manifesto, paul de vree

manifesto 1967

ALL PREDICATION IS AN ASSAULT UPON THE FREEDOM OF MAN. POETRY, AS I CONCEIVE OF IT, IS NO LONGER THE HANDMAIDEN OF PRINCES, PRELATES, POLITICIANS, PARTIES, OR EVEN THE PEOPLE. IT IS AT LAST ITSELF: A PHONETIC PHENOMENON IN ITSELF VOCAL OF PSYCHOPHYSICAL ORIGIN AND OBJECTIVELY STRUCTURED WITH THE HELP OF WORDS, SOUNDS AND MECHANICAL AND GRAPHIC MEANS (RECORDINGS AND SCRIPTS)

THE PURELY VISUAL VERBAL DOES NOT EXIST. IT ROUSES ALWAYS THE SOUND OR NOISE FROM WHENCE IT SPRINGS AND FOR WHICH IT IS THE SIGN. THE POEM IS EITHER AN AUDIBLE EMISSION OF RESPIRATION (AUDITION) OR A SILENT ONE (READING), CREATIVELY ADULATED, PROVOKED BY THE NEED TO SAY SOMETHING, IT REFERS TO NOTHING OTHER THAN THE SENSIBILITY OF BEING (PRESENT AND PLANETARY) THIS IS WHAT I UNDERSTAND AS THE OBJECTIVE INTENTION OF VOCAL SONORITIES: A COMMUNICATION IN CONCERT OF SPONTANEOUSLY CREATIVE VIBRATIONS.

PHONETIC POETRY CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT A REINVENTION OF THE RECITATION, THAT IS TO SAY THE SONORIZATION OR THE MANIPULATION OF SOUND. ACTUALLY ALL DEPENDS UPON THE NEW POSSIBILITIES OF MECHANICAL EXPRESSION FOR REALIZATION OF THE TRANSMISSION OF THE TOTAL SENSIBILITY OF THE POEM, ITSELF AT BOTTOM PART OF THE TOTAL KINETIC SPECTACLE WHICH HENRI CHOPIN PROVIDES THROUGH THE INEVITABLE USE OF THE MACHINE WHICH BREAKS THE VOICE UP INTO WAVES.

THE SOUND WORK IS THE RESULT OF TEAMWORK UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE POET, AND THE IDEAL REPRODUCTION IS THAT WHICH IS CUT ON HIGH-FIDELITY RECORDS. THERE AGAIN THE MACHINE IS INDISPENSABLE. IT GOES \WITHOUT SAYING THAT THE RECITOR (IF IT IS NOT THE POET) AND THE ENGINEER OF SOUNDS (\WHERE MY RECORDINGS ARE CONCERNED) HAVE CONTRIBUTED PERSONALLY TO THE ORIGINALITY OF THE REALIZATION. THE DAWN OF THE ERA OF ELECTRONIC POETRY IS NO LONGER A FIGMENT OF THE IMAGINATION.

above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/1967pauldevree_manifesto.htm

Some Statements on Sound Poetry, Bob Cobbing

From Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, edited by Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, Underwich Editions, Toronto, 1978


Leonardo da Vinci asked the poet to give him something he might see and touch and not just something he could hear. Sound poetry seems a to me to be achieving this aim. PARTLY it is a recapturing of a more primitive form of language, before communication by expressive sounds became stereotyped into words, when the voice was richer in vibrations, more mightily physical. The tape-recorder, by its ability to amplify and superimpose, and to slow down the vibrations, has enabled us to rediscover the possibilities of the human voice, until it becomes again something we can almost see and touch. Poetry has gone beyond the word, beyond the letter, both aurally and visually ... Sound poetry dances, tastes, has shape. MY USE of 'vocal-microparticles' as Henri Chopin calls the elements with which we now compose sound poetry, retains, indeed emphasises, the natural quality of the human voice, more perhapsthan does Chopin's poetry. But both he and I are attempting to use a new means of communication which I believe is an old method re-established, which is more natural more direct and more honest than, for example, the present day voice of politics and religion ... Gone is the word as the word, though the word may still be used as sound or shape. Poetry now resides in other elements. 1969

We Aspire to Bird Song:

