{"id":1382,"date":"2011-12-31T13:51:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-31T13:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/?p=1382"},"modified":"2012-01-19T12:17:09","modified_gmt":"2012-01-19T12:17:09","slug":"steven-hitchens-poetry-music-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/1382\/steven-hitchens-poetry-music-space\/","title":{"rendered":"STEVEN HITCHINS: Poetry: Music: Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thoughts on recent work by Zo\u00eb Skoulding, Susan Howe and Richard Skelton<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Increasing numbers of musicians are creating works which grasp at the transparency of water, seek to track the journeys of telematic nomads, bottle moods and atmospheres, rub out chaos and noise pollution with quiet, concentrate on sonic microcosms, absorb quotations and digital snapshots of sound into themselves, avoid form in favour of impression, concoct synthetic wilderness in urban laboratories \u2026 depict impossible, imaginary environments of beauty and terror. <\/em>Music that aspires to the condition of perfume, music that searches for new relationships between maker and listener, maker and machine, sound and context. \u00a0Music that leads the listener into a shifting zone, which Peter Lamborne Wilson has described as the \u2018sacred drift\u2019, a mode of imaginal travel \u201cin which the landscape will once again be invested with meaning, or rather with a liberatory aesthetics\u201d. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0(<\/em>David Toop, Ocean of Sound)<\/em><\/p>\n

When I started writing, I wanted my poetry to be some sort of literary equivalent of the music I liked, which was electronic music, ambient, electronica. \u00a0I liked the way that these musicians could take samples from different sound sources and mix them together to create a new space.\u00a0 I wanted to work with words in ways that were as exciting as the ways that contemporary musicians were working with sound.\u00a0 This led me to explore collage techniques as methods that seemed similar to the sampling and sound manipulation techniques incorporated in such music.\u00a0 I began to siphon materials from the place I inhabit to concoct my own imaginary landscapes.\u00a0 Recently I have been fascinated to come across three contemporary artists who have combined poetry and music \u2013 Zo\u00eb Skoulding Susan Howe, and Richard Skelton \u2013 each in works that explore notions of place and space.<\/p>\n

Overlaps between poetry and music have long been apparent.\u00a0 It is often commented that many early poetries were recited, sung or chanted to music.\u00a0 \u2018Symmetry or strophic forms,\u2019 wrote Ezra Pound in \u2018Treatise on Metre\u2019, \u2018naturally HAPPENED in lyric poetry when a man was singing a long poem to a short melody which he had to use over and over\u2019 (Ha\u00fcblein, p. 10).\u00a0 If poetic form derives from the traditional musical forms over which the lyric was sung, then consideration of the more amorphous forms of contemporary music might help towards new conceptions of poetic form.<\/p>\n

As Steven Brown comments, \u2018the similarities between music and language are not just the stuff of metaphors but a reflection of something much deeper.\u2019 (\u2018The \u201cMusilanguage\u201d mode of music\u2019, in Wallin, p. 272)\u00a0 Trying to write poetry as if it is music might be a pointless task.\u00a0 Perhaps these are simply two separate spheres \u2013 poems are made of words and music is made of notes \u2013 and it is impossible to apply the methods of one to the other.\u00a0 But maybe, as Jean Molino suggests, such hybrids give us a better sense of what language is and bring us closer to an idea of where language comes from: \u2018the first forms of something that was at the same time music and language\u2019 (\u2018Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Music and Language\u2019, in Wallin, p. 172).<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

Zo\u00eb Skoulding and Alan Holmes: Species Corridor <\/em>and You Will Live in Your Own Cathedral<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

A good example of what happens to poetic form when a poem is sung is Zo\u00eb Skoulding\u2019s \u2018City in the Intermediate Realm\u2019 which appears as a song on Parking Non-Stop\u2019s Species Corridor<\/em> album and as a poem in Skoulding\u2019s collection, The Mirror Trade<\/em>.\u00a0 The text of the poem is not the lyric of the song, though phrases from the poem do appear in the lyric.<\/p>\n

