Polypoetry 30 years 1987 – 2017 E-Book

Enzo Minarelli

• Herausgeber: EDUEL
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 387

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

This book aims to draw maps about Polypoetry manifestations around Europe and Americas. It gathers scholars and artists who dedicated their work for understanding the avant-garde expressions in print, sound, and visual languages, as well as to demonstrate how the experimentalism affects the world in a political and aesthetical perspective. In order to put different ideas in a framework, the first part of this book ("European Maps of Polypoetry") brings a debate about the space of Polypoetry in relationship with other avant-garde manifestations. The second one ("Intertwining voices") drives our attention to the Americas, focusing on how visual and digital poetry, music, and festivals embraced Polypoetry ideas, in a way to build a broaden art network between Europe and the Americas.

Leseprobe

Reitor

Sérgio Carlos de Carvalho

Vice-Reitor

Décio Sabbatini Barbosa

Editora da Universidade Estadual de Londrina

Diretor

Luiz Carlos Migliozzi Ferreira de Mello

Conselho Editorial

Luiz Carlos Migliozzi Ferreira de Mello

Abdallah Achour Junior

Daniela Braga Paiano

Edison Archela

Efraim Rodrigues

Ester Massae Okamoto Dalla

José Marcelo Domingues Torez

Luiz Carlos Migliozzi Ferreira de Mello (Presidente)

Maria Luiza Fava Grassiotto

Otávio Goes de Andrade

Rosane Fonseca de Freias Martins

A Eduel é afiliada à

Catalogação elaborada pela Divisão de Processos Técnicos da Biblioteca Central da Universidade Estadual de Londrina

Dados Internacionais de Catalogação-na-Publicação (CIP)

Bibliotecária: Marlova Santurio David – CRB-9/1107

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M663p Minarelli, Enzo, 1951-

Polypoetry 30 years 1987-2017 [livro eletrônico] / Enzo Minarelli, Frederico Fernandes; [revisão técnica] Tamer Thobet. – Londrina : Eduel, 2018.

1 Livro digital : il.

Vários colaboradores.

Inclui bibliografia.

Disponível em: http://www.eduel.com.br

ISBN 978-85-7216-979-0

1. Polipoesia – História. 2. Poesia sonora internacional – História. 3. Performance. 4. Multimídia (Arte) I. Fer¬nan¬de¬s, Frederico. II. Título.

CDU 82-1.09

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I, personally, would prefer the chaos and disorder which each of us would strive to master, in terms of his own ingenuousness, to the order imposed by the Word which everybody uses indiscriminately, always for the benefit of a capitol, of a church, of a socialism, etc....

Henri Chopin

In: Why I Am The Author of Sound Poetry and Free Poetry (1967)

Sumário

INTRODUCTION

PRELUDE

TURNER’S TURN OF PHRASE

Rod Summers

PART I

EUROPEAN MAPS OF POLYPOETRY

VOICE AND METHOD IN POLYPOETRY:FROM LETTRISM TO SOUND POETRY, FROM INTERMEDIA TO POLYPOETRY

Enzo Minarelli

THE AVANT-GARDE CONDITION,POLYPOETRY AND AUTHOR-FUNCTION

Frederico Fernandes

POLYPOETRY IN BARCELONA (1987-2017)

Lis Costa

STAGE AND TAPE POETRY IN FRANCE IN THE LAST DECADES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: A MEDIOPOETIC APPROACH

Jean-Pierre Bobillot

PART II

INTERTWINING VOICES

INTERTWINING VOICES: POLYPOETRY IN AMERICAS NOTES ON EXPERIMENTAL POETRY IN LATIN AMERICA

Clemente Padín

THE INTERNATIONAL BIENNIALS OF VISUAL-EXPERIMENTAL POETRY IN MEXICO AND SOUND POETRY

César Espinosa

SEARCHING THE PATHS OF SOUND POETRY IN ARGENTINA

Alan Courtis

AN INTRICATE ROAD: FROM CONCRETE TO NETWORK VIA DIGITAL POETRY IN THE ARGENTINEAN FORKING PATHS

Fabio Doctorovich

RADICAL ORALITY: VOICE, TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICS IN PERU

Luis Alvarado

A POLYPOETICAL COLLISION: TEXT-SOUND COMPOSITION, MINIMAL AND POSTMINIMAL MUSIC, ROCK AND JAZZ

Dean Suzuki

INTRODUCTION

What does Polypoetry mean after 30 years? This question could be answered in different ways: Polypoetry means the turning point of digital language into avant-garde arts. Polypoetry means the art that vibes the sound and melts the logic of the word, attesting the vivacity of voice, the presence of a body by the gesture, and the visual motion from the projection of successive images during a performance. Polypoetry means a way to do art, and a way to be poetry, thus emancipating people in society by the reflexive, innovative use of language. Polypoetry is the presence of poetry that effects. That is why its Manifesto published in Valencia, Spain in 1987, remains actual.

