interview with steve mccaffery about sound, poetry and philosophy (reprint from poetry is dead magazine. oct 2013)

reprinted from the poetry is dead magazine. the sound issue. october 2013.

1)  In your recent book, The Darkness of the Present (University of Alabama Press. 2012), the development of your ‘parapoetics’ engages with a noise poetic.  You say that “it is not music that poetry hears…but rather sound” (185).  Would you like to elaborate on that?  how does the ‘sound’ ‘that poetry hears’ take precedence over the ‘music’?  does the parapoetic sound that “transform[s] a total unity into multiplicity” effectively challenge the ‘frame’?

 

1. McC: I’ve long subscribed to R. Murray Schafer’s dictum that “noise” is merely “unwanted sound,” (la part maudite in the acoustic regime to steal a phrase from Georges Bataille) and the unwanted frequently results from ideological and cultural-racial bias. However, in the passage you cite I address “sound” not “noise.” The chapter you draw from is “The Instrumental Nightingale,” a historical study of a shift in sensibility in the eighteenth-century poets Thomas Gray and William Collins, from a musical paradigm to one found in insect sound, a shift, you might say, from pleasing harmonics to vibratory noise. I wouldn’t state that I’m proposing a “noise poetic” but the historic shift I note is traced into the Dada sound poem as a revolt, not only against meaning, but against music. Perhaps the shift from musical to entomological sound (specifically buzzing) connects with our current shift from analogue to digital but that’s a claim too large to introduce let alone defend here. It was Murray Schafer, the Canadian composer and soundscape theorist, who first linked insect sound to industrial noise. Noise, of course, enters the Modernist canon with the Futurist Luigi Russollo’s “Art of Noise,” that attempt to broaden the acoustic canon to include contemporary industrial “sound,” or nature’s “unnatural noise.” The difference between the cultural reception of natural noise (e.g. thunder) and man-made noise (e.g. the factory siren) still awaits detailed investigation.

 

To your other question: “does the parapoetic sound that ‘transform[s] a total unity into multiplicity’ effectively challenge the ‘frame’”? I would answer unquestionably yes. However, we need to specify what precisely is the frame and here the frame is aesthetic, specifically a theory of aesthetics which (without going into its multiple enumerations and instantiations) can be traced back to the Aristotelian concept of beauty as the unity between parts. For Aristotle parts exist not as independent entities but as sub-phenomena within the composite phenomenon we call the “whole.” This notion of “part” I think connects to my earlier claim about musical pleasure which involves precisely this accordance to Aristotle’s concept of beauty.

 

 

2)  i like the term ‘event fabric’ (43) that you use to describe what jackson mac low does with language in Words ‘n Ends from Ez.  it sounds like he offers sheet music for an improvised jazz solo.  is that an accurate analogy?

S McC: I’ve had the pleasure of not only reading Mac Low but performing with him. What struck me in the course of the latter (on several occasions) was the curious juxtaposition of theoretical anarchy and freedom, with imposed constraint; it’s a double imperative to introduce both stochastic and systematic elements in performance. This doublet, of course, governed Mac Low’s method of composition by systematic chance, facturing texts via a combination of rule and randomness and in a manner not unlike the effects of constraints in any number of Oulipian works. That relation of order and randomness in itself connects onto thermodynamics and Chaos theory as outlined by James Gleick and Prigogine and Stenghers. Mac Low himself referred to his linguistic units as events. This “event” of words I’ll explain in my response to your next question.

 

3)  is it fair to say the ‘event fabric’ is like a landing pad in a conceptual tesseract?  territorializing from your macro/micro ‘cyber-space’ to micro/macro ‘virtual reality’ and vice versa?

1. McC: I think of it relating more—or equally—to axonometric projection, i.e. a projection by which an object is presented in a skewed direction; such projection also eliminates scale within distance. so that distant and near appear the same. (Put two people of identical height in a room with a sloping floor and the person standing closer to the apex of the diagonal will appear much larger than the person standing at the base.) Axonometry was central to the architectural projects of De Stjil and Bauhaus and, if we treat grammar as an axis that organizes linguistic parts, then it’s application to poetics seems feasible. It’s nascent, for instance, in Gertrude Stein’s attempts to eliminate linguistic hierarchization (the kind that favours nouns and adjectives over articles). Her inspiration in part came from the visual arts, specifically, Cezanne’s particular method of painting in which each stroke was given equal value. Axonometry induces the kind of distortion that isometric projection avoids. MacLow’s seminal friendship with John Cage is well known, as is the fact that it was Mac Low who introduced Cage to systematic chance composition. But if anyone in writing superinduces a cube into a tesseract it’s Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons.