Between ground and sky<\/p>\n

its streets unfold a crumpled<\/p>\n

plan of another city,<\/p>\n

one you haven\u2019t been to<\/p>\n

\n

where caf\u00e9s fade in smoke<\/p>\n

behind peeling plaster<\/p>\n

with bullet holes suspended<\/p>\n

in fractions of a second<\/p>\n

(The Mirror Trade<\/em>, p. 38)<\/p>\n

Phrases from these opening lines of the poem appear in the second verse of the song lyric:<\/p>\n

Just around the corner,<\/p>\n

if you follow me,<\/p>\n

streets unfold between the<\/p>\n

ground and sky;<\/p>\n

\n

a crumpled map of where you<\/p>\n

want to be;<\/p>\n

lost in the City of the<\/p>\n

Intermediate Realm.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth noting how the text changes from one form to the other.\u00a0 The poem doesn\u2019t have a strict syllabic metre: though the lines tend to be of similar length, with predominantly three stressed syllables per line, this is not heard because the enjambment allows the voice to flow conversationally as if prose.\u00a0 The lyric acquires the loose metre of the song\u2019s melody \u2013 tum-tee-tum-tee-tum-tee \/ tum-tee-tum<\/em> \u2013 and the stanzaic structure, while silent in the poem, is emphasised by the end-stopped lines and the rhyming \u2018me\/be\u2019.\u00a0 It becomes less like conversation, becomes something more stylised, a different use of words and voice.\u00a0 When listening to the song, I don\u2019t register the meaning, or even the words themselves immediately, the breathed vocal bringing the melody to the forefront.\u00a0 The rhythm is also slower than the speed of normal speech, drawing the words out, turning them into tonal syllables.<\/p>\n

If Skoulding\u2019s lyric demonstrates how language becomes shaped to the rhythm and melody of song, Holmes\u2019 use of found sounds as the basis for the music draws attention to what melody and rhythm are and where they come from.<\/p>\n

Found melodies, such as birdsong and church bells, and the synthesised doorbell tones and prerecorded voices of railway and subway station tannoy announcements, raise questions of what melody is and what it is used for.\u00a0 Birdsongs come in many varieties: flight calls, alarm calls, territorial calls; they all are announcements.\u00a0 Church bells may also be considered as an older version of the announcement tone: announcing church services, events.\u00a0 They also can be territorial, defining the area of the parish.\u00a0 As well as space, they mark time, sounding the hours.<\/p>\n

Throughout Species Corridor<\/em>, drum patterns are sculpted from samples of recordings of slate being smashed on the mountains of North Wales.\u00a0 These rhythms emerge from the post-industrial landscape of North Wales, the disused slate quarries: scattery clattering ricochets, the ghosts of quarried chippings poured from trams.\u00a0 As well as industry and work, rhythm is connected to movement and travel.\u00a0 Many rhythms on the album derive from recordings of subway and railway trains, their repetitive rhythms creating a static repetition, a sensation of moving yet staying still.\u00a0 This is characteristic of the amorphous musical forms of ambient and electronic music, where the verse-chorus structures of traditional song give way to structures based on building up and breaking down patterns over long durations.<\/p>\n

Species Corridor<\/em> is thus both a deconstruction of the traditional song and an attempt to break out of its formal constraints in order to engage with the modern experience of movement through space.\u00a0 While Species Corridor<\/em> explores how sound and poetry change when they become song, You Will Live in Your Own Cathedral<\/em> attempts to combine sound and poetry without becoming song.<\/p>\n

The city in this work is a living thing, bodily and mechanical, artificial and organic: \u2018boundaries collapse in a rush of \/ security as cells multiply and break through stone \/ translucent grit cracks the skin open to the elements\u2019 (\u2018The Old Walls\u2019, You Will Live in Your Own Cathedral<\/em>, p. 14).\u00a0 Holmes melds ominous resonances and scuttling crackles foraged from Wales, the Czech Republic and Germany to build a soundscape of this living city.\u00a0 It reminds me of Burroughs\u2019 Interzone, the city scenes in Naked Lunch<\/em> written under the influence of the hallucinogen Yag\u00e9, where the city becomes his body, the room vibrating with motion, the blood of its past lives passing through him.<\/p>\n