When the term of Polypoetry was first coined in the early eighties, years before the official issue of the homonymous Manifesto, the same that Minarelli could not expect it to last for such a long time. The typical eagerness of the poetical colleagues unable to admit the goodness of ideas coming from others, or the incapability of elaborating themselves a theory for what they were practising. There was a double aspect that could prevent the concept of Polypoetry from being widespread. To say the truth, this was what exactly Minarelli wanted to provide everybody, a theory, an agile instrument that could allow all the poets to face rationally and consciously a live performance without any risk of being mixed with other disciplines, or worse, of being misunderstood. Along the eighties the concept started to move its first steps but just along the nineties it was able to reach a steady and large success due to both the consequent practice of many poets soon transformed into polypoets and the official approval of some well-known critics at the international level. Then festivals, records, books, catalogues, reviews, workshop, CD, DVD, films came to put forward a word that has already been entered into the common use of communication. Now, after 30 years of Polypetry the balance is undoubtedly positive for many reasons. First of all, it is a clear statement towards a way of making a performance, which immediately characterises who is practising it, as the use of the term of sound poetry was not and is never enough to define what the polypoet was and is doing live. Surely Polypoetry brings to the perfection previous practices, what counts is keeping the role of the voice in the foreground, at the same time keeping an open dialogue with the other ingredients of the live show. That’s why the interest round it has been growing more and more. We are indeed convinced that all the poets through the world who have started the Polypoetry proceedings, have appreciated the fact of managing a flexible form in their own hands to express themselves.

True that some protagonists have unfortunately passed away, but their place has been rapidly substituted by younger energies. It seems that Polypoetry represents that kind of totality poets have been looking forward to finding out since ever. And in a way, it is a complete performance from manifold points of view, electronic experimentalism can effectively be coupled with language. That of the language is a very important element, because we always have to start from it, trying to overcome the typical anxiety of the message at any cost, but at the same time, as we have always stated, the polypoets have the responsibility to set their own aim towards literature, an alternative path to reach the great achievements of official poetry. When we say «complete performance», we mean also the use of technology, which must be an extra tool to be exploited and not a burden or, worse, a limit. However, what is the real fascinating challenge of Polypoetry is the use of the body related to the voice of the poet in an incredible mixture where body becomes voice and vice versa. So, after three decades, we can declare that we had a great past behind our shoulders, but also the future is shining and rich of interesting promises. We expect that the energy of Polypoetry will never come to an end as it is truly based on such an exciting bunch of threads [voice, body, language, technology, show] which will allow the contemporary and future polypoets to find out their own, original and personal pattern. We trust, of course, the development of the technological aid, what we hope is that the future polypoem can’t be simply a consequence of a top-software, but it must always keep inside itself a soul which will mark the real difference between a banal product and a poetical one. Next to this we would like to see the new polypoets able to study, to observe, to meditate what was done by previous polypoets in an earlier period. This sounds essential, not only in order not to repeat the attainments already reached, but also to put more and more ahead the level of the work.

This book aims to draw maps about Polypoetry manifestations around Europe and Americas. It gathers scholars and artists who dedicated their work for understanding the avant-garde expressions in print, sound, and visual languages, as well as to demonstrate how the experimentalism affects the world in a political and aesthetical perspective. In order to put different ideas in a framework, we decided to divide the book into two parts. The first four chapters in the “European Maps of Polypoetry” brings a debate about the space of Polypoetry in relationship with other avant-garde manifestations, in which the contexts and roles of the polypoet are considered. The Enzo Minarelli’s contribution takes first place, which is about the fundamental definitions of orality, vocality, and his neologism vocorality, as he verifies the extent to which it has played in the evolution of sound poetry, so as to understand how the coupling oral/vocal works on the ground of live performance. He tracks the sound poetry history from Isou and Lemaître’s Lettrism to its “founding fathers”: Bernard Heidsieck, Henri Chopin and Pierre Garnier, reaching the differences between performative practices in Intermedia and Polypoetry. He also faces the issue concerning the methodology required for the composition of a polypoem, ending with an important reminder to all polypoets in order to confront themselves with the great themes of humanity. His own urging consists in the following statement: “do not lose more time in vacuous artifices that keep sound poetry distant from the great literature, relegating it to a minor art”.

Frederico Fernandes places the debate of Polypoetry in the post-50s avant-garde poetry. Based on the concept of “avant-garde condition”, he analyses expressions and manifestos, mainly the “Manifesto of Polypoetry”, in a way to demonstrate how some historic vanguard aspects such as the “praxis vital” remains in post-vanguards, providing key features for the experimental poetry. He examines Minarelli’s visual poem “La pagella di Enzo Minarelli a Enzo Minarelli”, demonstrating the permanence of avant-garde features in Polypoetry expression through the continuous experimentation and the use of digital media. The prefix “poly” for “polypoet” designates an artist who must deal with broaden cultural system, which leads him to act as critic, translator, curator, journalist, into a lively network of artists and promoters. On this account polypoets provide a specific networking as a production, dissemination and legitimation mechanisms for creating poetry, getting close poetry and life.

