"We have loaded the work with strengths and energies that helped us to rediscover the evangelical concept of the "word" (logos) as a magical complex image. (Hugo Ball cited in Ken Norris, The Little Magazine in Canada 1925-80)
The most resonant possibilities for poetry as a medium can be realized only when the performance of language moves from human speech to animate, but transhuman, sound: that is, when we stop listening and begin to hear; which is to say, stop decoding and begin to get a nose for the sheer noise of language (Charles Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems 300)
you are this that you see
assume my name my mantle
become me now (Penn Kemp, from Trance Form)
I listen to
Darkness Visible: A Sound Opera by Chris Meloche and Penn Kemp as I write. Then I listen primarily to write. Beginning with verses gets you as far as the page only, always typographically & spatially incomplete, even if it's the verses of Penn Kemp's
Trance Form, from which comes the song opera's divisions into 'mattermater', 'moonphase', 'familiars' and 'bonepoems'. Even if the segments of
Darkness Visible (
available at 94.9 CHRW- Gathering Voices)
most text-dependent are the apantomancy of "familiars" and the erotic "bonepoems" chant. Concrete poetry with the potential to turn into sound text does more than convert words into living performance: it knocks the text-as-king view off its throne, breaking the illusion that the textual is supreme, more ready to hand than invisible sound. And Penn's work opens up a rich store of literary interpretation accessible only to the ear. And this, again, even though most of the work is scored off the text.
It's my view that a Penn Kemp sound opera metamorphoses the ear, by which I mean she's not just making meaning but making song: and not just the song of chant, incantatory and almost mystical,but that of natural processes themselves. The text, even as wildly liberatory and open-ended as contemporary linguistics theory admits, can never be that fluid, 'multiform'. In fact, to make darkness visible, by which she means to restore the materiality of lived experience to poetry, is the audio text's primary impetus: particularly in the way it metamorphoses voice into any living thing imaginable. As she's said in a
"ditch" interview (used with permission here), "Sound Opera is what I call my narrative genre-bender of poetry, music and sound. It is a new form I developed in performance and recording with collaborators in a desire to lift poetry off the page to the stage." Bending more than genre, in fact, but becoming the very space of poetry.
Apantomancy in "familiars", for example, means a divination by animals, a vision of ecstasy induced by communion with the turtle, lion, and tiger. But it's transformative vision, with poet-shaman herself turning into turtle into lion into tiger, speaker induced, at each stage, to "follow slowly sluggish with change/to unclean green brackish water/rolling off our great horn shells". "familiars" (from the latin
familiares ) suggests also rituals of intimacy with the "green brackish" processes of every imaginable life form. Sound opera gives a kind of materiality to that ritual of intimacy, using modulated and rhythmic properties of voice to recreate a virtual divination for the ear. David Abram in
The Spell of the Sensuous, a work that is the prose counterpart of Kemp's audio text, speaks of a "human speaking [that's] necessarily tuned...to the various nonhuman calls and cries that animate the local terrain." (140)
It's Kemp's sound opera that gives voice to the non- (or perhaps trans-)human world: for in poetry become augury "the snaky way/becomes my trail/becomes my antler".What's heard (or even imaginable) in both segments of
Darkness Visible is the
res ipsa of voice & the natural world to which it sings. And it can do that because it seems the ear (rather than the "thinking eye", as Silliman puts it) has been pre-set (perhaps through evolutionary design) for registering formal properties of sound, engaged primarily in what Charles Bernstein calls the "iconicity" of language, both written and verbal (295) It's hard to describe how this living reenactment of living process is heard in sound opera except as just this "ability of language to
present rather than represent or designate" (295, Bernstein's emphasis). Meaning recreated as a type of performance (299).
In "bonepoems" the dark side of natural processes become starkly visible and audible, voices pitched into many roles, expertly ranged from keen to languorous chant to sexual play and release: from "overunderoverunderoverunder" to "quickbonequickbonequick" to "when soft flesh/withers". Here's a sound poem attuned not just to the physical but the mythological and linguistic. Instead of conjoined female choric singing (as in "familiars") there is a more haunting and sensuous male-female interplay: the male's monodic pursuit to female's dithyrambic teasing that results not in apantomancy but Tantric sex, a ritual of intimacy with nature's unrelenting & insatiable other. Kemp's voice, in particular, is a type of babbling (of plosives & aspirates) that in Lacanic terms alludes to the preverbal rhythmic speech of the female. Scripted meanings appear always intersected by the darker background male, a pattern of pursuit typified in Persephone and Dian mythologies.
If ever there was a Derridean binary worth unpacking, it's the text/performance one but suffice it to say criticism has leant too heavily towards the visual poem, regarding sounds alone as derivative and of secondary importance. Again
Charles Bernstein, among the most elegant sound poetry theorists, makes the case for the semantic integrity of sound poetry
Indeed, the drift of much literary criticism of the past two decades has been away from the auditory and performative aspects of the poem, partly because of the prevalent notion that the sound structure of language is relatively arbitrary. Such elements as the visual appearance of the text or the sound of the work in performance may be extralexical but they are not extrasemantic. When textual elements that are conventionally framed out as nonsemantic are acknowledged as significant, the result is a proliferation of possible frames of interpretation (Charles Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems)
The enchanting rhythms of a sound opera make the need for textual competence not just irrelevant but even otiose, as though the critic's drone were a violation of the text's true sacredness in performance. To hear the poem, and access it through use of pitch, timbre and breath pause only, is to re-encounter in it the language of the "poet-shaman", the oral text's essential fluidity and, as Hugo Ball says, "magical complex image" : its potential for aural metamorphosis in a way that is not visual or figurative but genre-bending.
