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.