 

As to the term “event fabric,” I believe it less a landing-pad than an escape from the conceptual. Horace Walpole in his Historic Doubts advances the opinion that an event is an outline of a truth; event also conjures up its Heideggerian variant of Ereignis, but I take event to be that which evades immediate conceptual grasp, that which resists assimilation into the conceptual regime of things. Stein sensed the need in her method of description to bracket out of operation all moments of memory and recognition, that type of recognition that would allow us to conceptualize a shiny white surface as a “plate.” As a consequence she produced tremendous textual events. In this respect too the event is not unlike Yves Bonnefoy’s recent poetry and poetic that we find in his The Arrière-pays. For him, concepts are impediments to the direct, unmediated perceptions that register a present. “Event” in this sense is also central to my outlines of a poetics of infancy that I start to develop in The Darkness of the Present: infancy understood as that which evades signification and hence conceptualization. The link between conceptualization and reference lies at the bases of all regimes of representation and Mac Low’s poetry contains a vast component of non-representational poetry.

 

4)  can you hypothesize on what would come from an extensive development of a noise poetic?

1. McC: It depends on the sense in which “noise” is understood. Is it acoustic noise (unwanted sound) or “noise” in a noise/signal relationship? The two will lead to vastly different poetics. Criticism of Mac Low’s work notoriously avoids textual interpretation and tends to focus on discussing Mac Low’s method of composition (its basis in Buddhism and anarchy for example). In my analysis of Mac Low’s Words ‘n Ends from Ez I follow the lead of Umberto Eco and try to apply Information Theory to aesthetic judgment and interpretation. Charles Elwood Shannon founded Information Theory (IT) in 1948 (the same year as Norbert Weiner published is earth-shattering essay “Cybernetics” and two years before Olson’s “Projective Verse” was published). IT treats messages as organized systems whose governing laws are fixed rules of probability. Language itself is an improbable event that establishes its own chain of probabilities (e.g. that an English word with three sequential consonants will be followed by a vowel. Questions of information become questions of communication whenever the relationship of message to a human receiver is considered. But messages are susceptible to unpredictability and disorder, what IT designates as “noise.” In order to guard against disorder messages are wrapped in a surplus of repetitions called “redundancies.” Linguistically speaking fifty percent of communicated language is redundant to the message being communicated. In this light we can consider Words nd Ends from Ez as an organized system governed by fixed laws of probability in which “redundancy” is virtually zero. The message is no more than the single theme name, whose systematic repetition is the sole but constant redundancy. A “noise poetic” in the acoustic sense would be one in which unpredictability is maximized to a degree in which disorganization might end in organization.

5) in regard to mac low’s Words ‘n Ends from Ez, on page forty four of the The Darkness of the Present, you ask what “hermeneutic strategy is available, or even feasible, when we attempt to negotiate the following sample of patterned textual shards ?”  i thought that maybe a double hermeneutic could illustrate the relationship of the text’s interior/exterior relativity as they act like a pair of isomorphic feedback loops through loud speakers.  care to riff off that suggestion?

1. Mc C. Yes, that’s very well put and it would be interesting in those acoustic terms to compare the strategy with the function of isomorphic feedback in the formation of tropical storms; it might lead to a re-evaluation (or better an up-dating) of Olson’s dictum that a poem should be a “high-energy construct” made out of stable patterns within a general context of disorder. I have a poem “The Baker Transformation” in which Shakespeare’s sonnet 109 is subjected to a pattern of chemical kinetics known as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. The sonnet is understood to be a chemically excitable system in which its alphabetic characters correspond to molecules and base alphabet functions as the central attractor. The actual written sonnet ”Oh Never say that I was false of heart … etc.” can thus be understood as a chaotic system with a non-equilibrial distribution of molecules: the readable sonnet. The Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction takes the following form. Where a chance concentration of a specific molecule occurs then this grouping acts as a catalyst to the production of more of the same molecules. As a result the sonnet self-organizes into all its separate letters:

 

OOOOOO

nnnnnnnnn

ccccccc

 

and so on. You might take this as an example of either cross-disciplinary translation or of a noise poetic. But it’s only noise when judged by a semantic paradigm. Deleuze and Guattari were both influenced by the B-Z reaction.

 

 

6) (just curious really):  deleuze wanted noise, wittgenstein wanted silence.  deleuze once called wittgenstein the assassination of philosophy.  how do you consider these two intellects while considering your own work?

