “politically correct” metaphor for redeeming the history of the repressed’ (cited in Huk, 2003, 391), while Lisa Robertson, commenting on this same quotation from Benjamin in relation to a poetics of the fragment, notes that ‘the material fragment of language is an anthropological souvenir which represents the successful colonization and administration of a differential symbolic’ (Robertson, 2003, 391). Severing lyric from its collective social context might be seen as potentially undermining the voicing of social protest with which The Commons is explicitly concerned. However, this would be to overlook the ways in which the poem resists completeness, and resists the absorption of quotation into a new structure. Furthermore, it tends to mobilise the linguistic affect of sources that are often lost and/or forgotten or in the process of becoming so. Bringing these dead voices to life in the poem releases their subversive power: the repressed supernatural is a recurrent motif, and zombies are deployed in the poem as ‘gratuitous cartoon violence’ that cuts across the mournful cadences of folk songs with abrupt humour. Yet the dismembered lyric carries on singing, so that phrases like ‘my own true love’, ‘my lily-white hands’ or ‘she got him up upon her back / and carried him to the earthen lake’ carry resonances in both image and sound (for example, in the imported ballad metre) from their previous contexts that are accentuated through sharp interruption. The songs are disembodied in their loss of context, but they retain their potential to disrupt. Ian Davidson has noted that Bonney’s work is: a form of cultural history that draws on folk memory, particularly of post-Thatcherite Britain, and the folk memory memorialized in the Child Ballads, yet the fragmented nature of the form of the poem, its unconventional use of syntax and its moments of ellipsis, defeat memory as it develops. […] [T]he poem must […] be read as a non-representational cultural form, and as a material interjection into everyday life. Its irreducibility impossible to absorb as a meaning; it always awkwardly sticks its wings out halfway down this reader’s throat. (Davidson, 2010, 40)

The sources, because of their insistent relationship to the materiality of sound, cannot be fully absorbed into memory or the ‘body’ of the poem, but this is what creates the poem’s potential to disturb collective structures of meaning. The use of quotation may in this respect be elucidated by Mackey’s description of ‘musics that haunt us like a phantom limb’; he suggests that the phantom limb is a felt recovery, a felt advance beyond severance and limitation which contends with and questions conventional reality… a feeling for what’s not there which reaches beyond 50

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as it calls into question what is. Music as phantom limb arises from a capacity for feeling which holds itself apart from numb contingency. The phantom limb haunts or critiques a condition in which feeling, consciousness itself, would seem to have been cut off… The phantom limb reveals the illusory rule of the world it haunts. (Mackey, 1987, 33) 

The idea of music as the phantom limb of the poem suggests possibilities that are always broken, are already lost, but that may be partially inhabited as a means of challenging the apparent wholeness or completeness of the poem, and thereby the completeness of the social structures within which it is written. The different rhythms and cadences of the lyrics in the poem draw attention to the voice as multiply composed; the voice is plural and performative, actively carrying the trace of other voices. It is in the sound of the sung or spoken words as they are heard, ‘as a spore left inside the language, / not a code made of letters, / but social utterance flaming’ (Bonney, 2011a, 7). Such plurality of context, which is increasingly a part of media-inflected and globalised linguistic experience, creates a situation in which the quoted lyrics disrupt one another. If one person’s noise is another person’s signal, living with one another’s noise might be considered a central issue for any form of collective understanding. In its investigation of what can be transmitted through a common code, The Commons activates shared musical memory but at the same time it disputes the possibility of ‘the common’ through the use of juxtaposition to create verbal interference. Lyric expression is therefore transformed into a collective mode that negotiates the anger and pain of repressed voices from the past without incorporating them or neutralising their power within a falsely reassuring vision of community. The experience of song as embodied utterance is paradoxically emphasised by recording, and throughout the past century traditional songs that might previously have circulated anonymously have become identified with the versions of individual singers. The memory of a song is not just the memory of a lyric and its tune, but of the voice itself and the absent body that produced it. Quoting a comment by James Baldwin about the effect on him of Bessie Smith’s ‘tone and cadence’, rather than her lyrics, Ian Penman continues to describe the impact of recorded song: Lyrical ‘authenticity’ has been consistently over-valued in the dominant (white) discourse, so much so you’d think it was virtually immaterial whether there was a microphone there or not, and a mouth to sing into it. Such phallogocentric criticism  cannot bring itself to imagine that, say, the ‘softest’ song in the world might equally bear the harshest truth. […] The microphonic song insinuates encoded, bodily truths in a code often so subtle (with such infinite 51

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gradation of tone) as to be almost inaudible … We can see here that Song is a ‘survival’ in at least two or three senses, a living on, an echo of something unsaid. (Young, 2002, 28–29)

The aesthetics of sampling that marks Bonney’s technique suggests memories not only of songs, but of particular voices. The distinctive characters of each voice, are not, of course, represented in the poem, but readers or listeners are likely to supply a ghost soundtrack, filling in fragments of remembered vocal textures where they know them so that further form of interference is produced in the interplay between reading and performance. As a reader of Bonney’s work I hear his voice behind the lines, a remembered speaking voice as well as a rhythmical patterning I know from the page, but I also hear snatches of remembered recordings, so that lyric voice and collective musical past disturb each other. It is this disturbance that locates the poem in a time and place, the individual listening to songs becoming part of an expressive assemblage in which noise confronts a set of political realities. If there is anger in Bonney’s readings, as Harris suggests of the 2004 event, or, for example, in the 2011 Voiceworks recording of The Commons, this, distinct from his gentleness in person, is produced within and through the lyric tension of the poems. Jagged rhythms do part of the work, read up-tempo with their spikiness exaggerated. Line breaks foreground disruption rather than open-endedness, and the reading across them is often pointedly sardonic, as in the following four lines early in Part II of The Commons: here is a landscape here is ‘all hell’, the distance between each line some kind of ‘celestial snarl’

(Bonney, 2011a, 34)

The performance of the lines reflects their parallel rhythmical structure in which a poetic convention, such as gesturing towards landscape or reflecting on poetic form, is ironically undercut. The irony of ‘all hell’, a repeated refrain in the poem, is sounded through the slight pause of the inverted commas, and it is picked up in the half-rhyme of ‘snarl’. Bonney’s position as a performer in language is dramatically located, partly through tone and partly through gasps and in-breaths that suggest a body being put under pressure by the language it is speaking – and that in turn exerts pressure on the poem.

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Noise in Translation

In Baudelaire in English, translation creates a different kind of double voicing. A first look at the overlaid typewriter textures of these poems (Fig. 1) suggests visual noise, although Hainge cautions against reading the nostalgic patina of typewriter fonts or any other superseded technology as necessarily noisy, since in its own time it would have been the clearest means of communicating. For Charles Olson, the typewriter is a means of emulating the movement of breath more closely than handwriting. Clive Scott notes the difference between Bonney’s use of the typewriter and Olson’s use: ‘it is the powerfully dissociative nature of keys on a keyboard which opens the way into the elaboration of avant-garde verbal musics’ (Scott, 2012, 177). It is not the typewriter itself creating noise but the specific use of the typewriter, following not Olson but the British sound poet Bob Cobbing, which creates the noisy effects in Bonney’s work, as he writes himself: Bob’s sense of the page as a score, and of anything being performable – going beyond even language – was fascinating to me. I loved the way he would focus on the text as material, would blow up the words until they fell apart, became simply marks on the page, and then still perform them. My Baudelaire poems were very consciously a response to his work – though I still insisted on content: for me, I want my poetry to still talk about things. More and more I’m interested in poetry as a form of communication, and the ways it can communicate that are specific to poetry, as distinct from other forms. (Literateur, 2011)

The typewriter enables a shift between musical approaches, from the song of the sonnet to the score as basis for improvisation. While a score might be seen as approaching more closely the condition of music, Bonney insists equally on the communicative potential of poetry, and it is in this tension that the noise in his work is created. An online video of a reading ‘in an abandoned Church inside a grave yard somewhere in Stoke Newington sometime early 2008’ (Openned, 2008) shows the intersection between aural and informational noise; the performance, after Cobbing, is an act of deciphering interspersed by jagged breaths and stutters that dissolve the sound of language into its elements, in line with the disintegration of the visual text. Several of Baudelaire’s poems are translated more than once, creating a sense of provisional approach to the source text, as if translation itself is an embodied performance that depends on how a poem is read by an individual at a particular moment, which may change. The performance of the texts is an extension of this, the body’s materiality and the sedimentation of its cultural past (in Bonney’s 53

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Figure 1. ‘La cloche fêlée’ (Bonney, 2008, 24–25).

case, an early training in punk gigs), meeting the materiality of language on a partly decipherable page. Noise marks the point at which a particular embodiment is made audible through traces of cultural forms; it emerges from a transient individual encounter with collective practices, and its value is that it makes both apparent. Bonney’s translation of Baudelaire’s ‘La cloche fêlée’ derives ‘it is murder’ homophonically from ‘Il est amer et doux’, while ‘their happy throats rust’ comes from James McGowan’s rhyming translation that introduces the personified bell as ‘Alert and dignified despite his rust’ (Bonney, 2008, 24; Baudelaire, 2008, 145). A clash of techniques therefore allows multiple approaches to listening in a poem that itself listens, as it exposes a violent compression of space and time. Like Blake’s ‘London’, in which sound of the soldier’s sigh runs synaesthetically ‘in blood down palace walls’, Baudelaire brings distant war into the Parisian soundscape via the old soldier and wounded man in the source text (Blake, 1998 [1794], 194). Bonney’s version comes via interference in the airwaves, as interrupted news reportage brings war into the immediate space of the poem with ‘a burst civilian / who has forgotten everything / but the rubble && bodies that crush him: : : daily’. The visual text parallels this political and emotional damage through the obliteration of text on the page; damage is embodied. Bonney’s translation transposes Baudelaire’s cracked spirit into ‘my voice is cracked : : --- / & when it tries Sing / it Rasps’ (Bonney, 2008, 24). The cracked voice carries suffering, as in old blues recordings, but ‘rasping’ is more abrasively punk, insistently unmusical within a musical form. In her afterword, ‘Poetics of Terror’, Esther Leslie comments on the ‘torn’ language of the poems, in which ‘French is mockingly translated and the English into which the poems are conveyed is one that can only splutter its senses out, on the edge of inarticulacy. This is language damaged, language as damage, language as register of damage’ (Bonney, 2008, 101). If there is a fragmented lyric self, it belongs neither to Baudelaire nor Bonney, who writes in his ‘notes’ on the poem: ‘there is a lyric I in these 54

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poems & it is annoyed by perpetual efforts to destroy it. the I is now an interferer, an inconvenience, a potential parasite within the clean capitalist body’. Here it is useful to consider the triple meaning of ‘parasite’ as developed by Michel Serres (2007), where the parasite is not just biological, but anthropological (in the relationship between guest and host) and informational, noise being a possible translation of the term in French. There is a spatial analogy of the parasite in the photographs of derelict rooms that appear at the beginning of Bonney’s text, and some of them again in the notes. He writes that they interested him ‘because they were of the “invisible”, both in terms of being rooms I couldn’t see, and of being an asocial, abandoned space in the inner city […] these gaps in the safely constructed social text, tenuously analogous to “poems”, where nothing “useful” can happen’ (2008, 86). Like the abandoned buildings (also the name of Bonney’s blog), the Baudelaire translations are both echoing and resistant: ‘as the poems are in danger of absolute illegibility, they become places that cannot be entered’ (2008, 89). The rooms are discussed alongside ‘static: the most interesting sound available in the radio, or the TV / transmissions of the origin of the universe, etc. / information that, with the digital switch over in all broadcast media, will be sealed off. Still there, but unavailable’ (2008, 89). Just as static provides a parasitic dimension where new forms of interpretation are possible, the derelict sealed-off room, the poem and the lyric ‘I’ are all similarly lingering forms of interference. Another kind of noisy translation is evident in Bonney’s referencing of Rimbaud. Here, too, the city provides a necessary element of the poem’s friction since Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (Bonney, 2011b) is a reading of Rimbaud and Paris of the Commune superimposed on twenty-first century London in the early years of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition. Rimbaud is a poet who cannot be understood, according to Bonney, by anyone who has not ‘studied through and understood the whole of Marx’s Capital. And this is why no English speaking poet has ever understood Rimbaud’ (Bonney, 2011b, 63). The misunderstanding, he explains, arises from a tendency to interpret ‘dérèglement de tous les sens’ (Rimbaud, 1871) or ‘derangement of the senses’ as hedonistic excess rather than a systematic reordering of the social senses, where ‘the “I” becomes an “other” as in the transformation of the individual into the collective when it all kicks off’ (Bonney, 2011b, 64). The poems of Happiness depart radically from Rimbaud’s texts, the jacket description warning, ‘If you think they’re translations you’re an idiot.’ Idiocy may be worth pursuing, however, in order to consider the role of noise in translation and the kind of listening it reflects and enables. Rimbaud’s well-known 1871 sonnet ‘Voyelles’ proposes synaesthesic links between colours and vowel sounds, ‘A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu’ (Rimbaud, 2008, 19). Robert Sheppard argues compellingly that Bonney’s text is indeed a translation, one in which he ‘“occupies” [the word 55

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used in its political sense, with resonances of the Occupy movement] the schema of Rimbaud’s poem for his own purposes’ (Sheppard, 2016, 114). Sheppard shows how, through Bonney’s palimpsestic method, ‘the forms of translation transform into the translation of forms – in this case with a clear political stance implied in both form and content’ (Sheppard, 2016, 116). Despite this political directness, Rimbaud’s synaesthesic structure and Bonney’s interpretation of it also reveal the role of noise in the interaction of translation. On the one hand, Rimbaud makes a direct link between language and sensory experience through synaesthesic apprehension of vowels as colours, and the use of long rhyming vowels draws attention to the affective powers of sound. Most readers will not see the same colours in each vowel, but the intensity of sonic effects invites them to share the intensity of synaesthesic experience. On the other, the connections it makes between sound and colour are so arbitrary and personal that language is disordered, not just the alphabetical reversal of ‘U’ and ‘O’ but in being made irreducible to a single meaning. ‘Common’ sense is broken in a time of political upheaval; sense and the senses must be remade through new and multiple connections. A language in which vowels were pure expression of colour and shared association would be noise-free, although this is not what is happening in Rimbaud’s poem, which is already noisy in its disjunctiveness. In Bonney’s reworking, further noise is created though the poem’s commentary on vowels as the materials of its own construction, which sensitises the listener to its linguistic medium as well as the political context. In his versions, Bonney locates the problem of sound and signification in a series of shifting situations. These are translations in the sense of a carrying over, and what is carried is not a narrative but a problem, a set of language relations in which agency is uncertain and interpretation is dominated by the powerful. election day. terminal. a cluster of predecessors in the language i.e. cells of racist light, in verbs, tumbling Belgravia or something, an adverb think of adjectives as refugees. you just shot em: here is a style guide – (e) a deficit line – (a) negates the interruption of the speaking I – (u) a system of collective thought – (i) unable / unwilling to find work – (o) beyond a certain tenancy of stoic disdain – (Bonney, 2011b, 26)

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Using the same language as the government is a form of complicity in its violence, for example against refugees, so the introduction of noise into the translation is a refusal of equivalence. Bonney’s first scheme of vowels reveals its arbitrary basis in capitalism’s spreadsheets where the ‘deficit line’ is the first consideration. The relationship of the ‘speaking I’ and the ‘system of collective thought’ is ambiguous, in that the second may be a definition of the first, but both are negated by capital. The speaking ‘I’ is replaced by (i), no longer a person but a choice on a form, presumably about unemployment benefit. Since there is no choice between alternatives, ‘stoic disdain’ is one possible response, although not a satisfactory one. In this predicament, we move to the next stanza, where language has given way to physical violence, the vowel A becoming a marker of depersonalisation that enables this: ‘I entered first. Target A was standing by the table / I hit him with the shield. Pinned Target to floor’ (Bonney, 2011b, 26, italics in original). The lettered list of choices is a rhythmical arrangement, but in official documents such rhythm is designed to be received unconsciously, as a signal of authority from the one who has the right to designate and categorise. In the next version of the vowel list, enumeration by letter suggests a different and more didactic context, such as a point-by-point lecture: ‘(a) glyphs & harm. understood simply as in / (c) simply / public spheres or stones / (o) chemicals & stones / (i) feasts of hunger, simply as in, stones / (a) stones’. The repetition of ‘simply’ may be an attempt to reassure a listener but it masks a far from simple collapse of meaning into circularity, where the ‘public sphere’ is reduced to hunger, or the chemicals and stones of protest. The failure of language is a failure of differentiation that sustains the powerful, ‘glyphs’ allied with ‘harm’ through the erasure of the ability to make meaningful distinctions. -

blue – the ultimatum expands on green – we presume the decision not red – magnetic idiocies, mostly white – our arseholes are different black – isolation in its pure phase

(Bonney, 2011b, 28)

In Rimbaud’s ‘Voyelles’, having focused on embodied experience of flies, laughing lips, seas and wrinkles, the blue ‘O’ ending opens into the otherworldly possibilities of the sky: O, suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges, Silences traversés des Mondes et des Anges : – O l’Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux ! – (Rimbaud, 2008, 19) 57

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Bonney gestures to this source text with ‘o paradise’, but his ending is a far more troubling conclusion: anxiously their faces, were not there it was a kind of heaven, scraps of sky cold wind. passengers and crew

(Bonney, 2011b, 28)

While Sheppard sees here ‘images of the utopian “happiness” of his book’s title’ (2016, 116), these are glimpsed from the vantage point of catastrophe. The comma after ‘faces’ suggests that this is fragmented reportage, suggesting a plane crash, since this is one of the few situations in which all the people on an aircraft, ‘passengers and crew’, would be placed in the same category. Rhythmically, the underlying iambic pentameter creates a melancholic mood, the long vowel sounds at the ends of the lines mirroring the effects of the Rimbaud poem. However, Bonney’s refusal of transcendence creates a noisy relationship with its source through the insertion of death, the end of the senses. While language cannot reveal colour, panoptic power sees everything, as ‘they’re making a chart of all of our secret thoughts’. In response, the poem presents the vowels as an analysis of political crisis (Bonney, 2011b, 47): (a) the fusion of transnational capital with reactionary political power (e) arbitrary militarisation (i) a racist mobilisation against selected scapegoats (o) public opinion’s spectral ditch (u) a fanatical ideology based on hypocrisy and sentiment (Bonney, 2011b, 47)

The final line, ‘the point is an absolute redistribution of all the senses –’ makes clear Bonney’s commitment to communication. The poems may not be translations in terms of conveying meaning directly from the source text, but they are determinedly concerned with meaning, and with translating one political context – that of revolutionary Paris – into another. The fragmentary contexts and repetitive structure of Bonney’s translation draw on the reader’s ability to respond not just to the formal relations within the text but also the historical and social contexts out of which the work is formed. Redistributed Senses

The phrase ‘redistribution of the senses’, implying that physical perception is owned by the powerful, suggests a more structured levelling than 58

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Rimbaud’s ‘dérèglement de tous les sens’ (1871). Anahid Kassabian argues that contemporary listening may best be understood not in terms of the familiar distinction between hearing and listening, but as ‘distributed subjectivity’. Her argument begins with a discussion of the kind of expertise in musical listening described by Adorno in which the listener ‘hears the sequence, hears past, present and future moments together so that they crystallize into a meaningful context’ (Adorno, 1988, 4). In her view, this is dependent on a narrative structure, the listener distinguished by an ability to ‘follow a theme throughout its journey, as narratologists would put it, away from and back to home’ (Kassabian, 2013, xxii). If such a sequence is present in Bonney’s work, it is one that spills over from the text into its relationships with other times and places: an engagement with the resonances of Rimbaud’s poetry creates a powerful transhistorical connection with language as an art form, as well as a sensitivity to the interferences of bureaucratic and political language in everyday contexts. A ‘redistribution of the senses’ is a challenge to the subjectivity on which Adorno’s expert listener is predicated. Kassabian, in her work on ‘ubiquitous music’, emphasises moments of unconscious affect that leave traces in embodied memory, and that produce the effects of subjectivity. Her focus is on how background music, whether in public places or in film and video, creates fluid and collective subjectivities through the sedimentation of affective responses. It is, on the whole, an irenic vision, in which music brings different groups together into temporary forms of belonging through their unconscious listening. While this perspective usefully sheds light on a contemporary listening that extends subjectivity beyond the individual, it does not fully account for the political friction that is central to Bonney’s work, and that demands the presence of an active reader–listener who will participate in the critical relations established by the text. Bonney invites us to hear the repeated patterns of bureaucratic language, and by attending to their noise, to what is usually below the surface of conscious attention, he reveals their oppressive structure as well as the collective forms of experience that might enable new political structures. Redistribution of the senses involves a rethinking of what noise is, and how it functions in a situation of political stress or change. Bonney’s critical approach may be better understood in the light of Jacques Rancière’s use of the term ‘distribution of the sensible’, or ‘the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it’ (2004, 12). The sensory friction that positions the listener between Rimbaud’s poem and the white noise of officialdom creates the possibility of a community formed in and through disruption. The noise that results from these clashing structures is what defines the poem as spatial, as happening within an urban space that is the stage for a riot. In Bonney’s work this is partly because the city itself 59

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is defined by its noise (Martin, 2015, 53), but it is also to do with a more specific understanding of the city as a revolutionary space, hence the parallel between London in 2010 and Paris in 1871. The language of the poem tips over into the gestures of protest, for example in the injunction: ‘When you see a Tory on the street, cut his throat / It will bring out the best in you’ (Bonney, 2011b, 37). Steve Willey (2015) comments on the experience of reading these lines to an audience gathered for a concert, and its stony reaction, noting, ‘The  poem is as much about measurement as  violence. The degree of hostility expressed by the audience towards the poem and its speaker is the distance between the audience and the possibility of their revolution.’ His experience is particularly revealing because it separates the effects of the poem in performance from the persona of Sean Bonney, and from a generation more familiar with punk’s original capacity to shock. It marks a change in public discourse, which is more fearful of violent verbal confrontation in a punk gig, but arguably less able to expose the harm done to bodies by state policies. Noise, here, enables a redistribution of the senses because it makes difference audible. Much of Bonney’s Letters Against the Firmament (2015) argues along these lines, while taking an epistolary form that sidesteps poetry’s lyrical aspects in order to comment on how easily music is co-opted by patterns of control, as in ‘Letter on Silence’: It’d be too much to say the city’s geometry has changed, but its getting into some fairly wild buckling. It’s gained in dimension, certain things are impossible to recognise, others are all too clear. I wish I knew more about maths, or algebra, so I could explain to you exactly what I mean. So instead of that I’ll give you a small thesis on the nature of rhythm – (1) They had banged his head on the floor and they were giving him punches. (2) He was already handcuffed and he was restrained when I saw him. (3) He was shouting, ‘Help me, help me’. (4) He wasn’t coherent. (5) I went to speak to his mum. (6) He couldn’t even stand up after they hit him with the batons. (7) They knocked on her door three hours later and told her ‘your son’s died’. I can’t remember exactly where I read that. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in a literary magazine, but I guess you’ll have to agree it outlines a fairly conventional metrical system. (Bonney, 2015, 12)

The numbered points function like the vowels in Happiness, hyperbolically applying order to a chaotic system to reveal its disorder more fully. Read aloud, they shift the sound of the prose poem towards an effect that suggests line breaks, although there are none. As in the translation of Rimbaud’s vowels, an element in poetry’s sounded construction, rhythm, is transposed into another acoustic context, in this case the pattern of blows 60

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and cries in a report of police violence. State ownership of this sonic effect distorts sensory information. Rhythm and harmony are identified in his work as instruments of state control, whether in the form of the police knocking on the door or chart hits played inaudibly at the Job Centre. The poem cannot be trusted as a medium of resistance simply by virtue of being a poem: Poetry transforms itself dialectically into the voice of the crowd – René Ménil made that claim way back in 1944 or something. But what if that’s not true. What if all it can do is transform into the endless whacks of police clubs – certainly you get that in official poetry, be it Kenny Goldsmith or, well, anyone. Their conformist yelps go further than that, actually, as the police whacks in their turn transform into the dense hideous silence we’re living inside right now, causing immediate closing of the eyes, difficulty breathing, runny nose and coughing. Because believe me, police violence is the content of all officially sanctioned art. (Bonney, 2015, 117)

The interpellation of the letter invites a different kind of listening from the metrical poem, and articulates a suspicion of its effects, but at the same time it refuses the oppositional, fragmenting techniques of modernist poetry. Bonney’s prose poetry is in this respect closer to Rimbaud’s letters and prose, or the prose poems of Baudelaire, than Language writing or Ron Silliman’s New Sentence. The persona is dramatic, sometimes self-parodying. In places, it may seem that prose is an admission of poetry’s failure to live up to its moment, as Bonney searches for what he calls ‘a new prosody’. Key to his argument is a frustration about the role of poetry in a time of political upheaval. The pressures to which his work responds have become increasingly acute since it was written, but the moments in question are the aftermath of the 2011 London riots and subsequent student protests. Of these protests he writes: I started thinking the reason the student movement failed was down to the fucking slogans. They were awful. As feeble as poems. Yeh, I turned up and did readings in the student occupations and, frankly, I’d have been better off just drinking. It felt stupid to stand up, after someone had been doing a talk on what to do if you got nicked, or whatever, to stand up and read poetry. […] I wondered could we, somehow, could we write a poem that (1) could identify the precise moment in the present conjuncture, (2) name the task specific to that moment, i.e. a poem that would enable us to name that decisive moment and (3) exert force insamuch as we would have condensed and embodied the concrete analysis of the concrete situation. (Bonney, 2015, 141) 61

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Bonney’s poetry is not directed at replacing the political slogans at events, or reaching a wide public with a poetry of mass persuasion, but with identifying structures of control situated in language, and using language to critique them. David Nowell-Smith observes that in this it shares longstanding concerns with a history of radical poetics, including American Language poetry, but it does not rule out the lyric subject in doing so. Whereas lyric subjectivity is seen by Bernstein and others as being locked into structures of control, Adorno in ‘Lyric Poetry and Society’ (Adorno, 2000, 211–29) sees the autonomy of the art work as a site of resistance, offering a means by which as Nowell-Smith, drawing together these perspectives, observes of Bonney’s work that ‘lyric becomes, through its linguistic resistances, the site where a salvaged subjectivity can start to be articulated’ (2013, 4). He notices a change in Bonney’s poetry from individual rebellion to a more nuanced approach that is able to ‘trouble the threshold of individual and collective, both problematizing and yet straining for the political act of saying “we”’ (Nowell-Smith, 2013, 32). Thinking in terms of noise allows us to hear the political dimensions of this ‘troubling’ on a textual level as a tension between lyric individualism and collective possibility. Drawing on Lenin’s comments on Hegel, Bonney observes that harmony, derived from a Pythagorean understanding of ‘a hierarchy built on scalar realities that justifies social conditions on earth’ is an oppressive structure held in place by a fiction (Bonney, 2015, 33). The poem raises the possibility of ‘poetic realities as counter-earths where we can propose a new stance’, then disputes it, on the basis that song is irredeemably commodified (33–34). As a letter offering the apparent authenticity of prose, it refuses the appeal of ‘fetishised rhythm’ as a solution, although it has its own speech rhythm, a tone that undercuts and unsettles the positions between which it moves. It encompasses quotation of Amiri Baraka, who describes the potential of noise to push past music to the point that ‘the sound itself became a basis for thought, and the innovators searched for uglier modes’. Bonney’s reference to this noise that would clear ‘some ground from where we can offer counter-proposals’ comes via reference to music rather than the embodiment of music or noise in the poem (2015, 34). A reference to Coltrane’s Live in Seattle, a performance from 1965, describes a moment where the horn: forces a dimensional time-loop through the already seismic constellations set up within the music’s harmonic system, becoming a force that moves beyond any musical utterance, while still containing direct, clear communication at its centre. Dialectical love, undeclared logic. Etc etc etc. (Bonney, 2015, 35)

This is both primordial noise and noise as resistance within a system. Such sound, an ‘irruption into present time of the screams of the bones of history’ 62

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might establish ‘a new ground outside of official harmony, from which to act’, but this possibility is held against the knowledge that jazz, as much as any other form of music, has become tamed into a field of expertise: ‘[N]ext time some jazz fan tells you that late Coltrane is unlistenable, or something, laugh in their ridiculous face. Seven times. More later’ (36). Bonney’s determination to keep opening new channels of noise is predicated on a critical alertness to structures of sensibility as they emerge in the hostile environment of neoliberal capitalism. Neither a dérèglement de tous les sens nor a redistribution of the senses can be contained in the sounded structure of the poem, given its structural dependence on coercive and hierarchical forces. There must nevertheless be a ‘communication at its centre’ for noise to stay noisy, or to function in Hainge’s terms as an ‘expressive assemblage’. By extending the concept of the assemblage beyond the artwork to include the political system in which that work reverberates, Bonney extends the scope for noise in and beyond the poem, whether it is created through the friction and resistance of his translations or his alignment with the noise of predecessors such as Baraka and Coltrane. It may not be a musical structure in the sense that Adorno describes, but it is a structure in which forms of music are both evoked and disrupted. It is possible to read a sequential narrative that begins with past revolution, the vowels of Rimbaud or the ‘metallic, musical screeches as systems of thought’ in the 1960s (Bonney, 2011b, 34), moves through a present marked by the rhythm of state and corporate brutalities, and into future revolutionary possibility. However, for the noise in Bonney’s work to be fully amplified, these moments need to be heard simultaneously as cross-echoes within a sensibility that is expanded beyond the individual.

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CHAPTER 3

Acousmatics: Sounded/Silent Text in Caroline Bergvall’s Drift

The use of subtitles in a film may appear to situate the viewer straight­ forwardly between a known and an unfamiliar language, but it also occurs within a whole panoply of visual and audio techniques through which the audience is located in a represented space. Similarly, the spatial metaphor contained in the word ‘translation’ suggests a movement in a particular linguistic direction, marked by the frontier between one language and another, yet this implied movement is often more complex than terms like ‘source’ and ‘target’ suggest. Cinema makes us aware of how orientation in language, written and spoken, takes place alongside a process of location through the primary (or privileged) senses of sight and sound, not naturalistically but via an ‘audiovisual contract’ to use Michel Chion’s term (1990, 1). Jean-Luc Nancy’s argument that listening is underrated in contemporary philosophy, in comparison with the visual, is a challenge to attend to the work of the ear rather than the eye. Although hearing, like any of the senses, cannot be considered in isolation, Nancy’s arguments are useful in outlining the implications of auditory thinking, and in considering what it means to make resonant rather than make evident (2007, 3). In what follows I will focus on the interaction of the senses, and in particular on sound, as a process of spatial, cultural and political orientation. I will aim to identify varieties of listening in a work that draws on a range of artistic frames, as a poetic text and performance that is not, as I will show, wholly contained by the boundaries of poetry as an art form. Caroline Bergvall’s multimedia piece Drift (2014) is neither film, nor is it quite translation in the traditionally accepted sense, yet in its collaborative processes it has a relation to both of these areas. Bergvall is a British poet of French and Norwegian descent whose work ranges across art forms, often fusing visual art, performance, poetry and critical discourse. Taking its point of departure from the anonymous Old English poem The Seafarer, the piece was originally commissioned for the festival lost.last.gru by Grü/ 64

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Transtheatre, Geneva. It was subsequently toured across the UK as a live performance for voice, percussion and electronic texts, involving percussion by Ingar Zach, visual programming by Thomas Köppel and direction by Michèle Pralong. For Bergvall, the creative journey of the piece extends her previous practices of live vocal performance and installation of visual text by bringing both together in a collaborative context. The frame of the quest narrative means that it is profoundly concerned with the perceptual process of orientation in time and space. Bergvall’s ‘Log’, published as part of the written text of Drift, tracks the process of orientation involved in its composition. What is north. Is it a direction or a process. A method or a place. Is it space accelerated into time, like a glacial flood. Is it time spread into space, like permafrost. Is it always further on, further north until it makes a vertical drop, like a voice that traverses, illuminates everything but will not itself be held. Is it trajectory or endpoint, or both. (Bergvall, 2014, 127)

Bergvall quotes Sarah Ahmed’s insight that ‘being lost is a way of inhabiting space by registering what is not familiar’, a comment Ahmed follows with the observation that ‘the work of inhabiting space involves a dynamic negotiation between what is familiar and unfamiliar’ (Ahmed, 2006, 7). While the spatial metaphor contained in the word ‘translation’ suggests a movement in a particular linguistic direction, marked by the frontier between one language and another, this implied movement is often more complex than terms like ‘source’ and ‘target’ would indicate. The rate of travel may vary, revealing the ways in which linguistic borders are controlled and the extent to which they are threatened by the arrival of a foreign text. Foreignness and Silenced Text

Drift may be seen as a development of certain cinematic practices, but also a piece that explores space and ideas of foreignness through subverting cinematic expectation. It also exists as a book and a gallery exhibition, and this fluidity of movement between forms is reminiscent of early cinema and its borrowings from visual art, literature and theatre performance. Early cinema emerged as a hybrid form from literary precedents, accompanied by live music and dependent at first on live interpreters explaining the action, then on projected text to provide the narrative. Giuseppe de Liguoro’s 1911 L’Inferno, for example, is modelled closely on editions of Dante illustrated by Gustave Doré. Intertitling weaves a narrative between scenes in which tableaux based on Doré’s engravings are brought to life via exaggerated 65

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acting drawn from the stage, or more specifically from opera. Chion points out that intertitling ‘had an inherent limitation: it interrupted the images, it implied the conspicuous presence in the film of a foreign body, an impurity’ (1990, 170). The hybridity of Drift, therefore, and the noisy interplay between written text and performance, has precedents in the evolution of film. Bergvall notes the skaldic influence on the live performance of her poem, which ranges from speech to song with many gradations in between. It is juxtaposed with a morphing electronic visual text screened behind her, in which associations and etymologies are explored and deconstructed. The text is reminiscent of subtitles, but subtitles freed from any accompanying visual information; as such they focus attention on the text and sound, revealing language as the site and subject of the poem’s unfolding narrative. Hybridity is equally important to the translation, since although the text takes The Seafarer as its starting point, it is very far from being a translation in the conventional sense. Bergvall’s vocal performance slides from one language into another just as on the page the reader must navigate non-standard English usage that confounds the idea of language’s insularity. Bergvall has described her own difficulties in approaching the Old English original, reading it against both English and Norwegian. The main language of her text is English, but it is an English traversed and expanded by its own past, and that creates connections to other languages. Through slippages, false friends, guess-work and sound-play it charts not only the experience of being lost between languages but also the experience of reading, which is radically defamiliarised. Translation is enacted through the unfolding of language’s changes over time, since every language is a process of translation just as the sea is a place of flux and exchange. Bergvall’s process therefore puts the instability of language in a historical context that sharpens its potential for political critique. The wandering of the anonymous Seafarer is contrasted with modern English and particularly with the fate of the most vulnerable contemporary seagoers: refugees heading across the Mediterranean to European shores. In its description of a refugee boat lost in 2011 after the failure of relevant authorities to respond, Drift brings the historical predicament of the lost sailor into the present, and into contemporary debates about what is, or should be, visible. At the centre of both the book and the performance of Drift is a found-text narrative about migrants lost at sea trying to reach Lampedusa from Libya. In the performance, the screen goes black and the music stops; in the book, this documentary section is printed in white on black pages, beginning as follows: On March 27, 2011 a ~ 10m rubber boat overloaded with 72 migrants departed the port of Gargash adjacent to the Medina of Tripoli, Libya. This vessel was bound for Lampedusa Island, Italy 160 nm (nautical miles) to the north northwest. (Bergvall, 2014, 71) 66

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Figure 2. Drift production shot of Caroline Bergvall and Ingar Zach, with electronic text by Thomas Köppel, at The Forge Camden, 6 October 2014. Photo: Josh Redman for Penned in the Margins.