This is appropriate to the source of the project\u2019s title \u2013 Ivan Chtcheglov\u2019s early Situationist text \u2018Formulary for a New Urbanism\u2019: \u2018In a way everyone will live in his own \u201ccathedral.\u201d\u00a0 There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than drugs\u2026\u2019 (McDonough, p. 38)\u00a0 The proposed future city is itself conducive to hallucination.\u00a0 \u2018Architecture is the simplest means to articulate<\/em> time and space, to modulate<\/em> reality, to engender dreams\u2019 (ibid<\/em>, p. 36).\u00a0 It is the remains of this city that Skoulding and Holmes traverse.<\/p>\n

It is a city constantly creating and destroying itself: a demolished building rising from rubble in \u2018The Building Constructed from its Own Fall\u2019.\u00a0 A city built out of language: a \u2018wind tower\u2019 built out of lies, perhaps, or a call to prayer, or disembodied radiator-pipe voices.\u00a0 A city that speaks in glass, metal, concrete: \u2018Between the buildings \/ trees reach down \/ to languages \/ of soils and worms, \/ leaves gloss argots of glass and steel\u2019 (\u2018Building Site\u2019, You Will Live in Your Own Cathedral<\/em>, p. 8).<\/p>\n

In Holmes\u2019 sound sculpture, we hear such argots: the reverberating vowels of a dropped girder; the brittle consonants rustling in the sound of breaking glass like some alien insect lingo.\u00a0 On Species Corridor<\/em>, language set to music becomes sound; here sound set to poetry becomes language.\u00a0 But it is more complicated.\u00a0 Notions of background and foreground, music as accompaniment to voice and vice versa, break down when Skoulding\u2019s poems, after being read in English, are subsequently read in Czech and then German.\u00a0 Now I get the same experience in reverse.\u00a0 Shifted from my linguistic habitat, the clink of Polish \u0161, ? and \u017e, the brush of German f, v and w, become part of the soundscape.\u00a0 As the referential dimension drains, I hear language as sound.\u00a0 This raises interesting questions regarding what sound is; a sense that all sound has the potential to be language, that all sounds have meanings.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=1TUZNHxoEmc<\/a><\/p>\n

Susan Howe and David Grubbs: Souls of the Labadie Tract<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In Souls of the Labadie Tract<\/em>, Susan Howe has also combined poetry and music in a project that has close connections to place.\u00a0 The first pages of the \u2018Souls of the Labadie Tract\u2019 sequence, and the opening track on the CD, explain, in Howe\u2019s characteristic blend of dry fact and poetic prose, that \u2018the Labadie Tract\u2019 refers to the area in Bohemia Hundred, Cecil County, Maryland settled in 1684 by members of \u2018a Utopian Quietist sect consisting mainly of Dutch followers of the French Separatist Jean de Labadie\u2019.<\/p>\n

Howe points out that a \u2018labadie popular\u2019 was labelled on Dennis Griffith\u2019s map of Maryland in 1795, by which point the Labadist community had already dispersed.\u00a0 For Howe, the fact that it is the single tree on the map highlights its significance, as trees are rarely labelled on maps.\u00a0 She draws attention to this as a way that a trace can be left in language on a representation of space.<\/p>\n

Howe is precise in her location of this space as consisting of 3,750 acres of land where Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland meet, yet the poems themselves are not specifically concerned with describing any particular place.\u00a0 Howe comments that the sequence began simply with the word \u2018Labadist\u2019, which she encountered in reference to the genealogical research of Wallace Stevens.\u00a0 The space in which the poem moves is thus rather one of language, texts, books.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Personal Narrative\u2019, the prose section at the start of the Souls of the Labadie Tract<\/em> book, Howe suggests the relationship between landscape and writing throughout her work: \u2018In Sterling [Library]\u2019s sleeping wilderness I felt the telepathic solicitation of innumerable phantoms \u2026 I wish to speak a word for libraries as places of freedom and wildness\u2019 (Souls of the Labadie Tract<\/em>, p. 14).\u00a0 Souls of the Labadie Tract<\/em>, then, is a s\u00e9ance with place conducted through books.<\/p>\n