 

1. McC.: Both have been important to me, even formative: Wittgenstein earlier in my career as a poet and Deleuze later. I was immediately attracted to the non-discursiveness nature of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, especially his grounding of philosophical solutions in scenarios drawn from the everyday. bp Nichol turned a few of them into short plays or scenarios and I, of course, did my poetic response to the PI in Evoba. I also came to Wittgenstein after my reading of Jan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, a book that argues for the centrality of play and game in human interaction and social stability. So the articulation of that material onto Wittgenstein’s concept of “language games” seemed natural. I was also impressed by Wittgenstein’s use theory of meaning that suggested that philosophy was grounded in pragmatics and the everyday. So it’s somewhat ironical that Deleuze, a continental philosopher hostile to structural linguistics and an ardent proponent of pragmatics should accuse Wittgenstein of the assassination of philosophy. I’m remembering too that interview of Deleuze by Claire Parnet where not only does he accuse Wittgenstein of being an assassin of philosophy, but also conessess to being a philosophical sodomist (he speaks of taking philosophy by the rear). I first encountered Wittgenstein as an undergraduate student at Hull University in England where the Philosophy Department was unrelentingly committed to the belief that Philosophy is neither metaphysics nor ontology, but conceptual analysis and Wittgenstein was extremely appreciated. Deleuze (and Guattari) I discovered in the mid-seventies as a poet living in Toronto through a special issue of Semiotexte devoted to Anti-Oedupus. I met Guattari a couple of times: first in the 1980s at a party in Paris thrown by Julian Blaine where Pierre Joris introduced me to “Felix”. In the 1990 I met Guattari in Quebec City at a Polifonix Festival. He was a good friend with many of the Quebec artists, performers and sound poets of that time who I knew and still know. What impressed me most in Deleuze & Guattari was their insistence on multiplicity and the productive rather than theatrical workings of the unconscious. I’d read lots of Wilhelm Reich and Freud by then (being introduced to Reich’s theory of orgone through bp Nichol) and their ideas seemed fresh and liberating. I took their notion of dynamic ontology (that humans are not beings but becomings) as a fruitful concept in my own poetics that lead to my work The Black Debt and its attempt to develop a writing based on phrase propulsion and the continuous becoming of meaning: a method of composition in which meaning is never settled at but always becoming. I later discovered a similar theory implicit in the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade that I wrote about in “Sade and Modernity.”

race, poetry and protest: a correspondence between toronto poet laureate george elliot clarke and jesse chase

race, protest and poetry: a correspondence between george elliott clarke and jesse chase

in the chapter of your book ‘directions home’ (toronto university press. 2012) does (afro-) caribbean canadian literature exist? In the caribbean? you reference harold head’s statement towards his white canadian readers, “you share our colonial heritage; your (our) liberation is not yet done”. when i read some of our fellow white canadian poets,more specifically lyric poets and their critics whom, on the one hand i admire technically, i find on the other hand that their content often perpetuates a subconsciously white anglophone privilege that inconsequentially governs what the ‘traditional’ canadian poetic is through a systematic downplay of other poetic genres like dialect poetry, or even language poetry. my question is this: do you find there is a lingering imperialist presence in canadian poetry that may be hindering a liberation towards a greater, more expressive and unified, canadian poetic?

GEC: Your great question addresses the fundamentals of Canadian self-hood: We think we are an egalitarian society: Tim Hortons, Don Cherry, avuncular Stephen Harper, and all that.

But we’re not. We’re a monarchy, and that fact has cultural and psychological consequences.  Pick up any Canadian coin and you’ll find a Latin inscription on the right side of the Sovereign’s head: “D.G. Regina”–or “Dei Gratia Regina”–“By the Grace of God, Queen.” This phrase speaks volumes about what Canada is: An elitist, hierarchical society, where, as opposed to the republican spirit of “E Pluribus Unum” (the American motto), only one person–the Queen– is of any real import, a fact repeated on every coin that the Royal Canadian Mint issues and that the Royal Bank of Canada lends or deposits. I emphasize “Royal” here because it is the first fact of the country. Problematically though, monarchy means “ethnic privilege,” automatically, for, only those of the “right” blood, genealogy, “race,” school, class, religion, etc., may inherit the throne.  This fact orients a society to value privilege, elitism, hierarchy, the “right” people, etc.  Canada is this type of society, but quietly so. So some ethnicities are more valued and privileged than others, as are some “races”: John Porter’s Vertical Mosaic (1965) makes this point clearly. (Doubters need look no further than the Idle-No-More protests to realize that white-Anglo/Franco-settler and subsequent immigrant ‘privilege’ vis-a-vis First Nations is a grievous reality in Canada.)