This austere recitation continues with the account of the drifting vessel, all but nine of the migrants dying of thirst or in storms over the following days before the boat was washed up back on Libyan shores. During this time, as a later report made clear, there would have been ample opportunity for the many military and surveillance craft in the area to arrange a rescue. A helicopter takes photos and flies away. All the sophisticated technology of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) fails to make visible the urgency of the rescue. The authorities appear to be acting in as much blindness as the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer. This failure of vision is central to the poem as a whole and its distrust of the eye. The first performance includes, as Bergvall notes, ‘the report read live in more or less complete darkness’ (2014, 135). Her aim, she explains in the accompanying statement, is ‘to shorten the narrative and relay the report’s complex piece of memorialisation, interpretation and investigation through live recitation. To register the event by recitation’ (134). Contemporary and historical voyages are thus turned into echoes of each other, overlaying journeys that demand to be considered in terms of global inequality and struggle. The navigator’s problem is also listener’s problem, since both must find their way in the complex conditions of global capitalism. The distinctive project of Drift becomes clear when it is compared with a documentary animation that is a response to the same 2011 event. The animated short film Liquid Traces — The Left-to-Die Boat Case is part of the 67

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same Forensic Oceanography research project from which Bergvall draws her material. A map of the Mediterranean, filled with slowly undulating waves, is marked successively by a series of lines and points indicating satellite imagery, search and rescue zones, the NATO surveillance area, Frontex operational areas, fishing areas and other forms of mapping and record that counter, as the introductory text explains, ‘the vision of the sea as a nonsignifying space in which any event immediately dissolves into moving currents’ (Liquid Traces, 2014). The narration describes the events of 2011, explaining the means by which the crime of non-assistance may be uncovered through visual evidence, stating: ‘Every point and every line drawn on this map seeks to inscribe responsibility in a sea of impunity.’ Bergvall’s project includes the same evidence but is not limited to witness of this particular event. Like M. NourbeSe Philip, whose Zong!, based on the slave ship massacre of 1781, is an important precursor of Drift, Bergvall emphasises the historical, material relationships constructed in and across the sea to show that it cannot be read as a blank or ‘natural’ space. Mandy Bloomfield, writing on Philip, comments that in contrast to Walter Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’ (Benjamin, 1999a, 462), which ‘conceptualizes significant historical configurations as encapsulated in epiphanic moments of arrest, the fluid space of the ocean suggests a conception of history as constantly flowing and transforming’ (2016, 209). The mapping of the sea as a signifying space is expanded through history via its literary and linguistic traces, and through a problematising of vision that foregrounds the role of the ear. Varieties of Translation

For Nancy, ‘to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible’ (2007, 5–6). It is this kind of listening that Bergvall’s language invites, its tendency to slip from one language to another creating noise and non-transparency. Bergvall’s ‘Log’ reveals the ways in which listening is fundamental to the development of the work, showing how performance is an extension of a performative process of composition, a translation-like process that positions Bergvall as both reader and writer. She writes: I work some of it out by sound association. By engaging with the source text in a loose homophonic call and response, I can both cut away from the less yielding aspects of this transhistoric contact and value the strongly sound-led rules of the original. (Bergvall, 2014, 144)

Whereas in film, dubbing erases the sound of the source language, subtitling allows it to become part of the soundscape of the film as the eye and the 68

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ear adapt to different signals. In the translation of poetry, the question of how one might preserve the sound of a language is one that frequently vexes translators, since the sound of words, arguably what is most intrinsic to a poem, is inevitably replaced. Ezra Pound’s typically loose version of The Seafarer responds to this problem by allowing sound structures from the source text to shape the expression of the translation: ‘May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,  / Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days / Hardship endured oft (1912, 25–30). Bergvall goes further, through a dynamic and interactive technique of ‘homophonic call and response’ interrogates the language of the past rather than replacing it. The space of the poem is a space of multiplied, overlaid languages, echoing with the sounded shapes of the source text: ‘I can make my sorry tale right soggy truth / sothgied sodsgate some serious wrecan’ (Bergvall, 2014, 25). ‘Soggy truth’, as a translation of ‘soðgied’, keeps the sonic contours of Old English, asserting the sound as part of the truth to be conveyed. The phrase ‘soðgied wrecan’ from The Seafarer could be translated as ‘sing a life-story’ (North, Allard and Gillies, 2014, 187), but both song and utterance are inflected here by the sonic and etymological links of wrecan to wreckage. It is the wreckage of utterance that surfaces in Bergvall’s text, where traces of the past exist only in the echoes they produce in the present. The repetition of sound in ‘sothgied sodsgate’ reproduces some of the density of the original but also grounds Bergvall’s technique in sonic improvisation, whereby one sound suggests another. ‘Hu ic’ (How I) is homophonically translated as ‘How ache’ in the manner established by Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s translations of Catullus. Focusing on sound rather than meaning of the Latin text, they produced a writing of radical strangeness in which, for example, the Latin line ‘Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle’ is translated as ‘Newly say dickered my love air my own would marry me all’ (Zukofsky, 1969, 70). Charles Bernstein comments that this approach draws out the ‘queerness’ of the source text and ‘reframes what is significant in translation, challenging the idea that the translation should focus on content or create poems that sound fluent in their new language’ (2016, 107). In Bergvall’s translation, the impact of this homophonic technique is doubled through the inclusion of both source and target language. This repetition of sound accentuates the alliteration of the line, as the sounds of ‘ic’, ‘ache’ are picked up in ‘rekkies’ and ‘wracked’, echoing the stress patterns of Old English poetry. The doubling of the phrase also sounds like a hesitation, fluency faltering in the re-enacting in language of a physical ordeal: the site of the journey and its hardships is in language. In Lawrence Venuti’s terms, this may be seen as a foreignising translation strategy in which ‘neither the foreign writer nor the translator is conceived as the transcendental origin of the text, freely expressing an idea about human nature or communicating it in a transparent language’ 69

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(2008, 20). Rather, there are ‘discontinuities at the level of diction, syntax or discourse that reveal the translation to be a violent rewriting of the foreign text, a strategic intervention into the receiving culture’ (Venuti, 2008, 21). The text comments on its own violence, revealing the difficulty of traversing both seas and language. As Liquid Traces shows, the sea is a space of unequal passage, easily navigated by military and trade vessels but slow and treacherous for refugees. In ‘Shake’, a fragment of the performance available online (Bergvall, 2016), comparison with the printed version (Bergvall, 2014, 97–103) shows some divergence, as though the written version is being used as a basis for improvisation. The voice comes in over a subtle instrumentation, and the phrases are chanted softly. However, as the piece contines their pitch in places has a relationship to shouted speech, as if heard in the distance against a storm, vowels elongated just enough to shift them into song. Hearing this for the first time, without access to the printed text, the musicality is emphasised by the undecidability of the language: ‘Gattir allar gates’ is likely to be heard only as sound by someone not familiar with the source text, while ‘guess us all’, which follows, might be caught as a fragment of English that leaves the listener in a state of suspended guessing. The playfully associative method of the translation might emerge with the incongruity of ‘Elders are berries’, but the accretive sonic pattern is more important than semantic meaning. Where the sound comes into focus as recognisable language, it has the feel of song lyrics: the theme emerges with ‘better alive than unalive / not lost at life / with lust for life ok ok’. As well as quoting Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’ (1977), these phrases are similarly constructed with the simplicity of lines to be half-sung, half-shouted. The performance therefore gives a sense of the harsh environment of the sea, and its distances over space and time. Bergvall’s translation and her performance slow down the speed of passage from one language to another and register its inequalities. Fragments of various sources, including also the ninth-century Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan are intermingled and juxtaposed, translation, source and original text intermingling, for example, ‘nysse hwæðer he didnt know which’ (Bergvall, 2014, 35). The incorporation of the source language alongside the translated text prevents transparency, inviting the listener to make the journey between the two through echoed sound. The text draws in places on the Hávamál, the opening section of which is ‘Wisdom for Wanderers’, offering advice on how to navigate social situations. The following extract from the 1908 translation introduces its concerns: Gáttir allar, áður gangi fram, um skoðast skyli, um skyggnast skyli, 70

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því óvíst er að vita, hvar óvinir sitja á fleti fyrir. At every door-way, ere one enters, one should spy round, one should pry round for uncertain is the witting that there be no foeman sitting, within, before one on the floor.

(Bray, 1908, 61)

A comparison between the source text, this standard translation of the first stanza and Bergvall’s version below reveals that her first three lines include the source text alongside a homophonic translation of it that hints at the sense loosely. There follow two wholly untranslated lines, and then a line that echoes their sound: Gattir allar gates guess us all adur gangi fram others go forward um skodast skyli um skyggnast skyli em shadows em shudder

(Bergvall, 2014, 97)

Some of Bergvall’s translation (as in ‘carrying over’ of the text), therefore, involves moving the source text into the context of an expanded English where we listen to it differently, not in terms of singular message but as texture and timbre, inflected by the noise of non-communicative sound. Bergvall’s technique can be explained by Nancy’s discussion of timbre, in which he suggests that we might think of communication as ‘not transmission but a sharing that becomes subject… An unfolding, a dance, a resonance’, since timbre is plural and involves ‘methexis: participation, contagion (contact), contamination, metonymic contiguity rather than metaphoric transference’ (Nancy, 2007, 42). In Bergvall’s translation, one language contaminates another, and does not replace it. To the reader who, like Bergvall herself, is not fluent in Old Norse, the text presents multiple associations. In the Hávamál the word ‘ok’ often stands out anachronistically, an association seized on by Bergvall for its idiomatic effect in lines such as ‘ok solar syn ok solar sight / ok seeing matter hopes’. Jonathan Catherall, noting this reaction to ‘the connective and iterative Anglo-Saxon word akin to “auch” (and, also) in modern German’, relates the piece to Bergvall’s broader ‘ampersandic’ practice, 71

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harking back to her earlier work in ‘8 figs’, which repeats ampersands with subtle changes in font, underlining the multiplicity created by repetition and echo (Catherall, 2014; Bergvall, 2005). In shifting between codes, Bergvall’s poem holds open a moment of doubt where meaning hovers between two languages, an experience that might be understood via Nancy’s suggestion, ‘Perhaps we never listen to anything but the non-coded, what is not yet framed in a system of signifying references, and we never hear [entend] anything but the already coded, which we decode’ (2007, 36). In Drift it is the tension between signification and noise that marks the distance travelled. Noise is an important aspect of the aesthetic, since the multiplied signal might also be viewed as ‘interference’, a usually negative term for sonic plurality. The effect of a signal breaking up begins gradually in ‘Hafville’: Then the wind ddroppe and they were beset by w inds from then orth and fog for manyd ays they did not know where they were sailing Thef air wind f ailed and they wholly l ost their reck their reckoning. (Bergvall, 2014, 37)

In Catherall’s view, the places where the language is torn apart are less experimental than some of Bergvall’s earlier work because they are ‘more purely mimetic of storm’ (Catherall, 2014). However, to take an extract that may be mimetic, but of fog rather than storm, different relations open up: ‘s th b t f g s th b t f gs th th th th th k k v r d s th t w c ld sc rc ly s th p p r th pr w f th b t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t.’ An extract like this might suggest a particular kind of mimesis – not just the idea of words lost to the obscurity of fog but a breaking up of reading into sound. On the page, unable to grasp the whole word with the rapid synthesis of vision, we pick out phonemes, reading defamiliarised and slowed until it gives way to the repeated ‘t’, a stutter that blocks the passage of language from the mouth. In performance, ‘to go’ becomes a breathless rhythm accompanied by a rapid drumbeat, the body of the performer caught in its repetitive stasis (Bergvall, 2013). Elsewhere, Bergvall discusses her bilingual experience in terms of a cat in the throat, the French version of the frog in the throat. For the bilingual speaker, the process of spitting out the mother tongue makes the mouth a crucial and conflicted site: It is not about having a ‘voice’ […] it is about siting ‘voice’, locating the spaces and actions through which it becomes possible to be in one’s languages, to stay with languages, to effect one’s speech and work at a point of traffic between them, like a constant transport that takes place in the exchange between one’s body, the air, and the world. (Bergvall, 2009) 72

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The nonverbal sound in Drift is therefore not mimetic of landscape, but a spatial performance of the bilingual subject. The stuttering ‘t t t’ links in Drift to the exploration of the consonant now lost to the English language, thorn, in which the ‘tongue pushes between the teeth to emit a breathlike whistling, an unvoiced friction of air […] Famously, the sound itself is one of the things which makes English so difficult to get right’ (Bergvall, 2014, 181). As in Bergvall’s earlier work on the shibboleth in Say Parsley (Bergvall and Maher, 2010), sound locates the speaker, either allowing or inhibiting movement. Some bodies pass; others do not. Collaborators

The role of sight, and of visual evidence, takes on particular political dimensions since the piece is concerned with the role of visual technologies in our navigation of contemporary geopolitical space. Köppel’s programming is a virtual exploration of this space, rather than a representation of it. It fills a cinema-sized screen, although it does not draw on the whole of the audience’s visual attention in the way that cinema does. Whereas in film, ‘the frame is important, since it is nothing less than that beyond which there is darkness,’ as Chion notes, ‘in video the frame is a much more relative reference,’ since a video screen may be part of a wider context (1990, 164). Frame and sound work together in film to draw the viewer into a fictional, illusory space, but in this multimedia performance time and space are dimensions of language. The audience is taken into a fictional world – the space and time of multiple juxtaposed voyages – but at the same time its linguistic construction is foregrounded, so the effect is a dramatisation of reading and translation as narratives in their own right. The focus of attention is often semantic, rather than syntactic; words are broken loose from their syntactical positions and released into historical trajectories. At certain points the programming isolates words alone, and at others it isolates phrases; both fade in and out so that they are experienced as echoes. The slow movement of words does not only invite the spectator to make new recombinatory meanings but also to hear echoes of the spoken performance and to reflect on the constant change of all language over time. The audience experiences history through etymological change, and the space of the drifting mariner is articulated through a linguistic geography that marks the difficulties and inequalities of passage. The visual text sometimes seems mimetic, since its pattern of organisation suggests at times the sea or maps of continents changing their shapes over millennia. However, its clean font recalls 1950s concrete poetry such as Eugen Gomringer’s ‘Silencio’ from his 1953 Konstellations, where his architectural approach to ‘a play area of fixed dimensions’ results in texts where, as Johanna Drucker writes, ‘the structure and presentation of the 73

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piece are to be exactly identical with its meaning’ (1998, 117). The visual void at the centre of ‘Silencio’ is therefore the silence of the text’s blank space, which invites the possibility of listening as a response. In Drift, the rigidity of Gomringer’s approach is replaced by algorithmical movement that introduces perpetual change within a certain number of elements. As Köppel writes: Multiple data bases contain all the textual elements. For each of these elements a group of parameters is assigned, in order to define its behavior in the system. In total these data bases contain 2885 words and 11227 signs. These textual elements are distributed on 17 text layers. Each layer represents one of the ‘songs’ of the Drift poem (three of them are parts of the refugee report). Each of these text layers can be rendered in a virtual three-dimensional space by giving for each textual element x y and z positions. Each plane is associated to a movement generator which allows change of these coordinates for every rendered frame using algorithmic procedures (Köppel, 2015)

The mobile, virtual space of the textual presentation therefore reflects, on a structural level, the narrative space of linguistic migration and change over time, becoming image as well as text. Its incorporation into a performance adds an additional element, because what we are reading is remixed fragments of what we are hearing. Reading involves an inner voicing that echoes, parallels or prefigures the text as the audience hears it performed by Bergvall. While the relations within Gomringer’s ‘Silencio’ remain within ‘fixed dimensions’, those of Drift are open because of the infinite algorithmical possibilities. It is a drift in language that, like Liquid Traces, asserts the sea as a signifying space. However, its constant unpredictable change means that loss is built into it – combinations and juxtapositions may appear on the screen that will never appear again. In this it has certain similarities with Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland’s electronic poetry generator Sea and Spar Between, in which a corpus from Emily Dickinson’s poems and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is algorithmically combined to produce new stanzas. Their explanatory note states that this work ‘defines a space of language populated by a number of stanzas comparable to the number of fish in the sea, around 225 trillion’. There is a mimetic relationship between the text and the world, but it is an equivalence created on a structural rather than a descriptive or representational level, as the sea is paralleled with flows of language and information. The mobile text, rather than replacing language ‘lost’ to incomprehension as subtitles do, dramatises the slow process of translation that is the experience of etymological change. The juxtaposition of embodied performance and electronic text, furthermore, multiplies the frames of representation in ways that emphasise 74

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sound. The parameters for the visual text elements can be changed in real time, and at certain points they are set by sound data. This is a very different relation between sound and image from cinema, of which Chion remarks, ‘sound is determined in relation to a notion of the fictional space, and this space extends beyond the frame, constantly being remodeled with changes in framing’ (1990, 165). The ‘fictional space’ of Drift is a linguistic space that is being doubly performed by the visual text and by Bergvall’s own performance. It is sound that determines the fictional space, and not vice versa. Given this complex relation between the visual and verbal, the piece might, therefore, despite its important visual aesthetic, be considered in relation to a term coined by the composer François Bayle: ‘cinema for the ear’ (Kane, 2014, 51). Bayle, who, as Kane notes, popularised the term ‘acousmatic music’ to describe the use of a concealed sound source in performance, has described his own work in this way because it takes place in darkened auditoriums where the means of sound production is hidden and the audience is free to create their own imaginative projections (Kane, 2014, 51–53). The music in Drift is not, strictly speaking, acousmatic because it does not disguise the sources of the sound. Zach explores the sonic and mimetic properties of the bass drum in a way that is fully evident to the audience, and as a performer he provides a focal point because the production of sound, for example, chains and other objects being dragged across the drum, is inventive and intriguing. Nevertheless, Kane’s account of acousmatic listening is relevant to the experience of this piece. He focuses on the ways in which a sound that one hears without seeing prompts speculation about the relationship between source, cause and effect, which he describes as the ‘tripartite ontology of sound’ (Kane, 2014, 224). Where the source is not visible, he argues that sound is epistemological in character, articulated in terms of knowledge, certainty, and uncertainty. Even when described in terms of seeing and hearing, the experience of acousmatic sound is not fundamentally about seeing and hearing. The difference between the eye and the ear is really a synecdoche for the different ways the mind apprehends the exterior world, modulated through the sense organs. […] Far from simply isolating the ear and offering a privileged glimpse into the essence of listening, the acousmatic listener continually attempts to use the knowledge he or she has garnered from fellow senses to make sense of his or her auditory experience. (Kane, 2014, 224)

Kane distinguishes this kind of listening from the haptic, vibratory experience of sound emphasised by Deleuzian influence on sound studies, in which ‘[t]he claim is that sound is a material, vibrational force; when 75

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it encounters a body, this force makes a direct impact on the nervous system of the listener, one that bypasses his or her cognitive categories and forms of representation’ (Kane, 2014, 225). While Kane is sceptical about this Deleuzian emphasis, it can be a productive concept for practitioners. Alongside Bergvall’s exploration of linguistic sound, Ingar Zach’s percussion is, as Bergvall notes, an ‘intense search for resonance and vibration’ (Bergvall, 2014, 129). The concept of resonance is as intrinsic to the thematic development as to the technical realisation of the piece. The book version of Drift contains a commentary on the project: The forensic principle: that every action or contact leaves a trace… […] Letting the recitation become a resonating chamber, a ripple effect… A reciting voice remains simultaneously input and output. Everything is connected in the vast chamber of the world, beyond the callous, brutal politics. Everything ripples at contact. (Bergvall, 2014, 135)

Is the vast chamber of the world, though, beyond politics? If ‘[e]verything ripples at contact’ there may be a stronger connection here than is immediately evident between the powerful vibratory impact of the drum, the reciting voice and the ‘forensic principle’ that demands sharp, attentive listening. The experience of the piece, understood in Kane’s terms, suggests that the resonance of documentary is felt simultaneously on haptic and critical levels, and that one cannot be separated from the other. Zach’s work introduces some subtle elements of what Kane describes as ‘acousmaticity’, that is, a ‘spacing of source, cause and effect’, in two ways (Kane, 2014, 225). First, although the performer is present, the experience of watching a screen and the convention of cinema encourages an interpretation of the sound in relation to what is on the screen, but the screen is filled with words rather than images, and the insistence of Bergvall’s text on lostness and blindness is paralleled in the use of a dark screen as a backdrop for the moving text. Second, if the audience shifts attention to the performer, there is often a surprising disjunction between the musical technique observed and the atmospheric sound that is produced as an effect. The use of sound demonstrates, to some extent, the epistemological uncertainty that is described by Kane, and that is also a central theme of the piece. Kane’s discussion of how acousmatic sound tends to produce fear and unease, as the listener searches for explanations of unidentifiable auditory events, helps to explain how Drift achieves its effects. It articulates the fear of being lost in hostile and dangerous elements, but in the partial absence of visual information it also encourages the listener to try to locate themselves, whether via the imagined world of sound effects or the historical, cultural or political frameworks referenced by the text. 76

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Concealing the source of sound in performance can lead to phantasmagorical effects. As Kane notes, an ‘occultation of production’ tends to assert the work of sonic art as belonging to a timeless and otherworldly sphere (2014, 98). Drift is, by contrast, structured around a historical juxtaposition and a contemporary political problem, which is the inability of those in authority to recognise the ‘invisible’ refugee. It does not obscure its own construction in order to produce mystery, but invites the audience into its locatory process against a background of darkness and obscurity, striking a balance between the immersive effects of film and the personal interaction of the live performance. Bergvall’s physical presence and the visibility of Zach’s methods enrich the performance, but the electronic text mass on the screen arrests the attention in language and offers no transparent representation of the world. It is to language that the spectator must look for her bearings, and for the historical traces of travel and suffering that shape her perception in the present. Zach’s percussion underscores these aspects of the voice and also works mimetically to suggest the physical and ecological context of the lost voyager in seascapes and bird sounds. In its dissolving of the boundaries between music and atmospheric representation, the sound of Drift demands a critical listening, since Zach’s performance keeps music and noise in tension with each other. An aerial photograph of the boat is included in the book; it is what allows the refugees to be seen but also invisible. It is followed by two pages of close-up macro treatments by Tom Martin, working in collaboration with Bergvall, where the image disintegrates completely. It looks like the low resolution of newsprint and was widely circulated in the media. The images reveal the process of image-making and the resistance within it. While Roland Barthes sees the photograph as ‘literally an emanation of the referent’ (2000, 80), Greg Hainge takes issue with this not just in respect of the multiple transcodings of digital photography, but also the framing and composition involved in traditional photography, and the relational aspect involved in both production and dissemination (2013, 212). The macro images reframe and slow down response to the moment at which the two-dimensional image was formed. This is perhaps the only way to address the loss of lives in the glare of surveillance and media attention, to push those media against themselves so that they cannot be absorbed. Bergvall comments in her log on the project, ‘I need to make sure that we can work through but not cancel out the uneasy sick feeling I get when peering down from the future at this image’ (2014, 157). Michel Serres observes the link not only between Old French noise and nausea, but also with the sea: ‘Noise et nausée, noise et nautique, noise et navire sont de même famille./ Noise and nausea, noise and the nautical, noise and navy belong to the same family’ (1997, 13). The ethics of noise, as Bergvall notices, involves the uncomfortably inseparable. The sea, for Serres, is the space of noise and of irreducible multiplicity. Nothing will stay put; we cannot separate 77

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ourselves from the heave and swell of our surroundings, or in Bergvall’s case the relationship between observer and observed. The noise of the image and its treatment also amplifies the noise of Köppel’s digital text and the noisy relations of Bergvall’s translation by superimposing contemporary surveillance on historical and poetic accounts of the sea. Listening and Repetition

The simultaneous presence of both auditory and visual elements in the performance invites speculation as to their relationship. Although Bergvall’s physical presence is strong, the use of visual text draws attention away from the body of the performer in ways that are underlined by the text itself. The refrain ‘Anon am I’ draws attention to the speaking of the text, rather than the speech of Bergvall as the poet (2014, 25). In Kane’s discussion of acousmatic voice, he notes of ‘I’ that young children find such ‘shifters’ confusing because they ‘may encounter the word “I” coming repeatedly from the mouths of various sources, such as their mother, father, uncles, aunts, grandparents or siblings’ (2014, 182). Citation and repetition in Drift tend to foreground this iterability of the written word, which is intensified by translation. The repeatable ‘I’ is changed by both translation and performance and is independent of the body that utters it, deflecting attention from the narrative of desire that becomes evident in Bergvall’s ‘Log’. Instead of an individual subject who seeks to orient herself, spatially and emotionally, the repeated emphasis on anonymity turns the subject into what Nancy describes as a renvoi or referral, an approach neither to the self nor to another but to the form, structure and movement of an infinite referral [renvoi], since it refers to something (itself) that is nothing outside of the referral. When one is listening, one is on the lookout for a subject, something (itself) that identifies itself by resonating from self to self, in itself and for itself, hence outside of itself, at once the same as and other than itself, one in the echo of the other, and this echo is like the very sound of its sense. But the sound of sense is how it refers to itself, or how it sends back to itself [s’envoie] or addresses itself, and thus how it makes sense. (Nancy, 2007, 9)

Through the interplay of performance contexts the voice is located within larger spatial and temporal structures, while the echo of historical sources involves a resonance that does not surpass language but is deeply embedded within it; it is in Nancy’s terms ‘the sound of sense’ (2007, 9). As discussed in the Introduction, the French word sens, for Nancy, is a key term that has several meanings built on his interpretation of Heidegger, as Adrienne 78

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Janus has observed, encompassing meaning, perceptual sense and sense of direction (2011, 183). In the struggle for orientation in the darkness and fog of Drift, these meanings are simultaneously relevant. The performance plays on the inseparability of semantic meaning, sensed experience and space, which is why its relationships to different art forms are so conceptually significant. Set in a vaster temporal context, these relationships are even more revealing. The sea of words that floats in the background is reminiscent of the journeys made by people and languages; the concept of the border is itself dependent on time. The looping of time in Drift connects contemporary and historical migrations, showing them to be the rule rather than the exception. Only by making ‘other’ languages invisible can the myth of cultural purity be asserted, but in Drift English is, as in so much of Bergvall’s work, made visibly dependent on its relationships to the past and to the languages that surround it. The use of projected text, while evoking subtitles, holds both eye and ear at the surface of the text instead of allowing rapid transit into a fictional space of visual imagery. The use of multimedia performance forces us to listen forensically to the relationship between sound, vision and language as they are used to investigate time and space in current political conditions, and in particular the conditions of the refugee crisis that has intensified in the years since the piece was written. That the work seems increasingly attuned to its times is an indication of the importance of the kind of listening it demonstrates and invites.

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CHAPTER 4

Synaesthesia: Tuning in to Carol Watts and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

Synaesthesia is a neurological condition in which sense modalities become linked, but it is also a literary device in which one sense is used to evoke another metaphorically. In both cases it subverts the boundaries of the senses, providing a means of considering listening as interconnected with sight, taste, touch and smell. When Rimbaud’s sonnet ‘Les Voyelles’ (Rimbaud, 2008, 19) attributes a colour to each vowel, this is a pattern of association familiar to those with colour-grapheme synaesthesia, which is the most commonly known form of synaesthesia, and much discussed in literature of the time. Synaesthetes rarely match the same letters to the same colours, and little is known about how the links are made, but the phenomenon focuses attention on how the mind works in and with the body. As I have discussed in Chapter 2, given that the sonnet was written in 1871, the same year as Rimbaud’s involvement in the Paris Commune, his rerouting of senses should be read, as Sean Bonney emphasises, not in the context of hedonistic excess but as part of a revolutionary disordering that makes a challenge to existing systems and habits of thought. In this chapter I will discuss recent work by two contemporary poets, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Carol Watts, which interrogates the relationships between sound, vision and touch, revealing different interrelationships that inform listening. In their work, listening through the body and its other senses enables new forms of feminist and ecological attention. The Chinese–American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s collection of poems Hello, the Roses (2013) is intensely focused on observation of the natural world, but also on multisensory embodied presence within it that breaks down the unified isolation of the observer. Berssenbrugge was born in China to a Chinese mother and American father, and has lived in the United States from an early age. Her work has evolved in parallel 80

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with Language writing and within avant-garde traditions, and while she does not overtly address questions of identity directly in the poems I will discuss here, the complex nature of identity formation in language is intensified in her work by the defamiliarisation that comes from crossing cultures. In the absence of a stable cultural or linguistic position, the senses must constantly be tested and reappraised. Berssenbrugge’s poems listen to animals and plants in ways that challenge traditional subjectivity through anthropomorphism, an approach of which ecocritical thinking has often been wary, but, as I will argue, the perspective this creates is far from anthropocentric. The work of UK poet Carol Watts is characterised by deep attentiveness to perception as an aspect of ecological thinking. Her poetry explores the senses as continuities between the human body and its connections with other species and life forms, from sheep to a field of docks, but it does so analytically, often engaging with perceptual frames, such as musical or mathematical ordering. She has worked collaboratively with the sound artist Will Montgomery to create combinations of text and field recordings, and comments: ‘I think of poetry at times as a highly attuned recording surface, even as a skin (not just a surface for sensation and inscription, but an expansive organ that has the capacity to hear and metabolise’) (Watts, 2018, 130). An attention to spoken language, song and cadence runs through all of her work, and she has also written critically on Berssenbrugge, whose work has affinities with her own in its multisensory interests. The overlap of senses in their writing is a means of developing a post-humanist approach to the subject such as that described by Rosi Braidotti ‘within an ecophilosophy of multiple belongings, as a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity’ (2013, 49). Nancy’s threefold play on sens as meaning, perception and direction, as observed by Adrienne Janus (2011), as discussed in the Introduction, is an insistence on the meaningfulness of sense in all its resonances. It works against a reductive current of thinking, one that is encouraged by the English language in which ‘common sense’ points us back to a history of shared reference to empirical self-evidence. In synaesthesia, perceptual sense is anything but common, and might refer to the intersection of any senses, but my interest here is specifically in those that involve hearing. Given that the boundaries between synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes are thought increasingly to be fluid and changeable, it is not necessarily relevant to make a distinction between the neurological condition of synesthesia and the tradition of literary synesthesia, as developed by Patricia Duffy and others (Simner and Hubbard, 2013). The poems I discuss here deliberately evoke multi-channelled sensing and these, rather than the poets, are my focus. Synaesthesia offers a means of considering listening in the context of long-running debates about how lyric poetry 81

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can respond to contemporary understandings of the self. Carol Watts writes of Denise Riley: ‘[T]he lyric “I” becomes an assemblage of bodily sensations, a place of synaesthesic interchange. Mouth, ear, eye, touch. The effect of this is to site consciousness in bodily terms, to see the passions as a means of speculation. […] This is not, however, to realign the embodied self with a traditional lyric expressivity’ (Mark and Rees-Jones, 2000, 164). What is at stake here is not just a reimagination of lyric, but a reimagination of the self through ‘synaesthesic interchange’, which, in challenging boundaries of empirical knowledge, also challenges the lines drawn between human and material worlds. In the defamiliarisation of thinking one sense in terms of another, particular forms of embodiment become apparent, and the self-evidence of a universal viewpoint is open to question. All the senses are mediated through the skin, the point at which subjectivity comes into being, as Michel Serres notes: The skin forms pockets and folds, and refining itself at a given site, creates an eye. The obvious concentration of ocellations here is found merely in diluted form everywhere else. If it forms a hollow – a rimmed, pleated, hollowed, half-oval fan – it becomes an ear where hearing is condensed. Everywhere else, be it an ear-drum or drum, it hears more widely and less well, but it still hears, vibrating as though auricular. (Serres, 2008, 52)

His analysis of the senses discovered them as radically interconnected, and at the same time places the materiality of the human body in a continuum with the rest of the material universe it inhabits. The skin, becoming either ear drum or drum, is a resonating surface that can only be discovered through contact or mingling with the world. This extends from physical to symbolic experience for Didier Anzieu, whose different emphasis on the skin expands the visual imagery of Lacan’s mirror into a sonic equivalent: ‘We would like to call attention to the existence […] of a sonorous mirror, or an audio-phonic skin, and to its function in the psyche’s acquisition of the capacity to signify, then to symbolize’ (1976, 162). His notion of the moi-peau or ‘skin ego’ makes evident the inseparability of hearing and touch; he describes the skin as a ‘filter of resonance’, offering a useful counterbalance to a tradition of thought dominated by visual metaphors, and a means of foregrounding the embodiment of consciousness. A shift of emphasis from the optical mirror to the audio-phonic skin places the listening subject in the middle of surrounding vibration. Rather than a visual separation defining identity as the starting point for language, touch and hearing are points of physical contact with the exterior world. 82

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Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Hello, the Roses

Berssenbrugge’s poems extend their characteristic long lines like tentacles, often feeling their way into questions of human perception of non-human phenomena. An exploration of the dynamic between touch and hearing can be found in her ‘DJ Frogs’ in Hello the Roses, a poem that begins: ‘We stand in a vernal marsh surrounded by spring peepers so loud I feel like a tuning fork vibrating’ (Berssenbrugge, 2013a, 39). The immersiveness of the aural experience is signalled in the direct, vibratory contact of sound, but sound is paralleled by vision, through the simultaneous intensity of a shadowy moonlit landscape with ‘violet, indigo streaming into saturation like blowing sand’ (Berssenbrugge, 2013a, 39). As I have discussed in relation to acousmatic sound in Chapter 3, listening is inflected by visual knowledge; although this is not the same thing as synaesthesia, it reveals the interdependence of the senses that enables perception to cross their boundaries. In the line ‘A density of peepers, bullfrogs, crickets, cicadas rounds the corner of my hearing’, a spatial metaphor that would usually depend on vision is applied to sound, drawing attention to the role of cognition in shaping and mediating perception as the listener imagines the location of the sound source. In the image of the tuning fork, the poet as vibrating instrument, there is a development of the image of the wind harp used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his 1795 poem ‘The Eolian Harp’: And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversly framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? (Coleridge, 1985, 28–29)

Berssenbrugge’s interest in vibration is not unconnected with this account of Romantic sensibility. The inclusiveness of ‘all of animated nature’ and the ambiguity of ‘animated’ (to be full of life, or not alive but made life-like) allow for a blurring of the border between the animate and inanimate, and between subject and object, but for Coleridge this life comes from the animating force of the intellect as an immaterial breezy universal. Under the influence of Coleridge as well as the eighteenth-century materialist philosopher David Hartley, whose pioneering work on vibration connected sensation and thought, Percy Bysshe Shelley in his ‘A Defence of Poetry’ makes an argument that humans, even ‘all sentient beings’, are like wind harps. Citing this example, Timothy Morton observes, ‘Sentience, on this view, is vibrating in tune with (or out of tune with) some other entity: sentience is attunement’, going on to claim: ‘If a sentient being is like 83

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a wind harp, and if, moreover, sensation and thinking are ontologically similar to one another, then we can invert the image. Wind harps are like sentient beings’ (Morton, 2012, 205). Embodied thought, which is explored from many angles in Berssenbrugge’s poems, allows for relationships in which sentience is confined neither to a human perspective nor to those conventionally considered ‘animate’. Instead of discovering, like Coleridge, a singular essence within nature that is expressed through a diversity of notes, Berssenbrugge’s tuning fork responds to dispersed phenomena that exist independently of the observer. It suggests a more analytical view of the poet’s work, since a tuning fork is a tool, not an instrument. The poet’s body responds to the impact of sensory impressions by becoming, like the tuning fork, a sounding instrument, against which the sounds of the world can be measured. Shelley Trower, writing about the experience of vibration in dance music of the 1990s, describes how [s]ound, at its lowest and loudest, begins to break down into separate, palpable vibrations. Bass notes underfoot, in the ground, in our bones. Slow the sound down further and each vibration might be separated out, counted, added up; there is no more sound, just individual shocks, one at a time. (Trower, 2012, 1)

