Idea of North

Download Glenn Gould's Idea of North here. The piece, a documentary produced for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, consists of the voices of five people discussing the Arctic and sub-Arctic "northern third" of Canada.

Rather than presenting the interviews separately, Gould weaves and layers them, inventing and exploring a contrapuntal form derived from the composers Gould studied before he left live performance for studio art. In places, this is not particularly different from today's radio broadcasts, voices drawn, via mixing board, into a dialogue. Elsewhere, voices overlap into polyphony, into a babble from which distinct phrases emerge, are picked up by other voices, echo.

In its documentary relationship to testimony and to place, as well as the polyphony of voices, common ground is shared with Charles Reznikoff, Chris Marker, Charles Olson, Susan Howe, others.

Recorded Language

[A couple of quick thoughts as I listen to Jack Spicer's reading (July 14, 1965) of Language, once broadcast on Susan Howe's Pacifica radio program, and recently made available on PennSound.]

The material that opens the program comes from the Bastille Day talk Spicer gave in Berkeley (reprinted as "California Lecture: Poetry and Politics" in Peter Gizzi's House that Jack Built). Mark Weiss has edited the recording to organize it around the issues Spicer raises with regards to community and society, and the distinction, somewhat provisional and uncertain, that he makes between the two. Weiss' editing of the recording has a further effect: the audience — central to Spicer's concerns in both the discussion and the poems that follow — is effectively erased, except in one instance in which they respond with laughter. Spicer's assertions about audience are stripped of complexity, as lively discussion is reduced to lecture.

— - — - —
The line break that differentiates "No one listens to poetry" from "No / One listens to poetry" in "Thing Language" is sounded, and heavily, but with a flat tone that does not diminish the ambiguity that resides in the latter line, which fluctuates on the page between "No one listens" and its negation, "No — One listens." I've tried, when teaching the poem, or showing others the complexity and thoughtfulness of Spicer's line breaks, to bring this flatness to the second iteration/variation, but am unable to do so. The break, in my own sounding, always punctuates, and the line comes out firmly as the latter iteration, an assertion that one does in fact listen to poetry.

— - — - —
Elsewhere, the poem's voicing resolves ambiguity: Spicer sounds "constructs" in "Constructs / Of the imagination / Of the real canyon and the heart's / Construct" with the accent of the second syllable, as "con-STRUCTS," as verb. On the page, the word fluctuates between syllabic accents, between verb and noun.

— - — - —
Scarcely a section goes by without producing differences between the page and the sounded poem. Most are of little consequence ("compared with" as "compared to"), but the difference, in "The deer / Your heart and guesses, blandly seek water," between printed "blandly" and sounded "blindly" seems deeply significant.

Out of time

In lieu of a real post, I'll just put up a link to Susan Howe's Poetry Programs from Pacifica Radio, recently put online by PennSound. I'm not sure if this is an exhaustive list of broadcasts — could there have been only four?

Patrick Durgin has already recommended the Reznikoff episode, so I'll add that the one featuring Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein is also worth a listen. It consists of both readings and discussion, and has Bernstein providing an excellent explanation of the politics of normative language use.