Crying "UNCLE!"

1.  I spent an inordinate amound of the weekend reading (okay, that's an exageration... becoming frustrated because I could not read) Shannon's “A Mathematical Theory of Communication."  I tried reading it sober.  I tried reading it after a little too much Gnarly Head Cabernet. (An amazing wine for about fifteen bucks a bottle, if you're a wine drinker, but it won't help you with the Shannon one bit.)  I tried reading some of it to my husband, who is himself a scientist, to see if he could help me figure it out.  "I think there are clothes in the dryer that need to be folded, and I'm busy," he said.

Then, this morning, I went downstairs to wish Lori D'Angelo a belated happy birthday.  She wasn't in her office, but Tony was there, half-hidden by the jumble on Lori's desk.  And he, who has a thick math background said something to the effect of, "I don't think this is what it proports to be."

So I came home and I opened it again.  I read around the parts that had previously given me a headache, and I came to the same conclusion.  And so now my question:  Is this art, rather than science (or, more accurately, engineering)?  Because, on closer inspection (and without the Gnarly Head, so it wasn't very pleasant closer inspection), I think maybe it is something of a math poem?   Or perhaps a short story about fictive theories?  

2.  On the other hand, I loved Ron Rice's "A Brief History of Anti-Records and Conceptual Records."  And not just because Adorno made another cameo, though it's always nice to see him in these bit parts.  The litany form here is lovely, although I guess this isn't a workshop class, so maybe nobody cares that I think the essay is lovely.  My question:  So many of these works seem to exist simply to problematize our willingness to accept the validity of recording in general.  Is there, then, a point at which they stop speaking to us as an audience and end up only in conversation with one another?  How dependent is each peice on being part of the larger body of works, and does this dependency require again another idea of recording--an idea that has also something to do with curating?

Sterne and Eluction Lessons...

I am particularly struck with Sterne's discussion of attempts to normalize spoken language as part of the modernist project of equalizing social class.  

I'm going to digress for a moment into personal history.  I took elocution lessons--yes, I know, how pretentious--from the time I was six until I was twelve.  So did nearly all of the upper-middle-class children in my home town at the time.  We spent an hour a week in the studio in Mrs. Page's basement, where we recited bad poetry that we had memorized between lessons.  (I still know too much Emiliy Dickenson, and this ridiculous poem that begins "Henry Horton Humberdickle/Spent a dime and saved a nickel..." as a result.)  There was no hidden agenda here:  our parents were very clear that we went to these lessons so we wouldn't pick up the speech patterns associated with southern West Virginia.  The class distinction between people who spoke heavily accented English, and those who did not, was explicitly acknowledged.  

I find myself particularly aware of this as an English 101 instructor.  It is, largely, my job to teach students to turn their authentic, spoken speech into a more rule-bound, formalized version of English that will allow them to pass the higher-level courses in their individual majors.  Last semester, I could hear certain phrases dropping out of usage as we discussed their grammatical "flaws."  For instance, by the end of last semester, at least two of my students had stopped speaking the very Appalachian phrasing in which the verb "needs" is used instead of construction "needs to be" and the gerund form is applied to the modifier.  (As in, "My dog needs walking," or "this blog post needs revising.")  

So, I suppose my question would be:  What is the value of preserving a way of speaking that acts as a negative social marker for the speaker?  What is the epistimological cost of creating a constructed version of a person's first language and privelaging it above the traditional, spoken version?

Second Question:  Stenre writes, "At the most basic level, sound-reproduction technologies presumed some kind of social network, a cooridination of people an actions over time and space; they were partial machiens that, from the outset, depended on the presence of possibilty of other machines."  This reminded me of Sandy's assertion that, really, in Ong's analysis, things like Facebook would be speech rather than text.  My question is, then, looking over Ong and Sterne both, what is the liminal role that "ephemeral text" plays in briding the gap between the two sorts of language?  And is this ephemeral text--which exists for a longer time than a spoken word, but a shorter time usually than a recorded one--a new thing, or can we find an analogously temporary form of writing elsewhere?

To Still Write A Poem... Instigation on Ethnopoetics

First:  Questions of Barbarism and Poetic Colonization

Theodore Adorno said famously, “To still write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”  I think ethnopoetics must be understood, in part, in the context of Adorno and of Rothenberg’s response to him.  Embedded in his poem Khurbn, Rothenberg answers, “…after Auschwitz, there is only poetry.”  What does it mean for ethnopoetics that it was born, at least in part, as a direct response to the attempt to silent Rothenberg’s own languages, and how does this effect the politics of ethnopoetics?

On the Kelly Writer’s House blog (http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Rothenberg/Signature/Rothenberg-Jerome_and_Morrow-Charles_Signature_02.mp3), I found an interview by Mara Gordon with Rothenberg in which he discusses Khurbn at length.