In her account, listening to volume as vibration is a means of slowing perception to uncover what she describes as the ‘audible unconscious’ that exists in parallel with the ‘optical unconscious’ revealed by film in modernity, where the split-second frames of film made movement visible (Trower, 2012, 3). With this reduction in speed, touch and sound become continuous. By contrast, the sound of spring peepers is shrill and high; hearing and responding to them as vibration means imagining what escapes consciousness, hearing what could only be heard if the ‘DJ Frogs’ slowed the record to make it audible as low notes. Sound is thereby understood and mediated through recording technology, which makes sensory information available in new ways rather than something taken for granted. Furthermore, the image of the tuning fork invites us to consider the senses themselves as material, rather than unreliable categories for gauging material existence. Trower quotes Steven Connor, who writes that ‘the phrase “material imagination” must signify the materiality of imagining as well as the imagination of the material’ (cited in 2012, 9; Connor, 2002). In slowing down and inspecting sensory information through the medium of the poem, Berssenbrugge makes language, in continuity with listening, part of the materiality of the imagination. Vibration, as Trower’s argument reveals, has often been associated with pleasurable excitement that seems to transcend thought; here, the enjoyment of night is intensified by vibration but is combined with 84

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curiosity and enquiry in its efforts to identify species and impressions. Experience of the night sounds is therefore one of écoute in Nancy’s distinction between hearing and listening, not the hearing–understanding– agreement of entendre/entente but the ‘straining towards a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible’ (Nancy, 2007, 6). Because of the physical properties of sound, which moves more slowly than light, we are aware of how sound ‘spreads in space, where it resounds while still resounding “in me”’ (Nancy, 2007, 7). The self, for Nancy, is a site of ‘infinite referral’, an echo chamber in which meaning is discovered as the senses refer back to themselves. What is revealed in Berssenbrugge’s poem is the structure of these referrals as the relationships between sound, sight and sense are shown to be inflecting one another. Perception spills between bodies and is not limited to the human: ‘You open your hand near my face, a warmth like infrared, on two tiny frogs with shining black eyes’ (Berssenbrugge, 2013a, 39). Here, the warmth sensed by the frogs is experienced by the human. Touch and sight are fused, and whereas the ‘warmth’ typically expected in a lyric poem might be the emotional or metaphorical warmth between speaker and listener, this poem instead hints at the capacities for physical perception that exceed human awareness. Human communication is deferred, held in a multi-dimensional space where the lyric subject is subjected to touch and sight; the frogs, similarly, are not just observed but looking back. As well as a performance of listening, the poem, in its essayistic mode, is a discussion of what it means to listen. The space created as the senses refer back to themselves is described through the act of translation, which links human and non-human worlds: ‘Besides translating inner images into a painting, for example, we unconsciously translate inaudible sounds into images, or a spring peeper translates its multidimensions aurally’ (Berssenbrugge, 2013a, 41). The poem enacts a series of crossings between the senses, which are fused in the moment of intensity so that the ‘dark places of inner listening’ are exposed to light, or the experience of sound as light (Berssenbrugge, 2013a, 41). This embodied response is not one, however, that transcends or denies the role of signification, since, the poem continues, ‘There are symbols and characters within listening, there’s exchange’ (Berssenbrugge, 2013a, 41). The ‘unconscious translation’ described here is also the experience of a subject between cultures and languages; music is a further language. The grammatical perspective allows us to recognise the existence of signification that is not necessarily intelligible to humans. If there is an element of anthropomorphism in the frogs described as a ‘young mother and her twin girls’, it is not one that subordinates animal communication to a language that humans can understand (Berssenbrugge, 2013a, 41). Rather, it extrapolates from human experience of music and communication to imagine further kinds of exchange within and beyond language. The frogs are here personified as 85

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musicians, with ‘flute and voices’, but the title that describes them as ‘DJ Frogs’ draws attention to the rhythmical focus of the poem (Berssenbrugge, 2013, 41). Berssenbrugge notes in her PennSound reading of this poem (2013b) that the poem draws on the Afro-Futurist music theory of Kodwo Eshun, who observed that ‘the posthuman era is not one of disembodiment but the exact reverse: it’s a hyperembodiment, via the Technics SL 1200 [a turntable]’ (Eshun, 1998, 2). Within this hyperembodied context, rhythm has a transformative potential, oriented to the future, particularly in the isolation of the breakbeat that ‘drives new pathways through the brain’ (Eshun, 1998, 2:22). The ‘expected beat I don’t hear’ places the speaker’s body in dialogue with its surroundings as the speaker’s ‘pulse falls through subtracted space’ (Berssenbrugge, 2013a, 39). What is unheard is what is listened for; the frogs meanwhile are reordering the perception of rhythm and shifting its meaning away from what can only be understood in human terms. An anthropomorphic image of frog as DJ works unexpectedly to open up the unintelligibility of the non-human world to a human écoute. Berssenbrugge has linked her writing’s radical interrelatedness to her movement between cultures: I try to expand a field by dissolving polarities or dissolving the borders between one thing and another. Sometimes I think it’s because I’m from one culture—I was born in Beijing—and grew up in another. I’ve tried to feminize scientific language, to make continua between emotion and thought, between the concrete and abstract. […] Looking back, I see that all my poems are written with an intimate voice that’s also an instrument for dissolving borders. (Berssenbrugge, 2006)

This suggests a different emphasis on the border from that of Nancy, an openness rather than a strained attention towards a separated other; the poem’s listening is absorptive and synthesising. The ‘intimate voice’ of the poems is reflected in Berssenbrugge’s reading style, which is quietly thoughtful, an address to a listener that suggests both physical and emotional proximity. The scientific register is subsumed into an intense focus on an environment that is, for the duration of the poem, shared. If the voice is sometimes explanatory, its hushed gentleness of tone has more in common with the voice-over narrative of a nature programme than a lecture (Berssenbrugge, PennSound, 2013b). This situated approach to observation, an invitation to shared listening, also underpins Berssenbrugge’s collaboration with the artist Richard Tuttle based on ‘Hello, the Roses’, the title poem of the collection. For the exhibition shown in Kunstverein München in Munich in 2012, Berssenbrugge and Tuttle made work separately, the artist arranging his 86

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work in situ in response to Berssenbrugge’s reading aloud of her work: listening is used here to register the text as an event in a given space, and the point of contact between art forms (Berssenbrugge and Tuttle, 2012). The construction of the exhibition is a reminder that these are lines to be heard aloud, so vision is slowed to the pace of the audible. The opening of the poem presents sight in terms of touch, echoing Serres’s use of the term ‘soul’ to describe the body’s contact with the world: ‘My soul radially whorls out to the edges of my body, according to the same / laws by which stars shine, communicating with my body by emanation’ (Berssenbrugge, 2013, 58). Exploring the link between sensation and subjectivity, Serres comments, ‘The soul resides at the point where the I is decided’ (Serres, 2008, 22). Invoking the soul permits a spiritual vocabulary, one that is at odds with rational secularism, but not with the vibrant materiality of the posthuman. As the poem continues, it links touch with sight, while the unfolding observation of the poem keeps pace with listening: ‘When you see her, you feel the impact of what visual can mean’ (Berssenbrugge, 2013a, 58). This emphasis on touch resonates with the tactile surfaces of Tuttle’s sculptures; their raw, unfinished textures resist visual representation by foregrounding a process of response to shape, colour and organic materials. In Berssenbrugge’s work, sight as ‘felt sense’, slowed down, touched and touching, creates a space of referral in Nancy’s terms. It no longer allows us to seize the world rapidly as information but reveals the ways in which the world seizes us, as in the lines: ‘I make a reciprocal balance between light falling on the back of my eye to optic nerve to pineal gland, radiance stepping down to matter, and my future self opening out from this sight’ (Berssenbrugge, 2013a, 58). Agency is a balancing act, an act of weighing up sensory information and the possibilities it affords. Reciprocity and balance are also evident in the sculptures, which are situated within a space in response to an exercise in listening. Tuttle’s materials are everyday objects, pieces of wood and wire, textiles paper and plastic, which hover at the edge of signification. Unusual combinations of ordinarily useful objects defy purpose and categorisation in ways that draw attention to the textures and physicality of matter. They lean against walls or tilt in corners, and although it is difficult to judge the effect from photographic records, it seems that their placing in the gallery is often peripheral and unexpected (Berssenbrugge and Tuttle, 2012). As a conversation with the poems they do not assimilate or absorb meaning, but resist closed interpretation. In this way, they allow for future listening and multiple interpretation. The importance of the ‘future self’ becomes all the more evident in the light of Dorothy J. Wang’s discussion of Berssenbrugge’s emphasis on the relational and the contingent, noting, ‘[t]he idea that a person cannot be reduced to a fixed state of being (or “identity”) is crucial in her body of work’, a point underscored by a commitment to collaboration (2015, 87

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258). Through a detailed analysis, Wang shows how Berssenbrugge fuses phenomena and consciousness, thing and metaphor, or the abstract and the concrete (Wang, 2015, 253). The ‘radiance’ in the quotation above is both literal and metaphorical, suggesting both the physical quality of light and the radiance of the ‘future self opening out’ in ecstatic connection with the world. Wang pursues this aesthetics of interrelation on a grammatical level throughout Berssenbrugge’s poetry, noting, for example, her frequent use of deixis, conditional or qualifying clauses and the fact that ‘pronouns designating persons exist in close relation to pronouns designating objects and/or indefinite entities’ (Wang, 2015, 260). The listener is situated within these continuities between the human and the non-human. Quoting Berssenbrugge’s comment, ‘I would say the ethos and aesthetic of my poetry aspire to be holistic, continuous, or one thing’, Wang writes: The poems are equally concerned with similar issues – of processes, contingency, relationality, materiality and immateriality, abstraction and particularity, language and representation – and they are all equally Asian American poems, as they are ‘experimental’ ones. (Wang, 2015, 268)

A recognition that embodied experience is culturally inflected foregrounds the role of the senses in negotiating the plural landscapes of contemporary poetics. The effect of this on the listener is observed by Charles Bernstein in a dialogue referencing one of Berssenbrugge’s earlier poems, ‘Hearing’, where he comments that her work envelops me in its own world of extended sound waves, carrying me along as I read and then lapping back for another line. It’s not mesmerizing exactly but there is a strong tidal pull. You seem to have turned Clark Coolidge’s notion of ‘sound as thought’ into sound as perception and then again thought as perception. […] Hearing not as the physical listening to the words […] but as a form of response. The difference between hearing and a resonant listening that I’m getting at is suggested, for example, when one says – you hear what I say but you don’t listen: listening is, in a word you use in a word you use in ‘Hearing,’ ‘reciprocal’. (Bernstein and Berssenbrugge, 2000)

Berssenbrugge’s response within the same discussion develops a different angle on the distinction between hearing and listening: ‘I think of the physical latency of hearing as a form of response. Now I realize I think of hearing as encompassing and receptive, while listening […] would be a more focused, directed perception’ (Bernstein and Berssenbrugge, 88

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2000). What emerges in the conversation with Bernstein is a non-Western perspective on listening that challenges the Cartesian legacy while echoing a history of cross-cultural engagement in US poetics in which different strains of Buddhist philosophy have long been influential, from Ezra Pound, through the Beats and via John Cage. Peter Jaeger, for example, has noted the ‘congruence of literary experimentation and the emergence of Western Buddhism’, discussing the work of John Cage in relation to Buddhist ecopoetics (2013, 6). Berssenbrugge’s Chinese–American perspective resonates with this background, while being distinct from it. ‘Hearing’, the poem under discussion with Bernstein, begins paradoxically, like a koan: ‘A voice with no-one speaking, like the sea, merges with my listening, as if imagining her thinking about me makes me real. […] She’s not speaking words I hear in an undertone’ (Berssenbrugge, 2003, 53). Berssenbrugge identifies the ‘she’ as Kuan Yin (or Guanyin); as Yugon Kim explains: Her understanding of Buddhism comes, by and large, from the Mahayanist tradition, but it particularly revolves around the female bodhisattva Guanyin, whose full Chinese name Guanshiyin (觀世音) translates literally as ‘the perceiver of the world’s sounds’ or, alternatively, ‘the hearer of all the cries of the world’. (Kim, 2016, 97)

Berssenbrugge comments that Guanyin ‘represents compassion’, adding, ‘I’m trying to encompass my conflicting worlds of poet and caregiver’, a conflict that reflects a familiar feminist concern (Bernstein and Berssenbrugge, 2000). However, this should not be read as a specifically maternal form of listening. Kim is cautious about regarding Guanyin as a feminist influence, since she is often evoked in ways that support patriarchal beliefs and power systems, but he notes that the androgynous, amorphous representation of the deity do nevertheless make it possible to connect her with an antiessentialist feminism (2016, 100). For Kim, the compassionate hearing of Buddhism is an ethical stance, a turning towards the world that has parallels in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. While this is an important observation, it can be taken a step further, since if, for Levinas, it is the face of the other that calls forth a response, Berssenbrugge’s attention to sound also recognises the potential facelessness of the non-human other, not making a distinction based on visual recognition, but hearing across ‘dissolving borders’. Watts, writing on this poem, notices the play between immanence and transient perception in ‘the synapse between birdcall and hearing it’ and in a ‘bird falling along a stitched in and out of my hearing it call and its ceasing to exist’ (Berssenbrugge, 2013, 55), commenting that it poses ‘an existential question. The bird exists or does not according to the auditory perception of the “I”. Perhaps the reverse is also true for the bird.’ These 89

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perspectival shifts lead her to the observation that ‘otherness and exposure to community are central to the acoustic contingencies of a milieu’ (Watts, 2018, 135–36). The image of ‘A voice with no-one speaking, like the sea’ suggests that this compassionate and reciprocal form of hearing operates at the boundaries of sense, between the animate and inanimate, the audible and inaudible (Berssenbrugge, 2003, 53). In ‘Hearing’, the process of attention is intuitive, the senses evoked not in the Lockean tradition of empirical fact, but in a mode where paradoxical spiritual revelation overlaps with understandings of photons from quantum mechanics. The long sentences hold these different possibilities in connection and suspension through sound, syntactical complexity revealing the difficulty of separating sense modalities enough to be certain of anything other than intuition. A Buddhist sensibility, far from undermining scientific enquiry, creates an openness to scientific knowledge that has not yet filtered into everyday language. In this context, metaphor is crucial to thinking and sensing; it makes itself felt in evidence that cannot otherwise be grasped and analysed. The receptivity of Berssenbrugge’s listening invites openness, and a dissolving of boundaries as communication flows across forms. Her efforts to articulate a mode of conversation with non-human entities are necessarily anthropomorphic, since human perception cannot help but leave the fingerprints of its own subjectivity on what it observes, but also a means of contesting the separation of anthropocentrism. Carol Watts, Sundog

If Berssenbrugge’s expanded lyric subjectivity invites the reader to sharpen a multisensory perception of the natural world, Watts’s Sundog is more concerned with the unreliability of the senses and the political implications of their misalignment. In her sequence, the atmospheric phenomenon of the parhelion, in which multiple suns appear in the sky, is explored, via Johannes Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi, in the context of song. The section titles draw attention to the relationship between music and speech through reference to solfège notation, which is the means by which musical structures are physically learned and internalised; it is a training of the ear. The final section is titled ‘Ut’, the name for solfège from ‘ut queant laxis’, a medieval hymn from which the system is derived; the second, ‘ray raster’, links the sounded ‘ray’ to visual scanning, while ‘So’ works doubly as word and note. Section 1, ‘Mi Fa Mi’, is derived from a quotation from Johannes Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi: ‘the Earth sings Mi, Fa Mi: you may infer even from the syllables that in this our home misery and famine hold sway’ (Watts, 2013, 11). The sensed sound of the musical notes is, in Kepler’s theory, related to the sense/direction of the planets and their angular speeds, which 90

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in turn creates the sense/meaning of a harmonious and ordered cosmos. Yet the falseness of this abstracted meaning is constantly exposed in Watts’s poem by a tendency towards semantic overspill and multiplicity. Kepler’s discoveries, including the third law of planetary motion, were useful to later astronomers and physicists but they were also connected in his thinking with the Pythagorean and Ptolemaic concepts of the music of the spheres, and with a Protestant faith that drove him to articulate the movement and harmony of planets in spiritual terms; in particular, he aimed to reconcile Copernican theory with Biblical authority. Watts’s text radiates through verbal echoes to question notions of likeness and similarity in vision and sound, juxtaposing observation and overheard speech with a historical text that unsettles perspective and language. The sundog is an optical illusion that appears to destabilise the very foundation on which the post-Copernican universe is understood. Instead of the singular sun, around which the cosmos organises itself, there are multiple suns that decentre the optical sense on which we depend. These are referred to repeatedly as ‘fakery’, and one of the voices that emerges from the opening and repeated thereafter announces, ‘I have six birds on the go // trust me’ (Watts, 2013, 13). This apparently masculine brag sounds anything but trustworthy. This ‘point of view’ comes to us in speech, as does ‘laik’, a phonetic spelling for ‘like’ as it is pronounced in the writer’s south London neighbourhood. ‘Likeness’ or ‘laikness’ is explored not just in terms of visual trickery but also through the echoing surface of sonic repetition (Watts, 2013, 13). In Watts’s poem the senses, whether visual or verbal, are the only means of gaining embodied knowledge of the world, but their evidence must be combined with a sceptical, resistant view of the patriarchal structures through which knowledge and power are articulated. The ‘laikness’ of the sundog is reflected in mediatised surfaces, both visual and sonic. The sound of the television is suggested by ‘celebrity tetrachords’ or   that guy screaming at the screen I’ll kill you fuckin sundog   don’t want that bile coming into the room

(Watts, 2013, 23)

Instead of succumbing to the temptation to scream pointlessly at manifestations of power in the media, the poem seems to propose an alternative, which is to ‘try to sing against the tide / this earth allows’ (Watts, 2013, 23). Versus the smooth harmonies of planetary agreement or ‘celebrity tetrachord’ the language is deliberately noisy: song is evoked not as a 91

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universal constant but a history of sounded expression that is riffed against in the present. Robert Southwell’s visionary Catholic Christmas poem ‘The Burning Babe’ is referenced via the boast of ‘six burning babes’, which introduces a clash with Kepler’s Protestantism as well as with the contemporary sense of attractive young women. As this image is developed it is filtered through a double layer of kitsch: they have such bonny faces cherubic sun for eyes rays   spoking laik retro wall clocks tock tock baroque

(Watts, 2013, 23)

Here, it is the sound of ‘tock tock baroque’ that fuses baroque church décor and mid-century starburst clocks into a single moment of historical irony that punctures grandiose religious imagery. The author’s drawing from a rat’s optic nerve intersperses the sections of the poem. Instead of the eye’s direct line of the gaze towards its object, the radial process field of neuroglia presents us with a rhizomatic unfolding of connections in which the magnified scale creates a map where our location, our relationship with the world, is not linear, and where we may find sens/ direction played against sens/sensation to produce new forms of sens/ meaning. I want to begin again or find in soft skin intricacies a history or horizontal scent of knowing glows with the mouth not in terminal vision or cranial heroics where parodies in star spelt distributions make this mockery of living but where words pule detonating human translations in infant breath or as grief rises everyday convocations in air which is the water or 92

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a car a clock a sewing machine turning

(Watts, 2013, 69)

The ‘synaesthesic interchange’ that Watts notices in Riley may also be said to inform the subjectivity of Watts’s own poetry, and this particular passage sets the need to ‘begin again’ in the context of a distrust of vision’s dominance. The optical illusion of the sundog is set against auditory and temporal patterns of understanding, where repetition of sound creates mental pathways and connections unlike ‘terminal vision’, which, because it is located in the instant, conceals other possibilities. For example, we find in ‘soft skin intricacies’ a ‘history’ that is discovered through internal rhyme as much as through discursive logic. Knowing ‘glows with the mouth’, transmuted from scent to light by an accident of repeated sound that places the subject at the point of exchange between senses. The intake of scent, the most primal and often unconscious source of knowledge, gives way to the emitted sound of speech. However, the words themselves can only ‘pule’; it is their translation into the world of sound and embodiment, along with all the other sounds of the world – cars, clocks, sewing machines – that allows their sense to be listened to. Watts’s reading of two sections of the poems recorded at the 2013 launch in the POLYply series emphasises these tensions. In her explanatory introduction, Watts sings ‘do re mi fa so la ti do’ after apologising first for the The Sound of Music association, then proceeds to read the first part of the poem softly, but on the cusp between speech and song, the pitch of each word accentuated and the sung fragments of solfège notation. The effect is to defamiliarise further the already defamiliarising effects of discontinuous syntax. In its frequent iterations, ‘laik’ begins to sound like ‘lack’, the preposition skewed as much in sound as on the page, its repetition insistent. The second sequence is read with a narrower pitch range, but with attention to the line breaks and gaps in the lines through which silence intrudes on the poem, in keeping with the attunement of Watts’s ear to American modernist poetry. In a poetics statement she recalls her debt to Lorine Niedecker, commenting: ‘I’d always picked up on American cadences alongside English traditions, the directness of sound and speech’ (Watts, 2012). This directness might seem to be at odds with the more formalised or song-like aspects of her reading, although in fact these too may be seen as related to the context of poetry from the USA. Her comment on specific writers is framed in terms of the aural: [T]he most important writing to me has been that by Alice Notley and Leslie Scalapino, for the integrity of their encounter with language, two forms of being uncompromising. I hear the stakes of 93

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writing there. I am listening these days to Eleni Sikélianòs, Cathy Wagner, Lee Ann Brown, and thinking about song. (Watts, 2012)

These are telling references that underscore the ways in which Watts approaches the reading of her own work. Notley’s ‘form of being uncompromising’ is not direct statement of a position, but a listening and attentive stance towards language. Notley has frequently described her use of receptive, trance-like states in the writing process, and if her poetry is a form of bearing witness, it witnesses to the effects on language, in the moment of speaking it, of vision or memory. In writing elsewhere about Notley’s poem ‘Would Want to be in My Wildlife’, Watts further clarifies her point: I am interested in the ways that poems hail you, call you out, both as a reader and in the process of writing. Needing to get the pitch right, the kinds of acoustic accommodation that hearing that demand requires (a kind of tuning in), the disturbance it reveals. For me this poem is about that interpellative demand and the inevitable misrecognition it entails, which is nonetheless the testing of poetry itself. (Watts, 2008)

Misrecognition is key to the effects produced in Sundog, where ‘laikness’ is approximate and defamiliarising. In Notley’s work, Watts considers pitch in relation to a blurring of temporal perspectives between younger and older versions of the speaker and the childlike associations between vision and touch, all of which work towards a complex inhabiting of language that Watts presents as gendered: ‘This is a poem about what it is to step up to language for a woman poet, from the outset’ (Watts, 2008). In her poetics statement it is also striking that Watts locates the listening of her poems within a configuration of American women writers with highly distinctive reading styles, including Lee Ann Brown (Watts, 2012). Pitch and voice are subject to a whole range of gendered prejudices in the media, in which women’s voices have often been considered noisy, either ‘shrill’ and inappropriate, or too high in the raised intonation of ‘upspeaking’, or too low in the case of ‘vocal fry’. The need for women poets to ‘step up’ to language has implications for voice as well as poetic language. Brown’s work exploits the potential for song to become noise in the context of poetry: it is song as excess, deploying radically recontext­ ualised folk and religious traditions. Her use of song, often in the form of ballads or hymn tunes, creates a social space within the poetry reading that references diverse and collective forms of voiced expression, including those that might seem to be most opposed to experimental poetry. In the context of the fragmentation, found text and parataxis of an experimental poetry reading, to hear someone launch into a hymn tune, with its freight 94

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of ideological certainty, is profoundly unexpected (Brown, 2003). Yet the hymn is in the DNA of American poetry, underscoring Emily Dickinson’s breathing against it, and what Brown does by juxtaposing and rewording sections of hymns and other songs is both transgressive and joyful, an extension of the intertextual polyphony that marks all poetry. At the same time, its heightened attention to form it draws attention to the frames and conventions of vocal performance. Watts’s singing of solfège notation marks the edge of one of these frames. Kepler’s translation of the notes into ‘misery and famine’ indicate the oppressive aspects of apparent harmony: like his theory as a whole it is a naïve mapping of a schematised sound structure directly on to lived experience. Watts’s reading, where she is not singing, introduces many more notes than there are in a scale: the speaking voice slides mid-syllable, inhabiting uncharted semitones and subtle shifts of pitch. The inclusion of sung phrases in the poem marks a level of musicality that permeates the whole reading, playing against other flatter reading styles that would emphasise the text’s openness to multiple interpretation. Given that varied pitch in speech is considered a form of expressiveness, this could be described as an expressive reading, but the tonal inflections are not there to convey the individual emotion of a stable subjectivity. Watts’s comments on the lyric ‘I’ as ‘an assemblage of bodily sensations, a place of synaesthesic interchange’ expand to the poem’s sounding. Noise prevents us from creating a total order, of the kind imagined by Kepler, but Hainge’s description of noise as a form of ‘resistance’, arising between the communicative act and its medium, is relevant to Watts’s work (2013, 17). The interplay between sight and other senses forms the basis of a phenomenological exploration, but language resists noise-free transmission. It becomes noise as it tracks sensory process in which language and perception are mutually dependent: language is the noise of the senses and the senses are the noise of language. It becomes evident as the poem progresses that this noisiness is related to memory as it is summoned in fragments that are on the one hand historically specific, such as the evocation of 1970s food in ‘using angelica to stiffen up yr / cakes green diamonds // glassed-in daisies tea trays home / for dinner at six boil-in-a-bag’ (Watts, 2013, 39) and on the other refracted through a series of references to change and decay such as ‘browning as paper in the heat’ (Watts, 2013, 58). Access to the sensual perception of the past is only possible through language’s distortions, which draw attention to memory as filmic medium: yr life its sentimental sheen a recorded light & melody turned up too loud & drowning all before you 95

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there was silence its soft beat & reverberating noises.

(Watts, 2013, 44)

What creates noise in Sundog is the tension between lyric memory and its inaccessibility. The poem repeatedly establishes relationships with others and with the past, only for them to be disrupted syntactically in a process mirrored by the references to sonic and visual distortion. Memory does not fall outside of this process and cannot be separated from it. The noise inherent in the linguistic registering of sensual memory prevents it from being assimilated, entendu, holding it at the level of écoute, where we strain to listen and find meaning (Nancy, 2007). The interplay between sound and vision exposes different emphases, as one might expect, in the two poets’ work. Berssenbrugge’s image of the tuning fork places the speaker as vibrating matter within the material world around her; noise resolves into a sensed order, an attunement of human and non-human perspectives that challenges the singularity of a lyric perspective. Watts challenges the possibility of tuning, or of any underlying harmony in the world. Instead of reaching into an expansive present, as Berssenbrugge’s long and exploratory lines do, Sundog registers the failure of language to chart the synaesthesic experience of memory: & I find sight is a deep cup thrown shadows in lipped intuitive torching a wail of rockets ascending or scaled by touch when reach fails & the fuel burns out falling back we all fall back on song & echolocation of an ancient kind

Echolocation in this poem is part of a process through which the materiality of song and speech persists over time through its accumulation of meanings. It is what we fall back on through the body’s remembered senses, a specific cultural positioning, unlike Berssenbrugge’s more immediate state of apprehension within a constantly emerging environment. A synaesthesic sensibility, as Rimbaud’s ‘Voyelles’ establishes, is one that challenges not just individual habits of perception but the prevalent structures of thinking in any given time. However, Watts’s poem is also a work of reciprocal and receptive hearing, in Berssenbrugge’s terms, a tuning in to voice. The increased incidence of sundogs has been linked to environmental pollution, 96

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so the viewer’s relationship with atmospheric phenomena is not only to do with observation but also the broader relationships of humans with their surroundings. The swaggering, deceitful sundog is anthropomorphised, but not in a way that subordinates physical phenomena to human understanding or control, or that posits an uncomplicated relationship between the observer and observed. Rather, the potential of humans for deceit, fakery and misconception is the reason why a critical intelligence needs to be turned towards language. In listening to patterns of echo and reflection through song and speech, the poem reveals the material processes that connect sound and environment.

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CHAPTER 5

Echo: Claudia Rankine and Vahni Capildeo

The US poet Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric has made a powerful intervention in discussions of racism in the USA and UK since it was first published in 2014. The final image of the book is a detail from J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship of 1840, revealing fish eating the manacled body of a slave thrown overboard, a work painted in support of the abolitionist movement and in memory of the 1781 Zong massacre (as mentioned in Chapter 3), in which slaves were thrown overboard by their British masters so that the insurance money could be claimed. Rankine’s use of the detail refuses the sublime, the oncoming storm, and the possible reading of the painting as a struggle of humans against nature. Her book ends with a shackled limb. It is an image that provokes nausea and evokes its cognate, noise, in the dissolution of human life, the body pulled apart in the waves, reduced to unwanted cargo, an obstinate returning fact. If the sea is, for Serres, the ground of noise, it is for Rankine as inseparable as everything else from the historical positioning that forms the body’s relation to the world. Rankine investigates the after-effects of casually racist speech, and an important aspect of the poems is their potential for revealing the harm and micro-aggressions concealed or plainly evident in everyday encounters. They prompt a consideration of how racism changes what is audible, and of the kinds of listening that are needed to create citizenship. The title evokes two different forms of listening that might be supposed to clash, since citizenship implies the polis, a place of public debate and exchange, whereas ‘lyric’ evokes the intimacy of a singular expressive voice. However, the relationship between the two is what gives Rankine’s work its own particular dynamic, revealing that even the most personal expression cannot be separated from the historical pressures that shape social contexts. In these poems we hear the public utterance replayed privately as lyric memory, which in turn challenges the audible racism encountered in public 98

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places. Rankine’s poems question hearing because the question the politics that structures perception: all hearing, in her poems, becomes listening, the speaker asking for example: ‘Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth?’ (Rankine, 2014, 9). In such questions, which arise frequently throughout the book, a friction is revealed between sensory evidence and a structure of ‘knowing’ that is weighted towards whiteness, and within which racism is not always immediately obvious. The narrations are often framed within a scene of sharply sensed detail that accentuates the impression of reliving a memory. In considering auditory memory as a form of recording, I will examine in these poems the qualities of the ‘echo’ of harmful speech, as Riley describes it, and the role of sound more broadly in Rankine’s work. As I have shown in Chapter 1, Denise Riley’s work provides a means of considering the ways in which language causes such harm. In her chapter ‘Bad Words’ she examines the mechanisms by which ‘[i]njurious speech echoes relentlessly, years after the occasion of its utterance, in the mind of the one at whom it was aimed’ and suggests a possible means of overcoming it by recognising the contingency of the ‘word as thing’ (Lecercle and Riley, 2004, 46). Reifying the word, and hearing it as a product of language’s impersonal workings, she argues, is a means of evading the damage of harmful speech. At the same time, her work recognises kinship with the non-human world by listening to language as matter, as materially shaped by context, and as therefore resistant. This matter of language echoes through specific histories, for example in relation to Fred Moten’s attention to the pressure that the politics of race exerts on sounded language and music. Like Riley, he is concerned with the coercive effects of language in aural memory, but, in his account, the materiality of the signifier is inflected by a history of slavery in which people have been treated as objects. He contests, on this basis, Marx’s assumption that the commodity cannot speak, since the slave is a commodity and can not only speak, but ‘shriek’ (Moten, 2003, 11–12). Just as Marx imagines the exchange of inert commodities within capitalism, so Ferdinand de Saussure imagines the materiality of sound as ‘ancillary’ to language or meaning, its meaning created by difference just as the value of a coin changes according to where it is spent or what is written on it. Drawing these perspectives together, Moten discovers a form of listening in which ‘objects can and do resist’, and that undermines a capitalist system in which passive, noise-free exchange is taken for granted. There is instead: ‘an irruption of phonic substance that cuts and augments meaning with a phonographic, rematerialising inscription. That irruption breaks down the distinction between what is intrinsic and what is given by or of the outside.’ Moten enquires into the auditory dimensions of the noise that erupts within this process, and its revolutionary potential. The examples he gives of black performance, through poetry, music and fiction, situate the avant-garde as founded both 99

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on the experience of slavery and the struggle for emancipation, or what Moten refers to as ‘freedom’ in inverted commas (Moten, 2003, 6). ‘No one is free’, as Rankine reminds us, since we perform within the constraints of historically layered subjectivities (2004, 24). Rankine’s work has a directness that has drawn wide response and recognition in its depiction of everyday racism, but it also evokes complex forms of listening through a poetics that combines repetitive performance with disturbance and noise. Its mainstream reception tends to elide its formal innovation; as a ‘lyric essay’ it does make direct statement and observation, but it also interrogates language and perception. Reading it for noise can attune the listener to some of the cultural silences affecting UK poetry; as Sandeep Parmar (2015) writes, ‘The British look at the United States and abhor the actual physical violence against black citizens. We disregard our own violence done both by language and by the silence we allow.’ Rankine, born in Jamaica only months after it achieved independence from the UK, has lived in America all her adult life, but part of the challenge of her work is the way in which it defamiliarises daily experience by amplifying its resistances; Citizen does deal directly with actual physical violence but much of it is concerned with subtleties of listening in which long histories of racism continue to echo. The situations Rankine describes are often apparently low-key, exploring the way in which blackness intersects with a privileged, middle-class existence: Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat on United Airlines, when the girl and her mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are our seats, but this is not what I expected. The mother’s response is barely audible — I see, she says. I’ll sit in the middle. (Rankine, 2014, 12)

Vahni Capildeo (2016a), in an engaged and supportive review of the book for PN Review, is nevertheless left with questions, including: ‘[W]hy is she holding back? Isn’t everyday life much worse, criss-crossed with more violence and stupidity, than the incidents she picks?’ One answer could be that the incidents often probe the point at which liminal background hum becomes audible shock; if the passage above seems to represent a trivial incident, it is because the deep, historically rooted injustice of the values at work has been drowned out by attrition. This shock of recognition, of implication, is what makes the book such an important document not only of black experience but also of the kind of desensitisation that can lead white Americans to believe they are the victims of racism, or white British people to think that racist violence is an American problem with no connection to them. The power of the book is not just in its cataloguing of racist abuse and unfairness; social media provides ample evidence of that and often a more direct channel for acting on it than a book of poems ever 100

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could. Providing more shocking examples of violence would run the risk of activating the reader’s automatic responses to filter out noise, rather than the straining to listen and discern that is prompted by the acousmatic effects of these vignettes. Neither victim nor aggressor is visible; ‘you’ as reader must position yourself in the space of the encounter, and experience it as a space that echoes with the sound of a historical impact that continues to reverberate. Listening without supporting visual information is potentially disorientating, forcing the listener into an active search for meaning. Some of the incidents Rankine describes may seem distant from the descriptions of slavery with which Moten begins his book, referring in particular to Saidiya Hartman’s writing on the escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, which in turn refers to his account of the violent beating of his Aunt Hester but does not quote it directly (Moten, 2003, 2–4). Hartman’s point is that there is no need to, since the spectacle of black suffering has become ‘benumbing’, leading either to obliteration of or prurient fascination with the other. She writes: [R]ather than try to convey the routinized violence of slavery and its aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I have chosen to look elsewhere and consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned… By defamiliarizing the familiar, I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian. (Moten, 2003, 3)

