This past
July, Bob Dylan played in Toronto on a double bill with ex-Grateful
Dead member Phil Lesh. Dylan opened with a set punctuated mostly
with his classic songs from the 1960s, performing many of them
in new arrangements, often with a country acoustic flair. Dylan
presented his new arrangements with the help of his tight backing
unit, perhaps the best touring band he's ever played with. It
was hard not to arrive at the conclusion that Dylan was pushing
his songs through new arrangements to show both their versatility
and their value. The sounds may change, but the song remains the
same. The structure of the words is strong enough to support various
interpretations.
Following
Dylan, Lesh led his band through a series of extended jam sessions,
which did their best to erase all of Dylan's subtle nuances. If
Dylan was Formalism, Lesh was Post-Structuralism. If Dylan was
a speaker, Lesh was a shouter. If Dylan was a bard, Lesh was a
self-indulgent poet. Dylan spoke with clarity about me, you and
them - he sang "Song To Woody" and was once again attempting
to be a dust-bowl ballader worthy enough to fill Guthrie's shoes.
On the other hand, Lesh invited the audience to worship (however
paradoxical this may seem) the communal "I". The 1970s
were not called the "Me-Decade" for nothing. Lesh showed
again where it all started, and how the community of Martin Luther
King's dream descended into the individualist spiritualism of
New Age ninnies and other California dreamers.
Which brings
us to the two spoken word CDs under review here: the Tupperware
Sandpiper anthology, Unheard Of..., and Penn Kemp's On
Our Own Spoke. Which one is Dylan and which one is Lesh? Well,
first, a qualification - it would be unfair to draw hard lines
here and make such simplistic comparisons; there is a little of
Dylan and a little of Lesh in each. That said, however, Kemp is
more distinctly Lesh-like, and many of the contributors to Unheard
Of... appear more inspired to track Dylan's formalism.
Kemp's CD
is subtitled "performance poetry". The first track on
the CD is an introductory monologue which outlines the "theory"
behind Kemp's approach. She says her sound poetry is related to
the babble of babies. It is an attempt to return language to its
early stages of discovery, and that is exactly what many of the
tracks on the CD sound like: babbling babies.
Kemp takes
a phase and breaks it into its most basic verbal sounding blocks.
She then improvises other sounds off these blocks, and repeats
and repeats and repeats them, moving ever closer to the original
or destination phrase. An audience is employed on some of the
tracks to introduce a "call and response" aspect to
the exercise. The audience appears to be having fun, as Kemp asks
them: "Isn't this just like being six years old again?"
There are
15 tracks on On Our Own Spoke, although only 9 titles listed
in the index. This makes following along with the babble a little
difficult, as the titles of the pieces are also difficult to match
up with the sound poetry once it's in progress.
A different
experience of On Our Own Spoke can be attained by placing
the CD into a computer with a functioning CD-ROM drive. Kemp has
constructed an audio-visual interaction, which adds graphical
elements to the soundscape of her poetry. A table of contents
makes it clear that there are 15 tracks, though titles are not
attached to the numbers. The interface is intuitive, and the visuals
are stimulating and professionally done. That is, they look good.
They weave well together, and they complement the audio art as
well as they can reasonably be expected to do.
The visual
tone, however, is not much different from the audio tone. The
colour scheme leans heavily on primary and secondary colours,
and leads one to believe recess is coming soon. There are numerous
web-based resources included in the links section, which provide
a broader social context for the work at hand. For example, readers
may wish to look up a collection of essays (of which Kemp is a
contributor) called Illegitimate
Positions: Women & Language, published in 1987 as part of
the feminist Living Archives Series of The League of Canadian
Poets.
Feminist literary
criticism has played its hand heavily towards recovering women's
voices from the margins of the West's patriarchal literary tradition.
Kemp is a contributor to the theory of this "new" anti-tradition
and to the anti-tradition's art. Will the anti-tradition last?
Does it matter? Is there more to Kemp and the Grateful Dead than
songs of the self for the self? Is the personal political? These
are questions for someone else to answer.
Personally,
I resisted Kemp's emphasis on returning language to its infantile
beginnings. It seems to me that we've all been there and done
that, and now it is time to grow up and live in the real world
- a world that includes a social context beyond the self. Which
isn't to say that there are no longer times for play - or even
babble - but poetry is not an inner child workshop; it is not
an early childhood education seminar; and the 1970s were over
twenty years ago and fading. Poetry needs more adult readers -
educated readers willing to do the hard work of literary comprehension.
Poetry also needs to follow literary, not political commands.
All songs of the self (following Whitman) are legitimate, but
not all are interesting. Associating poetry
and the babble of infants makes me deeply uncomfortable. It seems
to me that words should push towards old age - towards complication
and wisdom - not in the other direction.
Being an anthology,
Unheard Of... presents a variety of approaches to spoken
word as an art form. The CD includes 26 tracks, representing 19
artists performing solo or in collaboration. The pieces run the
gamut from narrative prose (Monica S. Kuebler), to Kerouac inspired
jazz poetry (J Dennie), to pieces that emphasize line breaks as
on a printed page (Cynthia Gould).
The contributions
to Unheard Of... repeat no common motif, unless it is the
voice of a new generation pushing up through the cracks of a degrading
older culture. However, like contemporary haircuts, none of the
sounds or voices on this CD is particularly new. Perhaps nothing
is new under the sun. Perhaps all rhetorical strategies have been
attempted and exhausted, and it is now only left to each new generation
to ape the strategies and positions of the past. Old Kerouac was
pushing against the culture of Eisenhower's America, trying to
create a separate space. What does it mean to adopt Kerouac's
strategies now, when Kerouac's image is used to sell Gap jeans
and On the Road became a hippie mantra almost a quarter-century
ago?
Tom Waits
successfully infused Kerouac, Louis Armstrong, and Frank Zappa.
Hip hop spun it in new - and sometimes disturbing (misogynistic,
nihilistic, hyper-violent) - directions. Unheard Of... presents
an impressive crop of urban hipsters working their art on the
margins of Toronto's Wannbe-American Neo-Con Dot-Com scene. "What
does the poet make?" Mark Kozub asks on his track "Support
the Poet." The question refers to a sum of money, but perhaps
it is also asking: "What is the poet's purpose?" The
poet makes poetry, but what is that? This CD is an excellent introduction
to a new generation of poets returning like their elders once
did, and others will tomorrow, back to that eternal question.
Rock on.
This issue
of The Danforth Review also includes a review of Penn Kemp's
CD When the Heart Parts.
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