Contrasted with the CD that comes with the Short Fuse anthology, Arundo’s Triumph of the Damned and Edwin Torres’ Please present divergent alternatives.

Arundo consists of Actualist poet, G.P. Skratz and multi-instrumentalist Andy Dinsmoor. Skratz sent me Triumph to convince me that he was more than merely popping “up in print from time to time” as I had suggested in a “where are they now” discussion of Actualism. Given its 1999 production date and homegrown packaging features – photocopied cover, the CD’s title posted on a TDR CD-R disc via a mailing label – I’m not certain that I’m dissuaded of the “from time to time” periodicity. But there is more than print to Skratz alright. Triumph falls into the poems set to a musical accompaniment vein, akin perhaps to Dwayne Morgan’s use of bongos on the Short Fuse CD, or the work there of Bob Holman, never quite going so far into song as Michele Morgan’s jazz vocals. Dinsmoor ranges between guitar, recorder, sitar & tabla, with Skratz coming in on a couple of tracks on tamboura and two members of The Serfs, Ed Holmes & Bob Ernst, adding toy percussion, blues harp and a backup vocal on a couple of pieces. Save for one collaboration by Skratz with the late Darrell Gray and a translation from the poetry Hans Arp, the words – the back cover is careful not to call them either lyrics or text – are all Skratz.

It would be easy enough to dismiss Triumph – nothing here strives to be a breakthrough – but it is just too enjoyable for that. These pieces for the most part work quite well. Skratz’ droll wit rolls softly over the soft raga backgrounds offered by Dinsmoor. Only the final piece on the CD, the blues rock “Doorwayman,” comes across as more energetic than arranged. A couple of the pieces seem too similar lyrically – “Banana Ghazal’s” anomalous use of guitar & “Banjo’s” equally anomalous use of traditional Indian instruments don’t really paper over the redundant strategies of the poems – but as a whole, this is an excellent way to take in Skratz’ poetry, including his work as both collaborator & translator.

Please is an ambitious multimedia CD, one of three issued thus far by Faux Press (the others are Wanda Phipps’ Zither Mood & Peter Ganick’s tend. field). You put it into your PC, not your CD player. Once you go past the opening screen (with its own text, a much longer voiceover by Gina Bonati & title graphics), you arrive at an ideogram with links in each of its strokes. Depending on where you click, you will be led to one of five series of poems (“City,” “Boy,” “Remote,” Time,” and “Love”), a play in twelve parts (plus a prologue & epilogue) or section entitled “Media” that contains documentation of eight Torres performances plus his bio.

Each section of the CD, each set of poems, the play & “Media,” has an opening screen, a logo with its own set of links. Each set of poems as well as the media section also begins with a voiced over text read by Bonati. For the play, we get a little bit of music in a truncated marching band vein. Most though not all of the poems seem to have their own sound tracks, a few of which can be seen as readings of the text. If Alicia Sometimes’ music seemed to play against, rather than with, her own text on the Soft Fuse CD, Torres actively explores the entire range of push-pull juxtapositions between sound and written language. Often these are quite wonderful. Always, they’re playful & optimistic, qualities totally consistent with Torres’ poetry. As writing, Please is at a higher level, or perhaps at a high level with greater consistency, than any of the other CDs I’ve considered on the this. It’s a shame that there isn’t a collection gathered in a liner-note booklet – as a book’s worth of work, they’re more straightforward pieces than the typographic extravaganzas of his big Roof collection, The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker: the texts work just fine on the screen even with the PC speakers shut down.

Like almost any web- or screen-centric work, Please invites bouncing around from link to link – while there is an order, the project seems set up to undermine it. One doesn’t so much read as browse, homo ludens in total evidence. Overall, though, it can be as engrossing as any front-to-back text imaginable. In fact, the one piece that doesn’t fully work on the CD is the play, precisely because it requires the participant to go sequentially.

There is an old rule of thumb with technology, one that I first learned watching Jackson Mac Low struggle with tape machines some 30 years ago: something always goes wrong. There are inevitably a few “gotchas” on the CD – the apostrophe often shows up as an umlauted capital O, there is at least one link that doesn’t go anywhere, opening a dialog box in vain search of a missing file on the CD. & the images are consistently too small throughout (a consequence of another of my rules of thumb: QuickTime sucks). But these are nits when taken in the context of the total project.

Overall Please pleases. It demonstrates the gazillion different ways Edwin Torres’ poetry (& mind) can move simultaneously, always interesting, always in the ballpark with something of value to add. He’s one of our great talents & we’re lucky to have every manifestation we can get of his work.

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.