Saturday, October 19, 2002

Todd Swift's work in the poetry-music duo Swifty Lazarus allowed us to pose the question of how well intermedia presents writing as writing. Now the anthology he has edited with Philip Norton, Short Fuse lets us turn the question around and ask just how well the printed page can represent poets whose work is primarily turned towards performance.

Short Fuse is hardly the first book to pose this issue. The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker, by Edwin Torres (Roof, 2001) is an in-depth collection by one of the most brilliant performance poets alive, but I couldn't work through its use of typographic pyrotechnics until I had actually heard Torres for myself. In ways that are not apparent from the text, or at least were not to me, that experience opened up the work — I could hear it, even in poems that I had not heard Torres perform.*

Some of these same issues bedevil Short Fuse, but principally for those poets not represented on the book's companion CD. The disc contains roughly 70 minutes of work by an exceptionally diverse selection of writers, from Torres and Bob Holman to Charles Bernstein to Simon Armitage to Billy Collins.

But Penn Kemp, to pick one example, is a superb sound poet & enormous fun to see on stage. Her texts on the page offer no sense of the extraordinary phonemic overload that comes with her words. Ditto, tho more in a jazz vein, Adeena Karasick.

Even though there are performance poets whose work can be adequately represented on the page, such as Holman or Willie Perdomo, Short Fuse is wise to include the CD even though it only contains 34 of the project’s 175 writers. But what it points to is the probability that the future of representing such work may not be on the page, nor on the CD, but rather in the fuller (tho more costly) medium of DVD.**


* In retrospect, this reminds me of something Josephine Miles once said to me about William Carlos Williams, that writers of her generation literally did not know how to read him at first, they could not hear his poetry, its foundation in speech, which seems self-evident to somebody my age, was not at all apparent. Yet over a couple of generations, Williams literally changed what poets understand as “clarity.”

**Indeed, Ram Devineni, the publisher of Rattapallax Press, tells me that if the anthology gets a sufficiently positive response, he and its editors have discussed a bi-annual journal that might come out with a DVD. Rattapallax already issues a CD with each book it publishes.