Notes from Charles Bernstein & Al Filreis – I’ve received four & read others on various listservs – announce that PENNsound is “now open for close listening.” So I was spending a morning listening to some treasures, both there & on the Ubuweb MP3 site, when I received an email from a reader who wrote:

 

As a reader who looks forward to installments of your blog the way Americans waited on the docks in New York 150 years ago to get the latest chapters of whatever Dickens was doing – even in the midst of the horrors the world is contemplating right now – I'm a touch devastated to miss whatever you were saying from Dec. 1 to Dec. 13.

 

Just how much of hyperbole is sarcasm, anyway? Whatever. My correspondent was quite correct in pointing out, however indirectly, that I had neglected to set up the December archive page on my blog site. Which I then did, but it made me think about archiving & the archival process – not to mention the role of the recorded reading in poetry.

 

PENNsound may have gone live, finally, after a year or so of living in that beta limbo state through which all software services must pass. But readers here will note that I’ve had a link in this blog’s left column to my work at PENNsound for several months. What it is now, finally, is a full fledged archive with some substantial and remarkable materials. Of particular note – or maybe just what I enjoyed most this time – were Jack Spicer’s “Imaginary Elegies” – this 1957 event is the best reading of Spicer’s that I’ve ever heard. As if to underscore the point, PENNsound also has the only reading I’ve ever heard of Spicer reading Book of Magazine Verse, a strong candidate for being the best thing that Spicer ever wrote. Spicer’s reading, tho, is listless – this must have been recorded just a few weeks before he died. The distinction is telling – a great reading does not necessarily mean that the work itself is great, nor does a lesser reading equate with a lesser text. We can toss this into the hopper with the “platform independence” I would argue always characterizes the best poetry, noting that some great performance pieces (the Ubu site has a ton of these) may be great sound texts, but not necessarily good poetry. And, as I think my back-&-forth with Geof Huth would suggest, that’s just as it should be – they’re not the same genre.

 

Also worth hearing – in fact, an absolute delight – is Hugh MacDiarmid’s longpoem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. This is not only one of the few major modernist long poems to come out of the British Isles, it’s a fascinating reminder of just how far the English language can stretch. We Yanks – not MacDiarmid – should be understood as the ones with the recently acquired accent.

 

PENNsound’s home page links directly to both Ubuweb and the Electronic Poetry, which are its closest peers on the web. The three together go a fair distance toward the creation of an actual archive of poetry recordings. PENNsound goes further, in fact, by offering up a manifesto for sound archives & promising (in 2006!) to actually have a useable catalog of sound recordings. Penned by Charles Bernstein in 2003, the manifesto’s major points are as follows:

 

1. It must be free.
2. It must be MP3 or better.
3. It must be singles.
4. It must be named.
5. It must embed bibliographic information in the file.
6. It must be indexed.

 

While a couple of these – notably 4 & 5 – seem aimed primarily at agitating for changes in Ubuweb practices, the group as a whole make eminent sense. The only one that doesn’t feel central to me – “It must be singles” – is one of those glass-half-full type of arguments. I’m mostly interested in hearing readings – I can understand the value of “singles” – individual poems segregated out from their larger reading venues –but it seems a lot of extraneous effort to get 15 files if I want a collection of short poems read at one event by a single author than it would be to get one larger file. So the ideal presentation would be a both/and, not an either/or, solution.

 

What this points up, tho, is what I take to be the important seventh rule for sound archives – I would actually list it as number 3 were I putting together this manifesto – It must be downloadable. This is what separates out useful archives such as Ubu or PENNsound from one that has interesting holdings but sometimes proves too irritating in practice – the Slought Organization archives. Streaming media ought to be banned from these kinds of projects, simply because even the best broadband connections can suffer buffer reload interruptions, especially during periods of high internet traffic. Plus you can’t go back & forth easily to focus in on a few lines here or there, which is the advantage of recorded media when it comes to the reading. Logically, streaming should be understood as contrary to item 1 in Bernstein’s list above – if it can’t be downloaded, then it’s not free – but it more is in the listening experience where the problems show up.

 

I’m sympathetic with the problems of archiving. An adequate index or search tool is something which would make this blog far more user friendly. The Blogger bar at the top – which is forced on the site by virtue of being hosted on the Blogspot server – is useless. The Pico Search tool isn’t a whole lot better – this blog is already well beyond what the free version of the tool can index & it doesn’t help that a search on any name that shows up on the blogroll will return an answer of every possible page. The cheapest paid version of the tool, however, is several hundred dollars annually – which is to say that it’s not targeted at individual users at all. So treat that button on the left with some skepticism. It might not be telling the whole truth.