But Canada’s monarchical/hierarchical/elitist orientation also impacts us intellectually and artistically, not only in terms of socio-political organization. So, even though there have been poets–like Wm Henry Drummond and Robert Service–who emphasized popular poetics (balladry, narrative verse, rhyme), or who reached out to everyday persons in the style of U.S. poet Walt Whitman or Scottish bard Robert Burns, these populist, verse movements and traditions have never had, in English Canada, the cachet of academic-oriented, intellectually “difficult,” and experimental/theory-besotted verse, which is our Establishment poetry. So, when America had Allen Ginsberg, Canada had Irving Layton. Both were Jewish; both poets had books introduced by William Carlos Williams. But Ginsberg spoke to and for marginalized, white middle-class (hipster) youth, while Layton spoke to university students.

Ginsberg attacked “Moloch”; Layton attacked professors and prudes. Simply put, the American poet could appeal to a republican tradition of public representation and mass protest, but Layton had to be content to needle WASP poets and WASP critics. Ginsberg could be a symbol of liberation, but Layton symbolized the libertine. There’s a difference….

Fast forward to today: One reason why “Spoken Word” or “Performance” poets have had difficulty in being accepted as ‘legitimate’ poets in English Canada is because, by and large, they don’t represent the “right kind of people,” and are populist in inclination, and also are, occasionally,not only non-intellectual, but anti-intellectual. In other words, to the gatekeepers of the Canuck Academy and the Canon, these marginalized poets cannot represent “royalty”–as does intellectually elitist verse (whether poets themselves are conscious of this idea), but, rather, only a “royal pain” or “royal nuisance.” They are too loud, too outré, too outlandish, too flamboyant, to be acceptable as representing excellence in poetry.

The short answer to your question is, yes: But it’s not imperialism per se that lingers on in our verse, but rather the inheritance of an ethnically-based ‘ethic’ that only academically oriented/’difficult’ poetry can be considered canonical. Nevertheless, to quote Bob Dylan,

“The times they are a-changin’.”

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 2:02 PM

that brings us right into something else i wanted to ask you about: the great black north anthology (2013) that you helped with as an adviser. this anthology brings together some of the most renowned living black canadian poets of the page and the stage. i find reading the great black north challenged my own prejudices when it came to what constitutes poetry. on the basis of aesthetics, could you explain what parameters you take into account when considering poetic value? especially when it comes to establishing the newer stage and performance poetics that counter a lot of the craft and tradition of the written word.

Date: Mon, 13 May 2013 20:03:46 -0400

Dear Jesse:

Tonight I write from Harvard U., where I’ll be teaching for the next year. I have a lot of meetings tomorrow, so I’ll be brief tonight.  In Directions Home, there are three essays that take up the aesthetics of ‘performance’: the articles on Maxine Tynes and Frederick Ward deal with the matter tangentially; but the article on Oni and d’bi young TRIES to look at the matter more thoroughly. I do try to elaborate something of a “poetics” grounded in orality and performance. To be (unfortunately) very brief here, I can say that the aesthetics of “Spoken Word” is to highlight the plasticity of the word–in the mouth, in the lungs, in the air/ears. So, for example, Yeats might write, “That is not a country for old men,” and it’s fine, and it ‘sits’ well on the page. But a Spoken Word artist might say, “THAT is NAAAWWWT a CUN-TREE for Ohhhhhhhld men,” and while he or she is saying it, he or she might also deploy the gestures and intonations and facial expressions of an actor.

What the Spoken Word poet knows that the page-poet has forgotten is, POETRY is meant to be performed. In the Western tradition, it descends from Ancient Greek performances of sagas and plays. EVEN IF a Spoken Word poem LOOKS simple–TOO simple–the only way to know its real power is to read it aloud, for oneself.  Eliot said, “No verse is ‘free’ for a poet who wants to do a good job.” I say, “No poem is ‘good’ UNLESS it can be read aloud.”

Before I forget, I should say: The most important thing about the poet-as-reciter is, he or she has an audience who can respond to the reading, even if it is with criticism. The Spoken Word poet is PUSHED by an audience to excel, for whom every word uttered, matters. But the print poet is limited to the responses of editors and readers—and MAY NEVER improve….

Hope this helps!