Q: We've talked a lot about the spectrum of Holocaust art and literature in this class, having read Art Spiegelman's "Maus" earlier in the semester, and our professor Al being "obsessed" (self-described) with various representations of the Holocaust. You've quoted Adorno's famous line about no poetry being possible after Auschwitz; no metaphor, no language (a metaphor in and of itself) is adequate to describe genocide. At the other end of the spectrum is Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List -- an oft-quoted trope in our class to represent "bad" Holocaust art: art that is too authoritative, too confident, too simple. It's almost silly to refer to Schindler's List and Khurbn in the same sentence, but they have more in common than the idea that no art should exist -- can exist -- that refers to the Holocaust. Where do you fall in this debate? What were some of your concerns writing Khurbn (and to a lesser extent, Poland/1931) and how did you approach them as a writer?

 

JR: I'm writing this in Berlin, where the Holocaust still haunts all of the Germans I've been with – even the younger ones – so that gives us a kind of common ground. For me, although it was far away from me while it was happening, the Jewish disaster was very vivid, and the sense of loss was also unavoidable. I think it was a presence behind the push I was feeling into poetry, but it didn't enter directly for close to 25 years after the war, while I felt an unwillingness to claim somebody else's suffering as my own or to tie the question of identity (Jewish or otherwise) to a kind of death cult. In the course of assembling Technicians of the Sacred, however, I began to consider the possibility of writing an ancestral poetry of my own – taking a pass at a form of ethnic writing that I otherwise thought of as degraded. The book that came out of that was Poland/1931, and I wrote it (or thought I did) without a direct reference to "holocaust" but with a sure sense that "holocaust" was the underlying subtext. For this I had to dig pretty deeply – "investigate," to use Ed Sanders' favorite word – to make a fantasy world that had some degree of credibility. I was more interested anyway in the archaeology of the Jewish life than in its destruction, and I wanted not to idealize it but to construct it with a regard for its dark and dangerous side – "the world of Jewish mystics, thieves and madmen" that I've mentioned elsewhere. (A Big Jewish Book from the mid 1970s is an ethnopoetic extension of the same impulse.) That intention was helped along further by an early meeting with Isaac Bashevis Singer and a later one with Paul Celan. The conversation with Singer raised the issue of cruelty – rhyming at the time with what we were reading in Artaud – and let me push forward a sense of the absurd / comic / demonic that was waiting to come to surface. For this I needed a further range of investigations to bring the reality – the fantasy – to light and to allow other voices to speak or (if that were possible) to drown out my own.

 

A central question for me, as for Lindsay, has been about the ways in which much of Rothenberg’s work could be seen as appropriation.  In this interview, he says, “…I felt an unwillingness to claim somebody else's suffering as my own…”  This seems, in some ways, in opposition to his willingness to claim other’s words as his own, and to rework them to his own purposes.  (See Linsday’s blog on his “translations” of Native American poetries.)

I have come to believe that there IS a saving impulse in Rothenberg’s work; a working toward something admirable that forces the risk of appropriation in an attempt to rid poetry of the silencing insistence that the poet may only speak in a voice to which he has been granted access by virtue of his identity. 

In Rothenberg’s 1994 talk, “Ethnopoetics at the Millenium” ( http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/rothenberg/ethnopoetics.html ), he warns, “…as that time unfolds, we see again the dark side of that strange force I used to speak about as ethnos - the side that shows up (in Bosnia, Rwanda, elsewhere) in a terrible conjunction with the nation-state, erupting into ethnic violence & hatred. I would therefore be wary - & hope you will be too - of the politics of ethnic exclusivity, to insure thereby that our ethnopoetics will not stop with a useful but centrifugal multiculturalism but will push (again) toward anintercultural (centripetal) future.” 

I’m going to steal the first line of Professor Dennis Tedlock’s syllabus (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/tedlock/syllabi/ethnopoetics.html ).  “Ethnopoetics is a decentered poetics, an attempt to hear and read the poetries of distant others, outside the Western tradition as we know it now.”  If we consider this definition, and pay attention to Rothenberg’s own warnings about ethnos, I think an argument can be made that Rothenberg is accessing, rather than appropriating, and that this accessing is an act of both including and preserving.  I think it even likely that there is a distinction in his praxis between cultural imperialism and a very dismodern sense of the radical interdependency of all peoples.

Is it possible for an act that would clearly be recognized as colonizing—such as the “translation” of the poetry of an oppressed people by a person in the dominant culture that, among other things, made changes intended to create a work more pleasing to the esthetics of that culture—can be rescued from being an act of aggression or colonization by the theory behind it? 

Listening for this question:

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Rothenberg/Signature/Rothenberg-Jerome_and_Morrow-Charles_Signature_02.mp3

Two:  Endangered Languages, Translation, and Yiddish Poetry

Perhaps because so much of Rothenberg's poetry is accompanied by Klezmer music, or perhaps just because it is a personal interest of mine, I found my reading of A Declaration of Poetic Rights and Values heavily colored by my surprise at the centrality of, and reliance upon, a specific sort of translation in Ubu web's collection on ethnopoetics curated by Rothenberg himself.