Now go back to sleep we<\/p>\n

can\u2019t be crazy the truth is<\/p>\n

we couldn\u2019t we couldn\u2019t<\/p>\n

\n

we\u2019re the past \u2013 we\u2019re too<\/p>\n

close \u2013 to covet \u2013 you\u2019re<\/p>\n

not to be afraid \u2013 breathe<\/p>\n

(Souls of the Labadie Tract<\/em>, p. 39)<\/p>\n

There are plays on presence and distance throughout the sequence, through use of the pronouns I, you and we.\u00a0 Occasionally visual images flit past, but Howe\u2019s hypnagogic monologues tend to favour the general and the vague \u2013 what John Cage might call \u2018empty words\u2019 (see Perloff).\u00a0 It is not what they describe, but the voices themselves that create the sense of space.\u00a0 It\u2019s as if I\u2019m blind and have walked into a room where people are talking.\u00a0 I orient myself by where they are speaking from.\u00a0 But these voices speak across distant stretches of time.<\/p>\n

The text is made up of short poems (usually 5-8 lines) placed one-per-page in the centre of each page.\u00a0 David Grubbs\u2019 long, flat tones, provided by khaen and synthesizer, respond to this minimalism in Howe\u2019s textual presentation.\u00a0 He comments that Howe told him at that start of the project that \u2018she could show me a photograph of a cemetery in Ireland where the stones were every bit as regular as the short poems that make up the piece\u2019.\u00a0 It is interesting that Grubbs\u2019 music echoes the visual appearance of the poems.\u00a0 While Pound suggests that the poetic stanza formed when poems were sung over melodies, here the stanza is a visual shape on the page, which the musician responds to with a block of sound.<\/p>\n

The sustained tones recall the early minimalist composer La Monte Young.\u00a0 Young\u2019s drones seem to derive from Cage, whose 4\u201933\u2019\u2019<\/em> might be seen as the original minimalist composition.\u00a0 This is clearly appropriate to Howe\u2019s poetry, which isolates words and sentence fragments amid white space, so that the reader experiences them with heightened vividness as visual and aural objects, in a similar way to which Cage\u2019s silent composition draws our attention to sound-events going on around us that would otherwise be ignored.<\/p>\n

The regularity of stanza-shapes in Souls of the Labadie Tract<\/em> is in contrast to the scattered arrangement of Cage\u2019s poetry.\u00a0 While Cage\u2019s poems are characterised by juxtapositions of single words, a loose syntax threads through Howe\u2019s unpunctuated stanzas, inviting the reader to read across the different speaking voices.\u00a0 Yet there is a strong sense that these poems have been shaped spatially and with just as much attention to the space of the page as those of Cage.<\/p>\n

Like Howe, Grubbs seems to have taken silence, white space, as the foundation to work from.\u00a0 His drones seem to hold the short fragmentary poems together by sustaining flat tones between them.\u00a0 Grubbs refers to this as the vine on the trellis, drawing a visual analogy between a trellis and the \u2018grid-like\u2019 blocks of Howe\u2019s poems.\u00a0 The use of the khaen, a Laotian reed instrument resembling pan-pipes but sounding more like a harmonica, draws attention to the breath.\u00a0 Dissonant chords of overlapping notes are drawn in and out with long inhalations and exhalations.\u00a0 The slow rhythm of the music seems to respond to the pace of Howe\u2019s reading.\u00a0 While Howe\u2019s \u2018empty\u2019 spaces build an atmosphere without any definite sense of location, Grubbs builds an ambience through the poetry; he tints the silence, the breath, the white space around the voices.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=dJqTTu5VxFs<\/a><\/p>\n

Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson: Wolf Notes<\/em> and Landings<\/em><\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n

Musician and poet, Richard Skelton\u2019s works are both textual and auditory explorations of place.\u00a0 In a typical project, the poetry and music are separate engagements with the same landscape (Angelzarke in Landings<\/em> and Ulpha in Wolf Notes<\/em>).\u00a0 They form an assemblage, into which other sensory elements sometimes enter: birch twigs, stones, grasses collected in the place.\u00a0 The addition of tactile and olfactory elements to the auditory and textual ones suggests a desire to produce an immersive experience of place.<\/p>\n