From a theoretical point of view, Lis Costa discusses Polypoetry in a Spanish context. She demonstrates how the publication of the Manifesto of Polypoetry in Spain, in the catalogue Tramesa d’Art in Valencia, fostered the experimental production in Spain. According to her, Xavier Sabater started to disseminate the concept of Polypoetry and its practice in 1987, and didn’t stop until his death in 2014. She also identifies other polypoets who have also contributed strongly to the expansion. Those who had a more prominent role are the duo Accidents Polipoètics –Xavier Theros and Rafael Metlikovez–, who initiated their artistic career in 1991, and the poet Eduard Escoffet who, by organizing diverse cultural events and poetry festivals through his association propost.org, has naturalized Polypoetry practice since the mid-nineties.

Technomedium is a central word whereby Jean-Pierre Bobillot merges into Polypoetry in a French context. He tracked sound poetry during the 50’s, observing the correlation among names such as François Dufrêne, Henri Chopin, Bernard Heidsieck, Ian Sommerville, Brion Gysin, and many others. He updates the debate for 60’s and 70’s approaching the problem with written and performed poetry, as well as the different medium involved. In his perspective “...the book, the page, and the imprint are no longer the proper limits of poetic publication as they will soon be replaced by phonographic recording, magnetic tape, audio cassette, video cassette cd, dvd, cd-rom, and the internet.” Thus, the medium of dissemination and achievement remains “reading/diffusion/action, no matter what proportion of each is or is not represented in the work, a live version, or a recording of the given work.” From this statement he tackles the importance of the media for the experimental poetic, interweaving stage,recorded, simultaneous, and phonetic poetry. The influence of sound poetry in Minarelli’s Polypoetry concept was clearly stated in his manifesto, and the Bobillot’s essay clarifies the French context of sound and action poetry from where Polypoetry certainly has been influenced.

We could also understand the concept of Polypoetry in a layer of polyideas, in order to understand how the range of poetic experimentalism ideas scattered around the world converge inevitably into the same workflow. Driving our attention to the Americas, we realized how visual and digital poetry, music, and festivals embraced Polypoetry ideas, in a way to build a broaden art network between Europe and the Americas. The second part of this book brings to the spotlight authors who dedicated to the dialogue with Polypoetry ideas.

Clemente Padín gives this time a complete description of the Latin American visual scene especially quoting those generally obscured by the Brazilian Concrete movement: Wlademir Dias-Pino, Ferreira Gullar, Moacy Cirne, Philadelpho Menezes... and right also the reference to holopoetry by Eduardo Kac. He gives an alternative vision of the Latin avant-garde movement, on the other side he mentions authors of his generations like Garnier, Blaine, Totino, Higgins, Misson, among others. This important panorama leads us to think how the poetic experimentalism is connected to themes of politics and humanity in Latin America. For Padín, the artist has to provoke changes, and he/she has to make “…uniting efforts in the productive and social areas” modifying the “way of doing and thinking”. The Padín’s comprehension on Latin American avant-garde is in keeping with Polypoetry aesthetics since both are concerned about themes of humanity

The art promoter and visual poet Cesar Espinosa points how the history of Bienales in Mexico, during 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, was responsible for integrating generations of poets who deal with experimental poetry, providing to poets a new horizon of exploration, as well as giving a new body to the Mexican poetry. He highlights the presence of experimental poets in the Bienales and other festivals such as: Enzo Minarelli, Clemente Padín, Dick Higgins, Jaap Blonk, and others whose work later prompted networks among poets in that country. He refers to groups and events such as: Laboratorio de Experiencias Poeticas 0.1., Spoken Word/Rap Poetry, Cabaret-Rock Poetry, Arcaicofonías that strive to combine technology, social and political criticism in their work.

Alan Courtis gives us an overview on Argentine’s Sound Poetry pointing out the main authors involved in it. It starts with the early precedents including: native aboriginal ethnic groups, Payada, Candombe, Baguala and Lunfardo. It continues with the XXth Century Avant-Garde circles which brought Xul Solar or Oliverio Girondo plus contributions from Gyula Kosice and Mauricio Kagel. Reaching the 60s it refers to different experiences like Diagonal Cero in La Plata, the performances of Jorge Bonino and the influential poetry exhibition at Instituto Di Tella. It also focuses on writers from the 70s like Bustos, Fijman or Carrera plus Peralta Ramos and contributions coming from the rock circles until the irruption of the 1976 military dictatorship. The article continues with the appearance of Paralengua and the experiments of Emeterio Cerro in the 80s. During the 90s projects like Vórtice Argentina and VideoPoesía emerged along with other authors. Courtis observes that multiple experiences involving technology emerged during 21st Century: E-poetry, Net projects and different informatics platforms working with diverse forms of relationship between text, technology, voice, performance, processing and music, albeit Sound Poetry is still an enigmatic practice with a brief history and a great potential.

The second Argentinean contribution comes from Fabio Doctorovich. He goes through the past, present and future of Polypoetry in Argentina, focusing on poetic works done by the author in the period 1988-2016. Visual poetry is taken as the starting point, branching out towards web poetry, performance, and animations, in a flexible chronological order, as examples of the possibilities for this portion of art in a Latin American country, mentioning other works from poets and academics related to the area. Doctorovich’s contribution also presents some examples of poetry related to science. He debates some possibilities of producing poetry in the near future through mechanisms involving networks and assembly of conceptually interrelated modules. Doctorovich also discusses the influence of military dictatorships in Argentina, and the internal discussions among experimental poets for a place in history.

