A third question posed by the new anthology Short Fuse has to do with the volume's underlying agenda. Its ambition can be gauged by the fact that Swift & Norton's intervention works in two directions simultaneously. First, the book attempts to situate oral and performance poetries, aligned in this particular case most closely to the slam & spoken word scene rather than to, say, sound poetry, well within the legitimated borders of text-based work, placed alongside neoformalism, langpo & McPoetry as an equal, not just something quaint done by wannabes at your local slam tavern. Secondly & most ambitiously, Short Fuse argues at least implicitly that oral poetries offer the "missing link" between contending traditions of verse. Thus Short Fuse offers to transcend the poetry wars by placing itself front & center.

Although Short Fuse is hardly the first anthology to suggest the breadth & diversity of oral & performance poetries, it succeeds at its first task. The book clearly demonstrates a phenomenon that is more global than any other tendency within English-language poetry & with a lot more pizzazz than some. 

But to succeed at the second, the performative poetries of Short Fuse would have to overcome some serious limitations. This version of oral poetry would have to become, for example, a genuine poetic tradition whose sense of long term historical memory consists of more than the occasional Robert Service / Vachel Lindsay imitation.*

Close to half of the work presented in this particular vision of oral poetries could be described as stand-up comedy routines transcribed for the page, some better, some not. Polysemy in such works is not only close to non-existent, it's often counterproductive, in that this is a poetry aimed toward an audience that doesn't identify as readers & which places at least as much value on agreement & titillation as it does on meaning. Still, multiple levels of signification are possible, as Guillermo Castro's wry, wonderful homage to Allen Ginsberg, "A Deli on First Avenue," demonstrates. But as a rule it's not evident that, in the context of performativity, richness in content advantages the text.

I think it’s important to note that Short Fuse as a project represents one possible step toward just such an increase in depth & this may be its major achievement. Oral poetries by their very nature tend to be local. If you don't see what, say, Edwin Torres  is doing, you have relatively little access &, by itself, a transcription on paper is seldom enough to suggest all the many layers that are potentially active when the poem itself is understood first of all as a score. At a party I attended for the anthology in the offices of CLMP, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, one Toronto poet told me how much she appreciated hearing the work from Montreal at a reading the previous evening at the New School. The two scenes, according to this poet, seldom communicate, even though both are involved in parallel activities within the same country. In bringing together so many like-minded writers from different regions and parts of the world, Swift & Norton may ultimately be taking the first steps toward the creation of a performance metalanguage, a shared vocabulary that would enable such writers to begin to build on what one another are doing elsewhere.

The absence of this vocabulary is a major weakness in many of the oral poetries gathered in Short Fuse. It explains, in part, why so much of this work falls back on the stand-up comedy routine as a formal framework from which to operate – it’s something to which all these poets and their audiences have been exposed. The lack of a metalanguage is precisely the problem that has kept conceptual art in a position of always having to start over from scratch with each new work, regardless the worker, regardless the scene. And the absence of a true sense of tradition, of historical memory, is itself as much a consequence of this lack of shared vocabulary as it is a cause. It is precisely this absence that an oral poetics must overcome if it is to become more than an adjunct to the text-based poetries of the day, interesting more as sociology than literature.

All of which is to say that I don't think that Short Fuse, the anthology, is going to change the world of letters, not now, not yet, but that by envisioning what such a project might look like, Todd Swift & Philip Norton have upped the ante for performance poets everywhere. That is a huge achievement. And one from which we all benefit, whatever our taste in poetry.

*If either editor has read, for example, Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, edited by Steve McCaffery and the late bp Nichol (Underwhich Editions, 1978) or The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary Compendium on Language & Performance, edited by Stephen Vincent & Ellen Zweig (Momo’s Press, 1981), it’s not evident. The relative lack of sound poetry and Fluxus-inspired work in the anthology – Penn Kemp is the notable exception – keeps Short Fuse from being truly definitive as a gathering of oral poetics.

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.

The Envelope, Please by Swifty Lazarus, a collaboration between Canadian expatriate poet Todd Swift and composer Tom Walsh, is the latest attempt to wed the impulses of poetry to sound recording in some format beyond the traditional reading. The major influences – & they’re right out front & center – include Laurie Anderson; the Bill Burroughs of Towers Open Fire; the Brian Eno-David Byrne project, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; touches of Brecht & Weill; Godard’s sound tracks; and just maybe the backwards-talking dwarf from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

There is some good writing here, but mostly you have to read the liner notes to get to it. The problem is, I think, inherent in the medium. To carry over as anything other than pure reading, the text as literary signifier must choose to do one of three things:

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>focus solely on itself as signifier, becoming sound poetry

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>enter into a collaboration with other media and genre expectations, or

<![if !supportLists]>·        <![endif]>subordinate itself to another form altogether

Ultimately, those aren’t such attractive alternatives.

Collaborations between media are less common than those within one. The major challenge for any collaboration, regardless of the genre involved, is the surrender of control between players and between the conjoined forms. But whereas, within any single medium, two participants or players must arrive at a position that enables each to function, often enough something no one individual involved could have conceived of on his or her part alone, between media the gap can yawn so large that ultimately their interaction may not matter all that much.* It does matter in The Envelope, Please as a gathering of diverse poems (all by Swift, save for one by Adeena Karasick that is buried deep in the found-language layers of a 12 minute track) are transformed into the sonic shadows of recordings we already know, avant-garde as nostalgia. Several of the texts appear to have been written for Lazarus: there are generalizations so bald that they could not have been intended for consumption by a reader – “If History is dead, why do things still happen? / If there is no Truth, why do I bother lying?” But the title piece is a quiet surreal lyric that gets lost as a sort of preface in its 30-second format.

Texts that are subordinated within another form often work best when they immerse themselves without looking back. The poets who have had the most success with careers in popular music – Anderson, Jim Carroll, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen – produce words for music that share relatively little with their best known writing. Similarly, the finest musical texts in recent years – the work, say, of Dave Carter or Townes Van Zandt – don’t stand up well on the printed page, precisely because they were never conceived as doing so.

Containing sound, reference, syntax, and context, language is déjà toujours intermedia. The instant it combines with any form of instrumentation, the entire history of song is invoked and the result, regardless of how well intended, can never be innocent. Consider from the perspective of poetry the comic inappropriateness of Steve Reich’s filigreed setting for the work of William Carlos Williams as art song in The Desert Music compared with the far more powerful use of found language a much younger Reich demonstrated in tape loops such as Come Out.**  In projects that recruit poetry into other media, the ultimate question of context cannot be begged: where is the language most itself? Collaborators who forget or ignore that question do so at their own risk.

*The most successful intermedia collaborations in recent years – between poets & painters and between poets & dancers – have been in forms where the text functions alongside the other medium, rather than within it.

** A participant in a riot explains on tape what he needed to do to convince the police to get him medical attention:

I had to, like,

open the bruise up

and let some of the bruise blood

come out to show them.

The tape adds, then phases out of synch, multiple tracks of this last line until it gradually evolves into a roar.