The music is often recorded in the landscape.\u00a0 \u2018In some oblique fashion this music has come to work its way into the moor itself,\u2019 he writes in Landings<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Bowed plucked and chafed steel strings.\u00a0 The sound of stones gently rubbed together.\u00a0 Soft soil sprinkled on resonant wooden bodies.\u00a0 Grasses intertwined around neck and fretboard. Bone and wood plectra.\u00a0 Sound folded on sound.\u00a0 A collusion of place and instrument. (Landings<\/em>, p. 50)<\/p>\n

The instruments become part of the landscape, sometimes buried or left out to be exposed to the elements.\u00a0 These processes of transformation through decay evoke the way the space is formed and reformed through the combination of human construction and nature: old farmhouses reclaimed by vegetation.<\/p>\n

A similar sense of change layered through time is present in the poetry.\u00a0 Wolf Notes<\/em>, a collaboration with poet-musician Autumn Richardson, mines the etymologies of the place-name Ulpha:<\/p>\n

Wolfhou,<\/p>\n

1279<\/p>\n

Ulfhou,<\/p>\n

1337<\/p>\n

Ulpho,<\/p>\n

1449<\/p>\n

Ulpha,<\/p>\n

1625<\/p>\n

Ulfay,<\/p>\n

1646<\/p>\n

Ulpha,<\/p>\n

1777<\/p>\n

?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hill frequented by wolves\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>(Wolf Notes<\/em>, poem 2)<\/p>\n

\n

Layers of sound are fossilised in language when a place-name is written down.\u00a0 Change becomes visible through writing.\u00a0 Writing is the landscape that preserves the imprint of past forms of language.\u00a0 He talks of \u2018the litter trail of a name caught in different places\u2019:<\/p>\n

How are names fastened to places?\u00a0 Do they chafe at the tether, become unmoored, catch in\u00a0grasses and along walls, snag and tear? \u2026 Attrition.\u00a0 Atrophy.\u00a0 Change.\u00a0 Written into the landscape. (Landings<\/em>, p. 83)<\/p>\n

Skelton collects language materials in the same way as he collected sticks and stones, his \u2018thing-poems of the moors\u2019.\u00a0 \u2018Where before I collected fragments found on my visits to the moor,\u2019 he comments, \u2018I now gather words that were once used to call upon the landscape\u2019 (Landings<\/em>, p. 137).\u00a0 Wolf Notes<\/em> teems with names: farms, land formations, grasses.\u00a0 In the act of naming, possibly one of the first uses of language, sound becomes tied to space.<\/p>\n

It is interesting that while the poetry emphasises the visual and physical material of written language, the music is not a direct vocalisation of the text.\u00a0 Autumn Richardson provides voice on the recording, but her singing is without words, her repeated vocal tones like another instrument.\u00a0 As Richardson and Skelton point out, however, \u2018although the voice is an instrument, it is also undeniably a voice.\u00a0 As listeners we can\u2019t help but feel that it is saying something<\/em>, if only we knew how to interpret it\u2019 (email to author).\u00a0 It shows how language can convey meaning without words.\u00a0 Wordless singing demonstrates language\u2019s capacity for emotive rather than referential meaning: we don\u2019t have to interpret; we feel what the voice is saying.<\/p>\n

While the performance is wordless, the text remains silent.\u00a0 It\u2019s a visual, mute music of letters; but that ghost of a sound in our silent reading might form a spectral melody of the place.\u00a0 Skelton notes that, \u2018To sound the changes that a place-name has undergone is a form of incantatory, transformative poetry.\u2019\u00a0 When a word, a melody of vocal sounds, attaches itself to a place, the sounds lose their original meanings and come to denote only the place.\u00a0 The fact that such sounds are intimately connected to the space is important to Skelton.\u00a0 \u2018Could I reconstruct the landscape from its stress pattern?\u2019 he wonders. \u2018Is there a clue within each subtle voicing, which, when gathered together, provides a key with which to sound the landscape?\u2019 (Landings<\/em>, p. 149).<\/p>\n