What is the role of the orality in sound poetry production? Luis Alvarado analyzes this question under Peruvian oral tradition. He understands the orality as a consequence of the widespread use of sound reproduction technologies that has been transformed the world for almost two decades. He points out a manner how oral has been used orality in their creation, and discovers that the great majority of artists are elaborating pieces which make certain mechanisms of social inequality visible. More than 43 languages are spoken in the Peruvian Amazon, where the most vital language is the Asháninca, which is spoken by around 97 thousand people. Peru is therefore a multilingual and multicultural country. The oral tradition therefore entails an important collection for experimentalism. He presents and discusses the sound composition of José Luis Martinat, Eliana Otta, Elena Tejada, and others, demonstrating how the voice reaches the political sphere, and how it has been a fundamental element of its legitimation.

Throughout the twentieth century, sound poetry developed numerous styles, genres, and aesthetics. The musicologist Dean Suzuki goes through text-sound compositions, and demonstrates how it has also manifested the influence of vernacular music, including rock and jazz. He makes an ample overview of sound compositions in the USA, putting in the spotlight names such as: Beth Anderson, Scott Johnson, Ter Veldhuis, Phillip Bimstein, who “...have emerged as potent materials and have led to an ever growing repertoire”. The innovation of techniques in the text-sound compositions has prepared the ground for Polypoetry.

Polypoets are not totally absorbed in making up a media product able to attract people’s attention. We have to master the technical tool in order to submit it to our desires, and a visual, of course, vocoral euphony could also help the transmission of Polypoetry. By the way, we expect the polypoets also to take care of apparently insignificant details, like the cloth or the shoes they are wearing on stage, but, at the same time, all this great effort to set up the live event, must be followed by the same intensity to be put into the concept of the performance itself, reminding us of the fundamental lesson given by the great Paracelsus, who warned: “externality is the mother of interiority”.

Enzo Minarelli

Frederico Fernandes

PRELUDE

TURNER’S TURN OF PHRASE

(An imaginary paper wrapped around the development of polipoetry)

[Random fact & Rambling fiction]

Rod Summers

[Spoken from beyond a dream] We write poetry because the words are in us; we perform poetry because the words within us seek a broader, more dynamic, platform than is offered by the printed page.

[Overture and beginners] It is an interesting phenomenon that in the late 20th. and this the first part of the 21st. century, there has been a resurgence of performed poetry… Slam poetry being perhaps the ranting grandchild of a Polipoetic union.

[Reality return] We have stepped over a threshold into the virtual world where contemporary culture is disseminated electronically and… barring super powers engaging in a devastating war with electromagnetic pulse weapons that would throw us all back into the plastic age… here we shall remain. Make no bones about it, the performance of poetry has come a long way since Dylan Thomas broadcast his The Colour of Saying series on BBC Radio from 1945 to 1953, although; in all modesty, we may never achieve his passion and understanding of that love which hides within the word.

So, to use the masters own words “To begin at the beginning…”

[Naming the game] Just as the sport of cricket played with a white ball on a snow covered pitch might not be to everyone’s taste we should be aware that there are certainly some amongst us who would rather be sitting in a fully stocked gasometer lighting a tobacco cigarette steeped in heroin of doubtful origin, than be listening to contemporary performance poetry, but, if art and poetry are human evolution’s highest achievements, then it could be suggested Refusenics are denying themselves a substantial cultural fix.

There may be many steps between a poem read in vocal innocence, Visual, Experiment and Concrete poetry and Polipoetry but the void between polipoetry and performance art can be straddled with a minimal bound or, at least, a clearing of the throat and the donning of an artistically ink spattered tattered shirt.

Although the term Polipoetry was coined by Enzo Minarelli in 1987 it may be easily ascertained that performance assisted poetry existed long before the manifesto. In 1915 the Trifiddi brothers; allegedly including the legendary Il Nacho himself, performed Futurist poetry events on the stage of the city theatre of Genoa. The most notorious of those well documented performances saw the three brothers seated on rickety chairs, line abreast, on the harshly lit stage gargling partially melted mozzarella, snorting valpolicella ripasso and then taking mouthfuls of alphabetti spaghetti soup and spray-spitting it all over the front row of the audience, an audience which consisted of retired watchmakers, post-vital Italian politicians and acrimonious, potentially vocal, potential DADA artists.

[A circling plane] From dropping glass marbles onto a marble xylophone in a round tower in Ferrara to Sharpening Spades in a Bolognese garden to reading inverted maps in an ex-custom house in Reykjavik, my experience in the presentation of polipoetry has been varied to put it mildly. What stories did I tell whilst a black & white airplane circled above my head? When and where did those Viking farmers first set foot on the soil of the angels? What was the secret that they brought with them? How did the poet stumble in the race to remove his shoes? Who now can tell us of these things?