Rankine’s work similarly defamiliarises the ‘mundane and quotidian’, focusing not on the modern spectacle of black suffering, although racist violence is always present as a backdrop, but on the social frameworks within which racism is still able to flourish, and that are reinforced through repeated interactions. The ‘you’ of the poem is an interpellation that both forms and critiques subjectivity from shifting viewpoints, while the ways in which we listen and respond reveal how we inhabit citizenship and how it might be changed. William Waters draws attention to the complexity of the lyric ‘you’, describing as ‘a wild spot in poetics, a dynamically moving gap in whatever secure knowledge about poetry we may think we have’ (Waters, 2003, 15). In the reading of Rankine’s poems, the decision about how to locate oneself in relation to the ‘you’ is what turns them into live interactions with their social and cultural moment. This aspect of address involves a further type of listening to the poems, for which the work of Judith Butler is particularly significant. Butler is evoked directly in one of the poems, as she responds to the question of ‘what makes language hurtful’: ‘Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this’ (Rankine, 2014, 49). This incident is reworked in the second person from a first-person account that Rankine recounts elsewhere, although in 101

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her original version she adds a note to Butler’s comment on the condition of being addressable, explaining: ‘by which she meant, I believe, there is no avoiding the word-filled sticks and stones of others’ (Rankine, 2011). This awareness of the depth and intensity of linguistic violence, shared with Denise Riley as discussed in Chapter 1, results in the ‘you’ of the poem (the ‘you’ here functioning as generalised extrapolation from a first-person perspective) reflecting on the purpose of racist language. It is not, as had been previously thought, erasure. Instead, ‘you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts’, and comparing this version with the earlier first-person account shows how the use of the second person gives the term ‘hypervisible’ its full force. Exposure of the self to racist linguistic aggression is, in Rankine’s terms, not only a physical attack on presence itself but a demand for responsive listening that is ‘intended to exploit all the ways that you are present’ (Rankine, 2014, 49). Hypervisibility is the problem that Hartman identifies in the spectacle of blackness: a vulnerability to the many ways in which the powerless person is looked at by the powerful, and, as Moten observes, she draws on Butler to present subjectivity as contingent on subjection (2003, 1–2). Much of the process is related to spectacle, whether the spectacle of suffering or the performance into which the slave is coerced (looking happy in order to fetch a good price). Butler differentiates between performance and performativity, but Hartman uses both terms interchangeably, ‘in an expanded sense that considers enactments of power, denaturalising displays, and discursive reelaboration as a set of interrelated strategies and practices’ (1997, 217). In the context of slavery, there is a less significant difference between the two, since performance as well as performativity is a product of coercion. Drawing on Édouard Glissant, Hartman proposes opacity as an antidote, which is ‘precisely that which enables something in excess of the orchestrated amusements of the enslaved’ (Hartman, 1997, 36). The obstruction of vision, in her view, offers a mode of thinking focused on listening: For this opacity, the subterranean and veiled character of slave song must be considered in relation to the dominative imposition of transparency and the degrading hypervisibility of the enslaved, and therefore, by the same token, such concealment should be considered a form of resistance. (Hartman, 1997, 36)

The term ‘hypervisibility’, widely used in discussions of race, may seem a tenuous, misleading or even demeaning link between the experience of a respected twenty-first century poet and academic and a nineteenth-century slave. Yet it is exactly for this reason that Rankine’s examples never occlude her own relatively privileged position, because the hypervisibility or otherwise of the person has nothing to do with their individual status and everything to do with the assumption of whiteness as normative, a sense of blackness as ‘difference’, a 102

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discourse constructed and perpetuated within the British Empire and colonial America as a means of justifying slavery. As a white reader in the UK I am addressed by Rankine’s interrogation of racism as a pervasive, structuring and ever-present pressure. Listening may be both a receptive and an anxious response, a drawing in and a straining out towards the unintelligible. As Robin DiAngelo’s (2018) work makes clear, both of these responses are necessary in working through the largely unexamined privilege that shapes those lives assumed to be untouched by considerations of race. British whiteness poses a similar problem, even if its demographic contours and history are different; ‘race’ is used as a justification of injustice that demonstrates troubling ignorance of its colonial past. This past, from which Britain continues to profit, shapes Rankine’s context as much as contemporary America does. The 2011 death of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, North London at the hands of the police is part of Rankine’s narrative and closely parallels events in America, but the increased racism that has emerged in the context of Brexit, after Citizen’s publication, has deeper roots in Britain’s colonial self-image, roots that are inseparably entwined with slavery and with America. White Listening

What, then, does white listening sound like? ‘Another friend tells you you have to learn not to absorb the world’, one of the poems begins. ‘She says sometimes she can hear her own voice saying silently to whomever – you are saying this thing and I am not going to accept it’ (Rankine, 2014, 55). The self-help tone of the opening line makes this a personal rather than a political problem; its patronising advice suggests that sufficient personal strength is all that is needed to overcome what is a structural problem. Not listening, on an individual level, cannot resolve that injustice. This is different from Riley’s reification of language, which is an analysis of how language functions that exposes the pressures at work in a given situation. The friend’s advice, however, turns the racist encounter into an incident between individuals, and apportions responsibility to the listener for managing linguistic harm. The text does not specify whether the friend is white, but her suggestion indicates that she is, since it paradoxically assumes a dominant position, even while appearing to voice solidarity with the person who is oppressed; this is someone who feels that she can control both her own reactions and the world in which she moves. She does not need to change it, or feel that it is weighted against her. ‘Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition’, the poem continues, but the physical impossibility of taking ‘your foot off your throat’ indicates an ironically dismissive approach to the voice in the head; the proper response to linguistic oppression is not resignation or 103

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dumb survival but speaking – as these poems do, turning racist address back on itself (Rankine, 2014, 55). Verbal and Visual Noise

The book features a number of visual works, mainly by black artists, which are included without captions. Glenn Ligon’s untitled ‘I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background’  takes a quotation from Zora Neale Hurston and reworks it in this large stencilled work. Smudged stencilling has a retro look, but this is not what makes it noisy, since it is also a familiar device in advertising that signals authenticity, or something direct and handmade. Noise does, however, emerge through the process of loading the stencil with gesso and repeating the phrases over and over until the stencil is clogged, the forms of the letters disappearing. This is paralleled in Ligon’s repetition: race is felt as a contextual process through these repetitions; the violence of being repeatedly ‘thrown’ against a ‘sharp’ white background is paralleled in the broken words. What begins as a poster-like statement breaks down. Why does a white background make things clearer? The text starts to disappear, but the blackening of the panel is also a reclamation that resists, in Hainge’s sense, the conventions of clarity in graphic design. On the page before Ligon’s painting, Rankine’s text explores a different tension between the verbal and the visual, in the recounting of the overheard comment that ‘being around black people is like watching a foreign film without translation’ (2014, 50). The poems often work like a kind of subtitling, an inner commentary on externally voiced or enacted injustice, but rather than framing the ‘film’ of black experience as a foreignness that might be framed and explained, thus domesticating it to a white audience, they make racism audible as continuous white noise. A different approach is taken in ‘Script for Situation video created in collaboration with John Lucas’. Both on the page and online, a commentary runs alongside footage of the 2006 World Cup, in which the French footballer Zinedine Zidane, provoked with racist insults, responds by headbutting his opponent. The verbal attacks, cited on the evidence of ‘Accounts of lip readers responding to the transcript of the World Cup’, are interpreted, the private brought into the public performance of the sporting event. Alongside these, there is a quotation from James Baldwin: ‘This is because, in order to save his life,  he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words’ (cited in Rankine, 2014, 126). As Rolland Murray writes of Baldwin’s ‘emancipatory subjectivity’, the speaking subject ‘presumes the constructed nature of language that shapes his being and persistently seeks the  motivations behind human discourses’ (2007, 26). However, this process of deep listening is complicated for the reader by the fact that 104

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there is no agreement between the lip readers or the parties involved as to what was in fact said on the pitch; the exact substance remains opaque although its intent was agreed in the subsequent investigations. Here, the ‘foreign film’ is the language of abuse, estranged and exposed for study. The phrase ‘BLACK-BLANC-BEUR’, printed across the page, echoes as a football chant (replacing ‘bleu, blanc et rouge’) in celebration of the diversity of contemporary France, but the text inverts it, the privacy of the unheard exchange undercutting the public declaration of unity. In the video for this piece we do not hear the crowd, as the action is slowed down and accompanied by drone-based electronic music that underscores the temporal suspension. It is this sense of stopped time, as in a car crash, that enables us, in Baldwin’s sense, to ‘hear the meaning behind the words’ (Rankine, 2014, 126). The quotation from Othello in this piece, one of several references to the play in Citizen, is Othello’s protestation of his worth and refusal to listen to the attacks made on him: ‘Let him do his spite: My services which I have done… Shall out-tongue his complaints.’ Sujata Iyengar explores the irony in this line, since Othello’s services to Venice do not ultimately save him, noting how they prefigure his dying speech. She goes on to comment: As a second-generation minority in one country, and a first-generation immigrant to another, I hear in that speech the model minority’s bewilderment that his ‘service’ counts for naught and that the nation-state or city-state he thought was his no longer acknowledges him as its own; his acceptance as the valiant Moor of Venice was merely contingent, his citizenship provisional, his worth not intrinsic but a product of his exchange-value. (Iyengar, 2016, 516)

Like Riley, whose important work ‘Am I that Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History is drawn from Desdemona’s speech in the same play, Rankine’s poetry responds to Shakespeare’s interest in how characters are addressed and situated, returning us to a form of poetry that encompasses the dramatic as much as the lyric (Riley, 1988). Her echoing of a canonical text evokes the cultural context from which Othello, like Zidane, will ultimately find himself excluded. This is also how we might think about noise in translation, through the friction of contextual difference. An example of this is provided by the cover of Citizen, by another artist, David Hammons, with the piece In the Hood (1993), a photograph of a sculpture made of a chopped-off hood, supported with wire so that there is a void where the face should be, the facelessness of the man in the hood contrasted with the known environment of the neighbourhood. Dan Chiasson (2014), reviewing 105

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Citizen in The New Yorker, comments that  ‘it suggests that racism passes freely among homonyms: the white imagination readily turns hoods into hoods’.  In ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ there is an account of a mistaken arrest. A repeated line in the poem draws attention to the failure of recognition, the failure of description that is processual: And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description. […] And still you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description. (Rankine, 2014, 108–9)

The reader is put into the position of the mistaken addressee who is forced to listen to the argument of force interpellated by the law in the ritual of oppression. The repetition reinforces the helplessness of the subject when confronted by the machinery of the state in this way, a hopelessness that could threaten to undermine Citizen’s intervention on behalf of black subjectivities. However, it is followed by another work by Ligon that, in switching the focus, creates another form of address. Untitled (speech/crowd) 2 (Rankine, 2014, 110–11), in which faces can only just be recognised, is an image of men listening intently to a speech, taken from media coverage of Benjamin Chavis, Jr, and Louis Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March. A photograph might seem like an indexical sign, evidence or reportage, but this has been enlarged, copied and recopied to the point of disintegration. It slows down perception, and like the painting we looked at previously it makes the sign unstable. In the context of Rankine’s poem it becomes illustrative of systemic misrecognition, but as Rachel Wetzler (2011) observes, the sequence from which it comes is both ambivalent and ambiguous, since the march was designed to create an image of black civic engagement that would be widely circulated by the media, but since it did not include black women it was also ‘an act of exclusion’, also problematic for a gay man like Ligon. The wounded surface of this image might bring to mind Roland Barthes’s distinction between studium and punctum. Barthes discusses this in terms of the affective response he feels in looking at photographs of his mother, a response in excess of the semiotic. This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). (Barthes, 2000, 26–27) 106

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Hainge finds the idea of piercing useful in relation to considering noise, although finds Barthes’s approach too subjective, subordination noise to signifiance. For Hainge, noise is affective, poignant, but it is a relational ontology that cannot be subsumed by semiotic meaning in the way that Barthes suggests (2013, 153). It remains excessive, and the noisy image opens up multiple meanings in the text. The works of art in Citizen are to some extent changed by the context of the book, but they are not subordinated to it and they remain noisily disruptive. The text is equally changed by the images, which resist and interrupt its progress; both aspects are concerned with noise, and noise emerges through their interaction. Ligon’s screenprint of the crowd photograph is followed by a reference to Barack Obama taking the presidential oath of office in 2009, the eagerly awaited moment of a black president taking power. The poem quotes the slightly out of sequence speaking of the oath, not ‘I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully / execute the office of President of the United States’ but ‘I do solemnly swear that I will execute / the office of President to the United States faithfully’ (Rankine, 2014, 113). The glitch arose from mistimed phrasing as Chief Justice John Roberts mis-spoke the words of the oath for the president to follow, causing Obama in turn to stumble. In the real event, an explanation was issued, and the oath was taken again; no harm was done to Obama’s presidency. But in Rankine’s poem, read as noise, against the visual noise of Ligon’s works, the event reveals power as a process of unevenly weighted communication. ‘Blackness – the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that anarranges every line – is a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity’ (Moten, 2003, 1). In echoing Obama’s words, Rankine makes audible the pressures acting on that moment and draws attention to the fragility of an individual vocal performance in relation to the vast historical weight of inequality. As noise, it reveals the working of state machinery and its friction with real human bodies; as punctum it shows a nation hanging on a phrase, the phrase slipping out of place. As in every other instance of listening in Citizen, the stakes are high. Vahni Capildeo and World Echoes

In a discussion at a workshop of the network Poetry in Expanded Translation (Arts and Humanities Research Council) at London’s National Poetry Library in 2017, Vahni Capildeo answers a question with the following statement about the interplay between the aural and the visual in their work: ‘What does bother me is whether the ear is switched on, because I think there is a tendency for people to gobble things up with the eye and then try to mince a summarisable meaning out of the poem.’ They explain that they try in their poetry to ‘do things with line breaks and white space 107

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on the visual field, which in some way will create a musicality of space where readers will feel OK about taking that time if they want to rather than skating through’. Reading with the ear slows time and opens up space, not just in the moment of encounter with the text but in the larger historical and geographical movements of language and languages. As a Trinidad-born writer who has lived in the UK for many years, Capildeo responds linguistically to Caribbean multilingualism and particularly their mother’s French, bringing to the English of their poetry a sense of its relations with other languages and its mutability. This comes not only from an interest in the Indian diaspora but also from studies at Oxford, which included Old English, Middle English and most importantly Old Norse, which became the focus of their PhD. If much of their work has been written alongside their job as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary, the dictionary’s presence is felt less as a regularising and legitimising tool of standardisation than as a system that reflects, in its very arbitrariness, the chaotic complexity of linguistic change. Their transcultural position creates in their work a continuous process of defamiliarisation, not just through the horizontal juxtaposition of one language against another in communities that neighbour one another, closely or distantly, but also a vertical movement as present-day English is brought up against its own histories of immigration and colonisation. As they note, this is more than a matter of italicising other-than-English languages in the text; it involves various types of disruption that draw attention to language as irreducibly foreign at the same time as being, in their work, the only possible ground of belonging: ‘Language is my home, I say; not one particular language’ (Capildeo, 2016b, 101). The punning title of Capildeo’s Forward Prize-winning Measures of Expatriation (2016b) signals a musicality in the measured distance between cultures, as well as drawing attention to the forceful effects of the expatriate condition. In ‘Five Measures of Expatriation’, Capildeo describes an inability to play word-association party games because words come multiply, or in another language, or not at all. Although this may seem like an expat phenomenon, it predates their move to the UK, and they wonder: Perhaps it was a hypersensitization to the fluidity and zigzagging of Trinidadian speech, where flowery translations of Sanskrit and the formality of older Christian (mostly Catholic) liturgies naturally mix into the same track as the tricksy shrug and bread-and-curses everydayness of Spanish-French-Portuguese-Syrian-Chinese-ScottishIrish-(English)? (Capildeo, 2016b, 101)

This description of Caribbean linguistic fluidity offers a context to Capildeo’s work and a sense of how a ‘musicality of space’ might extend beyond the page and into the poem’s wider relationships. The kind of 108

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listening from which their work emerges is that which Édouard Glissant’s The Poetics of Relation describes, in which: ‘One can imagine language diasporas that would change so rapidly within themselves and with such feedback, so many turnarounds of norms (deviations and back and forth) that their fixity would lie in that change’ (1997, 98). The space of exchange with which both writers are particularly concerned is materially shaped by its histories of passage and the criss-crossing lines of colonial power, yet it also offers continuing forms of resistance to contemporary global pressures. Noise is inherent both in the multiplicity of sources that ‘mix into the same track’ and in the back-and-forth movement that characterises Glissant’s view of relation, which draws on a particular understanding of the echo. In my earlier discussion of Denise Riley, I showed how the figure of the echo could describe not only the coercive workings of petrified inner speech, but also the relation of the listening subject to the non-human material world. A further dimension of the echo is suggested in Glissant’s use of three hyphenated phrases to describe the world: la totalité-monde, les échos-monde and le chaos-monde. His translator, Betsy Wing, notes that these are not ‘guises of the world’ but ‘identities of the world. The world is totality, echoes, and chaos, all at once, depending on our many ways of sensing and addressing it’ (Glissant, 1997, 216–17). Chaos, for Glissant, is neither positive nor negative, ‘neither fusion nor confusion’; paradoxically it is ‘not “chaotic”’ but a non-hierarchical complexity that can be revealed through the echoing spaces of poetics rather than from the organising viewpoint of a rational overarching structure. Échos-monde are ‘not exacerbations that result directly from the convulsive conditions of Relation. They are at work in the matter of the world; they prophesy or illuminate it, divert it or conversely gain strength from it’ (Glissant, 1997, 93). It is important to see this understanding of echo located in a poetics that encompasses artistic and political action. Glissant gives examples of échos-monde, including Bob Marley’s songs, Ezra Pound’s Cantos and the ‘marching of schoolchildren in Soweto’, a reference to the 1976 Soweto uprising against the imposition of Afrikaans in schools (1997, 93). These echoes are manifestations of frictional cross-cultural encounters, moments that both reflect and invite a particularly active form of listening. Glissant argues for this listening as the basis of productive thinking: ‘In Relation analytic thought is led to construct unities whose interdependent variances jointly piece together the interactive totality. These unities are not models but revealing échos-monde. Thought makes music’ (1997, 93). What is foregrounded here is not the passive repetition of the same sound bounced off a reflective surface, but the complexity and variance of a sound wave that has been changed and refracted by impact. The echo is dependent on its source, but also alters it as noise arises from its resistance. 109

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Against Transparency

Attention to the revealing echo, or the thought that makes music, is complemented in Glissant’s work by a plea for opacity. ‘The opaque is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence’ (Glissant, 1997, 191) More recently, Byung-Chul Han has pinpointed the accelerated movement towards transparency within neoliberalism: Transparency is a neoliberal dispositive. It forces everything inward in order to transform it into information. Under today’s immaterial relations of production, more information and communication mean more productivity and acceleration. In contrast, secrecy, foreignness and otherness represent obstacles for communication without borders. They are to be dismantled in the name of transparency. Transparency makes the human being glassy. Therein lies its violence. Unrestricted freedom and communication switch into total control and surveillance. Social media are also coming to resemble, more and more, digital panoptica that discipline and exploit the social. (Han, 2015b, viii)

Capildeo’s poems, I want to suggest, work against this form of transparency, drawing on the ‘secrecy, foreignness and otherness’ that are integral to a poetic process situated at the confluence of different languages. They contain multiple forms of translation that refuse what Lawrence Venuti describes as ‘the translator’s invisibility’; they re-wild meaning rather than domesticating it or assimilating it to a culture of sameness. A refusal of transparency shifts the focus to the ear, and to a practice that draws on the active echoes of ‘a musicality of space’, which is a space on the page but also a particular interstitial space that makes cultures audible by making them less visible. The poem ‘Sycorax Whoops’ creates both opacity and echoes on a number of different levels. The scored-out text interrupts visual absorption and recalls pre-digital communication, but in doing so it emphasises the role of the ear (Capildeo, 2016b, 121). Visually, the scoring slows reading by presenting obstructions to the free flow of association, but it also creates unexpected alternatives. The title draws attention to one of the many anomalies in English pronunciation, since the ‘w’ in ‘Whoops’, as loud cry, would normally be the most noticeable consonant, while because of the history of ‘wh’ as an aspirated sound, ‘whooping cough’, like ‘who’, is pronounced as if there is only an ‘h’. The use of ‘Whoops’ as an exclamation over a mistake adds a further layer of meaning, preparing the reader for 110

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further glitches as the poem unfolds. The poem takes as its epigraph Gonzalo’s utopian speech in The Tempest, ‘I’ th’ commonwealth I would, by contraries, / Execute all things’ (II, i, 148–49). Running contrary to expectation, the poem makes connective leaps across homophonies, scoring through alternatives but leaving them in play as a pattern of echoes. It dramatises writing as a faulty, faltering process, yet what makes it appear to falter is precisely the dizzying virtuosity of its movement and the expansive distances travelled in cultural reference. The cultural references are dense, since Sycorax, as an unseen, absent and disruptive figure of the past, has become such a powerful postcolonial motif, and as well as writing back to Shakespeare, Capildeo’s poem gestures to particular Caribbean poetic legacies. Both the title and the interrupted type recall Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘Letter SycoraX’, and his invention of the disruptive visual aesthetic he calls Sycorax Video Style, which mixes and distorts computer fonts, drawing attention to the written medium and the passage of information via the computer screen. In Brathwaite’s poem, in which the Caliban-like speaker addresses his mother, the visual opacity of distorted fonts draws attention to the orality of Caribbean speech. As Mandy Bloomfield observes, One of the most obvious ways in which these utterances bring ‘noise’ to the printed page is through orthographic and syntactic manipulations, which the poet often refers to as ‘calibanisms’; these reshaped terms approximate sounds, rhythms and idioms common to many versions of nation language in the Anglophone Caribbean. (Bloomfield, 2016, 161)

Relating such noisy effects to Attali’s theorisation of noise, Bloomfield notes that they create new meanings by drawing attention to suppressed histories of African Caribbean culture; if the noise is lost, so is the history of that suppression. The value of her argument is that it draws attention to the materiality of cultural spaces, revealing the media through which power relations are formed. The limitation of Attali’s position, however, is that ‘new’ meanings are subject to eventual recuperation. Capildeo’s poem seems to respond to Brathwaite’s innovations but rather than superseding his poetics with an emphasis on the new, according to Attali’s model, their work creates noisy resistance through its use of echo. The poem, like Brathwaite’s, is addressed to a mother, but instead of evoking the familiarity of a mother tongue, the speaker addresses Sycorax as a silent presence, while exploring the silencing that comes from the pressure of multiple perspectives, as in the word-association game described earlier in the book. The character’s complaint of ‘refrigerator angels clogging language’ resonates with the Shakespearean character’s condition of subjection; here, Caliban is subject to language. The scored-out words suggest mishearing but also 111

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exposure of suppressed meaning, as in ‘cold / called on Aphrodite, AIDS worker, to blonde bond us / again with triage ties of love’ (Capildeo, 2016b, 121). These are sonic echoes, but also, in Glissant’s term, échos-mondes, that draw attention to existing cultural tensions in the juxtaposition of telesales with appeal to the gods, blondeness with enslavement, bandages with ropes, revealing love as a set of problematic imbalances inextricably entwined with race and colonial pasts. These echoes create noise, disturbance and a shift in signification. If Brathwaite identifies Sycorax as the personified friction between orality and technologised processing of language, this is one possible reading of the following lines by Capildeo, which place science against silence and witness against whiteness: Turned over a new leaf to indict science silence siloed whiteness witness; was a portal, no paper; near as narnia, fell in; this darling darkling plain! (Capildeo, 2016b, 121)

However, the idea of a ‘portal, no paper’ updates Brathwaite’s emphasis on deformation and disruption of the page by shifting to focus on online communication. Here, there is an advanced and vertiginous form of context collapse in which different identities cannot be held apart or ‘siloed’, that term itself an uneasy juxtaposition of agriculture and business management. ‘Narnia’, no longer a proper noun but a fictional dimension that has passed fully into speech, is all too close in the transparent systems of online information. The ‘darkling plain’, from Matthew Arnold’s ‘On Dover Beach’, draws the struggle and doubt of modernity into uneasy juxtaposition with the colonial expansion described and prefigured by The Tempest. For the listener it evokes another line from the poem in which Arnold’s ‘world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams’, in turn subverts Shakespeare’s ‘brave new world’ (Arnold, 1986, 135). The transparent new territories of online interaction are revealed in this écho-monde as mirage. The technique of this poem is related to translation, whether in the intralingual sense of updating Caliban to a modern context, as Brathwaite does, or as homophonic translation in that the sounds of one word are transposed to another. As so often in Capildeo’s work juxtapositions of languages and registers create a ‘musicality of space’ that encompasses history because linguistic time is spatial, and always a story of journeys and coexistence.                have sung songs whose vibration slips the mascara from those gods, though a man lookin down on us dogs us with kind thoughts he kind of attributes to us as tributes to him. (Capildeo, 2016b, 121) 112

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‘Mascara’, Spanish for mask or stain, links the duplicity of the mask with the slipshod drag-act of deity. The rhyme of gods/dogs and the reflexive repetitions indicate the speaker’s subjection to controlling forces embedded in and created by language. The ambiguity of ‘dogs’, which might be read as a verb or a noun, reveals this play of power in which we are either ‘dogged’ by the persistence of the deity’s attention or mere dogs in relation to his power. Either way, the poem has reached an impasse that can only be broken with a change of perspective, and this is provided by its closing invocation:          Launch in sighted darkness our pack of languages, fluid as hounds, all ready: bathed: riteful: already intending chase: (Capildeo, 2016b, 121)

The release that Caliban demands, in a suddenly heightened register, is the mobilisation of plural languages, which are no longer clogged but running. They are ‘riteful’ in that they are practices that articulate identity, and ‘rightful’ in that they can be owned in their plurality. By the end of the poem these two alternatives, source and echo, can be contained in a single word. The rite takes its rightful place, yet it is still disturbed by alternatives because what is rightful is also plural. Rite and ritual situate music and noise within a given space. Capildeo’s ekphrastic sequence ‘Louise Bourgeois: Insomnia Drawings’ incorporates snatches of conversation from visitors to the exhibition during the time they spent ‘haunting’ the Fruitmarket Gallery for this commission: ‘Tell me why she –’ ‘If it weren’t “Louise Bourgeois” we wouldn’t – ‘ ‘Tell me why she used a red felt pen.’ ‘Because a red felt pen is Freudian.’ ‘Because felt is fuzzy, and she’s female.’ ‘Because red is menstrual.’ ‘Labial.’ ‘Dangerous.’ ‘Primal.’ (Capildeo, 2016b, 67)

The use of speech here makes listening primary, even though this is a response to visual artwork. The art is located in the space between the artwork and the audience; the poem listens in to the interaction between the two, finding an interest in the collective rather than the solitary experience of insomnia from which Bourgeois’s obsessive drawings derive. The dubious interpretations of the viewers are given an ironic distance as Capildeo, as much as Bourgeois, ‘fiercely repurposes whatever is to hand’. Ekphrasis is an echo of event and ritual, both the making of the work and its exhibition. 113

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The sense of ritual emerges as the sequence draws on several musical analogies, noting the artist’s use of music paper, ‘at first because they were there, soon for their other and purposeful powers of signification’. The poem continues with a swerve into autobiography: My mother has great trouble practising staccato on the piano with her arthritic fingers. She tries out the meant-to-be-rapid-fire movement note by note. From these detached, successive efforts, a shape of music emerges. It is as if the idea of bread can be established from a loaf with the crumb pecked away by a bird, the crust remaining like a frame. (Capildeo, 2016b, 73–74)

The movement from drawing to playing piano, and back to the visual ‘frame’ via the image of the bird, places the serial work of the artist in relation to the ‘detached, successive’ structure of the poem sequence, identifying this too as a shape of music. For Bourgeois, the use of musical staves provides ‘a passive direction to the horizontal […] and an active direction to the vertical’; one of the untitled ‘Insomnia Drawings’ features diagonal lines across several staves, on which apparently liberated notes run in dramatically ascending sequences. However, the use of multiple treble clefs and the indication of a 7/8 time signature suggest that this is to be viewed, in part, as a musical possibility. The different staves, which would usually indicate different parts or instruments, are connected by the zigzagging notation in much the same way as Capildeo’s zigzagging between usually separated languages, treating them instead as if they might be continuous, articulates a new musicality by reframing and exposing their disjunctions. The ‘musicality of space’ described above is most evident in the final section, ‘Counting Sheep’, which echoes Bourgeois’s habit of writing notes in both French and English (74–77). The layout on the page indicates a form of musical score, and the musicality again emerges through repetitions, this time as sound from one language is echoed in another. The impression is of the slide of words into sound on the point of dreaming, a suspense of signification that makes audible the sonic presence and interplay of two languages. We move from ‘tongue twisters the gestes d’un arbre are made of sourcils’ to ‘sources jitter’, following a sound logic that allows the reader to resolve the use of French through its homophonic echo; even if it is not understood, the English phrase points to an underlying instability. If the ‘gestures of a tree’ and ‘eyebrows’ are jittery in French, they are no less so in English, and they direct us in turn to the unselfconscious free associations of Bourgeois’s drawings by making her method audible. The visual punning of the drawings is both described and worked through sound equivalents: 114

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not-just-doodles because eye of the hurricane burqa’d fingerpuppets sea anemone anemometer a labyrinth of breezes la dame moves the damier of sleep check mate shah mat (Capildeo, 2016b, 75)

The question of whether the drawings are ‘not-just-doodles’ can only be resolved by exploring their musical arrangement, yet it is a process that also resists naturalisation. Cultural differences retain their edge, as in the ‘burqa’d fingerpuppets’ and the ‘shah mat’. The game of chess is a set of movements between graphically opposing forces; if ‘la dame’ becomes, through the play of sound, ‘damier’, or suede, this does not smooth over texture but rather accentuates it within the field of the poem’s disjunctions. The defamiliarisation of Capildeo’s work comes often from the poem’s positioning in the space between languages, which allows both (or all) of them to be heard as sound without being immediately absorbed as signification. That sounded space positions the listener in a way that visual art cannot. As Tim Ingold writes, sound is ‘neither mental nor material, but a phenomenon of experience – that is, our immersion in, and commingling with, the world in which we find ourselves’, but an immersive experience may simultaneously be critical; the directional qualities of echo encourage the listener to reflect on their relationship to the source of the sound (Ingold, 2011, 137). This can also happen within a single language, as, for example, in a poem from Capildeo’s earlier collection Utter. In ‘The Critic in His Natural Habitat’, the vehicle is a dramatic monologue from the point of view of a literary academic, apparently aimed at someone like the author, its jovial insults and casual sexism both dispiritingly accurate and mordantly funny: ‘Oh, is that your book? I’m afraid I don’t read much contemporary poetry. Will you give me a copy? Only if you have one spare, of course. Sultry photo! I’m never sure about books-with-author-photos. The rail station photobooth? Really?’ (Capildeo, 2013, 23). There are parallels here with Riley’s account of harmful speech, but in this case the echo does not just deflect harm by isolating and neutralising its effects; rather, it throws the ‘bad words’ back at their source, shifting the balance of power through parodic humour. Like Rankine’s second-person anecdotal accounts of racism, if in a more bleakly comic vein, the particular verbal incident is 115

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given force by its metonymic weight. The title’s othering of patriarchal power play, isolated here for the purposes of anthropological wildlife study, invites a particular kind of distanced listening, one in which the addressee’s complicity, confidently assumed by the speaker, is peeled away to reveal to the reader of the poem the violence of privilege defined by class and gender. This is accomplished so deftly that the poem seems at first to be harmlessly entertaining, but it can only be read as such if we have not fully registered the implications of the speaker’s entitlement, or what is at stake in the exclusion of the addressee from the world he inhabits. The poem therefore listens to listening with acute attention to the layering of verbal echoes. Slow Echoes

In their review of Rankine’s Citizen, Capildeo asks: Why my feeling of stoniness, of having stopped short, having been halted and spun about by means of pronouns? Where are the actions and reactions in return? Is it enough to register and prolong the freeze response, the bad trip, the learned helplessness? Would you offer, take, the white space around and beyond the poetry to write new, slow, powerful responses, beyond what ‘you’ did, or could do in the poems themselves? (Capildeo, 2016a, 9)

These questions elucidate Capildeo’s own poetics, the ‘white space’ hinting at perceptions of race as well as time. There is a commitment to slow response, but also to one that shapes space more actively, in line with Glissant’s view of the echo ‘at work in the matter of the world’. In the same review, Capildeo also notes a weariness at how the shocked reception of Citizen suggests a readership oblivious to writers such as Brathwaite and ‘the archaeology of English-language poetic heritage’ that already reverberates with multiple critical perspectives. This is not to suggest that Rankine herself does not engage with literary histories or previous traditions of protest, since she clearly does, but the most striking references in Citizen are often drawn from contemporary visual art or media sources that circulate more rapidly within a narrower historical span, and it may be exactly this that has led to the reception of her work beyond habitual poetry readerships. The slow echo that arrives long after the source is a model for the ways in which Capildeo’s poems listen across historical divides. In ‘Four Departures from “Wulf and Eadwacer”’ a serial translation process yields four voices that emerge from this mysterious Anglo-Saxon poem (Capildeo, 2013, 42–45). The source is a text that cannot be definitively translated in a literal sense, but that seems to be a love poem in a woman’s voice 116

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while also referring to rape, human sacrifice and a deep sense of difference and division between warring peoples. Nobody knows how it should have sounded, but it becomes a score for interpretations that pick up on imagined or reconstructed sonic features, like the use of refrains in the first section, ‘(i) reverse’, where lines like ‘Bunched up in your ruins, you cannot lose’, or ‘Near him I narrow to survival mode, wink out’, subtly echo the feel of the Anglo-Saxon distich and its internal sound patterning. This technique enables a weaving between past and present, as, for example, in ‘(ii) outside’, where ancient notions of lineage are set against global interconnectedness as the poem works through both: ‘What was so lacking in the upbringing we gave her that she had to go off with a stranger, one of them as well; she’s worthless, no getting her back, but so long as they’re in touch with each other they’re within our reach, for globalisation is also on our side’ (Capildeo, 2013, 44). As well as an echo of the source text, this can be read as an example of Glissant’s écho-monde, in which contemporary intercultural friction is bounced against historical parallels. The poem listens to a text that remains resistant, positioning the reader as an outsider; rather than reconstructing a world in which its meaning could become transparent, the serial translations multiply foreignness and opacity. The final section of the poem begins with the exhortation, ‘Eliminating all others from this poem save yourself, man’, but the slipperiness of the syntax makes it impossible to exclude multiplicity. The poem remains ‘a misfit serenade, anachronistic whispers’, as it refuses to settle into a clear historical narrative. The attempt to reduce it to summarisable meaning is likely to create coercions and distortions, rendering it ‘one comprehensive guiltfear package presented via compressive anticipatory history’. The structure of serial pattern of translations, however, allows for multiple and competing echoes that reflect the chaotic complexity of cultural relationships, all of which are also intercultural relationships.

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CHAPTER 6

Improvisation: Tom Raworth’s Intuition

Apart from its specifically musical meaning, improvisation has two related but distinct senses. On the one hand, it suggests a time frame – the on-the-spot response and the lack of advance preparation, while on the other it indicates working with whatever comes to hand, with materials that might not normally be put to those uses. In both senses, it focuses attention on an environment, and on the activity of creation. Etymologically, it is a blindness – the absence of foresight – so it is not surprising that it should have a close relationship with listening. The work of the Irish–English poet Tom Raworth, from its beginnings in the 1960s until his death in 2017, is characterised by its quickness and acute patterns of auditory attention. His method remains mysterious and inimitable, despite his engaging accounts of it in interviews and letters, and it is connected with a lifelong interest in jazz that preceded his work as a poet. Jazz suggested a style, a way of living as well as forms of listening that would inform his writing. Robert Sheppard observes the influence of Charles Olson’s projectivism on Raworth’s poetry of the 1960s in which ‘[t]he presentation of sharp detail and rapid re-location of point of view created indeterminate lyrics and fictions’, and ‘improvisatory intuition was pitched against a supposedly reductive intellection’ (Sheppard, 2002, 75). When critics refer to the ‘improvisatory’ aspects of his work, this signals a relationship with developments in music, particularly free improvisation, which emerged out of jazz in the 1960s and 1970s, yet this may seem paradoxical given that Raworth’s texts are written compositions. It is a description of a method, and by reading Raworth’s poetics alongside statements by musicians, I want to explore the extent to which that method is informed by the musical world he inhabited. ‘Letter to Martin Stannard’ (Raworth, 1991) describes the process of writing a poem in a way that makes clear his improvisatory approach, with its responsiveness to place, momentary events and a set of social relations that is produced by the writing itself. At Stannard’s request, 118

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Raworth gives ‘the context of the poem I wrote a couple of days ago’, refusing any kind of abstract statement of poetics while pointing outward from the poem to the world surrounding it. Writing during a stay in Marseille in January 1991, he describes a drunken walk home through the city, stopping at a sandwich stall: The owner, Tunisian, listening to loud radio in Arabic. As he rolled the sandwich in paper, twisting the ends and adding a pink paper napkin, he switched the channel and we heard the news flash of the start of war. We shrugged at one another with eyes and mouth. And as I went round by the port, the water dark grey and calm sitting there watching air decay between the levels of white tiles started running through my head.