We are aided in our search by sophisticated instruments, the microphone and the tape-recorder. Our human voices extend the range of the tape-recorder's abilities by their demands upon it. Conversely, the tape-recorder's treatment of the voice teaches the human new tricks of rhythm and tone, power and subtlety. We are in a position to claim a poetry which is musical and abstract; but however hard we try to do so can we escape our intellect? In the poetry of pure sound, yes.... Materials are the micro-particles of the human voice which amplified, possibly transposed in speed or pitch, superimposed one, two or many times, treated perhaps with a filter, echo or chopper, shaped maybe by editing, result in a piece no naked voice could achieve. 1969

Sophisticated / Primitive:

Two lines of development in concrete sound poetry seem to be complimentary. One, the attempt to come to terms with scientific and technological development in order to enable man to continue to be at home in his world, the humanisation of the machine, the marrying of human warmth to the coldness of much electronically generated sound. The other, the return to the primitive, to incantation and ritual, to the coming together again of music and poetry, the amalgamation with movement and dance, the growth of the voice to its full physical powers again as part of the body, the body as language. 1970

Music for Dancing:

COMMUNICATION is primarily a muscular activity It is potentially stronger than everyday speech, richer than those monotonous seeming printed words on the page.... Say 'soma haoma'. Dull. Say it dwelling on the quality of the sounds. Better. Let it say itself through you. Let it sing itself through you. The vowels have their pitch, the phrase has potential rhythms. You do it with the whole of you, muscular movement, voice, lungs, limbs. Poetry is a physical thing. The body is liberated. Bodies join in song and movement. A ritual ensues. 1972

Poetry in Performance:

The concept of one voice scarcely making use of the physical possibilities of body- almost disembodied - reading with attention only to intellect and syntax to an audience ranged in rows, gives way to a new concept of complex bodily movements and mobile vocal-body sounds in space, - moving in space and sensed in different intensities and from different directions by an audience who may, in the event, become participants, and who may also be scattered in space; just as, with electronic equipment (e.g. the four or eight channel systems employed in Sweden) sounds may be given substance and precisely placed to come from this direction or any direction, from five yards to fifty yards, with this or that quality, this or that intensity of vibrations, this or that physical and emotional (and, indeed, intellectual) effect on the bodyframes receiving them 1972

above copied from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/cobbing.html

Interactive Poems: intersign perspective for experimental poetry, Philadelpho Menezes

Relazione presentata nel Convegno Internazionale della Associazione degli Studi Parola/Immagine, Los Angeles. Ha come fondo del discorso il lavoro di poesia ipermediale dell'autore.

Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (Brazil)

The view that I intend to explore in this paper is that the possibilities opened to poetry by the new technologies of communication may be considered on two levels: (i) the possibilities of interaction with the reader, the most obvious and basic element of NTC, but the one where most theoretical discussion of the novelty of the technologies is concentrated; (ii) the interfaces that NTC imposes inside the communication system, that is, the internal interface between visual, verbal and sound signs of the poem. Despite the fact that my comments are based on poems that I call “intersign poetry”, these questions can be extended over the other communicational fields and products with similar analyses (newspaper, advertisement, encyclopœdic CD-ROMs, dictionaries, etc.). My view is that hypermedia, developed from hypertext, whether in CD-ROMs or in websites, does not come to be used only as an exercise in mechanical interaction with the user, but also to suggest rich ways of mixing different kind of signs, obliging the user to adopt an intellective approach to the exercise of reading. This activity brings the user out of the traditional system of languages, separated into their specific fields, into to an intersemiotic system of communication. If this interface between signs of different languages does not work in a hypermedia construct, NTC is merely reducing the activity of the user to a functional and programmed use of technology and communication. Some might argue that a functional work immediately produces new behaviour patterns and paths to new sensations. This is a predominant trend in contemporary theory of communication since Marshall McLuhan established the concept of medium as a message in itself. Nevertheless, recent theorists of technology have criticised this concept, arguing that without a level of intellective consciousness, it is impossible to establish new ways of relating to machines; without a certain level of reflection, is difficult to know exactly how to exploit the perspectives that the new technogies open up for us.