[Put aside your glue pot and fountain pen and speak to me in tongues] Vocal gymnastics as performed for example by Canadian W. Mark Sutherland and Jaap Blonk of the Netherlands are established favourites with poetry audiences, the delivery of seemingly disassociated voice sounds in structured sequences always seems to take audiences by surprise as they are confronted with the sheer variety of sounds that can be achieved by the trained vocal chords of the voice poet. This deconstruction of language into its component parts has a strong entertainment value, but does it advance the cause of poetic language or is it the very bottom of the bag of the poetry cul-de-sac? Yes it does have advancement value, particularly when considered alongside the discovery that all matter is constructed of atoms, a discovery which has profoundly changed our perception of reality and made us reconsider the very nature of everything in the universe, so it is in the case of vocal poetry which has exposed and employed the building blocks, the basic construction, of words, language and poetry.

[Leaning toward the post of futures passed] Let us, for the sake of argument, look to the performances by the Futurists and Dadaists and suggest that in those art movements of the early 20h. Century lie the beginnings of all experimental art and poetry. Members of the Futurist movement were the first to use seemingly unrelated, randomly selected; often onomatopoeic, words (ZANG-TUMB-TUMB) as poems written specifically to be spoken before an audience in an energetic and dynamic manner. The most well-known of these events and ones which still have reverberations, at least amongst contemporary art circles, were conceived, performed and documented between 1909 and 1914 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

[The sketch of a suggestion] Writing poetry is absorbing bliss whilst applying the poem to a performance before a live audience is tantamount to self-inflicted torture. E. P. Herbivox, that celebrated Anglo Austrian academic, described poets as being “masturbating angels or virgins with the experience of 24 years in the sex trade and bearing all the innocence of a butcher’s sausage.”

Of course performance poetry has not escaped its fair share of controversy. For example, Richard Lullenkopf; a locally notorious extrovert performance poet and ganja imbiber, performed his poem “he died with his dick in his hand.” at the Amsterdam’s Melkweg venue back in 1983. During the second stanza of the poem,

‘Oh! Globby knobby slobby wench

Pursue my knobbly snobby trench

For I’ll forgive the soapy stench

Of nic-nic-nic-knickers in the sink

which he delivered whilst pouring a carton of full cream milk over his own head with one hand and unpicking a lacy thong with the other and his teeth. Trouble broke out, the poem triggered a riot, it was his great misfortune that, unwittingly, he had chosen to premier the poem on the very evening that The Association of Militant Transvestite Feminists had gathered at the Melkweg venue for their monthly convention on the demolition and eradication of misogyny within the literate classes. He was lucky to escape the ensuing onslaught with nothing more serious than one badly unwound dreadlock and a slightly dented, but surprisingly still completely functional boom-box. His pride never recovered however and he never again performed in public.

[22 steps of polipoetry in no particular order]

The sonnet of the breaking of glassesA glass bottle memorial to the ancestors of languageThe mouths that shape the words.A video plethora of beds, beds, beds.An Italianate garden full of light on sunburned words.Ice cold Gullfoss waterfall and three chilled polypoets (Tom, Enzo, Rod) [Iceland, may 2006Maastricht “I was…” the first trans-Atlantic conversational collaborative poem.Maastricht, Magnús and a smoke screen at the end of a runway.The magic of the sharpened pencil flown in today from Japan.I am a poet, we are poets, this is poetry, we have no alternative motive for our alternative delivery.The baffled translator of Russian poetic realityAltered altars in the church of St. Jan and a theatre that once stabled Napoleon’s horsesThe writing spoken and the speech documented in writing.Bologna, Bologna, Maastricht, Reykjavik, gardens, theatres and harbour side museums.An explosive experienced Dane.Jürgen wears a cowboy hat on a bridge.The Icelandic Railway system, tourist maps, The VEC Vikings and chocolate.The boy from the Northern fjords and a Canadian Sutherland. Voooxing Poooêtre International record of sound poetry. 1982, 12 inch LP record, 21 tracks, 15 poets, published by Enzo Minarelli, Cento, Italy.Homo sonorous An international anthology of sound poetry. 2001. 437 pp book and 4 audio CDs, published by Dmitry Bulatov, Kaliningrad, Russia. Poli Poetry 2001 Maastricht A record of sorts. 2002, 500pp book and 8 audio CDs published by Tom Winter Jr., Hamburg GermanyThe shadows of the reflections of perished thoughts.

(Extra Time) What has happened to polipoetry since Tom Winter’s exquisite documentation of the poly poetry festival in Maastricht? What happened to the video document taken at the Reykjavik festival? What happened?

Where are we now and to where are we headed? Why would you expect poets to predict the future when even Certainty is riddled with its own doubts? Where once the poet was recognisable by the ink stained fingers of his writing hand, now he/she has clean callouses upon the tips of his/her fingers. Where once I stood before a crowd and spoke these rhythmic words of mine, now I select all and click upon the ‘text to speech’ button.

Listen! Who listens?

Is youth willing to ride the steam driven train? Yes! The performance of poetry and poetry with performance will not lie idly by in the polished coffin of history awaiting interment in digital dust. No paper shroud shall contain us… though it may well show traces of our sometime presence.