(Raworth, 1991, n.p.)

There are at least three kinds of listening in operation here: hearing the noise of the radio in another language; the different listening of the stallholder; and the response to startling information, both individually and in the shared reception of the shrug. Looking back, it is possible to observe that this was one of the defining moments in the framing of ‘the Islamic world’ as an entity hostile to ‘the West’, and the beginning of a trajectory that has intensified the following three decades. Raworth registers its significance and the potential divide it opens up between him and the stallholder, but also rejects that narrative in a moment of wordless community and listenership. The lines that start running through his head are also listened to, as if they are separate from him. The account of the making of poem continues, embedded in its world of social connections, including news of the death of a friend, Patrizia Vicinelli, and more news on the radio. The poem emerges tangentially, sounding through the daily activities and ‘juggled’, as he puts it, into shape. As well as attending to visual and tactile stimuli, it responds to different layers of sonic experience and varied foci of attention. Raworth describes writing in the hope of recognition by others of ‘something that they thought was to one side or not real’, and that ‘my poems will show them that it is real, that it does exist’; Sheppard takes this quotation as the starting point for examining the ways in which Raworth’s poems create the possibility of saying, of remaining open to otherness rather than closing around a singular interpretation (Sheppard, 2005, 171). 119

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However, my focus here is on the ways in which the poems listen and are informed by listening, and how these might relate to the musical practice of improvisation. While the eventual poem is carefully constructed, taking the fourteen-line form that Raworth was working in at that time, it is a text that approaches the condition of improvisation as nearly as possible, as a trace of process that invites further listening and response. As recipient of the letter, Stannard (2004) comments: ‘This stuff’s quick. It looks like what he does is write down just about anything, and it becomes “a poem”. But it’s also considered, and considered carefully. You’ve only got to try this method yourself and see what a mess you make.’ Such misunderstandings exist in music too, and for this reason ‘improvisation’ is a term that is not wholeheartedly embraced by all the musicians who practise it, as the guitarist Derek Bailey notes in his influential book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (1993). Apart from a general distinction between idiomatic improvisation, such as jazz or flamenco, which works within the identity of a particular musical idiom, and nonidiomatic free improvisation, it has taken many forms in different historical and cultural contexts. Bailey is at pains to foreground the role of intuition, and to contest the ‘widely accepted connotations which imply that improvisation is something without preparation and without consideration, a completely ad hoc activity, frivolous and inconsequential, lacking in design and method’ (1993, xii). Musicians who reject the term, he argues, may do so because ‘[t]hey know that there is no musical activity which requires greater skill and devotion, preparation, training and commitment’ (1993, xii). He ends with the following comments: In all its roles and appearances, improvisation can be considered as the celebration of the moment. And in this the nature of improvisation exactly resembles the nature of music. Essentially, music is fleeting; its reality is its moment of performance. There might be documents that relate to that moment – score, recording, echo, memory – but only to anticipate it or recall it. (Bailey, 1993, 142)

The difficulty in drawing comparisons across art forms is that the same term might shift through different or even opposite meanings. ‘Writing’ in music may be plan or aide memoire for the future moment of a sounded performance, and whereas this may also be true of a poem, the performance of the act of writing and the performance of reading a text also have their own moments, both of which are intricately concerned with listening. Part of Bailey’s project is to recover continuities of improvisation in earlier forms of music, from Indian traditions to that of the European organ. He traces the development of the score from the Middle Ages, originally a mnemonic device but one that gradually took over until, as he quotes Jacques Charpentier, ‘the musical work ceased to be, little by little, the 120

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expression of an experienced psycho-sociological continuum – on the spot and at the moment it is experienced; and instead became […] a wilful, formal and explicative construction which finds in itself alone its substance and its justification’ (cited in Bailey, 1993, 59). This opposition is too simple to apply to Raworth’s poetry, since there are certainly wilful formal constructions, even if they are often in a mutually interrupting relationship with ‘an experienced psycho-sociological continuum’. The writing of a score may seem a different practice from writing a poem; the moment of performance in a poem is already shaped by the possibilities of writing, as ‘Letter to Martin Stannard’ suggests. However, it is the tension between those poles of continuous experience and formal construction that creates the dynamic in Raworth’s writing. The term ‘intuition’ is frequently used by Bailey and others in discussing the work of improvisation. Its etymology embraces an earlier meaning of direct spiritual apprehension, thus bypassing the senses, but in creative practice it is most usefully considered in its Bergsonian sense as a grasp of experience within the continuous flux of duration, particularly given Henri Bergson’s profound influence on modernism. One of Bergson’s illustrations is of the melody, experienced not note for note analytically, but grasped intuitively as a whole; this situated, lived and temporal knowledge is core to improvisation, since working in a group demands an intuitive approach to emerging situations and responsiveness to others. Deleuze’s reading of Bergson emphasises the role of multiplicity, and the way in which one duration ‘has the power to disclose other durations, to encompass the others, and to encompass itself ad infinitum’ (1988, 80). If traditional melodic structures are abandoned in free improvisation, the possibilities are multiplied. Likewise, Raworth’s sense of what is ‘to one side or not real’ reflects this idea of intuition as revealing interconnected multiplicities as the abrupt dislocations of his work produce infinite possible readings. In response to Stannard’s invitation to discuss his method, Raworth writes: ‘I thought I’d pretty clearly stated my method in El Barco del Abismo’, referring to a short poem written twenty-three years previously with accompanying notes on the circumstances and gathered sources of the writing (Raworth 1991, n.p.). These include the following: ‘Title from Sr. Martin Ruiz’s Latin American History Lecture on Thursday, May 9th, 1968 at noon. I was so impressed I stopped listening’ (Raworth 2003, 42). Listening and not listening are equally important here as the speaker tunes out of the lecture and into the poem. The point at which he stops listening to the lecture, to the given instructional framework of the allotted hour, is the one at which he enters into a relationship with a different temporality and a different language. The poem then switches from Spanish to found text from letters, one a child’s rhyme and another a cryptic misspelled (or possibly mistyped) line: 121

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all the boats go out to sea all the men go home to tea AND THE SUNN IS AT LAST very stong I don’t wanr to open py e eyes (Raworth, 2003, 42)

The reference to eyes and the use of the first person in the final line links back to the second, ‘my image I do not recognise in the mirror stepping out of them and into it’, creating a sense of cohesion at a formal level, but it cannot by any means be resolved into a continuous statement. Each fragment is a miniature performance, the rhyming couplet with its own distinct sound and a naïve humour that twists sharply away from the suggestion of an academic context. The final line, typed apparently by someone with their eyes shut, also has overtones of John Donne’s ‘unruly Sunne’ (Donne, 2004, 80). Each element of the poem retains its own distinct temporality, suggesting independent narratives that intersect in the multiple structure of the poem. Neither the ‘Letter to Martin Stannard’ nor ‘El Barco del Abismo’ fully explain Raworth’s techniques, nor the ways in which they developed over a highly prolific lifetime. ‘The Moon Upon the Waters’ from Moving, 1971, part of a sequence based on John Clare’s ‘I Am’ (Clare, 1986, 193), for example, is subtly disorientating in its use of sonic effects. the green of days : the chimneys above : the green of days and the women the whistle : the green of days and the women the whistle of me entering the poem through the chimneys plural : i flow from the (each) fireplaces the green of days : i barely reach the sill the women’s flecked nails : the definite article (Raworth, 2003, 65)

The echo of Clare’s ‘living sea of waking dreams’ is at the beginning of the poem sonic rather than figurative, ‘the green of days’ picking up its vowel sounds and cadence. From this beginning, the repeated phrases pick up sound by accretion, through the echo of ‘chimneys’, ‘women’ and ‘whistle’. The colons, with spaces before and after as in French, take on the aspect of musical notation, dislodged from their usual purpose as punctuation, a pause where breath moves through as the speaker is nothing but wind, whistling round the empty building of a poem. The ‘whistle of me entering the poem’ also suggests a noisy interference, a disturbance that necessarily accompanies the communicative act. The associative links lag behind the sound, gradually mutating – if the juxtaposition of ‘women’ and ‘whistle’ 122

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momentarily suggests a wolf whistle, this is undercut by the cartoon image of the speaker making a Santa Claus entrance down the chimney, which diverts rather than negates the innuendo, preparing for the child’s perspective suggested by ‘i barely reach the sill’. The ‘flecked nails’ seem to have arrived by half-rhyming with ‘sill’. The sonic improvisation sets up incongruities that the poem intensifies rather than resolves; the repeated use of the definite article, which provides the sounded structure, is commented on directly. The improvising language of the poem becomes its own subject, and the disjunction between sound and meaning is what opens further and stranger possibilities. The speaker, who is not stable enough even at the beginning to be called that with any certainty, dissolves into the letter ‘i’, to be shuffled around the poem at will: i remove i and a colon from two lines above the green of days barely reach the sill i remove es from ices keep another i put the c here (Raworth, 2003, 65)

The phrase ‘green of days’ shifts into the plural, the phrase taking on a contextual oddness from each repetition, similarly to the repeated title in Richard Brautigan’s 1967 novella Trout Fishing in America, while the words break down into their constituent letters. This is followed by a riff off the word ‘waves’, ‘which if it were vaves would contain the picture (v) and the name (aves)’, the poems refusing to settle into pictorial representation but at the same time releasing a flock of Latinate birds. It is a compellingly playful as well as a musical poem, testing its thrown-together materials to their limits, where the ‘beachball on a seal’ in the concluding lines is part of a finely balanced and entertaining performance. The poem may be responding to its own verbal environment, but this environment is as material and acoustic as any other. The ‘liveness’ of the poem and its spontaneity is imbricated with the act of writing, which is itself a performance. ‘I hear my poetry as a sort of music, though I don’t think of it as music. I think of it as language,’ Raworth comments in an interview, carefully resisting the implication that poetry is in any way transcendent of its materials (cited in Bartlett, 1987, 150). If he turns to both music and aurality for a description of poetic process, the same might seem to be true in reverse, as musical improvisation is also described in terms of language. ‘The analogy with language, often used by improvising musicians in discussing their work, has a certain usefulness in illustrating the development of a common stock of material – a vocabulary – which takes place when a group of musicians improvise together regularly’ (Bailey, 1993, 108). While this can be helpful for a group of musicians working together, Bailey observes, it creates risks for the solo improvisor who must avoid falling back on the same vocabulary and formulae. Bailey describes his search for a language 123

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that would ‘stem from the concepts of unpredictability and discontinuity, of perpetual variation and renewal first introduced into European composition at the beginning of the 20th century’, while acknowledging that another language, that of a working and performing musician in more mainstream contexts, underlies certain ‘decisions that affect overall balance and pace’. The challenge, he writes, is to incorporate fresh material, creating ‘[c]hange for the sake of the benefits that change can bring’ (Bailey, 1993, 108). Raworth’s incorporation of discontinuous material does exactly this, while the lyric propulsion and humour of his writing work analogously to Bailey’s experience as a musician regularly playing live, surfacing in the shaping of the poems and their capacity to entertain. However, far from establishing the kind of common ground that Bailey refers to when he talks about ‘language’, Raworth’s continuous defamiliarisation makes each foothold in ‘meaning’ exhilaratingly precarious. His distinction between music and language draws attention to the materiality of language and its referential elasticity, which, if they form the basis of his improvisational practice, are very different from what is meant by a musician’s improvising ‘language’. The American saxophonist Steve Lacy comments that improvisation is ‘something to do with the “edge”. Always being on the brink of the unknown and being prepared for the leap. And when you go on out there you have all your years of preparation and all your sensibilities and your prepared means but it is a leap into the unknown’ (cited in Bailey, 1993, 57–58). Lacy’s work with Raworth is the setting of his poem ‘Out of a Sudden’ as a song, so it is not in fact improvisation, yet it reveals something about the responsiveness of a collaborative situation that draws on similar thinking. As Kevin McNeilly observes, the poem in question is unusual for Raworth in its use of formal pattern, but the lines between different approaches are often blurred, and it is difficult even within the context of music to separate improvisation from other practices. What McNeilly describes in his detailed analysis of the poem and score, written as an elegy for Franco Beltrametti, is a resistance to resolution that underscores a complex relationship with absence. The title and first line of Raworth’s poem is taken from Beltrametti’s adaptation of the English expression ‘all of a sudden’, and ‘connotes Raworth’s shock at Beltrametti’s sudden death’ while it also ‘registers the transitory estrangement of loss, as the words hover outside themselves’ (McNeilly, 2009, 163). What appears to be a more formally constructed lyric, therefore, also contains a destabilising immediacy of response. This is echoed in the music, according to McNeilly, by a ‘distinctively open, vacillating quality’ created through unresolved tonalities (McNeilly, 2009, 165). Lacy comments on improvisation, ‘The instrument – that’s the matter – the stuff – your subject’ (cited in Bailey, 1993, 99), and so it is in this composition, in which the affordances of the saxophone are tested in its interweaving with voice. The matter and stuff of Raworth’s poem is the language of elegy: ‘above in the night sky /scattered 124

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by chance / stars cease their motion / poppies don’t dance’, which is both evoked and negated. The ‘brink of the unknown’ is the capacity of language to mean, which is pushed to its limits in Raworth’s work: When Raworth describes music in his poems, he points up the fundamental alterity his work investigates in the incommensur­ ability of media. Hearing, especially listening attentively to music, suggests to Raworth an estrangement at the heart of any search for significance, a music of meaning that words can not ever quite contain or catch […]. Thought, as the ongoing pursuit of connection or sense, works at the edges of listening. (McNeilly, 2009, 159)

McNeilly links this with John Barrell’s observation that Raworth’s poetry demands improvisation of its reader, who must approach his work with ‘a continual sense of trying things out, improvising meanings, seeing how far a connection will work, how far it makes sense to junk it in order to make possible some other series of connections’ (Barrell, 1991, 403). The same qualities of improvisation and intuition that inform the writing are required of the reader as an active participant in the experimental text. In the collaboration, Lacy becomes Raworth’s reader, but the performance of a text is more often the reader’s silent delving into meaning. This does not work as an exact parallel with listening to a piece of music, although Bailey does explore the role of the audience in the context of improvisation. While it provides the pressure of a live situation, it can, for some musicians, be a limit on the freedom to take risks, or encourage showmanship at the expense of genuine exploration. For this reason, Paco Peña describes the presence of an audience as ‘a compromise’. Bringing composition and performance together creates its own problems for Gavin Bryars, a long-time collaborator of Bailey’s who gave up improvisation for a time because in any improvising position the person creating the music is identified with the music. The two things are seen to be synonymous. The creator is there making the music and identified with the music and the music with the person […] And because of that the music, in improvisation, doesn’t stand alone. It’s corporeal. My position, through the study of Zen and Cage, is to stand apart from one’s creation. Distancing yourself from what you are doing. (Bailey, 1993, 115)

The ‘improvising reading’ of poetry on the page does allow that distance, and allows the reader to engage in the construction of the poem. The counter to Bryars’s argument would be that collective experience of improvisation in which the music seems to come from somewhere 125

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else rather than from any one of the musicians involved, and where a collective intuition overrides individual contributions. The idea of the reader as improvisor, as an improvising partner in the poem rather than an audience, also sheds light on the famous speed of Raworth’s delivery in poetry readings, since they might be considered improvisatory exercises for the listener as much as the performer. Bailey quotes Curt Sachs on ‘the instrumental impulse’ that underlies free improvisation, as distinct from vocal melody: ‘Quick motion is not merely a means to a musical end but almost an end in itself which always connects with the fingers, the wrists and the whole of the body’ (Bailey, 1993, 97). The corporeal aspect, in this view, is focused on the instrument, the body subordinated to its potential. This is the effect of Raworth’s use of language, which is distanced from the body and the self, while being sounded out for the full range of its semantic possibilities. Looking for parallels between Raworth’s poetry and improvised music must take into account the temporal differences of production and reception between art forms, but it can also reveal what they have in common, which is a process of testing the limits of, on the one hand, an instrument’s sonic potential, and, on the other, language’s capacity to mean. In making these limits the focus of their work, they flatten the hierarchy of artist and audience, undermine power structures, assert the necessity of collaboration and provide an alternative to formal models. This kind of listening enacted in the poem has implications in its construction of community, which is one that is radically open, as we are invited to listen to a changing situation rather than a fixed structure. Listening creates situations, the relationship between the process and the text being reflected in the reader–listener’s active response to the text and the new relationships it generates. Using an expression borrowed from Peter Szendy, this approach could be described as a means of ‘listening (to listening)’ as the kinds of attention created in the poem summon multiple forms of listening in response (2008, 143). Improvisation draws on and evokes listening as a refusal of objectification. Sonic Experience

The moment of the creative act, for both Raworth and improvising musicians, necessarily draws on its surroundings. ‘The instrument’s responsiveness to its acoustic environment, how it reacts to other instruments and how it reacts to the physical aspects of performing, can vary enormously’ (Bailey, 1993, 100). This is music that responds to a given situation, which is why in the opinion of many practitioners it is considered difficult or even impossible to record. Cornelius Cardew observes, ‘The natural context provides a score which the players are unconsciously interpreting’ (cited 126

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in Bailey, 1993, 103). In the poem, the act of writing means that any sense of context is always mediated, and to a greater or lesser extent the language itself is the context, but Raworth’s poems often evoke social or material environments, returning language to its place among other sounds. Against Schaeffer’s account of the objet sonore, the isolated sound object, the composer Agostino Di Scipio has proposed the idea of ‘audible ecosystems’, writing: As a phenomenon of human experience, sound is never really object and is always event. We can always attend to it as the audible manifestation of relations and interactions in the space-time unity of experience, in the here and now. A non-objectifying attitude is at work here, sensitive to the ecology of the living, embodied process that auditory perception is. (Di Scipio, 2014, 2–3)

Thinking in this way of an event within an ecosystem opens up the politics of improvisation and collaboration to encompass other-than-human perspectives. Attention to the ‘here and now’ of listening produces a text that the reader must encounter in the same collaborative spirit, improvising a rapidly shifting meaning. It also suggests a way of understanding both language and music within a continuum of critical listening. Eric F. Clarke argues for a perceptual understanding of music, emphasising that ‘musical sounds take place in a wider context of other sounds’ (2012, 4). Instead of relying on semiotic interpretation of music, he examines the ways in which listeners might perceive ‘a variety of environmental attributes, ranging from the spatial location and source of musical sounds, to their structural function and ideological value’ (Clarke, 2012, 46). While his focus is on the experience of musical listening, rather than recalling or imagining, Clarke’s approach to environmental sound helps to reveal the subtle movements of attention in Raworth’s poems. A complementary perspective is offered by the work of Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue in their jointly edited Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (2006). This vocabulary of terms for everyday sonic experience is useful in articulating Raworth’s attentiveness to language as an acoustic event, showing how its sociality extends beyond speech to encompass the interference of the material world. ‘I really have no sense of question for knowledge. At all. My idea is to go the other way, you know. And to be completely empty and then see what sounds,’ Raworth remarks in a statement of poetics that captures both his alertness to the everyday environment and his self-deprecating resistance to any kind of lyric exhibitionism (cited in Alpert, 1972, 39). ‘What sounds’ is speech, which may be internally voiced thought, but the sounding of the poem draws attention to the sonic textures of language and their place in a wider auditory landscape. The effect is to unsettle habitual perceptions of 127

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an environment, as in the short poem, ‘From Time to Time in the Past’, from Back to Nature (1972), quoted here in full: tree lets me hear the wind over there where it is i won’t believe this is all there is (the interest on eternity) ‘it is’ squeaks my voice

(Raworth, 2003, 87)

A tree ‘lets’ the wind be heard simply by being an object, but its objecthood is here given agency, while the second line, which could refer to both the tree and the wind, directs the listener’s attention to a specific location, even though the wind is everywhere. The tension in the poem is between the abstraction of time and the lived experience of isolated moments, the phrase ‘from time to time’ taking on this secondary meaning as time, like sound, is localised. The poem works against the normal experience of wind, which is in Augoyard and Torgue’s terms, a ‘ubiquity effect’, that is ‘linked to spatio-temporal conditions’ and expresses ‘the difficulty or impossibility of locating a sound source’ (2006, 130). Wind fits this description as ‘Diffused, unstable, omnidirectional sound’, yet the poem pins it to a specific point that leaves the listener feeling short-changed, since neither the wind nor eternity can be accessed. The squeaking voice in the final line is a typically comic, self-deflating move in which the mouse-like listener confronts the scale of what lies beyond immediate sensory apprehension. The voice is nervous with good reason, since, as Augoyard and Torgue note, ‘The uncertainty produced by a sound about its origin establishes a power relationship between an invisible emitter and the worried receptor. The ubiquity effect is an effect of power’ (2006, 131). The forms of power hinted at here are multiple, ‘the interest on eternity’, suggesting that eternity has been co-opted by the world of finance and mis-sold as a bad investment. The way in which meanings undercut one another in the poem demands a sharp, multidirectional listening; what Augoyard and Torgue identify as worry and uncertainty is also, in Raworth’s work, a sceptical mistrust of power and its manifestations in language. A voice heard as a squeak, as separated from the body that emits it, is suggestive of another of Augoyard and Torgue’s listed effects, that of filtration, which they define as ‘[a] reinforcing or weakening of specific frequencies of a sound’, which can be ‘caused by distortions linked to the mode of utterance, to the space of propagation, or to an electroacoustic filtration’, and is liable to ‘make a listener feel that there is something strange or modified about a particular listening experience’ (2006, 48). 128

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Here, too, they note a relationship to power, particularly in relation to ancient acoustic practices such as oracles speaking through tubes hidden in statues to achieve an otherworldly effect. However, in Raworth’s work filtration serves the opposite purpose, which is to expose the ways in which sound is embedded in material contexts, although these are constantly shifting. Rather than speaking as the oracle, he focuses attention on the tube. Language is what sets in motion relationships between things – for example, between the shape of a landscape and the shape of a human voice box. Augoyard and Torgue comment, ‘The human hearing system, from the external ear to the brain, is itself a filtering process. Subjectivity also intervenes as a filter that is influenced by the degree of familiarity with sound situations, memory and possible connotations’ (2006, 49). Listening itself, in this analysis, is filtering. On a metaphorical level, by continually unsettling familiarity and proliferating connotations, Raworth’s poems radically alter the normal frequencies of linguistic communication. More literally, they frequently refer to filtered sound and its effects, heightening the listener’s awareness of a mediated environment. Filtration is used alongside other effects in ‘Rather a Few Mistakes than Fucking Boredom’, also from 1972, where the sound of cameras whirring, a drone effect, draws attention not just to representation, but also its material embodiment and the work involved in producing it. A play on ‘shot’ evokes both gunfire and film, while the dislocation of image and ‘sounds in the past’ creates an incongruous desynchronisation (Raworth, 2015, 57): giant cameras whirring on the lens hood of each stands a rifleman his warning shot as the image approaches sounds in the past today we are scraping every particle from the tin cocoa-tin telephones smell of steam trains unable to act his deformity sounds every where empty affects all thinking whistling sounds as the familiar voice sells its pretension

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(oh guide my hand to make these tracks i do not understand soft needle mind now fills all grooves to amplify time’s wind)

(Raworth, 2015, 57)

The lines ‘today we are scraping / every particle from the tin’ evoke a group activity, possibly still military, as in Henry Reed’s poem of the Second World War, ‘Naming of Parts’, which adopts an ironic relationship to army instruction (Reed, 2007, 49). The ‘cocoa-tin telephones’, with their clatter of consonants, echo the sound of the scraping in the previous line while evoking the filtration effect of a voice over an improvised phone line. The ambiguous ‘smell’, verb or noun, links these objects and their sounds to steam trains and the sensory world of the past. The whole aural landscape is filtered by time, yet experienced as a flickering present in which the details rush past. The second half of the poem explores the effects of sound on thought from multiple perspectives. There is a splintery subject either ‘unable to act’ or ‘unable to act his deformity’, and who is in turn deformed by uncertain syntax in which nouns and verbs are undecidable. Line breaks and a word break, ‘every where’, disrupt readings that would impose a continuity of thought: thinking is instead entangled in the ‘empty affects’ or whatever is empty that affects it, and this emptiness is acoustic, full of whistling air. Thought itself, therefore, is subject to a filtration effect, and its voice is anything but familiar; the illusion of familiarity is eschewed here as a ‘pretension’ to be sold. Such is the elasticity of Raworth’s writing that no single interpretation can hold for long; ‘a few mistakes’ – or more – are inevitable, and while the poem is certainly not boring, any attempt to unravel it risks being so. The poem depends on a rapid, intuitive grasping of sense at a sonic or musical level that will not fully resolve into semantic absorption. The speed of Raworth’s performances, in which line breaks would disappear in the quickfire delivery, inflects subsequent readings of his work through the effect of phonomnesis, where the experience of the page in the present recalls the memory of a particular sound, in this case Raworth’s voice. Having read Raworth long before hearing him read, I remember experiencing his poems differently, the white space suggesting a dreamier state of paused attention, for example in ‘The Blood Thinks, and Pauses’, where the syncopation of shifting left-hand margins creates a reflective tension between speaking, thinking and memory (Raworth, 2003, 4). The contemporary context of poetry, with the ready availability 130

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of online recordings that can be accessed at the tap of a key, means that the voices of poets are increasingly inseparable from their work, although they may often come through the filtered sound of the computer screen. The effect of Raworth’s speed is that an incomplete or unresolved phrase lingers in the ear as the next arrives; the impression is of simultaneity even though the lines come in succession. Augoyard and Torgue observe that the accelerando effect is often used in musical accompaniments to cartoon chases, and this is sometimes the feeling produced by Raworth’s poems, where line breaks can be like arriving at a cliff edge where one treads air for a moment before noticing that one has gone over a precipice. It is this lag that produces the sonic equivalent of double exposure and simultaneous multiplicity. This brief lingering effect of a sound, the ‘mnestic trace of barely subsided sound signals’, is identified as the remanence effect, a form of sensory illusion: Short-term memory intervenes through the reproduction and transformation of the prime sonic cause. Whether this is during sleep, awakening, tiredness due to hyperacousia, or a ‘surrender’ in a very cultivated and mastered way, to musical listening, it is always a matter of para-conscious perception. The sound that produces a remanence effect intercepts in us what escapes from the state of waking. (Augoyard and Torgue, 2006, 87)

This accounts for the effects of speed in Raworth’s poems, which creates an overlay of remembered and continuing sound, as well as for the dreamlike effect that was my first impression of his work, since it is in a half-awakened or dream state that one most easily inhabits simultaneous and contradictory possibilities. The final two stanzas introduce another sound filter, that of the record player. The parentheses make this seem like a comment on the poem as a whole, a filtering of a filtering. The syntax is less fragmented, and the introduction of rhyme creates a song-like resolution. All that has come so far in the poem is laid down as a recorded track that is now replayed in the mind again, through phonomnesis, ‘a lived situation that engenders an inner and silent listening’. What is heard is ‘time’s wind’, an abstraction that only amplification and filtration can make possible. Since filtration happens subjectively and physiologically as well as through technology, the poem reveals a continuity of listening between internal and external experience; the body as recording instrument and filter is continuous with the world to which it listens. This relationship between body and environment can be compared with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s image of the poet as tuning fork, vibrating to the overwhelming sound of spring peepers, as discussed in Chapter 4, which suggests a more immediate connection between the poet and environment (Berssenbrugge, 2013, 39). For Raworth, sonic experience 131

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is mediated by several effects before arriving in a playable form, that of the poem, which is in turn listened to by the reader. The processing of sound is the work of the poem’s mediation, which is different from the direct apprehension of Berssenbrugge’s involuntary response to the environment, or Coleridge’s image of the wind harp. Rather than subsuming the external world into the poet’s finely tuned interior sensibilities, in accordance with Romantic genius theory, the poem is focused on a constructive process of thinking in language that persistently, if tenuously, makes connections with its material surroundings. At the same time, it is work that reflects Raworth’s comment about being completely empty so that he can ‘see what sounds’. It is not certain who is being addressed in the lines ‘oh guide my hand / to make these tracks / i do not understand’ and the exhortation contains the possibility of irony as well as signalling that the speaker is not in control. Timothy Morton distinguishes between behaving and acting to question the distribution of agency between the human and non-human (2017, 58). In these terms, the speaker is behaving, rather than acting, and behaving in ways that are analogous to the material process of replaying, where the needle must be guided into the record’s groove. The two poems I have discussed explore listening to time and memory in relation to a lyric self in a non-human environment, but Raworth’s poems are often peopled and social. ‘Wedding Day’ is one such example, where incidental sound, for example that of cine cameras and partly overheard conversation, upstage what might be considered as the most significant moment of a wedding, the ‘noise of a ring sliding onto a finger’ (Raworth, 2003, 6). Since this event is inaudible, it raises the question of whether everything else is noise, and therefore interference, or whether the expansion of attention to encompass even inaudible sound enables us to respond to a wedding not as a union of individuals but within the context of social relations. The poem is a rhythmical organisation, but one that responds to an auditory social context – the ‘here and now’ – rather than its own purely formal dynamic. However, there is more than one ‘here’, and more than one ‘now’. The poem moves through an apparent statement of poetics, ‘I made this pact, intelligence /shall not replace intuition’ just as it seems to shift away from the scene to the moment of writing, ‘sitting here / my hand cold on the typewriter / flicking the corner of the paper’. The dislocation of writing is unavoidable, but it is also sounded through the italicised emphasis of reflective thinking, both at this point and earlier in ‘supposing he did say that?’ Intuition connects as it refracts, and is not dependent on the ‘live’ moment because speech is already experienced through the knowledge of writing that enables one to hear, for example, the italicisation of an emphasised word. The improvisation of the poem – that is, its use of the materials at hand – makes a continuum between the materiality of language and the material contexts in which it circulates. The noise that enters the poem as a condition of language is part of the atmosphere 132

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to which the improvising writer responds, while the improvising reader is encouraged through Raworth’s poems to make multiple connections between language and the spaces that make it audible, from the poem into everyday life and back again.