My analyses dialogue with two importants studies on digital communication published in United States in the 1990s. The first is Hypertext - Th Cconvergence of Contemporary Critical Theory, by George P. Landow, of Brown University (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 edition). Landow defines hypertext drawing on different theses such as Vannevar Bush’s conception of memex, Jacques Derrida’s deconstructivism, and Roland Barthes’s analysis of the new relationship between text and reader. Technically, for Landow, hypertext can be defined as a technology of texts put into a web that can make clear the intertextuality inherent in literary works. But, by making rapid and explicit the consultation of subtexts, and by increasing the potentiality of nonlinear and decentered contemporary literature, hypertext changes the conception of text and writing, thus transforming the role of the author and the possibilities of literary education. This new ethic of technological texts must be considered even when we go out of textuality and enter hypermedia programmes, a further development of hypertext, where non-verbal (visual and sound) signs are joined. Hypermedia facilitates working with experimental poetry as hypertext does literary works.

The second approach towards technological writing that I intend to consider is that of Richard A. Lanham in his book The Electronic Word (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Lanham analyses the transformation of the internal feature of the sign, its variable and changeable forms, its ways of organising itself according to the principle of collage. Computer graphics provoke “judgments about scale, a new icon/alphabet ratio in textual communication, nonlinear collage and juxtapositional reasoning (...) - all these constitute a new theory of management”. So Lanham deals with the concept of rhetoric, viewed as a dialetical play established in looking AT a surface pattern of communication and THROUGH it.

By the other side, the experimental poetry appears as an already traditional place for mixing different codes in the modern and contemporary poetics. It is useful to understand clearly what is the concept of “experimental poetry” adopted here: it is a kind of poetry, manifested in some styles and movements in the twentieth, whose form is not displayed in verses. So the concept is rooted in two grounds: I. in the visual field, experimental poetry embraces since the spatialization of verbal texts (like the foremost Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés) until poems with printed images (like the italian visive poetry of the 60’s), passing through very well known visual poetics as the chaotic arragments of futurism, the figurative poems of Apollinaire’s calligrammes or the geometric constructivity of the concretism; ii. in the sound field, experimental poetry contains since phonetic ruptures of dada’s poems until the polipoetry concept of Enzo Minarelli’s creation in the 80’s, crossing the inventions of the electroacustic poems of Henri Chopin, the French lettrism of the 50’s, some beatnik kind of discourses, among others.

A privileged place for the discussion of these issues, central to the contemporary poetics and aesthetics, is the digital technology because of its opened use possibilities, either the perspectives that they can still offer to the mix the two trends of experimental poetry in only one space of the communicational. Regarding a new spatial configuration that is no longer the codex form of the book, the poetry inevitably trespasses the limits of the verbal sign itself. Overcoming the unchanging and bidimensional space of the page as a support for the printed word, necessarily the possibilities to work with the isolated verbal sign in an instigating way is, we could say, also overcomed inside these news configuration of space. If the hypertext becomes naturally hypermedia by the inclination to the integration of the languages within the digital technologies, the digital poem also becomes a traffic between signs of different languages that, when well done, could be called “intermedia” - I prefer “intermedia” term to indicate the communication of a poem where a semantic and functional integration between different kind of signs is predominant, requiring a exercise of “composition” by the reader/observer. The “multimedia” term is preferable to designate poetic communications where free accumulation and superposition of many signs install a simple illustrated and didascalic ways of relation between signs. However, poetry, before entering the technological space of communication, had already reached, according to the intersign poetics, the object poems and the sound poems where, respectively, elements sucs as interactivity and immateriality, two totems of the emerging (and yet so fragile) theories of poetics in new media, are achieved. What matters also in the use of these new technologies is the easiness and the encouragement towards integrative realizations between languages where non-verbal signs (sound or images) are not reduced to the role of mere elements of reinforcing the verbal feature.