Slam shut those confining brass bound boxes. Shout loudly against the faltering of star struck sentences. Promote pirouetting paragraphs liberated from yellowing pages to the thrones of stages from here to there and every podium in between. The voice of poetic evolution shall not pause or dawdle; even for an instant, on this our cadenced watch.:

LAST POLIPOET LEAVING THE BUILDING SWITCH OUT THE LIGHTS

PART I

EUROPEAN MAPS OF POLYPOETRY

VOICE AND METHOD IN POLYPOETRY:FROM LETTRISM TO SOUND POETRY, FROM INTERMEDIA TO POLYPOETRY

Enzo Minarelli

“The opposite agrees: from the different one

creates the most beautiful harmony”

Heraclitus

Synopsis

This paper is placed in the perspective of the voice seen as poetic experimentation. It takes first place, the fundamental definitions of orality, vocality and my neologism vocorality.

To verify the extent to which it has played a decisive role in the evolution of sound poetry, it must be twinned inevitably with the language, and to understand how this coupling works, we have to analyse it down on the ground of live performance.

For reasons of space I limited myself to Lettrism (Isou and Lemaître), and to the founding fathers of the sound poetry, (Bernard Heidsieck, Henri Chopin and Pierre Garnier).

In the second part, after developing differences between the performative practices reunited under the seals Intermedia and my Polypoetry, I shall face the issue concerning the methodology required for the composition of a polypoem, ending with an important reminder to all polypoets in order to confront themselves with the great themes of humanity. My own urging consists in the following statement, do not lose more time in vacuous artifices that keep sound poetry distant from the great literature, relegating it to a minor art.

Lettrism

“I no longer need the words but voice is enough”, a phrase that is the right premise to my writing, it puts the voice in the top step of the poetic experimentalism; it was expressed by Abraham Abulafia, a rabbi expert of Kabbalah, he lived in the second half of the thirteenth century, of which I have been concerning for years until staging my most recent performance1.

With the word «voice» I mean the whole range of interventions that have been defined as vocorality I will delve deeper soon, which involves the outright abandonment of poetic writing. The poet carries out an aesthetic operation on the tongue in such a way that it is still recognizable in its normal status (orality), or he launches himself towards and within daring metamorphosis into the same language transforming it to the point that it is no longer identifiable according to the common, communicative regulation (vocality), wanting to stick slavishly to the valuable and unsurpassed lesson by Paul Zumthor2.

Flying over the historical avant-garde, where probably only the Italian Futurists and the Russians have been able to shake the old stuff of traditional poetry, using the power of analogy, onomatopoeia and neologism, it is up to the French Lettrists to give back a good shove to the language understood as an institution with a capital i.

If I think of its founder, Isidore Isou, surely it is true the statement according to which “he starred in the public pure phonemes rhythmed as a «phonetic symphony »”3meaning by symphony its original significance of «set of sounds». Simply watch on You Tube the curious excerpt of the film Around the World with Orson Welles, St. Germain des Prés (1955), or listen to his own voice in what is considered the prince of the web sites dedicated to the sound poetry in the world, Ubu, [http://www.ubu.com/sound/isou.html], to understand immediately that his is a direct attack to the heart of the word. It is not so much about rhythms, indeed it seems risky to me to talk about musicality in pieces which develop a phonetic brutisme tended to the destruction of the language which, at least in the Lettrist opinion, should complete the work left in half by Dada [Hausmann, Tzara].

On the other hand, in their manifesto they believed that the word was the main enemy to be killed, replaced by the dictatorship of the lettrie, which is nothing more but the phoneme [it is possible that the Lettrists lacked the knowledge of the De Saussure’s discoveries].

Their operational framework is essentially cacophonous, unlike a Mimmo Rotella who in those same years [his Manifesto dell’Epistaltismo is dated round 1955], achieves similar poems, but coated with an euphonic aura, almost adorned with nice sounds pleasant to hearing, while Isou’s poems are a rough and harsh acoustic sandpaper.

In the one performance of his I happened to attend, at Milanopoesia in the late Eighties, unfortunately he did not utter any sound, he just arrived fully dressed at the proscenium and slowly began to undress; once being left in his underwear, among an angry, roaring public because of his provocation, he started again to get dressed, and then he left the scene once he put on the same clothes just laid down. A performance more based on the charisma of the personality than on the sound, because it required a remarkable inner strength to make similar Lettrist striptease.

Instead, one finds very rhythm in Maurice Lemaître, I mean his famous poem, Lettre rock, 1957, because it develops a linguistic zeroing in perfect Lettrist style, a syllabic babbling or a repetition of the same phonic segment, as if one had forgotten the words of a song and began to hum a tune only recalling the rhythm.

There is no news of memorable performances by Lettrists, perhaps because as a mass movement, they tried to attack all the themes of life and art, so at the very end they did not press particularly the voice button. Undoubtedly the sincinema by Lemaître remains, from an executive point of view, the most advanced aspect, and the most engaging one, while, to return to the theme of the voice in the live event, their approach does not contemplate the use of any technology, so it leverages the pneumatic force of the chest, the power of the breath and then throughout the mouth, as it had happened for the Ursonate by Schwitters, or the Zaum, namely the classical language of the Futurist transmental Russians; what characterizes, however, the Lettrist contribution to sound poetry, is the existence of a very precise theory which coincides with the cancellation of the traditional word to be substituted by a paralinguistic jumble as if we were in front of the big bang of the codified language, and such existence of a theory, see the First Manifesto of Lettrist Poetry4, testifies us how much awareness there were in their actions.