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CHAPTER 7

Performance: Listening Bodies

How do bodies listen? I will begin this chapter on poetry and performance with a detour into music and sound art, via the insights of two artists for whom an understanding of the physicality of listening has been expanded by deafness. The solo percussionist Evelyn Glennie (2015) describes how, after the onset of her profound deafness, her school percussion teacher taught her to recover her sense of perfect pitch by feeling notes in different places on her body: ‘The low sounds I feel mainly in my legs and feet and high sounds might be particular places on my face, neck and chest.’ Her aim as a musician, she explains, is to encourage the experience of listening with the whole body as a resonating chamber. The widespread belief that hearing is enabled only by the ear, as if the external world is channelled straight into a Cartesian brain, somehow sidestepping a connection with the body, is what enables a division of the subject from the material world it inhabits. To describe, as she does, hearing with the fingers or with drumsticks, and to experience the body as part of a sounding environment, involves a shift in subjectivity, in which, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘We must avoid saying that the body is in space, or in time. It inhabits space and time’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, 161). This inhabiting is simultaneously physical and cultural: sound acts on the body as vibration but Glennie’s keen recognition of pitch depends on the structure of Western music. Christine Sun Kim explores the effects of sound through a widening of perception that encompasses the visual. She describes her changing relationship to sound, first in terms of alienation, as though sound was something that belonged to hearing people: ‘As a D/deaf person living in a world of sound, it was as if I was living in a foreign country, blindly following its rules, customs, behaviors, and norms without ever questioning them’ (Kim, 2015). Her decision to ‘reclaim ownership of sound’, despite not hearing, is the basis of her art, in which sound, performance and the visual are inseparable. She recognises the ‘value and currency’ of voice, which she can access through interpreters, while communicating only through American Sign Language (ASL) herself. She justifies her claim 134

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to sound by explaining how she is part of a sounding social world, in which she has had to learn from the responses and reactions of others how to develop her own ‘sound etiquette’: not to slam doors, or belch or scrape cutlery across a plate. Listening in this context is mediated through visual interpretation, so that movement and sound are equivalent. It may sometimes be equivalent in that sound can be translated or represented through movement, as in sign language, but since sound is movement, as vibration, relationships between sound and movement may be indexical as well as symbolic or iconic. This is illustrated in Kim’s sound experiments, for example in playing amplified field recordings and using their vibration to create visual patterns. In the context of this work, she describes the difference between responding to vibration as ‘visceral and internal’ and the ‘external and spatial’ world of sign language that can be immeasurably enriching, she argues, if we ‘listen with our eyes and not just our ears’ (Selby, 2011). Listening with the eyes is a form of translation that may seem paradoxical, but Kim’s comparison with the musical score shows that it is closely connected with familiar habits of musical listening. Neither the musical note nor the sign in ASL, she observes, can be fully captured in writing, since both are subject to interpretation, nuance and texture. Her series of drawings ‘The World is Sound’ blurs the line between score and visual poem, as it scores various situations not normally considered as sound, for example ‘The Sound of Obsessing’, in which the ‘p’ for piano is written in rows, first evenly spaced and then smaller, smudged and overlapping as the rhythm of return to the obsessive thought intensifies (Kim, 2017). Musical dynamics are used as notes, while smudging, as a record of movement, brings interference and noise into the text. ‘The Sound of Passing Time’ uses ‘f’ for forte to indicate the speeding up and slowing of time, while ‘The Sound of Temperature Rising’ also uses ‘sfz’ for sforzando to indicate rapid rises and falls in temperature. Each score represents an act of temporal attention to movement, either an inner listening to shifts in a mental state, or in the case of temperature, the translation into sound of the imperceptible agitations of atoms that cause global warming. These are acts of listening that draw attention to the located body and the ways in which its perceptions are mediated by musical understanding. The Space of Messages

The body is not just the site of listening, and certainly not an autonomous one: it is shaped by listening. Michel Serres places the body at centre of a nexus of informational and physical relationships with what is distant and close at hand, balancing and navigating within a continuum of the natural and cultural: 135

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The body stands and walks through the space of messages, orients itself within noise and meaning, amidst rhythms and rumblings. As it hears through the soles of its feet, through the sites where muscles, tendons and bones are attached and articulated, and finally in the space where the inner ear connects with the canals which control our balance, it can be said that our whole posture is linked to our sense of hearing. (Serres, 2008, 141–42)

If subjectivity is experienced through contact with non-human matter, the rhythmical and rumbling vibration of the world, the interplay of senses reveals the body as matter communicating with itself. However noisy and interrupted it is, language, the poem’s medium, will never detach itself from signification. However, where it creates points of contact between the verbal and non-verbal, it brings the listening of the poem, or our listening to the poem, within the context of the vibrational continuum that links all matter including the mind, understood in materialist terms, as, for example, by Shelly Trower, as part of the body and the world (2012, 9). Reuven Tsur (1992), as I have explained in the Introduction, argues that we process sound differently depending on whether or not we identify it as speech, but that poetry engages a mode of perception in which speech is heard as sound. It is in sound poetry, particularly, that these different kinds of listening are brought into play, and where poetry enables us also to listen to sound in the frame of speech. Serres examines the immersive physical effects of sound, suggesting that both noise and silence may be openings to the non-human world, and the perceived world outside language. In his classification of three kinds of audibility, the sound of the body comes first, to be followed by the noise of the world – ‘thunder, wind, surf, birds, avalanches, the terrifying rumbling that precedes earthquakes, cosmic events’, and finally the collective, where ‘[n]oise is what defines the social’ (Serres, 2008, 106–7). These three spheres as Serres conceives them, are connected as part of the vibrating material world, and his interpretation of the body is also posthuman, in Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) terms, not a unified and centred subjectivity but formed by a pattern of individual and collective responses to pressures inside the body and outside it. Listening enables an articulation of new subjectivities, and new imaginings of the body and its environments, a lived and sensed response, in which life is understood through patterns of connection between human and non-human others. Rather than imagining the human body, formed by language, attending to the non-human world outside it, Braidotti’s monism ‘results in relocating difference outside the dialectical scheme, as a complex process of differing which is framed by both internal and external forces and is based on the centrality of the relation to multiple others’ (Braidotti, 2013, 56). For both Serres and Braidotti, human language is one of many informational codes 136

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that organise and drive the material world to which humans belong, codes that ‘both deploy their own bars of information, and interact in multiple ways with the social, psychic and ecological environments’ (Braidotti, 2013, 60). Observing that ‘[p]osthuman subjects are technologically mediated to an unprecedented degree’, she argues that the current challenge is to address ‘the tension between finding new and alternative modes of political and ethical agency for our technologically mediated world and the inertia of our mental habits on the other’ (Braidotti, 2013, 57–58). This challenge, of meeting the mediated body with an adequate conceptual framework, has long been a concern of sound poetry. On one hand, this means adapting to the possibilities of the technologised body. The Canadian poet Steve McCaffery, surveying the context of his own work, writes: ‘The body is no longer the ultimate parameter, and voice becomes a point of departure rather than the point of arrival’ (McCaffery and Nichol, 1978, 10). The tape recorder offers ‘the possibility of a second orality predicated upon a graphism’, freeing composition from the sequentiality imposed by the body. Human vocal range can be appreciated in its ‘micro/macro/phonic qualities’, while sound poetry ‘permits, through deceleration, the granular structure of language to emerge and evidence itself’ (McCaffery and Nichol, 1978, 11). Speech becomes separated from voice, as new structures and textures become available to the poet. However, in the search for ‘modes of political and ethical agency’ that might transcend a humanist and anthropocentric viewpoint, that technologised body must be heard in the context of a wider non-human world. Bob Cobbing’s (1999) ‘Alphabet of Fishes’ takes as its starting point a list of Cornish names for sea creatures, including ‘canker’ (crab), ‘ehoc’ (salmon), ‘keinak’ (shad) and ‘zart’ (sea urchin). Naming institutes the separation from and control of the non-human environment through language that begins in the Western tradition with Adam naming the animals. Cobbing’s version of this originating myth refuses the split by placing language – as sound – on the side of the non-human material world; few of the names will now help much gaining information about aquatic life, and although some of them are verifiably Cornish, it is by no means impossible that others are invented. Assuming that all the names are authentic, Cobbing performs with sensual relish the noise of a revived language that, with fewer than 600 speakers, hovers on the cusp of survival. If it is lost, what disappears with it is a set of relationships between humans and their environment, represented here through what seem to the anglophone ear to be particularly outlandish names, yet this strangeness is a lost proximity of a neighbouring language and its knowledge of the sea. Since the piece was first performed in the 1970s, some of these species, such as the shad, have declined dramatically and awareness of the sea’s fragile ecosystem has intensified. As Cobbing draws out the sonic potential of each syllable into yelps and roars, the enterprise of naming is reversed. Noise, 137

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with its etymological links to the sea, plunges the listener into a watery evolutionary history and a kinship that does not stand above other species but sounds the difference, in this case that of the lungs and their primal roar. Cobbing’s aim is to return the sound of the voice to its full sensual possibilities: Leonardo da Vinci asked the poet to give him something he might see and touch and not just something he could hear. Sound poetry seems to me to be achieving this aim. PARTLY it is a recapturing of a more primitive form of language, before communication by expressive sounds became stereotyped into words, when the voice was richer in vibrations, more mightily physical. The tape-recorder, by its ability to amplify and superimpose, and to slow down the vibrations, has enabled us to rediscover the possibilities of the human voice, until it becomes again something we can almost see and touch. Poetry has gone beyond the word, beyond the letter, both aurally and visually […]. Sound poetry dances, tastes, has shape. (Cobbing, 1978, 39)

Cobbing’s contribution to the development of sound and concrete poetry in the UK, and his far-reaching influence on other practitioners through the Writers Forum workshops and publications, is visionary. The lo-fi aesthetics of his work, visually and in sound, was enabling for working-class experimental writers in the way that the DIY approach of punk would open new possibilities in music. The voice is also, in Cobbing’s work, one that tends to underscore the presence and strength of human embodiment. Rather than focusing on technological transformations of the voice, as did French sound poets Henri Chopin and Bernard Heidsieck, both influential on his early work, Cobbing would work with groups of performers for a multi-layered effect, as well as exploring the capacities of his own ‘mightily physical’ voice. Chopin, who was resident in England for many years, focused his attention on the tape recorder in a way that resonates more closely with Braidotti’s post-humanist critique. His close amplifications of the sounds of the body move beyond the voice and its social context to explore continuities between the body and technology. In ‘Vibrespace’, 1963, for example breathing and mouth sounds evoke vast, booming spaces (Chopin, 2016). We hear ‘the immense complex factory of a body’ as Chopin (1967) described it – this is not the voice emerging from the privileged vessel of the human body, but the body understood as a thing, an instrument, that manufactures these particular noises. In performance, Chopin’s typical expression is one of astonishment, as if the sound does not come from him but from cosmic forces that threaten to overwhelm him, or as if he has seen a ghost. Michel Giroud (1995) has described his work as ‘the primary 138

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planetary poetry of the corporal space’. Like Serres, Chopin attends to the sounds of the body, connecting them with the sounds of the world. In defiance of the tyranny of language, he writes: ‘[…] we are slaves of rhetoric, prisoners of explanation that explains nothing. Nothing is yet explainable’ (Chopin, 1967). The aim of his work, therefore, is to move beyond signification: You will like this art, or you will not like it, that is of no importance! In spite of yourself it will embrace you, it will circulate in you. That is its role. It must open our effectors to our own biological, physical and mental potentialities beyond all intellect; art must be valued like a vegetable, it feeds us differently, that is all. (Chopin, 1967)

The listening he describes is transformative since his work makes audible the uncanny otherness of the body and its chaos; sound is autonomous, circulating in the hearer whether they like it or not. However, this is not a purely affective response, since the techniques involved mean that the listener is likely to search curiously and critically for the source of the sound. Its source in the body is what creates meaning; a brief explanation in a 2005 performance notes that the sound is produced by placing the microphone in a nostril, even though the resulting sound (a tornado effect) is heard on tape. The process itself is a commentary on the body and its potentialities; even if it eschews language it still, I would argue contra Chopin himself, engages with the intellect in offering a perspective on the technologically mediated body. Chopin’s frequent expression of shock, as if he is negotiating forces that he cannot control, reveals for the listener the discovery that the body is not autonomously one’s own. The body is haunted by its technologies, but also by the many forms of non-human life that assist, for example, in creating that thunderous sound that turns out to be the process of digestion. It is the sound of the body that is and is not itself. Vibratory listening makes audible both the technological and the biological on a nature–culture continuum, while the apparent absence of language allows sound itself to carry meaning. Language is not, however, altogether absent. Poetic language is the other ghost of Chopin’s performances, present sometimes in whispers or gestures, in the fragment of a sound or the movement of lips. Without the sense that his performances were in the medium of the voice, and hence language, his surprise at what speaks through him, or through his machine, would be less striking. Breath and mouth sounds are the negative space of the poem; they are all that might usually be edited out of a recording as too much of a reminder of the poet’s presence and the technology involved. Chopin’s achievement is to situate the poem fully in the world by removing it entirely, so that the poem comes to have the same kind of spectral and ambiguous presence as the posthuman body. 139

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Aspiring to Bird Song: Emma Bennett and Jonathan Skinner

Under the heading ‘We Aspire to Bird Song’, Bob Cobbing notes in 1969 that ‘the tape-recorder’s treatment of the voice teaches the human new tricks of rhythm and tone, power and subtlety’ (Cobbing, 1978, 39). The bird-like behaviour of mimicry becomes, therefore, a means of adapting to technology in a posthuman context, the human body learning equally from bird and machine. London-based poet and performer Emma Bennett has developed a series of works that explores this relationship, listening to and mimicking particular bird calls. ‘BirdTalk’, in her description, involves: ‘Talking like a bird talking about a bird: using recordings of a blackbird’s morning and afternoon song, and also the strains of a mistle thrush at dawn, I try to make my voice approximate what I hear using language, non-language and half-language’ (Bennett, 2012a). The live performance of these poems is very much a performance of listening: Bennett wears earphones and concentrates on the recording of birdsong that the audience cannot hear. As she vocalises her ‘approximations’ the listener in turn catches songlike phrases, conversational asides and exclamations. Bennett’s birds are wordy, social and immersed in a world of movement and interaction. Some of the details are descriptive and musical, such as: ‘a heavy note two tunes’; or ‘it goes this is a different is a different  chubchopcheepcheep a bit happy it goes and / it sort of like it sort of has it flute sounds like a flute’ (Bennett, 2019, 95), whereas the Mistle Thrush seems to suggest the bird’s perspective on other birds: low look to get real     this is a real one wanna get woo  love it I love it here a comes  little bit of biscuit getting one today then I’m so woah woah I love it I love it what a get a  oooh he’s lovely what a get a knew oooh about him

(Bennett, 2019, 96)

The pleasure of the performance is in hearing birdsong and speech simultaneously, and the surprise of a human ‘parroting’ a bird that in turn draws attention to the phatic non-meaning of much human vocal interaction. It is also a virtuoso performance, as Bennett modestly does not point out in her practice-based paper on the project – one that combines patient repeated listening to birds with perfect comic timing and an ability to catch the fleeting nuances of humans communicating in real life. She does, however, comment on its difficulty: 140

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But I go on, again and again, attempting to catch a semblance of the song. What pulls me on is that I begin to hear, in the robin’s song, the possibility of my own speech as I imagine it  could  be: eloquent, witty, impossibly fluent. Listening to birdsong with the express intention of describing it in language produces a tangible feeling of the impossibility of grasping it. It is physical, a tension felt in the body, like an urge. (Bennett, 2019, 97)

It is a process of deciphering and answering back with the limited apparatus of the human voice: as much as it skilfully evokes specific bird calls, the performance also dramatises the impossibility of interpretation and the gap between human speech and birdsong. This gap of irony and comic failure is the work’s strength and revelation. While some of the recordings have a single voice tracking a bird’s call, others overlay successive attempts, revealing the process of sustained listening that underlies the project. The inevitable failure of representation is an important element of this work since it tempers and undercuts the anthropomorphism that is also part of its charm: as a form of homophonic translation, it is closer to the Zukofskys’ translations of Catullus (1969) than to the sentimental depictions of what animals might have been saying on children’s television programmes in generations before Bennett’s. There is no pretence of scientific mastery in deciding how the language of birds might be translated into human speech; homophonic translation requires semantic failure, however accomplished the performance that results from it. Bennett describes a process of achieving a ‘likeness’ in which her repeated efforts to talk like a bird are not just representational but a form of sociality: ‘What I begin to understand, through repeatedly feeling the impression the Robin makes upon me, is how speech enacts relations with and between bodies, both actual and imagined’ (Bennett, 2019, 100). The very human qualities of speech, therefore, are recoded as a point of encounter with the non-human. For Cobbing, the aspiration to birdsong is connected with a desire to ‘claim a poetry which is musical and abstract; but’, he asks, ‘however hard we try to do so can we escape our intellect? In the poetry of pure sound, yes’ (McCaffery and Nichol, 1978, 39). What is compelling about Bennett’s work is the way in which it brings birdsong from abstraction into human speech and social interactions. It is not a poetry of pure sound and does not escape the intellect; indeed, the sharp humour of her work is only possible because of this. There is nothing new about poetry’s fascination with birdsong, although the ability of Shelley to hear the skylark as ‘unpremeditated art’, or a transcendent form of poetry, is part of a particular Romantic sensibility (1994, 469). In more daily experience, the identification of birdsong through conversational phrases is a well-established ornithological technique, but its inaccuracies are as revealing as what it captures. For 141

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example, the phrase ‘Little bit of bread and no cheese’ to describe a yellowhammer’s song hints at a human context of rural hardship while mimicking the rhythm of the call. However, as Jeremy Mynott observes, ‘since there is rarely any and no in it – it just goes little bit of bread CHEESE’ (2009, 165). What makes the mnemonic memorable, and therefore useful, is the human noise it carries, but even with this distortion it still functions as a means of directing listening and understanding. In Bennett’s ‘De-composed Blackbird’ (2014), the framing constraint is trying to sing along with a blackbird at the same time as Paul McCartney’s ‘Blackbird’; the partial recognition of the song in its fractured form creates not only humour, but also an acknowledgement that the cultural interference of language, for example, in the word ‘blackbird’, as both species name and song title, is part of listening. Bennett’s work turns attention towards birdsong by suggesting new sonic frames in which it might be registered, but as well as attuning listeners to non-human others, it reveals that such listening can only ever be partial. Access to and knowledge of the world is limited by the noise in any expressive relation. In ‘Slideshow Birdshow’, described in the publicity for its 2013 performance as ‘a score for voice and uncooperative slideshow’, Bennett begins a talk about ornithology that is thrown off course by the jagged rhythm of a slideshow featuring out-of-focus, repetitive images of birds. This rhythm is imposed on the speech and the apparently helpless speaker, turning it into a cut-up in which ‘what emerges is a piece of music, like spliced tape running off the spool, out of control, peppered with occasional exclamations or expletives’, as a reviewer notes, and ultimately, in time with the distorted images, ‘Bennett’s trembling voice in perfect and unlikely synch with them, her wordless tones turn into a quivering digital birdsong all of their own, singing from somewhere deep inside the machine’ (Atack, 2013). The attempt to describe the natural world disintegrates into noise, first irrelevance then sharp breaths and particles of speech, as in the recorded extract that can be found online. The effect is to draw attention to the embodiment of the sound at the same time as the technological medium; the jerkiness of rhythm suggests not just tape, as the reviewer suggests, but the quick movements of birds as well as the stutters and breaths that might normally be edited out of a speech recording. The act of speaking is put under pressure in such a way that, in the brokenness of sense, speech can be heard in musical terms. This music, formed from the noise of language, approaches the abstraction described by Cobbing, but it is more usefully understood as a necessary interference in perception of the ‘natural’, which can no longer be romanticised as a pure state, free from human intervention. By bringing birdsong under scrutiny, Bennett changes our habitual sense of the environment’s neutrality, bringing the background into the foreground and showing how fully we are implicated in it. In defending their critical framing of the field recording, Stephen Benson 142

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and Will Montgomery note that ‘the act of framing is itself indigenous to the field recording’, and that the influence of John Cage continues to resonate in an understanding of the frames of ‘composition, performance and reception, and of the social relations inherent in each’ (2018, 15). In ‘Stirrup Notes’, Jonathan Skinner, like Bennett, directs his attention to recorded birdsong, reframing the field recording to articulate a reflexive approach to listening. A notable figure in transatlantic ecopoetics, Skinner weaves together practice and criticism in an essay incorporating poems that, like Bennett’s, attend to the possibilities of translating birdsong. He describes the process of writing ‘Warblers’: ‘field-based poems that follow “limiting factors” cued to the field experience: “listen to the bird’s song, translating its rhythm and pitches”, “acknowledge that warblers are restless, hard to see, and give you a crick in the neck”.’ His understanding of the field is of an audible space that is informed by the visual, as ‘Eye follows ear, close listening with purpose, to a confirming blaze of colour.’ His homophonic translations of birdsong include: Black-and-white Warbler Mniotilta varia scrapes down on Lima pointer’s down on insect toes flicks zebra barks for juices, icies eye sees icy heat sees large gunmetal orca cleans up shady shades

(Skinner, 2018, 253)

Accompanying the poem is a recording of the warblers, with occasional footfall and the distant whoosh of traffic, evoking a space and the human presence in it. If, for Zukofsky, whom he quotes, ignorance of Greek should not be an obstacle to listening to Homer, Skinner’s inability to interpret the birds is a prompt to a more searching listening, inspired by Steven Feld, to the ‘meaning inside speaking’ of inanimate landscapes and the dead. Beginning with mnemonics from bird guides, he discovers in ‘weesa weesa weesa’, the standard transcription, ‘eye sees icy heat’ (Skinner, 2018, 253). The poem does not settle into semantic interpretation; although it hints at the bird’s frame of reference in bark and insects, other details like ‘Lima’ and ‘orca’ prevent naturalisation and hold attention at the level of sound. It is capable of registering, in this way, field recording as an activity that ‘both 143

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connects to and separates from an environment’ (253). Much of Skinner’s piece is concerned with the attitude of listening that he has developed from a process of logging and archiving recordings over seventeen years. He notices that he records sound more often than he listens to recorded sound, even more often than he listens back to his own recordings. ‘Try pointing your field recorder at a tree in spring migration and recording a bird,’ he suggests. ‘They get me to listen without pressing record: the poem itself as recording device’ (254). Skinner’s listening as continuous practice and orientation is influenced by the concept of ‘Deep Listening’ developed by the composer Pauline Oliveros, who describes a series of workshop activities used to intensify aural attention. For her, performance is improvisatory, responsive and enmeshed in the daily experience of listening (Oliveros, 2005, xix). Notations for her pieces draw attention to potential sound, as in ‘Sound Fishes’, which involves ‘[l]istening for what has not yet sounded – like a fisherman waiting for a nibble or a catch’ (Oliveros, 2005, 50). These situational instructions have some similarities with Situationist or Fluxus procedures, but the approach also derives from various forms of Buddhist meditation, practised non-religiously but with a sense of the spiritual context of meditation (Oliveros, 2005, xxxiv). In this context, listening dissolves the distinction between art and life; this too is a concern of Skinner’s essay, in which the notational form of the prose sections integrates the extracts into the continuum of lived experience. Although sharing many of Oliveros’s interests, Skinner is less concerned with the ecstatic moment of performance than with the distancing that enables not only aesthetic awareness but also the clarity of judgement that is an ethical necessity in a time of ecological emergency. Skinner comments on the importance of context to discussion of field recordings and the need for writing to ‘sound more than acoustically, to return data on the dimensions of a relation, spatial or otherwise’ (Skinner, 2018, 266). One of the ways in which his work does this is by stretching temporality to create awareness of aesthetic distance that cannot be caught in immediate sense-impressions. The essay form places different modes of recording – poem and audio recording – in an extended temporal frame, revealing a long process of thought and investigation as well as physical training in the kinds of attention that the microphone makes audible. In responding to the complexity of rhythms in the world, he asks, ‘How can we participate in it and critique our participation, at one and the same time?’ (258). If Bennett’s ‘De-composed Blackbird’ highlights the incongruity in rhythm between birdsong and human song, Skinner’s approach to the blackbird is differently attentive to time: ‘A European blackbird (Turdus merula) sings at the edge of town on a golf course in the English Midlands. I slow the recording down to quarter speed and generate a spectrogram for each vocalisaton’ (259). These spectrograms then become the basis of stanzas, 144

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the visual patterning of the processed recording forming a verbal score within which poetry’s slower time can emerge. A more literal approach to rhythmical differences between humans and birds is explored in Marcus Coates’s installation Dawn Chorus (2007) in which birdsong has been slowed down to a pitch and tempo that humans can sing along to, filmed in ordinary domestic and word settings. The film is then speeded up to make their movements and sound uncannily bird-like. Skinner’s ‘Blackbird Stanzas’ use the expanded time and distance of recording less to explore the sonic affordances of birdsong than to apply pressure to language in the context of ecological urgency: interpreting graphs     who are we to say    YOU are ANimal? mwa’ahahaha we don’t know       we’ll eat you

(Skinner, 2018, 266)

The homophonic translation becomes a way of listening less to birds than the process of listening, and the ways in which sensory self-awareness reveals relations with the other than human world. ‘Does a microphone know how to listen?’ asks Skinner (266). Its hearing is perfect because it does not, as a human body does, need to navigate Serres’s ‘space of messages’ or ‘[orient] itself within noise and meaning’ (Serres, 2008, 141–42). By posing the comparison between ear and microphone, Skinner turns the listening body towards a space of messages in which meaning, value and survival for humans depend on non-human noise. Lullabies: Holly Pester

Holly Pester’s sound poetry emerges from close and critical forms of attention, for example, her Katrina Sequence, in which she listened to HAM radio operators in the disastrous Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast in 2005, and recited the text back into a voice recorder, creating a glitchy, unreliable version of events that reflected the inequalities and unevenness of the Bush government’s response to the situation. More recently, Go to Reception and Ask for Sara in Red Felt Tip (2015), is poetry composed from anecdotes responding to the Women’s Art Library. Her interest in speech and its failures shape a practice that she has described as ‘tragically British’ in its link to surreal comedy, nonsense and folk verse, but also informed by North American influences (Pester, 2012). In this she shares a sensibility with Emma Bennett, with whom she has collaborated. Westerkamp identifies listening as a site for reclamation of time and 145

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resistance to capitalist structures of work. Paying attention to time through listening, she argues, is a means of countering the open-all-hours culture of virtual communication and post-industrial work spaces (Westerkamp, 2015). Pester’s Common Rest goes a step further in contesting the gender inequalities in those structures. It takes the lullaby as its point of departure for a series of improvisational pieces, each created in three hours with a different collaborator, exploring notions of care as affective labour while imagining different forms of ‘rest’ that might create ‘a form of wild latency that puts bodies into a state of being other-to-work’. Pester comments: The sound of lullaby is the cry of reproductive work. The lullaby is the mother’s (the sister’s, the maidservant’s, the nanny’s) work song. Like any shanty or marching chant the rhythms of her body and the tempo of the song – rocking and jigging the baby into slumber – co-ordinate the act of material effort (in the scene of supposedly immaterial labour). Here, as with washing, cooking, loving, sympathizing, comforting and breastfeeding, the woman’s body performs as a resource to soothe and oil the mechanics of capital. This is care work shown for what it is, sweating, muscular movement-task. (Pester, 2016, 114)

This places the lullaby in a particular history of working-class women, whose voices have been submerged and erased by the romanticisation of motherhood. The project forges different and more inclusive patterns of social connectedness through sound. It ends with a playful lullaby with Vera Rodriguez that sounds as though it could be sung to a child, but Rodriguez’s background in sex worker activism offers an alternative context for considering working women’s bodies. The form of the lullaby is radically challenged in the first of the recordings, ‘Shift’, by Pester and Bennett, in which the listener is drawn into a space of layered sound, with voices overlaid at different positions, sometimes very close, sometimes more distant. Words repeated in the background, ‘work’ and ‘shift’ prominent, make a mechanical rhythm that intensifies to a violent choking. In the foreground, louder, the notes of a lullaby are sung as ‘lo’ and ‘la’, along with conversational phrases such as ‘have to deal with’, ‘it’s not nice but it’s OK’ and ‘sorry but I just couldn’t say this’ being audible but fragmented; there is implied address but the addressee remains ambiguous (Pester, 2016a). This piece establishes the space of the lullaby, one that is not private but always mediated by the demands of work and the social; in listening to these crossed lines we hear that no boundary can be drawn around the individual to separate her body from the context of production. This is an embodied feminism that does not try to occupy an imaginary position outside capitalism, but makes demands and reshapes relations by refusing to take the body’s 146

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positioning for granted. This refusal is audible even in the texture of the recording: widespread use of compression and other production techniques in contemporary music accustoms the ear to a smoothness that an untreated vocal doesn’t have; here, the vocal sound is raw and close up, unfinished and spontaneous, yet paradoxically this apparently private and ‘natural’ sound can only be caught through recording. The microphone does not just record, but creates the terms of a subversion that would be impossible without it. In the following piece with Nat Raha, a dense pattern emerges through fractured lines spoken simultaneously. There is a commentary on time (‘one hour’, ‘several hours’), in which ‘day is disruption’, and a discussion of subtle, perhaps unrecognised form of harm in repeated words including ‘fragile’ and ‘tired’. Ululations, caught breath and the background echo of a song, ‘I know you hurry’, build up a continuity of sound between the body and its social context. Elsewhere, there is a sense of friction between the body and the rhythms of work, for example, in ‘Brush’, with Claire Tolan, where words give way to vocal texture, and voice is at the edge of disappearance, where the body is lost in an avalanche of white noise and mechanical process, and what sounds at first like an alarm clock turns out to be vibration of metal against something spinning. Here, as in several of the pieces, close-up breath is used as a sound source, creating a sense of how we hear our own bodies. The snatches of song often have the feel of someone singing to herself, as if heard through the body of the singer rather than through the ear. The sense of privacy is enabled, paradoxically, by a recording process that allows exploration through tentative improvisation, and that captures the feeling of interior, vibrational sound. Body sounds are placed alongside others of less clear origin, as in ‘Nets’, with Vahni Capildeo, which features metronomic ticking, what sounds like the disembowelling of a piano, and a steady heart-like thud. This acousmatic listening, in which the listener struggles to identify sound sources, unsettles the distinction between body and environment, since both are linked in being sound sources that the microphone absorbs with absolute neutrality. At the same time, this does not necessarily mean a loss of affect. The half-sung sounds are comforting, suggesting that a call to revolutionary action need not come through the loud-hailer of public speech (although the treatment of Verity Spott’s voice evokes this, too), but might be a new kind of lived sociality that integrates intimacy and politics. Working on the cusp of signification, this work evokes, on one level, the undecidable space of the disruptive prelinguistic chora, as discussed by Julia Kristeva, but rather than presenting a tension between the sound of the body and the structures of language, it listens to the body as already structured by the logic of work and reproduction (1984, 25–27). In their discussion of women’s experimental poetry, David and Christine Kennedy critique the influence of Kristeva’s analysis of the semiotic as a foundation 147

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for a revolutionary poetics, echoing Peter Middleton’s concern that by positing the non-verbal as the disruptive ‘other’ of language, the existing symbolic order is reinforced, and Toril Moi’s objection that a focus on the unconscious is in conflict with the need for ‘conscious decision-making processes’ that revolutionary action requires (Kennedy and Kennedy, 2013, 42). As they argue, other aspects of Kristeva’s work may be more useful in considering contemporary experimental poetry. Pester and Bennett’s improvisation, attuned to the daily discourses of the work environment, challenges them, in Kristeva’s terms, ‘[b]y listening; by recognizing the unspoken in all discourse, however Revolutionary, by emphasizing at each point whatever remains unsatisfied, repressed, new, eccentric, incomprehensible, that which disturbs the mutual understanding of the established powers’ (Moi, 1986, 156). The mutual understanding in question is erasure of work, which is not seen as work because it is done by women. Listening for the unspoken in an apparently banal phrase like ‘It’s not nice but it’s OK’ reveals not the repressed unconscious but the effort of concealing unequal relations and of resignation to impossible demands (Pester, 2016a). As well as revealing a situation, these pieces, in their collaborative form, enable a collective answering, becoming an exploration of ‘friendship and the reserves of compassion we find there’, as mentioned in the sleeve notes, without resolving the tensions that structure the experience of work. The body does not exist independently of the bodies around it, as Pester’s body as a performer is put into dialogue with others. Ringing through the piece is Silvia Federici’s pronouncement: ‘They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work’ (1975, 1), and her argument that housework (which includes childcare and therefore the singing of lullabies) ‘has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depths of our female character’ (2). Building patterns of phrases, Pester’s collaboration with Jenny Moore has a more song-like structure and vocal style: ‘You might feel your feet multiply / you might lick or suck or clean them / you’ve got a night-time job / you might feel red at work’. It invites the listener to ‘imitate dream logic’ (Pester, 2016a). Dream logic is, however, suffused with the imagery of work and is not an escape from it. Reclaiming it, the song suggests, involves sustaining political energy and rethinking closeness and connectedness beyond the traditional boundaries of the family to include ‘your family at work / your family in the city’. Moore’s contribution evokes the Situationist slogan ‘Sous les pavés, la plage’; through her morphing of ‘I’d like burn something’ into ‘I’d like to burn slowly on a beach’, she uses the play on words to transmute the frustrations of a work environment into a distant space of leisure, but just as the Situationist beaches of Paris are discovered when the paving stones are torn up in protest, so the beach here suggests a reordering rather than acquiescence. While this piece builds into a barely controlled rage, a piercing high note with more 148

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distant shouts, it simultaneously has the feel of an obsessive thought or repeated voice-over. In this respect, it asks what work sounds like in the head, as it is lived in the body. It tunes into language in the body as the babble of inner speech, work as the body’s noise that becomes audible in the box of the recording studio, just as John Cage’s body becomes audible to him in the box of the anechoic chamber. As Serres observes, the domestic space is a box around the body, an ‘orthopaedic sensorium’ that protects it from the world; language is another layer that prevents the body from sensing (2008, 270). Pester’s work reinstates sensing and listening to the body as a means of diagnosing and healing it, not on an individual level but on a social one. This kind of listening is not the kind of mindfulness technique promoted in workplaces, in which the individual is encouraged to take responsibility for her own mental health when her illness or stress may be caused by profit-driven factors at work that are outside her control. As in Sean Bonney’s responses to Rimbaud, Pester’s work both calls for and articulates a critical rethinking of social senses via the embodied practice of listening. Voice as Medium: Tracie Morris

Not a lullaby, but what sounds like the beginning of a story told to children, Tracie Morris’s (2008) ‘Africa(n)’ sounds out the history of race in the USA as the enslaved body and its legacy resounds in the poem. It begins with the half-sung, half-spoken line, ‘It all started when we were brought as slaves from Africa’, and proceeds with a series of repetitions and variations, in the vein of Gertrude Stein, as different parts of the sentence are foregrounded or cut, producing variants such as: ‘It all started when we were Africa’. It is also a virtuoso vocal performance that soars through different pitches, sounding like a recording speeded up and jumping, to create a sense of the body as inhabited by repetition and formed by it. Having reached prominence within the slam tradition, Morris’s work was formed, as Christine Hume writes, by its ‘paradigm of improvisational (re)iteration and autobiographical narrative that gravitate toward themes of cultural and physical abuse’, but has since evolved in experimental, avant-garde contexts in which it challenges ‘reified notions of authenticity and sincerity as well as ready-made loopholes of indeterminacy and alienation’ (2006, 414–15). Although, as is typical of Morris’s sound poetry, ‘Africa(n)’ begins with a quoted line of speech, the reworking and reiteration of the phrase is shaped by the affordances of recording technology. The source phrase indicates a story of origin, but the storytelling is a shifting performance, the story a little different in each iteration. In listening, we hear two stories, one that points back to a shared material history of oppression, and another that emphasises constantly unfolding differences. 149

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The performative construction of black identity is as evident here, as in Glenn Ligon’s (1992) visual treatment of Zora Neale Hurston, which proceeds with a similarly accretive dynamic. As in his work, there is a build-up of noise, in this case not just the glitchy stutter of repetition but the sense in which the history of slavery still makes a noisy intervention in current-day American politics. Kathleen Crown observes that in Morris’s work, ‘“voice” is not the possession of a speaking subject but something that is in possession of the speaker. The audience experiences a voice that is wounded, dismembered, cut up and fragmented’ (Hinton and Hogue, 2001, 219–20). To describe this approach to voice as ‘a medium: a medium of being, a medium of history, and a medium through which language and personhood occurs’, is a perceptive insight into the spiritual and psychological motivations of Morris’s work, which she describes as a ‘harnessing’ of repressed or neglected voices that emerge, sometimes unexpectedly, in the contingency of performance, where, she says, ‘Stuff comes out that I am not prepared to utter.’ The ‘stuff’ that comes out – and ‘stuff’ is an intriguing word choice that hints at the materiality of this process – includes switching languages, often into Yoruba, and working improvisationally with non-linguistic sound and glossolalia, as Morris engages with an African spirituality that she directs to political ends (221). Crown, following Harryette Mullen’s observation of ‘the African diaspora’s aesthetic and therapeutic use of disarticulation for the evocation of spiritual and emotional states of being’ argues that ‘disarticulation in Morris’s work is an ethical poetic method capable of rearticulating lost connections and building a collective sensibility’. This ‘ecstatic method’ draws on the knowledge that is embedded in the sounds of words, and in cultural memory; it is ‘at once “noise” and “voice,” disjunctive and lyrical’ (226). While this is a valuable and astute reading, there is more to say about Crown’s use of the word ‘medium’, which carries the full force of both spiritual and material practices. Technologies of voice and the claim to communicate with spirits have an intertwined history. The repressed voices in Morris’s work include those of the dead, who are part of the collective that, in shaping language, speaks through her, but their ‘speaking through’ also makes her body a medium, in the sense of being an intervening substance through which vibrations pass. Fred Moten’s striking claim, ‘The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist’, points to the important ways in which her work articulates race as a breaking of speech, extending his argument for blackness as necessarily avant-garde. Morris’s performances draw attention to the objecthood that has been forced on black bodies through slavery, in which the person becomes a commodity. As I have discussed in relation to Claudia Rankine, Moten uses Marx’s formulation of the ‘commodity that speaks’ as a means of reclaiming blackness as a 150

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site of resistance through noise: the commodity does not just speak, but screams (Moten, 2003, 11–12). In treating her body as an instrument, as a screaming object, Morris is able to bring a much more powerful critique to a materially situated expression than those working in the slam tradition with its emphasis on identity and ownership of voice. In ‘The Mrs Gets Her Ass Kicked’, Morris examines gender and domesticity in its visceral engagement with domestic violence, but the violence she does to her own body and voice resonates in significant ways with Moten’s account to assert the material presence of the black body, with its power to disrupt. Repeatedly hitting her throat and chest draws attention to the voice as located in the body, and the body as an instrument, a working and sounding vessel as well as a centre of agency. In her 2013 performance of this piece, she introduces it, in an aside to the audience, as inspired by Doris Day: ‘Those movies, those kitten heels, those crinoline skirts that Doris Day’s wearing in her own kitchen, why?’ The rhythm that she sets up by slapping her hand and throat suggests heartbeats, but also creates a texture that suggests the turning of a record; the performance quotes lyrics from the Irving Berlin song ‘Cheek to Cheek’, beginning, ‘Heaven, I’m in Heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak’. The context of Doris Day and her crinolines sets a historical and decorous image of gender oppression against the title, and the performance itself develops this contrast. A deep breath, inflected by the slapping, foregrounds the violence already inherent in the song, the beating heart of anticipation giving way to the fear of assault. The lyrics are deconstructed into cries and broken phrases, familiar fragments of the song like ‘when we’re out together’ turning into ‘ow ow’ and ‘I can hardly speak’ transmuted into sobs, unvoiced screams, then finally screaming and choking, although the screaming is a hushed stage scream rather than a full-throated one. Such is Morris’s technical brilliance that the effect is like hearing both the song and the act of violence from a distance, as if in a neighbouring flat, a situation suggested by the uncomfortably ironic title. Alternatively, it is as though the victim is trying to keep the sound of her distress muted, to avoid attracting attention, forcing herself into the role assigned by the song. In this work the sound of the body is central, but what we hear is an embodiment of voice that takes fully into account its material histories, sounding them as noise and protest against the repurposed lyrics. Posthuman Gender: Hannah Silva

While Morris explores the resonances of the body objectified through its gendered and racial histories, the digital, dance music aesthetic of Hannah Silva’s work brings posthuman gender into dialogue with machines. Silva, 151

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who has a background in choreography, has developed her practice with the close interest in the embodiment of language and the relationship of voice to body, but the body discovered through her work is also fragmented through its relationship with power. Language is material, but so is the body on which it acts. On her album Talk in a Bit, voice is a musical element in a series of compositions, but often less a means of expression than of displacing subjectivity, the speaker discovering, for example, how ‘Writing to someone else’s music I predict my own’ (Silva, 2018). This may be a description of the process of collaboration through which the album was made, but it also describes a relation to the voice as external to the self. As the title suggests, talk comes ‘in bits’, fragmented through dislocated conversations. In ‘Blank’ a vocoder effect substitutes machine for voice, the tone flattened so that when listening it is difficult hard to hold on to sense; there is no intonation through which to catch the contours of meaning so each word is presented as its own moment, which slips away like the changing body to which the lyrics fleetingly refer. Silva (2018) makes the body’s objecthood audible through the prosthetics of digital sound, the track ‘Prosthetics’ placing this process in a militarised context. Looped vocals draw on found material: ‘Amputation is the first step in rehabilitation’; ‘40% of amputees will go back into war’; ‘It’s a positive thing’. The prosthesis in linguistics is a letter or syllable added to a word, and here the vocal fragment is also amputated and dissociated from the body. The malleable formation of the body in relation to power is a constant theme in Silva’s work. Women, in particular, disintegrate in Silva’s poems, whether in ‘New Orleans’, where ‘A woman sings “Yo soy la desintegration”’, or in ‘Puffer Jacket & Sushi’, in which the inside-out wardrobe of ‘A woman in a puffer jacket with a corset on top’ uncovers the demands made on the body of a Berlin prostitute by sex work, as much a struggle against the cold as objectification, the ironic observation of a fractured narrative framing the circumstances through which the body is constructed. The mediation of technology, the means by which voice as a ‘natural’ expression of the body is thrown into question, becomes a means of reflecting on gendered materiality, post-human in Braidotti’s sense of rejecting a humanist bodily perspective in which, in Protagoras’s famous phrase, Man is ‘the measure of all things’ (2013, 13). Serres’s body moving and balancing in its ‘space of messages’ must negotiate the cultural filters that fragment the body – filters that Silva’s work makes sharply audible. In her work with Tomomi Adachi, Silva has collaborated both with him and with artificial intelligence (AI) – in ‘Pluto is a Planet’, sensors on the two performers’ bodies are used to manipulate an AI response to their voices, the collaboration extended to machines whose voices are translated into textural sound poetry, or vice versa. Far from erasing the human body, this performance makes it central to a testing out of relationships with the multiple collaboration of AI (Adachi and Silva, 2018). 152

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Silva’s feminist commitments mean that the question of the posthuman is always framed in bodily terms, although the body’s construction is put into question. Her performance Schlock! draws on descriptions of pain in E.J. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey and the work of Kathy Acker, splicing them together to confront the clichés of erotica via Acker’s terminal cancer as well as her writing and her appropriative collage techniques (Silva, 2014–17). A series of transformations changes the relationships between bodies – a pear becomes a breast, the cancer is a child, while pages from James’s novel are torn out and chewed, as the textual body interacts with the physical one. The decision to present the performance partly in British Sign Language (BSL) further intensifies the role of the body. For a hearing audience it draws attention to the sound that is normally taken for granted, as does the use of disjunctive screened titles. Silva asserts its place as one of the languages of the UK, and describes the process of composition as a form of translation. Aided by Daryl Jackson, she approached the project via the different affordances of English and BSL, as she describes: Learning how sign language differs from English is also a process of learning how to write differently. Learning to see a situation means making it real. Where my spoken text plays with multiple meanings and uses voice as material and language as sound, the sign language had to be located in time and space. Where my spoken language might skip details of character, place and attitude, this is an intrinsic part of sign language. The materiality of the body and face took the role that in my work is usually played by the materiality of the voice. (Silva, 2015)

This distinction between the two languages is revealing. Silva regards them as equally but differently expressive; sign language puts the acting body into a space to be perceived visually, but the sound of a voice is also produced by a body’s movement in space, a fact that habitual understanding and the technologies of recorded sound tend to obscure. For the hearing audience, the use of both languages in the same performance creates a heightened awareness of the activity of listening, defamiliarising voice at the same time as it places it more fully in the body. The performance also invites those of the audience who can hear to consider how its D/deaf members might be listening, an experience that, as a hearing person with no sign language, I am not in a position to describe. However, the act of imagining this reveals the diversity of listening bodies, and the potential to expand listening beyond reliance on the ear.