So that as I listen and write I also intuit poet Penn Kemp as "sonosopher" and medium for transformation; and through chant, oftentimes the sound opera's primary channel, I sense the constellations of language, myth, dream and sexual play. As she says herself (in the same "ditch" interview), "Experienced viscerally in the present moment, [the sound opera's] dominant verb for me is 'to play'." An organic work (in the Coleridgian sense) springing out of natural processes: vegetative and meteorological, mineralogical & somatic. In fact, arising out of and back into nature's animate and nonanimate processes.The ear registers meanings of languishing streams, of turtle speech, and sanded objects strewn along a careless trail to "centre island" (the antlered syntax of the Canadian 'experience'). And not just figuratively for the eye but "magically" for the ear.
Voice reconfigures textual silence into music, almost
ex nihilo (and so Ball's "evangelized concept of the 'word'"). I'd even dare to valorize ancestral dream over waking rationality when I encounter poet and sound poetry through the very dynamics of primitive oral composition. As Ken Norris says
, "Primitive sense and sacred time are being reawakened", both in a single listening experience. (
The Little Magazine 137). Kemp talks of "restor[ing] poetry to the power of its aural origins around a Neolithic fire." To the ear encountering the mystical ménage of sound and poetry for the first time, the sound poem seems free of the constraints of traditional verse, not having to rely on the more formal conventions of metrical verse because of its inherent affinities to the pre-literate, the aural, Neolithic.
The sonic text is liberatory, freeing listener from syntactic constraints on a page; even if it begins or works with text, the concrete poem from which the sound opera derives, as though its libretto, the experience's also an essentially transmogrifying one in the way in which the text converts visual into sound structure. Sound poetry is a form that doesn't impose unnatural order on content: it rather allows that content to sing (and unwind into) its own stories. I will say the inner screen that replaces the neutral page becomes the highly charged one of transfigured shapes, objects and the new contextual alignments they create. Silliman thought, in
The New Sentence, that by allowing the prosodic to escape from prose the new sentence can emerge, the "poet's prose"; but he didn't go far enough. Unleashing 'prosody' takes you not to prose but back to the "speech" of what Kemp calls "MotherWorld's enChantments" and her " seasonal song cycle of ecco poetry"): the shaman's chant, the sonosopher's dialogue with the place where all of nature's water, earth, air divinities interweave.
In Kemp's sound poem
Flux, Flash, Flood, some of which is reproduced below, poets reciting in unison change the text not into lexemes (intelligible bits for the eye) but words charged with sound,words becoming not just signifiers but harbingers of the inevitability of natural (gynecological) change. There are none here of the usual letter or word permutations exploited for their rhythmic potential (at least not to the same obvious extent as in
Trance Form): the "Flux, Flash, Flood" is strictly libretto to the audiotext's sound opera. The way for poet to register directly the concreteness of menopause is to present straightforward text augmented by sound, not reflecting about but with the inevitability of life-processes: the only artifice is perhaps that of the strong choragic female voice of Antigone, Elektra or Sappho, embattled but self-reliant still in the face of age. And the easy enjambments, nearly uniform stanzaic arrangements and assonance and alliteration (as in the title itself) make it nicely amenable to sound technique.
The subject of hot flushes never arises
in our conversation. Are we ashamed
to admit the extraordinary, the poet
as heating system gone berserk in
the everyday climacteric, proclamation
of sweat the race is conditioned to?
A fever of estrogen deprivation confuses
my cooling system. Where else would the therm-
ometer measure a Hermes of despair, a message
of ruin, a riot of theorems that do not compute?
In Kemp's
Night Orchestra (Track 11) the voice, electroacoustically overlaid & expertly enhanced, foregrounds the poem even more strongly than in "Flux, Flash, Flood": pitch, intonation and vocal intensity create in the listener's inner space a poetry of the primal (and sacred) and never just its representation. What the poem can ordinarily do on page only through manipulation of sound and sense, here a solo voice does alone through sound, never the messenger of linear messages but always sinuous and deep.
Deep in summer
stillness, an electric
hum of air conditioner
in B flat flat monotone
entrains my body
monotonous
Heat produced to cool
my neighbours thrums
the outside air, heats
up our collective night.
Mechanical multitudes
self-replicate in chorus,
relentless fridge and clock.
Again, metamorphosis is the key to Kemp's sound poetics, genre-bending, aural, Neolithic . It's perhaps the musical upper limit of speech as envisioned by American Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky in "A" - 12, up to this point in Canadian experimentalism perhaps only ideally realized; or the apotheosis of bill bissett's own return to a primitive Ur-speech through a distinctively new pictographic reconfiguration of language(as in the case of
Blew Ointment), and then, of course, through his own pioneering sound experiments.
True to the impetus of
Ganglia, the Toronto-based magazine bpNichol first published for concrete and sound poetry (see
Writing in our Time: Canada's Radical Poetries in English 1957-2003, 65), Kemp's sound operas fan out like nerve endings into air, earth, wind and night, registering fluid ecstasy, parturition or vegetal loneliness: animal, human and inorganic in a kind of sound collage that's genuinely avant-garde. Associated though she was with the first group in Canada to experiment with sound poetry,"The Four Horsemen" comprising bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Kemp's sound performances are not meant (as theirs was) for radical 60s-type critique. For her it was "an expression of pleasure in word play: mishearings, trope and the fun of standing cliché on its head." ("ditch" interview)