Sounding a place-name\u2019s changes leads us back to its etymological roots.\u00a0 Skelton and Richardson tease out remnants of Gaelic and Norse buried within words.\u00a0 Ulpha is found to be made up of the Old Norse ulfr<\/em>, meaning \u201cwolf\u201d, and haugr<\/em>, meaning \u201chill or grave mound\u201d.\u00a0 Etymologies defamiliarise the word, allowing us to experience it as sound, but while the word loses its meaning as a place-name, its syllables take on new meanings: where \u2018ulph\u2019 was pure sound, it now takes on traces of \u2018wolf\u2019; where the word \u2018Ulpha\u2019 previously only denoted a place, it acquires new meaning as \u2018wolf-hill\u2019.<\/p>\n

Skelton has broadened the concept of melody to include any process of change over time.\u00a0 He and Richardson return language to the landscape, like an instrument left out to the elements.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=4OerDaiPbzE&feature=related<\/a><\/p>\n

Each of these artists approaches the combination of poetry and music in a different way, but some common conclusions might be made.\u00a0 Rhythm and melody forged the stanza, but as music moves toward ambience more amorphous shapes emerge.\u00a0 Where the poetic stanza was previously an imprint of the musical structures over which it was sung, the stanza is now a primarily visual and spatial form.\u00a0 A fossilisation of sound: layers revealing the way a sound once attached itself to space and how it changed over time.\u00a0 The new stanza acknowledges white space as silence and breath, and it is in this white space that the music now moves, not behind the stanza but around and between.\u00a0 For me, these works open the page out into space, showing the way to a poetry of music in language.\u00a0 Place-names sung, I now go back to dreams. \u00a0Origins, defamiliarish. \u00a0Set the page, territorial and human, the use of the poem shifting as it reforms. \u00a0A poem is the rhythm, how houses are. \u00a0Englished. \u00a0Built out regulary. \u00a0Its struction of modernesses: olded. \u00a0Artificians of wilderness. \u00a0Combinated space. \u00a0Poet-music.\u00a0 A s\u00e9ance in Yag\u00e9.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n

AR*, Wolf Notes<\/em>, Corbel Stone Press 2011<\/p>\n

Grubbs, David, and Susan Howe, Souls of the Labadie Tract<\/em>, Blue Chopsticks 2007<\/p>\n

Ha\u00fcblein, Ernst, The Stanza<\/em>, Methuen 1978<\/p>\n

Howe, Susan, Souls of the Labadie Tract<\/em>, New Directions 2007<\/p>\n

McDonough, Tom (ed.), The Situationists and the City<\/em>, Verso 2009<\/p>\n

Parking Non-Stop, Species Corridor<\/em>, Klangbad 2008<\/p>\n

Perloff, Marjorie, \u2018The Music of Verbal Space: John Cage\u2019s \u201cWhat You Say\u201d\u2019, online at http:\/\/marjorieperloff.com\/articles\/cage-verbal-space\/<\/p>\n

Skelton, Richard, Landings<\/em> (3rd<\/sup> Edn.), Sustain-Release 2011<\/p>\n

Skoulding, Zo\u00eb, The Mirror Trade<\/em>, Seren 2004<\/p>\n

Skoulding, Zo\u00eb, Remains of a Future City<\/em>, Seren 2008<\/p>\n

Skoulding, Zo\u00eb, and Alan Holmes, Richard Hopewell, Huw Jones, Monika Rinck, Eva Klimentov\u00e1, Alexandra B\u00fcchler, You Will Live in Your Own Cathedral<\/em>, Seren 2009<\/p>\n

Wallin, Nils Lennart, Bj\u00f6rn Merker, and Steven Brown (eds.), The Origins of Music<\/em>, MIT Press 2000<\/p>\n

Steven Hitchins read at the Hay Poetry Jamboree 2011. His\u00a0poetry has appeared in Poetry Wales, Fire <\/em>and Chimera<\/em>. He occasionally edits The Literary Pocket Book <\/em>and produces homemade pamphlets.\u00a0literarypocketblog.wordpress.com<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thoughts on recent work by Zo\u00eb Skoulding, Susan Howe and Richard Skelton Increasing numbers of musicians are creating works which grasp at the transparency of water, seek to track the journeys of telematic nomads, bottle moods and atmospheres, rub out chaos and noise pollution with quiet, concentrate on sonic microcosms, absorb quotations and digital snapshots […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1477,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[29,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/issue-2-logo3.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-mi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1382"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2832,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions\/2832"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}