On the basis of these considerations, I have been trying to develop a concept of “interpoetry”, related to exercises in the field of experimental poetry, first with visual poems, later with sound poems. Interpoetry has two meanings: that of interactivity and that of intersign poetry. The fusion of these two meanings in one poem is the concern of my work in the area of interpoetry. I will start with the older meaning: ‘intersign poetry’ is the name I used fifteen years ago(1) to express the idea of a poetry created by the fusion of verbal and non-verbal signs. At that time, I was concerned with exploring the characteristics of a visual poetry that, produced in the years after the concretist movement, distinguished itself from the tradition of experimental poetry up to the time of concretism: the tradition of making the visual element derive from the verbal element. From the figurative poems of Greek Antiquity to the concrete poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, every type of visual poetry in one form or another exploits the graphic form of the text, the word or the letter, that is, the various visual forms taken by the verbal sign. In some rare cases, when drawings or engravings enter the space of the poem, the visual element acts as an illustration of the text. The idea of intersign poetry was to use visual images (drawings, photos, numbers, or other graphic elements) as compositional components of the poem through formal interrelationship and semantic interpenetration with the verbal sign; from this, the coming to fruition of intersign poem is the function of an exercise in decoding, interpretation, and decifering that the reader/observer must undertake in the light of the montage of visual and verbal signs present in the poem. Thus intersign poetry emerges as a kind of visual poetry which negates past forms of visual poetry.

These questions led me to an idea that has guided my work since: poetry is a specific form of organising signs in a poem (formal fusion plus semantic montage); it is a language. It is neither a problem specific to the verbal code nor a problem of the techniques through which this language is exhibited or transmitted. Hence, when in the first half of the 1990s I began experimenting with the possibilities of sound poetry, I sought to try to introduce these concepts into the field of sounds by producing poems in which non-verbal sounds played, in the sound poem, the role of images in the visual intersign poem: to create formal fusions that produced not only acoustic effects but more especially meanings deciferable through intellectual interpretation(2).

In the second half of 1997, I began producing poems in which sounds, images and words coalesce, in a complex intersemiotic process, in a technological environment which precisely facilitated the simultaneous presence of verbal, visual and acoustic signs: hypermedia programmes. The idea here was to avoid doing what the visual poem up till concretism had always done: make the visual follow on from the verbal. Or what recited poetry always did: illustrate the reading of the text with music or incidental sounds.

But it was also necessary to avoid the equivocal discourse produced by artists who worked with the new technologies: these latter assume that the mere use of new technologies produces new languages, that is, new ways of combining codes. In practice, this does not happen. Technologies like videotext, computer graphics and holography, present new environments in which the signs of the poem are placed; that is, they suggest new ways of organising these images into spacial and temporal structures, different from those of the printed page. But this does not mean to say that the poem automatically takes advantage of these new structures. Technology suggests; it does not impose. And what we see today is a traditional visual poetry ( principally following concretist and futurist forms) reproduced in terms of the new technologies.

Intersign poems are not “experiments of poetic written texts”, but intersigned processes of word, image, sound, movement, varied ways of reading, where the image, the sound and the movement are not simply features of the word. Interpoetry sets out consciously to occupy the structures provided by the new medias, modifying the relationships between image, sound and word within the specific environments which only hypermedia makes possible. There are two levels of structure which may be considered typical of interpoetry:

1. the mode of relating image, sound and word, which gives continuity to the processes operative within visual and sound intersemiotic poetry, establishing the basis of intersign poetry in hypermedia, obeying a certain specific development of the poem within the time and space of hypermedia.

2. Forms of relationship with the reader and the question of interactivity. The intervention of the reader/user amplifies the forms of participation that the avant-gardes had introduced into art, breaking with the classic contemplative role of the reader/observer. The option of multiple paths for the reading of the interpoem gives rise to two circuits of association: a network of connections based on the technological links made available by hypermedia; a network of associations set up between the data of the poem, which refer to eachother, subterranean to the virtual links, and which could be called post-virtual. The suggested links (interpretative associations) thus supplant and subvert the links that are offered (virtual paths). The interpoem thus establishes the primacy of ‘suggestion’ over ‘explanation’, one that characterizes technological art in general. And it underlines the rethorical question put by Lanham: the superficies of technical links, this opened way to be read, keeps our attention AT the communicative features of the poem as a kind of game; the web of suggestions made by virtual (or mental) links requires our reading THROUGH the communicative features up to semantic conections. It could be said that the rethorical structure of reading an interpoem lies and relies upon the oscillation between “explanation” and “suggestion”, “technical links” and “semantic links”.