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Bilingual Performance: Rhys Trimble

Caroline Bergvall describes the position of the bilingual writer as a rejection of the naturalised relationship between body and language. Drawing on the postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak, she contests ‘the nativist myth often given to language belonging, that one’s body is unalterably the shape of one’s first language’, and explores an alternative model of linguistic inhabiting: It is not about having a ‘voice’ (another difficult naturalising concept), it is about siting ‘voice’, locating the spaces and actions through which it becomes possible to be in one’s languages, to stay with languages, to effect one’s speech and work at a point of traffic between them, like a constant transport that takes place in the exchange between one’s body, the air, and the world. (Bergvall, 2009)

The bilingual context of Wales raises particular questions about language, embodiment and identity. Rhys Trimble, who has performed internationally across Europe, India and the United States, explores the tensions of a north Wales locality in ways that have resonances in many similar situations elsewhere. Although bilingual listening, with its code-switching and shifting patterns of attention between languages, is globally the norm rather than the exception, this fact is often forgotten in the Anglophone world. Trimble’s performances are positioned in a unique and previously under-unexplored space between two poetic legacies, one being that of Bob Cobbing’s sound poetry and the British Poetry Revival, and the other the long tradition of Welsh-language poetry that stretches back to the early medieval period and thrives today in the annual cultural festival of the Eisteddfod as well as in its associated culture of local performance events throughout Wales. The bardic tradition (bardd is the Welsh word for ‘poet’) still flourishes but Trimble’s relation to it is complex. The incorporation into his performances of medieval Welsh poetry that he has learned by heart is in an echo of that tradition – but also one characterised by noisy disturbance. Trimble’s bilingual, citational approach is by no means typical of the Welsh-language poetry community, which draws on but also innovates within the historical tradition of cynghanedd, a highly complex system of internal rhyming structures, as described by Mererid Hopwood (2004). The intricacy of these forms and their resistance to normative translation methods isolates them from the influence of English, making them an important site of political and cultural identity for Welsh speakers. Twm Morys is well known for his refusal to have his poems translated into English, citing as a reason not just the damage that would be done in making them as unrecognisable as ‘friends who’ve been in some terrible accident’ (cited in Minhinnick, 2003, xii), but also the impossibility 154

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of translating sound; he has, on occasion, produced English-language cynghanedd as comic, parodic evidence of this (Morys, 2010). The depth of knowledge of Welsh needed to write cynghanedd means that most, although by no means all, of its practitioners are first-language Welsh speakers, and they write for a highly engaged and committed audience of Welsh speakers within and beyond Wales. As a Welsh speaker who grew up in a predominantly English-speaking area of south Wales before moving north, Trimble’s Welsh identity, as well as his language, is hybrid. As a writer, he found his bearings in English, through an internationalist modernism for which there are limited precedents in Wales, although David Jones and Lynette Roberts are among them. The ‘nomadic poetics’ of Pierre Joris and the ‘meddled’ English of Bergvall have more recently provided him with models for multilingual practice (Trimble, 2015), and he has performed his work extensively across Europe as well as in India and Jamaica, taking part in numerous collaborations with other poets and musicians. The Welsh language operates in his work in different ways. In its written form, it may be the use of Welsh words and phrases in a mainly English poem that provides a noisy friction for the non-Welsh speaker, as in The Red Book of Hergest Ward (2018), which collides medieval Welsh legend from the late fourteenth-century Red Book of Hergest with an account of Hergest Unit for psychiatric care in Bangor’s Ysbyty Gwynedd (Gwynedd Hospital). For the reader approaching the text only through English, Welsh is an opacity, alongside other avant-garde textual disruptions, a sounded surface that does not yield semantic clarity but is nevertheless crucial to the poem in locating its milieu. & how do you know if it’s knowingly done – faith, god, GOBAITH & to misunderstand is to know, meinhir altitudinal while stripe blaen-ffrancon dis-chime more cross out syntagm, hail descendants of the vanguard – HENFFYCH!

(Trimble, 2018, 16)

Here, the integration of both languages encourages a focus on listening to a defamiliarised English that is taken out of the context of Englishness. The beginning of this extract seems like a pre-emptive defence against criticism of the text’s often disorientating experimentation, yet it is certainly ‘knowingly done’ in the incorporation of the Welsh word ‘GOBAITH’, or ‘hope’ that follows and echoes in reverse the two monosyllables ‘faith, god’. The suggestion that ‘to misunderstand is to know’ is a rationale for the non-rational sound-based effects of the sequence. ‘Meinhir’ or ‘maen hir’, is a Welsh word that has passed into English as ‘menhir’ for a standing 155

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stone, while Blaen Ffrancon is a place name, but these topographical markers are defamiliarised through the syntactic disruption and ‘dis-chime’ of the English. The powerful colonial overview that is associated with the English language is undermined by the cultural resistance of a landscape known through Welsh. However, this is not a claim for a natural or innate relation between body, landscape and the Welsh language: ‘HENFFYCH’, translated on the previous line by ‘hail’, allows Trimble playfully to adopt the role of a Welsh bard greeting the ‘descendants of the vanguard’, among whom he has just positioned himself through the syntactical disjunctions and dislocations of the text. Performance creates different possibilities for encountering Welsh through the ear. Opening the conference Poetry in Expanded Translation in Bangor in 2018, Trimble based his performance on the apocalyptic thirteenthcentury elegy for the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd by the Anglesey poet Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch, mixing original and translation. As in many of his performances, the rhythm was marked with the pastwn, a staff used to underscore the consonantal patterning. This medieval technique has been reconstructed by Morys, Peter Greenhill and others, reactivating poetry’s earlier relation to song. For Trimble, it takes on a ritual aspect, a marking of the performance space. He comments that ‘performance is quite “holy” for me – a secular sacrament’ (Trimble, 2015). In placing himself outside the orthodoxies of the Welsh tradition, he is able to exploit its sonic potential. The listeners at the conference had encountered the Welsh language, many for the first time, through one of its classic texts, but without the framing that would distance it as a historical object; they may not have realised that it was not one of Trimble’s ‘own’ texts. The ritual aspect is a control of the space and a technique for holding the audience’s attention. In recent readings, Trimble has begun by throwing pages on the ground, then laying out a circle before selecting pages at random. His readings frequently involve him standing on a table, or if no table is available, a chair, and he exploits the oratorical affordances of both Welsh and English, with a volume and intonation that recalls the influence of the chapel tradition. Such a blend of religious and avant-garde context has many earlier precedents, notably Hugo Ball’s Dadaist performance as a ‘magic bishop’ described in ‘Flight Out of Time’ (Rothenberg and Joris, 1995, 293). While drawing on traditional Welsh poetry, Trimble provocatively dislodges its cultural authority by cutting and sampling, whether through selecting texts or, as in some earlier performances, using the loop function on a loudspeaker to create an immersive soundscape with musicians. Such techniques make the Welsh language sonically ‘accessible’ to those who do not speak it, enlarging the spectrum of bilingual Welsh identity to include those with differing levels of competence; listening with partial understanding is part of that spectrum, and part of what sustains the co-existence of languages. Of course, this approach is not 156

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unproblematic, since the concern of many first-language Welsh speakers is not how to sustain bilingual acceptance but how to sustain the depth and range of a language that is losing speakers. In the context of sound poetry, listening to another language without understanding it draws attention to the materiality of the signifier, opening the possibility for multiple interpretations. When that language is under threat, listening to it as noise, however positively one regards noise, runs the risk of dismissing the urgent political desires of its speakers to be heard and understood. Music offers a context in which these contradictions can be resolved, since it allows a listening that does not fully depend on semantic understanding. Trimble also performs with a group, Lolfa Binc, and although his approach is not markedly different from what he does in a poetry reading, the punk/noise aesthetic places such performances in a different Welsh context. He has cited the influence of the Welsh group Datblygu, active from the 1980s, whose drily savage lyrics, delivered by Dave Edwards, satirise the more conservative aspects of Welsh culture from within the Welsh language. Sarah Hill argues, following Barthes, that the sound of Datblygu’s recordings make audible a particular cultural position, in which vocal timbre and recording techniques accentuate Edwards’s ‘separation from his immediate environment. That is to say, his marginality from the Welsh establishment infuses his voice with an undeniable anger’ (Hill, 2017, 158–59). The corresponding sense of aural displacement in Trimble’s work, achieved through textual appropriations as well as vocal effects like the use of a loudspeaker, comes from a different position. Nevertheless, it reflects complex relationships within Welsh culture that are articulated through music as well as poetry, asserting a space for experimentation through its irreverence towards tradition. Hill examines the multiple pressures that have shaped Welsh musical culture during a period when the Welsh language has been ‘the central symbolic power of identity negotiation’, while spoken fluently by roughly one-fifth of the population (2017, 7). Because of this role, important in establishing the autonomous perspective of Wales as a country separate from England, the Welsh language has had to bear the weight of its political and cultural significance in ways that have made certain forms of irony and experimentation difficult: Hill aptly quotes Terry Eagleton’s comment, ‘Cultures struggling for recognition cannot usually afford to be intricate or self-ironizing, and the responsibility for this should be laid at the door of those who suppress them’ (cited in Hill, 2017, 155). For the same reason, the conservation of literary traditions takes on an importance that can inhibit modernist experimentation of the kind that has informed Trimble’s work. However, Datbyglu are now emblematic of a more recent tradition, and their sound is part of the complexity of a culture that encompasses countercultural irony and critique. Trimble’s development as a poet has taken place during what Matthew Jarvis (2017) argues has been a period of comparative confidence in Welsh culture, following the referendum on devolution in 157

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1997 and the subsequent establishing of devolved government. His work contributes to the many different forms of listening that are mobilised in a bilingual context, but it is also noisy and resistant, refusing a naturalised relationship between body, language and cultural identity. If poetry is heard as an expression against a background, whether that background or environment is cultural, formal and aesthetic or physical and spatial, the artifice of poetry creates various types of resistance. In performance, the poem in an unfamiliar language may recede into the background as noise for one listener and not for another, or at one point and not another. When poetry is juxtaposed with environmental or other vocal sound, multiple foci may similarly be created. Bringing the background into the foreground reveals both system and expression as simultaneously natural and constructed. Listening to the productive tension between lyric and noise in writing and performance is a means of opening borders between languages, as well as between human and non-human sound. Sound is, above all, energy; listening brings us back to matter, and the matter that we are. Listening to poetry and poetry’s listening, in the various examples I have discussed, is a means of engaging with the body’s changing relationships and its relational character as well as the forms of ethical and political agency that might emerge as we lend an ear to more than can be contained within habitual frames of language.

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CHAPTER 8

Resounding: Peter Hughes, Jeff Hilson and Tim Atkins

If translation is conventionally imagined as the substitution of one language for another, and therefore a silencing of the source language, the recent poetry translations I will discuss in this chapter foreground a recognition that translation is generative, tending instead to noisy multiplication. Roland Barthes describes textual jouissance in terms of ‘la cohabitation des langages, qui travaillent côte à côte’, ‘the cohabitation of languages [modes of discourse], which work side by side’ (Barthes, 1973, 10, my translation, italics in original). Yet, as Arno Renken points out, this side-by-side cohabiting does not fully account for the pleasure of the text as what Barthes calls a ‘Babel heureuse’, literally, a ‘happy Babel’ – happy in the sense of joyful but also in the sense of happy coincidence. Renken comments that if translation is to be a matter of pleasure, texts do not remain static but: ‘Ils interviennent, interfèrent, semblent se lire lorsque nous les lisons. Ils vivent ensemble,’ which is to say: ‘They intervene, interfere, seem to read each other when we read them. They live together’ (Renken, 2012, 12, my translation). This active interference between texts is particularly evident in multilingual texts like Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, as discussed in Chapter 3, where the languages of source and translation are in constant lively tension. However, the joyful coincidences of translation extend further into intertextual listening that might be imagined in terms of resonance, an amplification of matching frequencies across languages, periods and cultures. The sonnet, the form with which this chapter is largely concerned, is traditionally understood in terms of its sound as a ‘little song’ or, according to John Donne, a ‘pretty room’ a space of bounded resonance created through its formal prosodic structure (Donne, 2004, 26). With the publication in 1964 of The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan (2000), the sonnet’s echoing spaces are multiplied by his incorporation of cut-up, homophonic translation and numerous other techniques of textual replay and reverberation. ‘Is there room in the room that you room in?’ asks a line in the opening poem, 159

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performing its own echo bouncing off the wall while creating a new and substantially roomier kind of sonnet (Berrigan, 2000). It is in this context of poems not just cohabiting but inhabiting one another that I turn to Peter Hughes’s Petrarch versions in Quite Frankly: After Petrarch’s Sonnets (2015), Tim Atkins’s Petrarch Collected (2014) and Jeff Hilson’s In The Assarts (2010) and Latanoprost Variations (2017). A responsive mode of listening in these works informs techniques that use a source text as a basis for improvisation, interpretation or procedural constraints. While some of these might be seen as an approach to composition that relies less on listening than on abstract mathematical pattern, sound is central to the work discussed here, both at a compositional level and in what it has to say about the character and materiality of song. Despite the intensely local reference of some of the poems I will discuss, they extend towards a larger sense of community. They may be read in relation to the contact and sharing implicit in Nancy’s model of the ‘singular plural’: Everything, then, passes between us. This ‘between’, as its name implies, has neither a consistency nor continuity of its own. It does not lead from one to the other; it constitutes no connective tissue, no cement, no bridge. […] From one singular to another, there is contiguity but not continuity. (Nancy, 2000, 5)

Resisting the political fiction of community as fusion, or having a basis in a common point of mythic origin, Nancy emphasises the importance of the literary encounter in which singularities come together to create meaning or sens. He writes that ‘meaning does not consist in the transmission from a speaker to a receiver, but in the simultaneity of (at least) two origins of meaning; that of the saying and that of its resaying’ (Nancy, 2000, 86). Jane Hiddleston comments on this statement: Nancy’s concept of ‘resaying’ resonates with the thinking of Levinas here, and connotes the infinitely open, mobile and protean process of articulation (what Levinas calls the Saying) as opposed to the supposedly intelligible message of the Said (see Levinas 1999). The literary encounter is only ever the articulation of the ‘Saying;’ it is meaning as process or production, arising when singularities meet through reading. (Hiddleston, 2015, 49)

Nancy’s focus on the ‘singular plural’ draws attention to the communities in which translations may be divergent means of resaying, interruptions of the mythical status accrued by canonical texts. Robert Sheppard has drawn productively on the thinking of Levinas in this area to describe an ethical, open and processual poetry of saying, as opposed to a closed poetry of the 160

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said. A poetry of saying, in his terms, ‘responds to the call of, the call to, the Other’, but he cautions that ‘there cannot be a poetry of pure saying; the saying must exist in the said, as a ghost to its host’ (Sheppard, 2005, 13). This hauntedness is further extended by Nancy’s terms, since saying and resaying work in relation to each other to create a continuous process of transformation. Translation imagined as resaying involves the interpersonal performance of saying, but also an overlay of multiplied voices, and therefore noise and interference. Peter Hughes, Petrarch and European Identity

Peter Hughes, currently living in north Wales but until recently based in Norfolk, is a respected UK poet, translator and the publisher of Oystercatcher Press. His Quite Frankly: After Petrarch’s Sonnets is a translation of the 317 sonnets of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, or songbook. The poems in this collection maintain the shape and echo of Petrarch’s sonnets, following a broadly ten-syllable line, but the ‘Frankly’ of the title reveals a convergence with everyday speech as well as the speech-inflected poetics of the New York School, and particularly Frank O’Hara. This might relatedly be considered in relation to entrainment, a term Hughes uses for the title of a more recent collection, A Berlin Entrainment (2019), punningly in that case as it is about trains, but also with an ear to its meaning of bringing one pattern or rhythm into synchronisation with another. Since Petrarch, who wrote most of his poems in Latin, chose the vernacular for his Canzoniere, this amplification of speech rhythms in the translation allows texts to inhabit one another as the rhythms of Petrarch are overlaid with contemporary patterns. Sometimes this is an idiomatic updating, for example, ‘I dí miei piú leggier’ che nessun cervo’ becoming ‘my days speed past faster than a Fiat / Abarth’ (2015, 313). The assonance and alliteration of the line accelerate its ten syllables, only for it to come to an abrupt slowdown on the line break with a modest Italian car that is not popularly famed in British culture for its speed. The contrasts of the source text between the poet’s fleeting life and Laura’s eternal heavenly existence are paralleled in a secular and material clash of temporalities and contexts, the transformation of stag to car creating further intertextual resonances. The choice of a syllabic line, which rarely settles into the more familiar iambic pentameter, also has the flexibility to incorporate varied rhythmical patterns of song, as ‘Abor vittoriosa, triunfale’, which begins ‘you are my sunshine my only sunshine’ (253), where the apostrophe of the source text is transformed into such a familiar line that its tune as well as its rhythm is part of the experience of internal listening. Hearing Hughes read with characteristic deadpan flatness creates a further contrast with this subliminal music. Flickering between dry wit and melancholia, the poems tend to 161

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invite the reader into an apparent intimacy rather than creating visual or syntactical barriers to communication. In this sense, they are not obviously noisy, but in his focus on the sonnet as a sounded medium, Hughes explores the ways in which it resists or complicates transmission. The poems talk about the sonnet as a machine through which the universe is filtered: in 18/134 we read that ‘remote pastel tones of her answering /machine have put me back in a dither’ (Hughes, 2014, 152). The disembodied distance of lyric tradition is placed against everyday experiences of technological displacement, while there is also a suggestion that song emerges from foundational, primordial noise, since the poems are: ‘little songs which seek reconnection / to her & to energy & matter / & sound the agitation of the sky’. A similar logic underlies 9/302, ‘her hair & eyes not only amplified / the sun & stars & river but ran / the universe’s signals of light through / a stunning array of effects pedals’ (Hughes, 2015, 339). As well as using musical imagery to describe sound, the poems also enact frequent tonal shifts, drawing attention to the array of effects that can be created by the sonnet. As in more conventional translations of Petrarch, the title of each poem is taken from the source text, announcing the poem’s status in relation to another language, but given the radically different approach taken by Hughes, this also foregrounds the productive instability of the translated text. The fact that the whole first line is given in Italian sharpens the often bathetic humour of the switch into English; the change in tone between ‘Mille fiate, o dolce mia guerrera’ and cheap chocolates and flowers from a British petrol station, ‘the milk tray / dead Q8 chrysanthemums’ characterises the noisy disjunction of resaying as well as the particular timbre of Hughes’s voice and context. Yet if the figure of Petrarch were simply inhabited by his contemporary counterpart in a kitsch parody of medieval obsession, these would not be the compelling poems that they are. The passage from Italian to English is marked by its resistances. ‘I’ mi soglio accusare ed or mi scuso’ is followed by a comment on the line: from guilt to exculpation in a line thus enabling us to get on the bus & continue with our zig-zag journey round the recycling centres of Norfolk

(Hughes, 2015, 287)

The journey that takes place is not just from Italian to English, or from guilt to exculpation, but from the stateliness of the Petrarchan sonnet to the mundane, the barely noticed – in this case, rubbish. Recycling is what these poems are very much concerned with, and it changes the power dynamic between the canonical source text and the translation. Noise is waste or excess, and the process of recycling suggests a continuous, repetitive process 162

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of transformation in which noise is an element. As well as translating the sonnets of the Canzoniere, the poems are full of references to songs and other poets, as if each repetition of the Petrarchan formula picks up and responds to the background cultural noise that inflects it. The frame of the sonnet becomes a mechanism for recycling not just Petrarch and O’Hara, but numerous other poets, including Sophie Robinson, Sean Bonney, Jeff Hilson, Charles Olson, Tom Raworth, Dante, John James, ‘both Rileys & Ted Berrigan’ (Hughes, 2016, 42). Noise, here, is the sense of several conversations going on at once, accommodated by the form of the post-Berrigan sonnet, so that jumps between contexts create a pattern of interrupted signals. Serres locates noise in the chain of parasitic relationships, giving the example of a telephone call interrupting a party: A given noise, the sound of the conversation in the room, is a noise for the conversation I am having with my interlocutor on the phone, but it is a message for my guests […] I have found a spot where, give or take one vibration, moving a hair’s breadth in either direction causes the noises to become messages and the messages, noises. (Serres, 2007, 67)

This can be the experience of reading one of Hughes’ translations, where one conversation in the room relates to particular axis of twentieth-century transatlantic experimental poetry, while another is very locally English, another relates to music and yet another is happening in Italian, via the first line titles. To hear all of these as message, rather than noise, requires a particular set of cultural co-ordinates. For Serres, the position of the observer is what distinguishes message from noise; listening is a spatial exercise that makes spaces more complex. However, the dynamic expansiveness of the post-Berrigan sonnet allows for the listener’s pleasure in the noisy cross-talk. As the poems take us into the landscape of Norfolk, and the class-inflected dynamics of austerity Britain, they also carry static and interference from elsewhere, the cultural elsewhere of poetry as well as geographical links with Europe and America. The community imagined in the poems is one of multiple and distinct poetic voices, a plurality of singular perspectives. This is a poetry that traverses some of the fault lines that opened up during the 2016 Referendum, a rewriting of a canonical European text that takes it into a particularly English idiom, and one that resists the rarefied tones of high culture through the noise of the brand names that mark out the territory of daily experience; for example, the wine that inspires lyrics is ‘Tesco red’, and if the poet’s thoughts fly to Pisa, it is via easyJet. Rural Norfolk, the poetic avant-garde and consumer capitalism are overlapping territories through which we move as readers or listeners, the juxtapositions 163

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creating much of the poems’ humour. At the same time, locality is opened up; the anglophone emphasis of both the poetry world and rural Norfolk (which voted Leave in the Referendum) is challenged by the inclusion of Italian and the foreignness of the source text. In their ‘resaying’, the poems create a space of encounter between contemporary Englishness and European culture, a ‘singular plural’ position that counters the binaries that have beset British politics. Reflecting on the backdrop of austerity Britain, Sheppard comments that Hughes’s Petrarch is ‘one for our time, a time of generalized, lachrymose gloom. However, Petrarch’s concern for “justice & love”, denied by the hoodwinking of the poor in favour of a distant political establishment, arises enough times to bring us back to recognize Petrarch’s concerns, though they are cruelly stripped of theological consolation’ (2016, 79). The poems’ recognition of song as a material tradition held tenuously together by recycling, repetition and sound effects replaces the more transcendent, Platonic view of song as an approach to the divine with an ironic emphasis on everyday textures of language and culture. The poems’ collisions between song and everyday detritus insist on a grounded and located politics, as in ‘Cara la vita, e dopo lei mi pare’, in which ‘some will rummage through the restaurant bin / because life is dear & the cuts bite deep’, where internal rhyme and alliteration propel the song’s engine through pointed criticism of the government. Repetition intensifies the song-like effect but also sharpens that judgement: ‘some will wear their coats and hats till morning / because taxes are low & fuel is dear’ (252). Petrarch, in Hughes’s rewriting, is a human jukebox, churning out singles that catch and stick in the head to be replayed obsessively, long after the death of their subject, or rather their pretext, Laura. Song and songs travel through Hughes’s sonnets through references to singers and musicians, and as with poets and geographical locations, the proper nouns score out a wide span of cultural co-ordinates, from Dusty Springfield to Bat for Lashes. These encourage a reading of the poems as cover versions, in which we hear a voice inhabiting the song made famous by a different voice, and in which the tension between recognition and newness is part of the appeal. This is an effect to which ‘Quando dal proprio sito si rimove’ refers, as the speaker begins: ‘there are so many versions of Laura / thanks to so many mythical creatures / that when she departs from her native glade / I hum along with the spectacularly dead’. Humming along is a noisy form of listening, one that overlays the legendary narrative of desire with a contrasting jauntiness that deflates its cultural authority by bringing it into juxtaposition with the present. The poem explores the experience of inner voicing so that all the different versions seem to be heard at the same time, as ‘almost everything evaporates / in the misremembered blues of her eyes / as the Scissor Sisters or was it Johnny / Hallyday so very nearly chanted 164

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/ Julie London & Ella Fitzgerald / Eric Dolphy in Europe Volume 2’. The familiarity of the sonnet form, too, echoes with the misremembered blues. If crackle on vinyl reveals the mediality of the record, that of the translated sonnet consists of its intertextuality, the associations that stick in the grooves of citation and repetition as it arrives in the target language. One reference triggers a further association, as in the final line referencing the Scissor Sisters, ‘Laura won’t you just tell Cincinnati’, where there is a subtle echo of Frank O’Hara’s ‘Lana Turner we love you get up’ – but the sonnet itself is a history of interferences and was noisy to begin with. Hughes’s sonnets create a space of multiple, clashing signals; repetition of the pattern is what allows difference to reveal itself, and with it political possibility, as in 6/299, which begins: ‘some of these lines are inappropriate / in the same way that most of us don’t fit / in with the current regimes of our states / which prefer kettling & mainstream fictions’ (Hughes, 2015, 336). The misfit line breaks draw attention to the kinds of resistant thinking made available by the sonnet in translation. The noise of spoken English – made strange and strangely local – asserts a community of differences, a European identity founded on acts of encounter with otherness. Jeff Hilson: The Readable/Unreadable Sonnet

Jeff Hilson, whose early development was shaped by Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum, is an influential figure on the London poetry scene through his energetic hosting of readings, and internationally through his 2008 anthology The Reality Street Book of Sonnets. In it, Hilson refers to Craig Dworkin’s Reading the Illegible (2003), which argues for an understanding of form as signification that is ‘historically contingent and never inherently meaningful or a-priori’ (xix–xx). Hilson’s take on this is that we can usefully reverse the poles of his thesis and suggest that certain forms also become illegible through their very legibility. The sonnet is a case in point. Because it is such a well-known form – its form qua form can after all be taken in at a glance – it is overdetermined and its very recognizability makes it impossible to read. What is needed is a radical defamiliarization of the form. (Hilson, 2008a, 14)

For illegibility one could read noise, which is also a preoccupation of Dworkin’s book. Form, in this context, becomes part of a history of material signification, the form of the sonnet no different in this respect from the form of the pop song, both relating to a historically situated lyric tradition. In making the sonnet readable, Hughes, Hilson and other contemporary poets turn up the volume of temporal resonance, placing lyric expression within a historical continuum. 165

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Hilson (2012) writes of his own 2010 sonnet sequence In The Assarts that it is ‘my most explicit attempt to grapple with, as a British poet, my debt to US poetry’. The sense of voice as simultaneously intimate and multiple is reminiscent of Bernadette Mayer, while Berrigan’s cut-up sonnets are also detectable as an influence. However, the techniques of the second-generation New York School are fully relocated in a British context, and the written aurality of the text reveals that spoken language is inseparable from the power relations that shape place. In their magazine publication in Atkins’s magazine onedit, the poems are titled ‘naïve sonnets’ (Hilson, 2008b). In what sense are they naïve, and why? Some answers emerge in a reading of the first sonnet: And with my ‘whoso’ list as if we are walking in a Norman forest.
 Sometimes I think we all need a little 
 forest glossary so that game might be driven towards us. They fled with my dole hey that’s my share of the countryside!
 Give them thy finger in the forêt de Nancy. Into the countryside 
 with my dole!
 Or let them roam on lonely moats.
 A vast moat beautifies where she is going. Is where she is going far?

