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The Poetry Reading and Reading Series, Revisted by Amodern

4/1/2015

“The Poetry Series.” Amodern 4. March 2015. http://amodern.net/issues/amodern-4/

This fourth issue of the online journal Amodern should be of particular interest to the local people on the London Open Mic site. Most of the issue's articles reconsider the poetry reading series as a place to distribute and bring attention to new poetry. It is guest-edited by Jason Camlot, lead investigator of Concordia University’s SpokenWeb project, and media archaeologist Christine Mitchell.

Camlot’s Spoken Web project has been examining, in his words, “digitized live recordings of a Montreal [Sir George Williams University] poetry reading series from 1966-1974 featuring performances by major North American poets, among them Beat poets, Black Mountain poets and members of TISH, a Canadian poetry collective[;]" his "team is investigating the features that will be the most conducive to scholarly engagement with recorded poetry recitation and performance.” Much of this Amodern issue concerns that research, while other articles address contrasts between the role of the public poetry reading series in the 1960s and its function today.

Al Filreis contributes the essay “Notes on Paraphonotextuality” – a useful and accessible essay, despite its potentially daunting title, on the extras that a poetry reading can add to the printed text. Using US tape-recorded readings, he looks at the role of audience reactions in changing a poet’s way of presenting the poems, the effects of different kinds of audiences – friendly,

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Poetry on the 1960s Tape Recorder #mediaarchaelogy #creativewriting

8/16/2013

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I’ve been reading The Program Era by Mark McGurl, a book subtitled “Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing” – by which the author means US postwar fiction and the rise of Creative Writing programs in the US. I hope to have something to say about this book itself in the next week or so.

But in the context of the Kelowna summer institute which I recently attended, “Poetry On and Off the Page,” McGurl’s various mentions of literary tape recording have been standing out for me. One of these appears to be an error – he discusses the early 1930s work of Harvard classicist Millman Parry’s in recording Balkan oral storytelling as his having “traipsed about the Yugoslavian countryside recording the living vestiges of its ancient illiterate storytelling tradition on audiotape” (231). Harvard’s Parry collection indicates that Parry had used the recently developed aluminum recording disc. Magnetic audio tape, a much more accurate, portable, potentially marketable and less expensive medium, didn’t – as I mentioned in my previous post – become available outside of Germany until after the Second World War.

McGurl uses the work of Parry and his student Albert Lord in a chapter titled “Our Phonocentrism” to explain the rise of interest in the 1960s in the oral delivery and oral composition of poetry. In his 1960 book The Singer of Tales Lord had declared that the traditional “oral poem is not composed for but in performance” (231). Novelist Ken Kesey is recalled by fellow writer Ken Babbs to have aimed during their schoolbus-named-‘Further’ tour in 1964 to have aimed “to take acid and stay up all night and rap out novels and tape record them. Then we started talking about getting the movie cameras and filming it. So we were very swiftly going from a novel on a page to novels on audio-tape to novels on film” (211). McGurl includes both the Lord and Babbs quotations in explaining the 1960s quest for “vocal presence” in literature,

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Tape-recorded Poetry in the 60s #mediaarchaeology #poetry

7/22/2013

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I’m heading to Kelowna, BC, shortly to participate in part of the “Poetry Off the Page” events associated with the week-long textual Editing and Modernism in Canada (TEMiC) Summer Institute, being offered by the University of BC Okanagan in concert with the Editing Modernism in Canada Project (EmiC). I’ll be contributing to a poetry reading and a two-hour panel on 1960s and 70s audio recordings.

The amateur tape recording of literary readings and lectures began almost overnight around 1960 – mostly due to the sudden availability of 4-track portable tape recorders to the domestic market. I say “overnight,” because until the invention and use of transistors to replace vacuum tubes, tape recorders were large, bulky and expensive devices, often the size (and weight) of a small piano, and found mainly in commercial sites such as radio stations and recording studios. Even these machines were very recent. Audio recording on magnetic tape had been first developed in World War II Germany. Examples of the German machines had been brought to the U.S. after the war and used as the basis for the Ampex company’s equipment that in 1948 could pre-record Bing Crosby’s radio shows. Crosby had helped finance its development. Marketing of monophonic portable tape recorders to the household market appears to have begun around 1955.

This emergence of portable tape recorders was coinciding with the development of stereophonic sound recording and with the marketing of both stereo LPs and pre-recorded stereo reel-to-reel tapes, media which throughout the 1960s would compete with one another (with the LPs being cheaper and the pre-recorded tapes superior in sound). Many of the early portable tape recorders could play these stereo tapes but could record only monophonically. The 1959 advertisement above by Norelco advertises a machine that is the “stereo version” of a previous portable monophonic model. These new machines were not cheap – the stereo Norelco (marketed in Canada as a Philips)

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Jussi Parikka's Media Archaeology #jussiparikka #newmedia #archives

7/10/2013

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I’ve been reading Jussi Parikka’s What Is Media Archaeology (Polity, 2012), on the basis of several Twitter recommendations and on the publisher’s promise that it illuminates methodologies “used to excavate current media through its [sic] past” and that it is “essential reading for anyone interested in the interdisciplinary ties between art, technology and media.” It also seemed like an appropriate book for the London Open Mic site of this blog, where the oral dissemination of poetry from often handwritten manuscripts – a centuries old practice – is billed as ‘Open Microphone’ – a mere century-old device – and promoted on a Microsoft-based website.

Parikka is a Finnish scholar who currently teaches at the University of Southampton. My impression from this perhaps understandably Eurocentric book is that “media archaeology” is a much larger field than he currently envisions. I didn’t find any specific references to writers’ uses of technology in any of the chapters, although clearly inventions such as paper, the alphabet, moveable type, the fountain pen, the typewriter, the tape recorder, the Selectric typewriter, the word processor, the phototypesetter, the modem, the internet, e-books and search engines have altered how and what writers can write as well their conceptions of collaboration, intellectual property, originality and what it means culturally to be a literary practitioner. In 1984 when Fred Wah and I put the world’s first electronic literary magazine, SwiftCurrent, on-line and invited writers to participate we encountered established writers who were unable to type, poets worried that their ideas might be stolen, fiction writers horrified that we intended to do no editing, a surprisingly large proportion of

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The Poetry Reading and Reading Series, Revisted by Amodern

Poetry on the 1960s Tape Recorder #mediaarchaelogy #creativewriting

Tape-recorded Poetry in the 60s #mediaarchaeology #poetry

Jussi Parikka's Media Archaeology #jussiparikka #newmedia #archives

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