Sound Poetry

Shifting the focus to the true fathers of sound poetry, Bernard Heidsieck and Henri Chopin, the approach to the voice and consequently to the language is applied according to diametrically opposed operating modules. The first, orality leader, always develops a healthy linguistic balance, almost of respect for the sacredness of the individual word, often stretching along purely narrative tension, to keep inside a typical product of poetic transmission.

The second, however, worthy representative of the vocality, picks up, first of all, the Lettrist baton and also that one of the Ultralettrism. As he locates in the word the real cancer of literary production, he totally banishes it from the sound corpus; his work is essentially based on a sort of unfolding a «phonetic rumorismo» where, still starting from linguistic segments, he comes to pure entities at the limit of the white noise, without any opportunity to recognize any reference to the language.

This dual and opposite pattern to treat the word is also reflected in the use of technology: Bernard uses a hardware equipment of all respect for the period to which we are referring, early Sixties and mid-Seventies; it is known that one of his masterpieces, Canal Street (1976) has the title from special electronic equipment purchased by him in the homonymous, famous street in New York, however, on balance, his poems exploit multiplay, [the use of multiple recording tracks], the echo, with slight alterations of the voice, and a subtle reverb.

In sound poetry as in any other artistic discipline, it counts mostly to acquire a style, and it is clear that Heidsieck has always remained faithful to this model throughout his career. The same fidelity is also verifiable in Henri, whose position towards technology went far beyond some simple technological effect, because, in his case, the whole structure of the poem, in general, rests on multiple recordings, one close to another, ad libitum, focused on the same magnetic tape segment until the total annihilation of any logical connection. He himself has had occasion to state that some pieces are the result of well over fifty overlays. Once perpetrated this crime against the commonly accepted meaning, he readjusts the poem by means of a tight editing with the aim of creating a resonating aura which results indeed very rarefied, although it often tends to the search of a rhythm able to refer to the defunct linguistic chain.

This duplicity of aesthetic approach and technological development is further analysed in their respective live performances: despite being the promoter of action poetry, according to which every stage movement rightly should be motivated and not left to chance of the moment, Heidsieck, increasingly relies on the trusty written page for a look at what it has to perform; obviously there is the urgent need to control bluntly the text to be read, because the language, as noted above, resists in its lexical integrity.

Chopin on the contrary, does not need at all any execution scheme5 which can help him, his are the performances of an anomalous, noisy «orchestra». There is no need for words, just his gesture that indicates the changes in the volumes of the pre-recorded tracks, as it were indeed, a hypothetical conductor. During a live concert, to the already rarefied bases, he adds another one. Generally, this one aims at the strengthening of the acoustic potential as a result of an unlikely series of gargles, labial impurities, of tongue snaps on the palate. He is never tired of rattling off all the catalogue of those purely buccal distortions the linguist Martinet has called «click». In his attempt to master the language, he reached the excess of swallowing the microphone, as if his mouth could be fertilized and give birth to a new «language»6.

Halfway between the two poets just mentioned, I would place Pierre Garnier with its dual manifesto, The Sonie 1963 and Souffle manifeste of the previous year7, because, without resorting to electronic trappings, he goes straight to the heart of sound poetry, creating another neologism, precisely the «sonie» that “is, first of all, a work made with sounds made by humans, including puffs”8, essentially based, precisely, on the knowledge of the breath, the breath of the air emitted. It lacks any reference to the language. It emerges solid, solemn such a hymn to the corporal physicality of breath which is equivalent to energy, to vibration, to ripple, and to radiation with obvious references to the Stoic-known theory of the pneuma, aka the Latin «spiritus».

Paradoxically it mustn’t be unmentioned the performative weakness by the Garnier; I remember a performance of theirs at the auditorium of Liege for the XV International Biennial of Poetry in 1986, not at all matched in consistency with the beauty of their theoretical statements, but if you listen to their sound poems, one perceives the sharp sense of liberation from the words, and the absolute value of the human breath as a light, universal aura.

Intermedia

I understand that in front of these products called sound poetry, the recipient must reset their receiving organs, especially get rid of the ballast of hermeneutics toward that common name so inflated, that’s «poetry». Gottfried Benn advised, before reading a poem, to take paper and pencil as if you were sitting in front of a crossword puzzle, so before these sound poems, you have to let yourselves go, following the tonal convolutions, without looking for unusual or hidden sensations, the sound poem acts as an acoustic stimulator for consciences, at the bottom.

Based on these reflections, I need to introduce Dick Higgins’ concept of intermedia, which he has met directly into the essays of the great romantic poet answering to the name of Samuel T. Coleridge. Intermedia, as indicated by the same Latin philology, alludes to a merger of more means that contribute to the creation of the work. I always thought that the same formula was contained in the concept of hybridization already present in media arguments conducted by Marshall McLuhan.

The years are the same, 1964 Understanding Media, while Dick publishes its findings in the newsletter of the Something Else Press, in 1965/66. Conversing with him in his former church in Barrytown [just outside New York, where I used to visit him in the Eighties], once I made him such a remark, he said it was lawful and justified, a few doubts about the equivalence of the two definitions, just for that reason he had vainly sought contact with the Canadian scholar and wanted to argue that he had that insight first.