(Hilson, 2010, 1)

The performance here is of a voice mishearing language and, through a finely tuned comic irony, revealing the political conditions that create the speaker’s lostness. Thomas Wyatt’s sixteenth-century ‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind’ turns into the ‘Who’s Who’ list of the landowning classes; the textual forest evoked by Wyatt’s sonnet, with its conflation of woman and deer, is one in which both humans and animals are prey for those in power. The diminutive mock-innocence of ‘little / forest glossary’ highlights the extent to which mishearing and misunderstanding an alien language can exclude the powerless, with reference to John Langton’s (2010) glossary from his Forests and Chases in England and Wales, c. 1000 to c. 1850. The word ‘forest’ itself, from the Latin foris (outside), derives from the Norman kings’ exercise of hunting rights in certain areas owned by the crown and outside the law of the land. In this context, to assart (from French essarter), or to make a clearing for arable, was a dangerous act of trespass. The historical relationship in Britain between English and the French spoken by a landowning élite underpins Hilson’s critique of class 166

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power, since a form of translation already takes place within Assarts where its punning turns on the linguistic history of class division within English. ‘Dole’ in its Latinate sense related to the English word ‘dolour’ sounds through numerous sonnets, but ‘dole’ is also cognate through a Germanic origin with ‘deal’ (Langton’s glossary lists it as ‘hurdle stake’) and related to the theme of dividing and ownership of land. Unemployment benefit may be a recent version of this ‘share of the countryside’ but it is just as vulnerable to theft by those in power. The subversive gesture, ‘Give them thy finger’, clashes with the ‘forêt de Nancy’ not just because it is in a different language but because the ‘naïve’ speaker refuses, according to the tactics of the poem, to acknowledge the temporal gap between the benefit claimant and the landscape controlled by medieval aristocracy. The sonorousness of lines 11 and 12 is sharply undercut by the awkward syntax of the lines that follow, as if they are quotation that cannot be assimilated into the voice of the ‘naïve’ speaker. The sonnet is used not to embody a ‘little song’ but to juxtapose song, speech, formality and colloquialism, in violent terms that disrupt the power relations inherent in this aristocratic form. Hilson’s deliberately dispossessed English, sounded against antique francophone legal terminology, Renaissance form and the techniques of American experimentation, foregrounds listening as a located activity in which translation is always taking place. Despite his important work in anthologising the sonnet, Hilson’s work is more often a replaying or remixing of elements than a re-versioning. The 2017 publication of his Latanoprost Variations includes found text that is reworked in various ways. Latanoprost turns out to be a brand of eye drop first discovered, as Hilson’s explanatory text reveals, on a promotional pen for eye drops left under the bed in a shared flat (2017, 57). The collection features a number of longer prose poems with a taste for kitsch, detritus and, like Hughes, the deployment of bathos to devastating effect. The first poem directly addresses the mediation of listening in the twenty-first century in an extended piece based on Spotify recommendations, ‘The Incredible Canterbury Poem’. people who listen to marvin gaye are also listening to perry como since you listened to marvin gaye you might liken this new release by bing crosby if you listened to the kinks heres an album you might not liken if you liken the kinks try the cure if you liken marvin gaye we recommend dean martin you listened to the talking heads check out caravan. (Hilson, 2017, 3)

The ‘people who listen to’ this or that artist are processed into algorithmical data, rather than seen through the tribal identities of popular music as experienced in the past. In the environment parodied in this poem, liking and listening become profitable information in the marketing of music, part 167

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of a currency of monetised attention that overrides not only the community of listenership but also emotional, political or aesthetic responses to the act of listening. It is a piece that Hilson has performed on numerous occasions, often with an air of slight bewilderment in the rush of information. Like so many of his poems, it strikes a deliberately wrong note in ‘liken’, and then strikes it again and again to jolt the language into Hilson’s own off-kilter universe. The poem is apparently about not listening, or at least about the listing that has often accompanied or overtaken listening in the culture of recorded popular music. It catalogues a wide but coherent range of groups and artists that sounds convincingly like the record collection of someone who has explored the further reaches of psychedelia, punk and free improvisation but is not enslaved to any orthodoxy of taste. The progressive rock Canterbury scene of the early 1970s links several but not all of the groups mentioned, including Caravan, Gong, Khan, Hatfield and the North, Matching Mole, The Wilde Flowers, National Health and Pip Pyle. Some of the recommendations are logical, as in the link between the Incredible String Band and Dr Strangely Strange, but the humour of the poem derives partly from collisions between the very different musical worlds it evokes, such as ‘since you listened to throbbing gristle check out simon and garfunkel’, or the juxtaposition of Gang of Four and S Club 7. The playfulness of the names forms another texture, and as the poem develops through its repetitions, patterns of sound begin to link some of them together, as in ‘you listened to the feelies check out the ghoulies’ or in the shift from ‘gong’ to ‘gang of four’ (Hilson, 2017, 4). A musical listening emerges unexpectedly from the algorithmical noise of listing. The poem is followed later in the collection by ‘The Incredible DIY Poem’, which omits all the names, leaving the rest of the structure intact, as if the names of musicians and groups are fully interchangeable, their values flattened. However, for a music fan the ‘The Incredible Canterbury Poem’ is a portrait of listening over time that suggests a particular historical and political trajectory and set of interests – the very opposite of the passive consumption indicated by reference to streamed listening. Gertrude Stein’s 1935 lecture ‘Portraits and Repetition’ is quoted by Hilson as an epigraph: ‘A great many think that they know repetition when they see or hear it but do they’ (Stein, 1998, 292). Her lecture, itself a performance that embodies its ideas in practice, makes the point that repetition will always involve insistence, and different kinds of emphasis – so is not truly repetitive. Looking back at the process of writing portraits, she describes her process in relation to observation, as one would expect, but also ‘talking and listening’, as language is placed in a temporal and sounded context. What she aims to capture is ‘like a cinema picture made up of succession and each moment having its own emphasis that is its own difference and so there was the moving and the existence of each moment 168

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as it was in me’ (Stein, 1998, 308). The passing of time is, in ‘The Incredible Canterbury Poem’, a passing of cultural time as well as the Steinian monologue of Spotify; the repetition of names is part of the emphasis of a life lived through listening to music. The contemporary reworking of sonnets by both Hughes and Hilson is a form of translation, but whereas translation is a spatial metaphor for ‘carrying over’ from one situated language to another, their approach might more accurately be imagined in temporal terms as a rewriting, a non-repetitive repetition-with-difference, or a repetition that carries with it the meaning of the French word répéter, to practise. In the same lecture, Stein states: ‘If you think anything over and over and eventually in connection with it you are going to succeed or fail, succeeding or failing is repetition because you are always succeeding or failing but any two moments of thinking it over is not repetition’ (1998, 306). The description in the lecture of the evolution of her thinking about time reveals Stein’s revisions and changes to her practice, which is mobile and subject to new shifts of emphasis precisely because of its failure, a failure that she deploys deliberately in her re-articulations. If success is the matching of language with a particular moment, it can only be momentary or illusory; the flux of liveliness and attention is what demands continued remaking. The portrait will fail because all representations do, but the movement between failures characterises life, a constant ‘talking and listening’. Matthew Sandler (2017) has observed the pitfalls of celebrating modernist practice as failure. Discussing the influence on Stein of nineteenthcentury self-help manuals, he points out the limits of her idea of failure as a precondition for success, arguing that far from offering an alternative to capitalist norms, the redemptive view of failure is liable to reinscribe them. Samuel Beckett’s famous formulation ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail Better’ in Worstward Ho (1983, 7) has become a motivational motto for entrepreneurial thinking, while the bleakness of the lines that follow it are generally ignored: ‘Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good.’ Sandler is wary of a view of failure that obscures the differences between reasons for failing and masks inequality. It is difficult to separate the ‘failures’ of Stein’s work from the success, and appetite for success, in her professional life. However, in discussing her early life and work, Sandler acknowledges that it resonates with Judith/Jack Halberstam’s notion of queer failure to conform to norms of gender, and that it is only later that it underpins a more individualistic stance and rear-garde politics. The ironies of failure in Hilson’s work, by contrast, resist such recuperation, and, like Stein, he dislodges gendered expectations. ‘The Incredible Canterbury Poem’ is a performance of the failure of a certain kind of masculine authority, which is the ability to recommend lists of music knowledgeably, as observed in Nick Hornby’s (1995) High Fidelity. Suzanne 169

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Moore’s (1995) review of the novel recognised its depiction of ‘[m]en who believe that the only reliable way to glimpse the soul of another is via their record collection’, but Hilson’s poem works against such stereotypes. Here, the vinyl has disappeared, and along with it the highly specific knowledge of a material culture that in turn defines and produces social and political allegiances. Its replacement with the algorithmic knowledge of data is a deliberate glitch, a mis-performance and ironic erasure, not of a soul, but of a collective identity. For certain readers the poem may still trigger tribal recognition, even though the poem is based on its absence. Indeed, some of its comic failure depends on shared knowledge, such as ‘this new release by egg’ when Egg have not released anything since 1974, or the definite article used with intentional clumsiness before the names of Talking Heads and Matching Mole. A reader of another generation might read the poem, or hear it in Hilson’s hilarious performance, as the lostness of a digital non-native in a new landscape. However, the interference of different codes (another way of translating Barthes’ langages) makes audible a series of shifts in what song is and what it does to its listeners. The processual repetition and emphasis of Hilson’s prose poems may seem far removed from the sonnet, but the link between song and sonnet is reconstructed via an understanding of the malleable materiality of both. Just as the sonnet must be defamiliarised in order to be made newly legible, so must song, so that it can be heard once more. Tim Atkins’s Types of Translation

Tim Atkins’s effervescent poetry is likewise indebted to the context of the USA, and he spent a formative period in San Francisco although he has been a dynamic presence in experimental UK poetry for many years. His mapping of techniques for rewriting, categorised as ‘Seven Types of Translation’, is egalitarian and generative, placing the means of production of poetry in the hands of anyone who is open to artistic and linguistic possibility, shifting poetry to a mode of plural engagement. His voluminous Petrarch Collected (2014) sees many of these techniques in action. The sonnet, in his hands, is far from the ‘natural’ channel of human expression that Don Paterson claims it to be: [S]uffice to say that the square of the sonnet exists for reasons which are almost all direct consequences of natural law, physiological and neurological imperatives, and the grain and structure of the language itself. Or to put it another way: if human poetic speech is breath and language is soapy water, sonnets are just the bubbles you get. Sonnets express a characteristic shape of human thought. (Paterson, 2010) 170

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There are several reasons to take issue with this statement, not least the assertion that a European tradition may be equated with ‘human’ expression, or the failure to question the long history of sexual power games of various kinds that may not wholly define the sonnet but is certainly implicated in its history. The noise-free natural whole of the sonnet emerging from the body of the poet contrasts sharply with the narratives of dismemberment observed by the feminist critic Nancy J. Vickers, who equates Petrarch’s ‘scattered rhymes’ with violent exclusion and suppression of the feminine (Vickers, 1981, 265–79). While Paterson’s comment relates to Shakespeare, the pattern had already been set in earlier uses of the form. Nancy’s conception of listening as producing meaning through a sensual apprehension of materiality and multiplied subjectivity helps to clarify what is happening in Atkins’s translations. In Vickers’s view, the possibility of masculine expression is predicated on the silencing and fragmenting of the absent woman. For Atkins, the scattering and fragmentation of the subject liberates the text into an open field of invention, in which the sexual intensity of Petrarch’s oxymorons gives way to the erotic humour of language. A signal is given in the first translation, where ‘quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono’, or ‘when I was in part another man from what I am now’, is translated as ‘The insignificant details of a younger man’s parts’ (Atkins, 2014, 3). Puns and homophonic translation are part of Atkin’s battery of strategies described in ‘Seven Types of Translation’, most of which can be found to some degree exemplified in his Petrarch versions, although the exact process is not always easy to infer (Atkins, 2011). The types of translation are themselves gathered from reading and experience rather than formulated as theoretical models. The first section, ‘Constraints’, includes reference to the OuLiPo, and it is Lescure’s N+7 algorithm combined with dictionary definitions that seems to be at work in poem 312. The list of negations in Petrarch’s source text, ‘Né per sereno ciel ir vaghe stelle, / né per tranquillo mar legni spalmati, / né per campagne cavalieri armati, / né per bei boschi allegre fere et snelle’, already set up a sonic pattern. Part of the pleasure of Atkins’s translation is seeing the mechanism of the transformation whirring and exposed: No lovely small noisy birds with dark shiny feathers that roam through empty pieces of clothing for a woman or girl that hangs from the waist No well-oiled water creature with a shell upon a tranquil person who does sculpture No place where old or injured horses are taken to be killed and their flesh sold in low comfortable chairs with supports for the arms through the part of a cheque ticket etc which can be detached and kept as a record 171

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No swift and frisky tall thin people in charming women especially the women of a family or community considered together (Atkins, 2014, 452)

The reader might guess at ‘starlings’ being seven places on in the dictionary from ‘stars’, or ‘skirt’ coming before ‘sky’, or ‘knackers’ before ‘knights’, but the dictionary definitions present a tantalising riddle as the poem proceeds, and working backwards to find the method is clearly not the point, any more than the point is to read fidelity or otherwise to Petrarch. The flatness of the definitions, such as ‘a person who does sculpture’, presents a tonal contrast to Petrarch’s rhetorical crescendo, refusing the fluency of expression described by Paterson; language will not settle into a coherent whole any more than will the form of the poem or the imagined body of the poet. Atkins listens to the dead, but via the radio and via contemporary understandings of gendered relationships: 285 When the dead speak The radio Mondays Work to make women equal to men Vitamins determine the nature of houses Calling like a bird calls another bird & fights for it When there is too much evidence of love in the concrete It is necessary to go to the poem & erase all the bum notes Reference to livers or legs & then A man shuffles from memory to experience & back again Heaven I wished for vs. heaven received Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory It is possible to be both happy and in trouble Robert Browning bending over the body Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Atkins, 2014, 420)

Listening to the speaking dead is very much the business of Petrarch’s poems, in which Laura is more articulate than in life: ‘Once dead, it should be noted, she can often address her sleeping, disconsolate lover; while she is alive, direct discourse from her is extremely rare,’ Vickers observes (1981, 277). The voice of Petrarch’s sonnets is predicated on the absence of the desired lover. Hughes’s Petrarch preserves the structure of this yearning, while recontextualising and ironising it, but both he and Atkins play on a clash of tones and vocabularies that makes temporal distance audible. As in Stein’s poetics, the 172

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repetition with changed emphasis makes it possible to hear the passing of time, and, with it, a changing political emphasis, particularly with regard to gender. The speech of Atkins’s dead is refracted through the everyday, where in the third line a more egalitarian world seems to beckon. Laura’s ghostly voice is removed from its other-worldliness and placed in the context of radio, birdsong and the sound of the poem from which the ‘bum notes’ have been gleefully multiplied rather than erased. The abstraction of her voice from beyond the grave is replaced with the resounding interference of the material history that the sonnet carries with it, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose contribution to its history adds a counterweight to its predominantly masculine past. Not all readers have responded entirely positively. Reviewing Atkins and Hughes, among others, Peter Riley has objected to what he sees as a vogue for modernising translation in which ‘the effects of bathos are everywhere, for “now” is invariably a more vulgar climate than “then”, or you could say that the elitism of all antique poetry is cancelled in favour of “democratic” aural language (even if only an elite can interpret it)’ (Riley, 2018). Riley’s objection to what he hears as ‘vulgar’ is itself interesting in terms of temporal displacement, as it seems to combine the older sense of ordinary spoken usage with the more recent implication of ribaldry. He is right to identify an interest in aurality, and the way in which these translations shift towards the sound of speech, but what lies behind these strategies is not the kind of popularising impulse that he implies. It is rather that, despite the contribution of many important women writers, the weight of the history of lyric expression to which the sonnet belongs has been connected with the power of a masculine subject and underpinned by the authority of a written tradition that has silenced or excluded other perspectives even as it has obsessively celebrated women. This is, of course, not a new insight, and Bernadette Mayer’s sonnets, published in 1989, made the point with blistering precision. Neither Hughes nor Hilson nor Atkins can write as though her intervention in the sonnet had not left it ringing with the noise of its own contradictions. Riley sees the second New York School as having become ‘a sub-category in Britain’, and Hilson notes Berrigan’s influence on the resurgence of sonnet-writing, but within that line of descent it is Mayer who has most decisively changed the terms on which it is possible to engage with the form. Her best-known opening, ‘You jerk you didn’t call me up’, signals the freshness of a swivelled gender perspective and the deflation of an absence that is reduced to the banality of a missed phone call rather than expanded into the metaphysics of desire. However, as Juliana Spahr argues, Mayer does not simply make a place for women within a boxed-in tradition, but explodes it. She shows how lines from ‘Holding the Thought of Love’ introduce the idea of ‘a bomb or the like’ in order to explode structural conventions of love: ‘Of such a pouring in different directions of love / Love scattered not concentrated love talked about’ (Mayer, 1989, 10). If Petrarch’s rhymes are scattered, it is to underscore 173

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the concentrated nature of his love, and this is what Mayer transforms. According to Spahr, despite constant allusions to the tradition of the sonnet, Mayer’s are not within the box. […] The book as whole serves almost as an encyclopaedia of the sonnet’s possible violations while still remaining a sonnet, examples of Mayer’s statement that while the sonnet is a form that is ‘public and notorious’ it is also a form for innovative thinking. […] Mayer realizes that breaking conventional sexuality’s limitations means bombing to widen the hole of desire and also doing the same to forms. I want to cautiously assert an almost new thing here. Here are sonnets of inclusion; sonnets built multiple, not individual relationships. (Spahr, 1999)

Formal multiplicity is embedded in Mayer’s work, and her ‘Writing Experiments’ are an important precedent for Atkins’s ‘Seven Types of Translation’. The constraints of Atkins’s writing may prevent the effortless transmission described by Paterson, but they also reveal the silences on which it depends. In doing so they proliferate new textual relationships that suggest the possibility of a different set of gendered relations. As a cultural expression, in Hainge’s terms, the sonnet is already noisy as a medium overlaid with cultural and historical resonance (2013). Atkins generates multiple signals within the form until noise overrides the content of the source text poem, but in doing so he creates a new imaginative space that, like Mayer’s poetry, models multiple relationships. The sharing of translation strategies hands the process over to the reader to continue – it is in this sense that the work is democratic rather than it having an easily extractable ‘meaning’, which it often does not. The sonnet, in Atkins’s hands, is a machine that links relations of the past with a future of infinite variation. The mediality of the sonnet is a question of noise in its structural sense, but it is connected with the sound of the poem in several ways. Aurality is key to the contrast that is created when the antique form is evoked in a contemporary context; bathos is created and exploited in the collision of different moods or atmospheres, but it also blurs the distinction between them. In Hughes’s translations the tension is mainly between the historical source text and a contemporary aurality, but this is often filtered through song lyrics. In Atkins’s version there are any number of written sources playing alongside speech, the dictionary definitions being just one example. In the work of Hughes, Hilson and Atkins, these shifts between older literary forms and a speech-based poetics do more than renovate the sonnet or the lyric voice: by replaying, remixing and humming along with source texts, and through their exploration of the poem as a resonating chamber for multiple voices, they register and anticipate the possibility of new forms of community.

174

Conclusion

Because listening is a form of attention not only to language but to all physical phenomena, listening to and through poetry is a means of rethinking continuities between human and non-human environments. The poem’s aurality activates a listening that links imagined, remembered, recorded and live sound, as well as the multiple inferences between them. The insight of Denise Riley’s poetry is to break down these apparent distinctions: the voice in the head or the echo of a remembered song belongs to the same materiality as human breath, a sound wave or a gust of wind. Through listening to its sounded contours, her work locates language outside the self, in the collective. Recognising the human body as a sounding and resounding instrument creates continuities with the dead, and also with the non-human world, through a materialist imagination. Lyric, viewed in this material context, belongs not just to time, for example, via rhyme, but also the movement of collective thinking through history, which it survives as a stubborn artefact. The isolation of sound through recording that enabled the musical concept of the ‘sound object’ also creates a ‘lyric object’ that can be mobilised in a new context. If Riley’s work mobilises the sonic materiality of the lyric poem, Sean Bonney’s poetry deploys noise within a lyric structure to interrogate political relationships, as I have shown with reference to Greg Hainge’s analysis of noise as a relational ontology. It is through this informational view of noise that I have expanded my discussion from listening’s acoustic dimension to the forms of aurality and noise that inhabit Bonney’s reworking of lyric forms, whether folk songs or the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Bonney’s reading of Rimbaud, in which the dérèglement de tous les sens is a challenge to collective reordering of political senses, offers a guide to a politically disruptive listening. Following Michel Serres, for whom noise is the disruptive multiplicity that underlies all systems, I have aimed in this book to find points of connection between its aural, linguistic and political aspects. 175

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In discussing Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, a work that is multi-directional in its use of languages as well as its cross-artform collaborative dimension, I have drawn on the practice of acousmatic listening to explore it as a critical process of locating oneself in social, ecological and political contexts. Here, and in the chapter that follows on Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Carol Watts, the interrelation of the senses, and listening in particular, emerge as the basis of an embodied, situated poetics. For Watts and Berssenbrugge, music is a means of imagining but also testing and investigating perception of the other-than-human world from a necessarily human auditory perspective. An emphasis on listening, as opposed to looking, is for Claudia Rankine a means of countering the extreme exposure or hypervisibility experienced in the face of racism as harmful speech is echoed back. A different approach to echo is found in the work of Vahni Capildeo, which I have read in the context of Édouard Glissant’s échos-monde in order to focus on sonic attention to what bounces back from layers of cultural and linguistic history. Throughout the book, I have pursued connections between music and poetry, but have deliberately avoided discussion of notation on the one hand, and detailed formal or prosodic analysis on the other, in order to focus on other areas of common ground. In examining the poetry of Tom Raworth, I have focused on processes of writing and listening, drawing a comparison with the work of improvising musicians such as Derek Bailey, for whom listening to others and listening intuitively to a whole environment is key to the responsiveness of their work. Sound imposes a temporality on the compositional process, emphasising the role of speed and perception. In its response to shifting awareness of place, I have suggested that Raworth’s work may be understood in terms of the vocabulary developed by Augoyard and Torgue to describe sonic experience, a set of changing phenomena that help to reveal Raworth’s acute attention to sound environments. In discussing the work of Bob Cobbing and Henri Chopin, I have referred to the ways in which sound poetry of the 1960s explored a liberated listening through what Steve McCaffery describes as the ‘secondary orality’ of recording. Yet such a listening, enabled by machines, draws attention back to the capacities of the human body in a range of listening contexts. Serres’s simultaneous emphasis on the centrality of the senses and the space of codes and messages in which the body moves has framed my discussion of various boundaries between language, sound and noise in the work of Emma Bennett, Jonathan Skinner, Holly Pester, Tracie Morris, Hannah Silva and Rhys Trimble. The listening of translation, an underlying theme in much of the book, is the subject of the final chapter, in which I have described the noisy re-versionings of sonnets by Peter Hughes, Jeff Hilson and Tim Atkins, and their work of defamiliarising song so that it can resonate in new relationships. The thinking behind this project has emerged from living and working in 176

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the bilingual context of north Wales, where the sound of a plural language context is not just material but often almost tangible, in ways that are familiar in most of the world if less so in much of the UK. Lending an ear, for speakers of either Welsh or English, means tuning in and out of a certain degree of cross-channel interference that is the basis of civic belonging in a country with two official languages, a plurality strengthened by that of its European identity. During the time of writing, the political unravelling of the UK over Brexit has revealed harsher perspectives, failures of understanding and an increased need for modes of thought and practice that might enable more complex and subtle forms of listening. The poetry about which I have written here is, for this reason, more urgently necessary than ever before. Jean-Luc Nancy’s formulation of listening, to which I have returned at several points in the book, points to listening as a turn, even a straining, towards the other and the unknown. I have argued here for poetry’s active role in creating and articulating such forms of encounter.

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189

Index

Acker, Kathy 153–54 Adachi, Tomomi 152 Adorno, Theodor 14, 46, 59, 62 Ahmed, Sarah 65 American Sign Language 134 Anzieu, Didier 82 Arnold, Matthew 112 Ashbery, John 27 Åström, Paul 3 Atack, Timothy X 142 Atkins, Tim 2–3, 160, 166, 170–74, 176 Petrarch Collected 160, 170–74 Attali, Jacques 45, 111 Augoyard, François 127–29, 131, 176 Ayres, Gillian 30 Bailey, Derek 3, 120, 121, 123–27, 176 Baldwin, James 51, 104 Ball, Hugo 156 Baraki, Amiri 62–63 Barrell, John 125 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 173 Barthes, Roland 15, 77, 106–7, 156, 159 Bat for Lashes 164 Bate, Jonathan 42 Baudelaire, Charles 2, 53–55, 61, 175 ‘La cloche fêlée’ 53–54 Baudrillard, Jean 8 Bayle, François 75 Beckett, Samuel 169 Beltrametti, Franco 124 Benjamin, Walter 4, 25, 46, 49, 68 Bennet, Jane 17, 38 Bennett, Emma 2, 140–46, 148, 176 ‘BirdTalk’ 140–42 Benson, Stephen 142 Bergson, Henri 121 Bergvall, Caroline 2, 64–79, 154, 159, 176 Drift 2, 64–79, 176

190

Berlin, Irving 151 Bernstein, Charles 12, 15, 32, 69, 88–89 Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word 12, 15 Berrigan, Ted 159, 163, 166, 173 Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei 2–3, 80–89, 96, 131–32, 176 ‘Hearing’ 88–89 Hello, The Roses 80, 83­– 88 ‘Black is the colour of my true love’s hair’ 49 Blake, William 54 Bloomfield, Mandy 68, 111 Bök, Christian 17 Bonney, Sean 2, 43–63, 80, 149, 163, 175 Baudelaire in English 43, 53–55 The Commons 46, 47–52 Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud 46, 55–60 Letters Against the Firmament 60–63 Bourgeois, Louise 113–14 Braidotti, Rosi 18, 81, 136–38, 152 Brathwaite, Kamau 111–12, 116 Brautigan, Richard 123 British Poetry Revival 12 British Sign Language 153 Brown, Lee Ann 94–95 Bryars, Gavin 125 Buddhism 89, 143 Bull, Michael 9 Butler, Judith 101 Cage, John 1, 5, 9–10, 89, 149 Capildeo, Vahni 2–3, 98, 100, 107–17, 147, 176 Measures of Expatriation 108–15 Utter 115–17

Index Caravan 168 Cardew, Cornelius 126 The Cascades 25–26 Catherall, Jonathan 71–72 Certeau, Michel de 8 Charpentier, Jacques 120 Chavis, Benjamin Jr 106 Chiasson, Dan 105–6 Chion, Michel 64, 67, 73, 75 Chopin, Henri 18, 138–39, 176 Chow, Rey 49 clairaudience 37, 41 Clare, John 122 Clarke, Eric F. 17, 127 Coates, Marcus 145 Cobbing, Bob 53, 137–38, 140–42, 165, 176 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 83–84, 132 Coltrane, John 2, 62–63 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur 37 Connor, Steven 84 Crown, Kathleen 150 Culler, Jonathan 13, 33, 40 Cutler, Chris 7 cynghanedd 154–55 Dada 5, 43, 44, 156 Dante 65, 163 dark ecology 17, 36 Datblygu 156 Davidson, Ian 50 Davis, Betty 48 Day, Doris 151 Deleuze, Gilles 16–17, 121 DiAngelo, Robin 103 Dickinson, Emily 34, 74, 95 Donne, John 122, 159 Doré, Gustav 65 Douglass, Frederick 101 Dr Strangely Strange 168 Drucker, Johanna 73–74 Duffy, Patricia 81 Duggan, Mark 103 Dworkin, Craig 12–13, 25, 165 Eagleton, Terry 156 Edison, Thomas 5 Edwards, Dave 156 elegy 33, 124, 156 Eshun, Kodwo 86 Eurydice 7

Farrakhan, Louis 106 Federici, Silvia 148 Feld, Steven 6, 143 Fluxus 144 Forensic Oceanography 67–68 Frost, Robert 16 Gander, Forrest 3 Gang of Four 168 Giroud, Michael 138–39 Glennie, Evelyn 134 Glissant, Édouard 3, 102, 109–10, 112, 117, 176 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 41 Gomringer, Eugen 73–74 Gong 168 Graham, W.S. 40–41 Greenhill, Peter 156 Gruffudd, Llywelyn ap 156 Guanyin 89 Hainge, Greg 17, 46–47, 53, 63, 77, 104, 107, 175 Halberstam, Judith/Jack 169 Hammons, David 105 Han, Byung-Chul 11–12, 110 Haraway, Donna 17 Harris, Dylan 43–44, 52 Hartley, David 83 Hartman, Saidiya 101–2 Hatfield and the North 168 Hávamál 70–71 hearing vs listening 15–16, 59, 64, 84–85, 88–89 Heidegger, Martin 15, 19, 78 Heidsieck, Bernard 138 Henry, Pierre 6–7 ‘Henry Lee’ 48 Hiddleston, Jane 160 Hill, Sarah 156 Hilson, Jeff 2–3, 12, 160, 163, 165–70, 173–74, 176 In the Assarts 160, 165–67 Latanoprost Variations 160, 167–70 Hinton, Laura 150 Hogue, Cynthia 150 Homer 143 Hopwood, Mererid 154 Hornby, Nick 169–70 Hosokawa, Shuhei 8

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Index Hubbard, Edward M. 81 Huelsenbeck, Richard 5 Hughes, Peter 2–3, 162–65, 167, 169, 172–74, 176 A Berlin Entrainment 161 Quite Frankly: After Petrarch’s Sonnets 160–65 Huk, Romana 50 Hume, Christine 149 Hurston, Zora Neale 104, 150 Incredible String Band 168 Ingold, Tim 115 Iyengar, Sujata 105 Jackson, Daryl 153 Jackson, Virginia 13, 21 Jaeger, Peter 89 Jakobson, Roman 15 James, E.J. 153 James, John 163 Jameson, Fredric 45–46 Janko, Marcel 5 Janus, Adrienne 15–16, 78–79, 81 Jarvis, Matthew 156 Jones, David 155 Joris, Pierre 5, 155–56 Kane, Brian 17, 75–78 Kane, Daniel 43 Kassabian, Anahid 59 Keats, John 10 Kennedy, Christine 147 Kennedy, David 147 Kepler, Johannes 90–91, 93, 95 Khan 168 Kilbride, Laura 14 Kim, Christine Sun 134–35 Kim, Yugon 89 Kleiner, Mendel 3 Köppel, Thomas 65, 67, 73–74, 78 Kristeva, Julia 147 Krukowski, Damon 9, 10 Kuan Yin see Guanyin Lacan, Jacques 40, 82 Lacy, Steve 123–25 Langton, John 166 Language writing 12 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 23–24, 28, 39–40, 99

192

Leighton, Angela 18–20 Leslie, Esther 54 Levinas, Emmanuel 89, 160 Ligon, Glenn 104, 106–7, 150 Liguoro, Giuseppe de 65 Liquid Traces – The Left-to Die Boat Case 67–68, 70 Lolfa Binc 156 Lucas, John 104 Lynch, David 24 Lyotard, Jean-François 8 lyric 1–3, 6–8, 13–15, 19–20, 22–46, 48–52, 54–55, 60, 62, 70, 81–82, 85, 90, 95–96, 98, 100, 105, 118, 124, 127, 132, 150–52, 157–58, 162–63, 165, 173–75 Mackey, Nathaniel 5, 50–51 ‘Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol’ 5, 50–51 Maresca, Ernest 30 Mark, Alison 82 Marley, Bob 29 Martin, Niall 47–48, 60 Martin, Tom 77 Marx, Karl 2, 55, 99, 150 Matching Mole 168 Mayer, Bernadette 166, 173, 176 McCaffery, Steve 3, 137, 141 McCartney, Paul 142 McGowan, James 54 McLuhan, Marshall 46 McNeilly, Kevin 123–25 Melville, Herman 74 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 30–31, 33, 134 Middleton, Peter 148 Minhinnick, Robert 154 Moi, Toril 148 Moles, Abraham 46 Mongomery, Will 81, 143 Montfort, Nick 74 Moore, Jenny 148 Morris, Tracie 2, 146–48, 149–51 ‘Africa(n)’ 149–50 ‘The Mrs Gets Her Ass Kicked’ 151 Morton, Timothy 18, 36, 38, 83–84, 132 Morys, Twm 154–55 Moten, Fred 99–101, 107, 150–51 Muldoon, Paul 19 Mullen, Harryette 150

Index Murray, Rolland 104 Mynott, Jeremy 142 NATO 67–68 Nancy, Jean-Luc 14–15, 19, 33–34, 64, 68, 71–72, 78, 85–87, 96, 160, 161, 177 National Health 168 Nichol, bp 137, 141 Niedecker, Lorine 93 noise 1­–5, 9–22, 28, 30–32, 38–39, 42–63, 68, 71­–72, 77, 78, 80, 94–96, 98–101, 104–5, 107, 109, 111–13, 119, 132, 135­–38, 142, 145, 147, 149–51, 157–58, 161–63, 165, 168, 171, 173­–76 Notley, Alice 32, 93–94 Nowell-Smith, David 62 Obama, Barack 107 objet sonore see sound object O’Hara, Frank 32, 161 Oliver, Douglas 4 Poetry and Narrative in Performance 4 Oliveros, Pauline 144 Olson, Charles 53, 61, 118, 120, 163 Orpheus 6–7, 30–31 OuLiPo 171 Oystercatcher Press 161 palaeoacoustics 3 Parmar, Sandeep 100 Paterson, Don 170–71 Paulson, William R. 47 Paz, Octavio 6 Penman, Ian 51 Penned in the Margins 67 Perloff, Marjorie 12–13, 25 Pester, Holly 2, 145–48, 176 Common Rest 146–48 Go to Reception and Ask for Sara in Red Felt Tip 145 Katrina Sequence 145 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 161–63, 171 Canzoniere 161–63, 171–74 Philip, M. NourbeSe Zong! 68 Pitney, Gene 25 Poetry in Expanded Translation 107, 156 Pralong, Michèle 65 Prin, Yopie 13, 21

Pop, Iggy 70 Pound, Ezra 69, 89 Protagoras 152 Pyle, Pip 168 Rabelais, François 36 radio 5, 8, 25–26, 28, 55, 119, 145, 172 Raha, Nat 147 Rancière, Jacques 59 Rankine, Claudia 2, 5, 98–107, 116, 150, 176 Citizen: An American Lyric 5, 98–107, 116 Raworth, Tom 2–3, 10, 14, 118–33, 163, 176 Back to Nature 128 ‘El Barco del Abismo’ 121–22 ‘The Blood Thinks, and Pauses’ 130 ‘From Time to Time in the Past’ 128 ‘Letter to Martin Stannard’ 118–22 ‘The Moon Upon the Waters’ 122 ‘Rather a Few Mistakes Than Fucking Boredom’ 129–30 ‘Wedding Day’ 132–33 Redman, Josh 67 Reed, Henry 130 Rees-Jones, Deryn 82 Renken, Arno 159 Retallack, Joan 10 Riley, Denise 2, 14, 22–42, 82, 93, 99, 102–3, 105, 109, 163, 175 ‘Affections of the Ear’ 23 ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History 22, 29, 105 ‘Cardiomyopathy’ 38 ‘The Castalian Spring’ 28 ‘Death makes dead metaphor revive’ 33–37 ‘A gramophone on the subject’ 37 Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect 22 inner speech 23 ‘Lure, 1963’ 30 ‘A misremembered lyric’ 25–28 ‘A Part Song’ 30–33 Say Something Back 22, 30 Selected Poems 22 ‘Still’ 39 Time Lived, Without Its Flow 31, 33­–34, 36

193

Index ‘Under the answering sky’ 41–42 War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother 22 The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony 22 Riley, Peter 24, 38, 163, 173 Rimbaud, Arthur 2, 55–56, 59, 61, 80, 149, 175 ‘Voyelles’ 55–58, 80, 96 Roberts, John, Chief Justice 107 Roberts, Lynette 5–6, 155 Robertson, Lisa 10–11, 50 ‘Disquiet’ 10–11 Robinson, Peter 40 Robinson, Sophie 163 Rodriguez, Vera 145 Rosenberg, Isaac 38 Rothenberg, Jerome 5, 156 Roubaud, Jacques 25 S Club 7 168 Sachs, Curt 126 sampling 7, 52, 156 Sandler, Matthew 168 Saussure, Ferdinand de 99 Scalapino, Leslie 93 Schaeffer, Pierre 6–7, 127 Orphée 53 6 Schafer, R. Murray 10 Schultz, Susan 27–28 Schwitters, Kurt 17 Scipio, Agostino Di 127 Scott, Clive 53 ‘The Seafarer’ 2, 64, 66–67, 69 Selby, Todd 135 Serres, Michel 15, 46, 55, 77, 82, 87, 98, 135–36, 139, 145, 149, 152, 163, 175 Shakespeare, William Othello 105 The Tempest 111 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 83, 141 Sheppard, Robert 18, 55–56, 58, 118–19, 160–61, 164 Sikélianòs, Eleni 94 silence 1, 10, 19, 31, 39, 41, 42, 45, 57, 60, 61, 65, 74, 93, 96, 100, 112, 122 Silliman, Ron 61 Silva, Hannah 2, 151–53, 176 Schlock! 153 Talk in a Bit 152

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Simner, Julia 81 Sinclair, Iain 47–48 Situationism 143, 148 Skinner, Jonathan 2, 143–45, 176 Skoulding, Zoë 5, 11 Smith, Bessie 51 Smith, Mark E. 43 Solomon, Sam 22 song 22–42 song lyrics 2, 7, 22–23, 25–27, 29, 30, 43, 45–46, 48–49, 51, 70, 118, 151–52, 157 sound object 6, 127 The Sound of Music 93 Southwell, Robert 92 Spahr, Juliana 173–74 Spivak, Gayatri 154 Spott, Verity 147 Springfield, Dusty 164 Stannard, Martin 118, 120–22 Stein, Gertrude 149, 168–69 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 7 Strickland, Stephanie 73 synaesthesia 2–3, 41, 55–57, 80–97 Szendy, Peter 24, 30, 126 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 19 Thomas, Dylan 5 Tolan, Claire 147 Toop, David 21 Torgue, Henry 127–29, 131, 176 translation 2–3, 12, 16, 31, 46, 53­–58, 60, 63, 64, 66, 69–71, 73, 82, 85–86, 92–93, 95, 104–5, 107, 110, 112, 116–17, 135, 141, 143, 145, 153–54, 156, 156, 159–63, 165, 167, 169, 170–71, 173–74, 176 Trimble, Rhys 2, 154–57, 176 The Red Book of Hergest Ward 155–57 Trower, Shelley 84–85 Tsur, Reuven 15 Turner, J.M.W. 98 Tuttle, Richard 86–87 The Two Gilberts 27 Tzara, Tristan 5 ‘The Unquiet Grave’ 49 Varèse, Edgard 7 Venuti, Lawrence 69

Index Vicinelli, Patrizia 119 Vickers, Nancy J. 171–72 Vinci, Leonardo da 138 Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan 70 Wagner, Cathy 94 Walkman 8 Wang, Dorothy J. 87–88 Waters, William 101 Watts, Carol 2–3, 80–82, 89–97, 176 Sundog 90–97 Watts, Isaac 33 Westerkamp, Hildegard 11, 145–46 Wetzler, Rachel 106 The Wilde Flowers 168

Wilkinson, John 14, 44 Willey, Steve 60 Wing, Betsy 109 Wishart, Trevor 7 Woodbridge, Richard G. 3 World Soundscape Project 10–11 Wyatt, Thomas 166 Yr Ynad Coch, Gruffudd ab 156 Zach, Ingar 65, 67, 75–77 Zidane, Zinedine 104 Zuckerkandl, Victor 6 Zukofsky, Celia 69, 141 Zukofsky, Louis 69, 141, 143

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