–GEC

Mon, May 13, 2013 at 11:46 PM, jesse chase wrote:

i fully acknowledge and respect the need to develop a poetics of performance for the black poet. however, as i refer to your statement of the ethnically-based ethic, the development of this poetic is necessary on one front. but on another front i think to myself in response to this racial affirmation — we’re black, so what? what’s next? in the bring da noise chapter you make reference to marshall mcluhan. are you familiar with his predecessor donald theall and book about james joyce and techno-poetics? it’s of a deconstructionist bend in that it asserts that the written word has primacy over the spoken word. my question is this: what do you have to say about the poetic primacy of the spoken word vs. the written word in light of deconstructionism?

word up jesse

Tue, 14 May 2013 08:57:51

Dear Jesse:

I will say, initially, that Imperialism is long-view; and our responses are circumscribed by our attention to here-and-now issues. In other words, while I agree that the printed word has advantages over the performative I would be loathe to argue that ANY discourse imperils the operations of imperialism. Free jazz did not disrupt the Vietnam War; nor did Hip Hop render the Invasion of Iraq impossible. BUT a clear, realist, political speech–those of King, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, etc.–DID make a difference. In Canada, the famous example is “Speak White,” a poem by Michèle Lalonde, which has seldom been printed. It was broadcast, at a sovereigntist rally, in 1968, and attacked the Anglos as “White Rhodesians” who demanded that Quebecois speak “white”–or English.

The power of the word–printed or spoken–is great, but is greatest when the audience is ready to act on a relatively clear statement of purpose–to oppose Power–which also operates, as every deconstructionist knows, in adept and wily LINGUISTIC codes–along with simple application of brute force–to maintain itself. So, 150 years after American slavery, we’re still

talking FAINTLY about reparations. One can make a similar observation about Idle No More. I wish our First Nations brethren and sistren well. But the only way perhaps to win true economic equality and political parity would be through a sustained campaign of protest PLUS the shaming of Canadian politicians before the United Nations and other world bodies. the “message,” printed or spoken, would need to be as clear as are those three words, “Idle No More.”

–GEC

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 10:28 AM

dear mr. clarke with all due respect sir i am very much speaking of the here and now. the way the creative mind thinks is a most powerful technology, an art that can’t help but expropriate and redistribute imperialist values with all its techno-poetic might.

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 8:40 PM, jesse chase wrote:

we seem to be misunderstanding each other on certain levels. at the base of all my questions and statements i am trying to understand a post-symbolic language by mapping out the epistemological constraints illustrated by the metaphysical realism of afro-judaic symbolism. a universal, hyper-solipsistic program that can then be transposed along race and language [like wayde compton’s pheneticizing but on a strictly psychoanalytical and moral level] hip hop is my prime example of this.

i do believe art can cause social change. and i did understand that you believed this too.

ciao jesse

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:37:42

Dear Jesse Chase:

What I was trying to say earlier IS, ART/LITERATURE is an effective tool for political

change when it is clear enough for an audience to be moved to action. Even so, the power of ART, alone, to bring about long-term political change is circumscribed by the potency of Power itself to re-inscribe its ideological directives. The uncomfortable reality that we RIGHTLY turn away from is, power– or evil–is recalcitrant. It can only be challenged by clear, determined

opposition–and by artists/writers whose political sensibility is clear.

This point is historically true, if terrible to contemplate. Even art that speaks URGENTLY of here and now MUST (?!!) be clear about its agenda IF it is to have political consequence. But ART can be ART for Art’s sake too.

Truly,

GEC

Dear Jesse:

Perhaps the misunderstanding, on my part, is that you are trying to create a new paradigm for black self-hood that rediscovers our inherent mysticism. I’m reminded of Cheik Diop, Yosef ben Jochannin, AND a recent Routledge Press book by Dr. Lassissi Odjo, Between the Lines: Africa in Western Spirituality, Philosophy, and Literary Theory (2012), that draws heavily on Diop, Du Bois, Fanon, etc., to make the point that black writers/writing will NEVER be understood or truly appreciated unless we break away from Eurocentric paradigms for critique, and rediscover NEVER utterly obscured Egyptian and other African-continental belief systems, that people of African heritage still carry with us, in our blood, as it were, even in the diaspora. The argument is compelling, and I feel that it feels similar to your own. In the end, however, it is an appeal to mysticism, which is fine, because even Deconstruction is rooted in mysticism/occultism, as some critics (rightly–in my view) perceive.

We, as Canadians, may not like the history of the last 500 years–slavery, colonialism, segregation, racism–and we should ACT to change it, yes. But we should also recognize that the task of ART is to clarify the facts of oppression,

WHEN it isn’t (simply) to Entertain….

Yours most humbly,

George Elliott Clarke