The main purpose of his own theorizing concerned about helping the user, as I said before, to get used to these new products, explaining that the visual poetry was based on the union of images and words, the happenings on the union of theatre and action, concrete poetry on the union of words and typography, sound poetry on the union of words and music; all these explanations were exhibited in a decidedly axiomatic tone in the last edition of the manifesto, composed at Molvena in 1995 with his friend Luigi Bonotto; they create a large fresco on off experiments, those not covered by traditional manual9, but they are the real backbone of the avant-garde.

To return to the subject of my writing, I extrapolate his definition of sound poetry that indicates it as a research discipline with music inside10. Here, I think, I see the longa manus of John Cage, who in his turn had been contaminated by the obsession of music anywhere in the naturist beliefs of Ralph Waldo Emerson and in the known chapter Sounds from Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

To be sure, the influence of Cage towards Higgins can be easily identified, [except that Dick himself was first a disciple of his in the famous Black Mountain College, then close friend], just to compare a sound poem by Dick, the Glasslass, 1970, with two works by Cage, who are perhaps the true masterpieces of sound poetry of the late Twentieth Century, alluding to Empty words of 1974, and to 62 Re mesostics,the previous year.

In these works, the verbal mixture has total upper hand by developing an aggressive vocal style where it disappears entirely the language as code; there is little or nothing of music, in spite of their theoretical statements; it surfaces in Glasslass, a net intraverbal penetration, the lass of glass or the ass of glass [as a possible homage to the gay pride].

These endocentric digressions would rather be liked to Jean Starobinski [Les Mots sous les mots, 1971] especially if performed live with a lot of tongues, of granguignolesque jeers, suffering screams, in short, a continuous derision, almost a disorder to the ear, as if they were Satie’s vexations. I remember a performance of this piece just with such stylistic performing feature, very over the top, Dick Higgins in that case had been accompanied by the Four Horsemen (bp Nichol, P. Dutton, S. McCaffery), of course it was a guaranteed success, the Canadian public literally delirious, [festival Espèces Nomades, Quebec, fall 1986].

The two Cage pieces maintain a constant hypnotic movement for a long period of time, a daily spoken posture, without showing the language that never appears in its official status; the word sinks into the nothing of the insignificance, just empty words, a paradigmatic nothing that looks a lot like the «all» typical of the Buddhist nirvana. It matters little to know that those words-no-words are fragments from the Journal of Thoreau and the Finnegans Wake of Joyce. They are linguistic particles so small that it is impossible to go back to their original context.

I was lucky enough to be present at the end of the Seventies to the execution of Empty words at the Teatro Lirico in Milan. I remember well the aseptic sequences of empty words, neutral bursts of nonsense thrown at regular intervals alternating with periods of silence, to an increasingly furious audience whose utterances transformed slowly in an open dispute and then in vulgar noises made even more glaring by the intermittent absence of sound; on stage, Cage, unperturbed as if it were inside a anechoic chamber, for nearly an hour, pulled straight on his way ignoring the uproar had arisen in the room as long as he did not reach at its sole discretion the end of execution.

Along this line of research, a figure such as Demetrio Stratos settles in those years. He appropriates the teaching of Cage, and he will carry on the same issues performing with a lung capacity out of the ordinary. Thanks to special uvula and glottis, he can produce with the voice tonal timbres normally impossible to a common human being. Higgins, in this respect, was very normal, and of course I am dealing not with the Fluxus performers, but with the sound poet, though, apart from the aforementioned poem, his performance involved little sonority, contemplating a language at the service of direct communication11; for example, in a performance that I saw him do in the same Canadian festivals just mentioned, he stood at the centre of the stage, sitting on a chair as if he were at the barber’s, Alison Knowles [his wife] with comb and scissors slowly began to cut his hair, and we the public, as in the Kabuki theatre, dropped by shouting some input with the purpose to make him speak about the proposed theme. As I knew about his passion for the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, I cried out just that name and surname, and he started to rave about it for minutes and minutes. A narrator language although elliptical, without a predefined logical sequence, was the real manner of his being in performance.

Polypoetry

No one has forgotten the lesson of Arthur Rimbaud, great alchemist of the word, “je notais l’inexprimable”, which is the ultimate goal of our work of poets, to express what can not normally expressed by language, otherwise what would be the poetry?

I tried to organize our attempt towards a more detailed knowledge of the live poetic act, by creating this new noun «polypoetry» which is exclusively the result of what I was looking around me, in my tireless wanderings around the globe for festivals, seminars and various meetings since the early Eighties. I was aware that in the previous manifestoes a precise theory lacked in this discipline, sometimes described very generally as «sound poetry performance» or reductively «poetry event». Also, the known formula «action poetry» did not appreciate fully what the sound poets developed live on the scene.

Thirty years since the launch of that idea, I can be satisfied, Polypoetry has become a flag which has and continues to wave over the international performance. I want to focus on some aspects that clearly distinguish it from other artistic and poetic practices, because, unfortunately, there are those who in a too hasty way still tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The first and most distinct difference with intermedia