Close listening: poetry and the performed word

401 Pages·1998·26.903 MB·English

by  Bernstein, Charles(Editor)

Close Listening
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Close Listening
POETRY and the
PERFORMED WORD
Edited by Charles Bernstein
NEW YORK OXFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1998
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 1998 by Oxford University Press
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Close listening : poetry and the performed word /
edited by Charles Bernstein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-19-510991-0; ISBN 0-19-510992-9
1. Poetics. 2. American poetry—History and criticism.
3. English poetry—History and criticism. I. Bernstein, Charles,
1950-
PN 1042.C46 1998
808.1—dc21 97-32636
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to David Antin, Clark Coolidge, Eugen
Gomringer, Ana Hatherly, Maurice Lemaitre (through the Bismuth-
Lemaitre Foundation), Jackson Mac Low, Karen Mac Cormack, Maggie
O'Sullivan, Joan Retallack, Sonia Sanchez, and Rosmarie Waldrop for per-
mission to reproduce their work. Thanks also to Georges Borchardt, Inc.,
for permission to quote from W. S. Merwin; to New Directions Publishing
Corporation for permission to quote from Denise Levertov, Susan Howe,
and Gary Snyder; to the University of California Press for permission to
quote from Robert Creeley; and to Wesleyan University Press for permis-
sion to quote from Joan Retallack.
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Contents
Contributors, ix
Introduction, 3
CHARLES BERNSTEIN
I. SOUND'S MEASURES
1 Letter on Sound, 29
SUSAN STEWART
2 The Aural Ellipsis and the Nature of Listening in
Contemporary Poetry, 53
NICK PIOMBINO
3 Praxis: A Political Economy of Noise and Information, 73
BRUCE ANDREWS
4 After Free Verse: The New Nonlinear Poetries, 86
MARJORIE PERLOFF
5 Ether Either, III
SUSAN HOWE
II. PERFORMING WORDS
6 Visual Performance of the Poetic Text, 131
JOHANNA DRUCKER
7 Voice in Extremis, 162
STEVE McCAFFERY
8 Toward a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability, 178
DENNIS TEDLOCK
viii Contents
9 Speech Effects: The Talk as a Genre, 200
BOB PERELMAN
10 Sound Reading, 217
PETER QUARTERMAIN
III. CLOSE HEARINGS/HISTORICAL SETTINGS
11 Understanding the Sound of Not Understanding, 233
JED RASULA
12 The Contemporary Poetry Reading, 262
PETER MIDDLETON
13 Neon Griot: The Functional Role of Poetry Readings in the
Black Arts Movement, 300
LORENZO THOMAS
14 Was That "Different," "Dissident" or "Dissonant"? Poetry
(n) the Public Spear: Slams, Open Readings, and
Dissident Traditions, 32,4
MARIA DAMON
15 Local Vocals: Hawai'i's Pidgin Literature, Performance,
and Postcoloniality, 343
SUSAN ML SCHULTZ
Afterword: Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the
Poetry Reading, 360
RON SILLIMAN
Audio Resources, 379
Bibliography, 385
Contributors
BRUCE ANDREWS lives in New York City, where he performs as Musical Direc-
tor for Sally Silvers & Dancers and teaches political economy at Fordham Uni-
versity. Recent books include Paradise & Method: Poetics & Practice (essays on
poetics from Northwestern) and Ex Why Zee (poems and performance scores
from Roof).
CHARLES BERNSTEIN is the editor of The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public
Policy and, with Brace Andrews, The L=A =N=G = U=A = G=E Book. His
most recent books are Republics of Reality: Poems 1975-1995 and A Poetics. Bernstein
is David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters, Poetics Program, SUNY-Buffalo.
MARIA DAMON teaches literature at the University of Minnesota. She is the author
of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (University of
Minnesota Press, 1993) and a member of the National Writers' Union.
JOHANNA DRUCKER has been publishing her own visual and concrete works
since the early 1970s. Her scholarly work includes The Visible Word: Experimental
Typography and Modern An (1994) and The Alphabetic Labyrinth (1995). Cur-
rently a professor at Yale, she will be joining the faculty at SUNY-Purchase in
the Fall of 1998.
SUSAN HOWE'S most recent books of poems are Frame Structures and The Non-
conformist Memorial. She is the author of two books of essays, The Birth-mark:
Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History and My Emily Dickinson.
Howe is a professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo.
STEVE McCAFFERY is Associate Professor of English, Temple University, and
author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose including North of Inten-
tion: Critical Writings 1974-1936., The Black Debt, and The Cheat of Words. He is
coeditor with Jed Rasula of Imagining Language: Three Millennia of Conjecture
on the Written and Spoken Sign.
PETER MIDDLETON is a poet and a Senior Lecturer in English at the University
of Southampton in the U.K. His most recent book is The Inward Gaze: Mascu-
linity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture (Routledge). He has recently published
articles on Lorine Niedecker and on contemporary British poetry.