I was surprised, having read the theoretical texts first, to find that Rothenberg's poetry is largely devoid of Yiddish in spite of the fact that he includes many other conventions of post-Shoah Jewish literature.  And, while it's true that Yiddish makes some very brief cameos in some of his work (particularly in the title of Khurbn), I found myself asking, "Where is this endangered language, and how does its ommission speak to the Poetic Rights and Values?

In the section entitled "Signifagance of Translation," the authors make the very interesting assertion:  

Translating certain poetries from lesser-spoken or stateless languages and dialects into more dominant languages has been important because it has given poets who desire it a chance to have their work more widely read. On the other hand, if performed with care, it can also be extremely important to translate poetry written in dominant languages like English, Spanish, or Mandarin, into lesser-spoken tongues like Navajo, Ki’che, or Tibetan. While people all over the world begin to have increasingly more access to one another’s cultural traditions through travel and media, poetry may also find a significant role in helping to share worldviews and lifeways between many different language communities.

It seems to me that something key is missing here.  The authors talk about the role of existing works--in both their original languages and in translation--in the creation of shared world views.  What they fail to discuss, and seems to me of great importance, is the role of new work written in endangered languages.  

I'm surprised to see that Yiddish is not on their list of endangered languages.  It is, in fact, a language kept alive primarily by the insistance of Jewish poets, writers, playwrites, and musicians.  Born of a very specific time and place, it no longer functions as a first language in the way it did in pre-Shoah Europe.  Other languages, notably Gaelic, which have been simlilarly displaces as primary languages also continue mostly as a language of the literature of identity:  these languages allow for the expression of ideas unique to the cultures in which they are (or were) spoken, and permit a sort of linguistic subversion within the dominant culture whose language has subsumed them.

What does it mean, then, that ethnopoetics seems so comfortable with translation and puts so little emphasis on the creation of new poetry (and other literary forms) to be the agent of perservation for endangered languages?

The listening for this section is by the Yiddish poet, Itzak Manger.  Here, I link to the page containing both the sound file for his reading of oyf der stantsye Kolomey and to the translation, transliteration, and original text of the poem.  The authors of A Declaration of Poetic Rights and Values deal with the related issue of translating work that also includes some ceremonial or musical component, but they don't touch on the act of transliteration itself.  How does the recreation of the sound of a poem--perhaps, even, the creation of a "sound poem" version of a the original?--differ from translation?  What does it add to have both?  Why is transliteration so conspicuously absent from the conversation?

Listening (and looking):

http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/czernowitz-voices-manger.htm

True Protagonists

In his Manifest of Polypoetry, Minarelli asserts,  "Only the development of the new technologies will mark the progress of sound poetry : the electronic media and the computer are and will be the true protagonists."  I am struck mostly by how this utterly removes the poet from being the heroic creator of his own poems.  (And I'm willing to say that some of the works we saw/listened to for this week seemed a little less than heroic, but I've asked my computer and it has said that no, it does not wish to be held accountable.)  It also removes the human agents behind the creation and manipuation of computers and electronic media, which may be even more troubling.

If the the medium is no longer the message, but the messenger, where does that leave the concept of authorship?

There was, in late 1990s Manhattan, a little-known polytonal poet whose nom de plum (is that the right term, if there was never in fact a plum involved at all?) was Yap Yap Motherfucker Shit.  (I Googled her.  She seems to have sunk into such obscurity that nothing came up.)  She performed only improved poems, and her creative process worked thusly:

• Yap Yap was a person with Tourette  Syndrome whose symptoms became more and more pronounced when she was nervous (as when standing in front of a crowd).  So she only composed spontaneous poems that grew out of her nervousness as she stood on stage, waiting for something to come.
• Her poems were a mixture of purely aural exhortations and words that, in other situatoins, signified but as a sympton of her illness, did not.  
• Her performances lasted as long as her tics held out, and then were over.  They were never recorded and, of course, never repeated.
• As I said, she wasn't very good at attracting audiences... she was my neighbor, so I felt obliged to go to at least a few of her shows, which were usually at really sketchy Alphabet City bars and you could tell she'd been booked just because someone had thought it would be funny.  The audience was often boisterously unkind, which increased her nervousness, which in turn increased the duration and vehemence of the tic-speech.  

So, then, looking at Tourette Syndrome as, in a way, related to what Minarelli says about electronic media, I'd like to ask the following questions:

• Who authored Yap Yap's poems?  Did she?  Did Tourette Syndrome?  Did the audience, whose reaction directly shaped the utterances and duration of the performance?  Who would be the "protagonist" in this kind of polytonal poetry, and is it even really polytonal poetry?  Is Yap Yap the arbiter of that, or is it for someone else to say?

2.  Glassolalia... I am confused by this piece.  If I understand it correctly, this is a collection of hymns and examples of glassolalia (speaking in tongues) recorded, but not generated by, the poet.  If this is true, if these are recorded rather than generated texts, this further troubles the issue of authority and--I think even more--also troubles the line between art and exploitation.