For complete recording and program notes go to Jacket2.
PoemTalk #79, Discussing Joanne Kyger's βIt's Been a Long Time: Notes from the Revolution,β feat. Julia Bloch, Stephen Ratcliffe, and Pattie McCarthy
For complete recording and program notes go to Jacket2.
Performing with Thingamajigs Performance Group, Shapeshifters Cinema, Oakland, CA, June 27, 2021
Sound of Wave in Channel 10/1/13-4/10/14 (2:05:00): MP3
Sound of Wave in Channel 4/10/14-9/30/14 (2:05:04): MP3
Sound of Wave in Channel 10/1/14-2/12/15 (1:33:42): MP3
Sound of Wave in Channel 2/13/15-7/31/15 (1:51:58): MP3
Sound of Wave in Channel 8/1/15-2/9/16 (2:05:04): MP3
Sound of Wave in Channel 2/9/16-6/26/16 (1:31:30): MP3
Rocks was written on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada between South Lake and Whitney Portal, 120 miles over six 12,000-foot passes, August 10 β 18, 1993. I wrote the poem in three-line stanzas (five syllables in the first line, three in the second, five in the third), as a kind of walking meditation.
Complete reading of c o n t i n u u m in Vallejo, California, October 9, 2016
For more information on c o n t i n u u m, part of Ratcliffe's ongoing series of 1,000-page books, each written in 1,000 consecutive days, click here and here.
This performance was in collaboration with the Thingamajigs Performance Group, Rae Diamond (The Long Tone Choir), dancers Shinichi Iova-Koga (Ink Boat) and Jubilith Moore, and special guests. The event took place from 6am-8pm on October 9, 2016, in a WWII bunker at the Mare Island Shoreline Heritage Preserve in Vallejo, CA.
"The latest installment of Stephen Ratcliffe's thousand-page projects
triangulat[es] an eco-conceptual poetics through daily devotional
practice, rigorous form, and lyrical attention." (The Other Room)
c o n t i n u u m, written between January 5, 2011 and September 30,
2013, is the fourth book in Stephen Ratcliffe's ongoing series of
1,000-page books, each written in 1,000 consecutive days.
Listening to Ratcliffe reading the words of the day on the page
as it turns from one day to the next, one hears the poem's
acoustic 'shape': the length and pitch of its syllables and words
(plus those silences between them) sounding the air. What one
doesn't hear is its visual 'shape': words set in Courier, font of
equivalent spacing; the nine lines on the page divided into four
stanzas; first three lines all the same length, followed by two
pairs of indented lines (both first lines the same length, both
second lines six spaces shorter), followed by two final lines (back
on the left margin, both lines also the same length) (see photo of
"9.30", top right). The visual 'shape' of the words on the page 'corresponds
to' / 'performs' the 'shape' of 'things' / 'actions' / 'events' out
there in the world, which are themselves being 'pointed toward' / 'simply recorded' /
'described' / 'transcribed' / 'enacted' / 'documented' / 'testified to' /
'celebrated' in the first and last stanzas and 'considered' / 'thought about' /
'reflected upon' in the two middle ones.
Ratcliffe's readings of the previous volumes in his series (HUMAN /
NATURE, Remarks on Color / Sound, and Temporality), in collaboration
with the musicians in Thingamajigs Performance Ensemble, are also
available on PennSound. The texts of all four books are available at
Editions Eclipse.
human/nature, which explores collaborative work in a variety of mediums, is based on Stephen Ratcliffe's 1,000 page poem, written in 1,000 consecutive days between
10.19.02 - 7.14.05. The performance extends his investigations into the integration/interaction of human beings and natural landscape: "the relation between things seen/observed in
the natural world and how such things might be made (transcribed/transformed) as works of written (or visual) art." The reading of the poem will accompany sound, light, movement and sculpture
in an open dialogue with the architecture of the surrounding space. Audience will be free to move between an activated courtyard area and a more focused interior environment, creating a dialogue between reception, memory and stimulus.
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