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]]>How do deviations from the norm provide an important foundation for radical invention and improvisation in contemporary poetry? Acclaimed poet and scholar Charles Bernstein makes a strong case for the importance of the exception.
Bernstein’s talk explores how the process of swerving away from expected trajectories is necessary for radical improvisation and the invention of new poetic forms. With special reference to Wittgenstein’s use of “queer” in Philosophical Investigations, he makes a strong case for the value of aesthetic positionality as part of the overall program of ’pataphysical disciplines such as Midrashic Antinomianism and Bent Studies.
Introduction by Darren Wershler
Recorded by Michael Nardone
Concordia University, Montreal
25 October 2012
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]]>In bringing to a forefront concepts of public and collective composition, multivocalic improvisation and political action, I read the human microphone as a mode of tactical composition extensively imagined and theorized in Language poetics and Performance Writing. I focus first on Charles Bernstein’s concept of “poetry as dissent, including formal dissent; poetry that makes sounds possible to be heard that are not otherwise articulated.” Then, I pick up on Lyn Hejinian’s concept of a transitive poetry, where a poem functions not as “an isolated autonomous rarefied aesthetic object,” but, instead moves toward a production in which “aesthetic discovery is congruent with social discovery” and “new ways of thinking (new relationships among the components of thought) make new ways of being possible.” With these guiding concepts in mind, I look to Caroline Bergvall, who asks: “What is the process of live performance in its relation to writing. Is it writing’s role, in that context, to function as a guiding background, as the blueprint of a live piece?” And finally, to David Buuck, who questions: “How might the performance writing form of ‘action’ expand beyond the recognizable activist performance model (scripts for street theater, etc.) and/or the much more militant and confrontational modes of direct action which are generally discussed in terms of efficacy (symbolic &/or material) rather than ‘as performance’ (as if the latter threatens to turn the political into the ‘merely’ aesthetic)?”
With these compositional aspects in mind, I also pursue the sonic and spatial dimensions of the human microphone. For this, Steven Connor’s concept of vocalic space plays an important role. Of vocalic space, Connor writes: “I mean to signal with this term the ways in which differing conceptions of the body’s form, measure, and susceptibility, along with its articulations with its physical and social environments. In the idea of vocalic space, the voice may be grasped as the mediation between the phenomenological body and its social and cultural contexts. Vocalic space signifies the ways in which the voice is held both to operate in, and itself to articulate, different conceptions of space, as well as to enact the different relations between the body, community, time, and divinity. What space means, in short, is very largely a function of the perceived powers of the body to occupy and extend itself through its environment.” Finally, the papers ends with a conceptual sketch of sonic disobedience: effective sonic tactics of composition, communication and intervention in situations of protest.
As I like to make public the work I’m doing – even if it is in progress – I will gladly send on a .pdf of the chapter to anyone who might like to read, and perhaps comment on the work.
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