The intersigned fusion conducts, after all, the creative exercise towards the fusion between the text genres, where the poetry penetrates the field of theory, tale and encyclopedic information. Everything proceeds to the creation of big systems of communicating chambers where the narrative fiction, the game, the poetry, the scientific research, the daily information and the interpersonal contact can be moments of the same productive exercise.The fusion of genres is, furthermore, natural to interpoetry: visual poetry, sound poetry, theoretical text, encyclopœdic information, fiction, lies, games, all are possible paths within the interpoem. Questions are further raised by the perspective of incorporating narrative forms, by the production of works which could be called ‘interprose’ and which could appear as a follow-up to interpoetic work.



References:

Theory



. AA.VV.: “Visual Poetry: na international anthology”, Visible Language, Vol. 27, n. 4, Providence, Rhode Island School of Design, 1993.

. BARILLI, Renato: Retórica, Lisboa, Presença, 1979.

. BARTHES, Roland: "O grau zero da escritura" in Novos ensaios críticos, São Paulo, Cultrix, 1974.

. BOLTER, Jay David: Writing Space – The computer, Hypertext, and the history of writing, Hillsdale/New jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991.

. BUSH, Vannevar: "As we may think" in Druckrey, Timothy (ed.), Eletronic Culture - Technology and Visual Representation, Quebec, Aperture Foundation, 1996, pp. 29-45.

. COSTA, Mario: O sublime tecnológico, São Paulo: Experimento, 1995.

. DELANY, Paul e LANDOW, G. (ed.): Hypermedia and Literary Studies, Cambridge/Londres, MIT Press, 1991.

. DOMINGUES, Diana (ed.): Arte no Século XXI - A humanização das tecnologias, São Paulo, Ed. Unesp, 1997.

. ECO, Umberto: Lector in Fabula, Milão, Bompiani, 1983.

. HAYLES, N. Katherine: Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, Chicago/ Londres, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991.

. HAYLES, N. Katherine: How we became posthuman, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999.

. LANDOW, George: Hyper/Text: the convergency of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

. LANHAM, Richard: The Eletronic Word -Democracy, Technology and the Arts, Chicago/Londres, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993.

. LÉVY, Pierre: O que é o virtual?, São Paulo: 34, 1996.

. --------------: Cibercultura, São Paulo, 34, 1999.

. LYOTARD, Jean-François: O Pós-moderno, Rio de Janeiro, José Olympio, 1986.

. MCLUHAN, Marshall: Os meios de comunicação como extensões do homem, São Paulo: Cultrix, 5a. ed., 1979.

. MENEZES, Philadelpho: Poetics and Visuality, translation Harry Polkinhorn, San Diego State University Press, 1995.

. MENEZES, Philadelpho: Poesia Concreta e Visual, São Paulo, Ática, 1998.

. MENEZES, Philadelpho (org.): Poesia Sonora: poéticas experimentais da voz no século XX, São Paulo: EDUC (Editora da PUC), 1992.

. MENEZES, Philadelpho: "Poesia Visual: reciclagem e inovação", em revista Imagens, número 6, Campinas, Editora da Unicamp, 1996, pp. 39/48.

. MENEZES, Philadelpho: "Poetics and new technologies of communication: a semiotic approach" in Face - Revista de Semiótica e Comunicação, D.1, 1998, site: www.pucsp.br/~cos-puc/face

. MEYER, Kenneth: “Dramatic narrative inVirtual Reality”, in Frank BIOCCA e Mark R. LEVY (eds.), Communication int eh Age of Virtual Reality, Hillsdale, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995, pp. 219/259.

. MURRAY, Janet: Hamlet on the Holodeck – The future of narrative in Cyberspace, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1997.

. NEGROPONTE, Nicholas: A vida digital, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1995.

. ONG, Walter J.: Orality and literacy – The technlogizing of the word, Londres, Routledge, 1989.

. PIAULT, Fabrice: Le Livre - La fin d'un régne, Paris, Stock, 1995.

. --------: "New Media poetry - Theory and Strategies" in Visible Language, 30.2, Providence, Rhode Island School of Design, pp. 214-133.



Cd-roms:

. JOYCE, Michael: Afternoon, a story, Watertown, Eastgate, 1987.

. MOULTHROP, Stuart: Victory Garden, Watertown, Eastgate, 1991.

. MENEZES, P. e AZEVEDO, W.: Interpoesia, São Paulo, EPE-PUC/Dep.Artes Mackenzie, (no prelo).



Above copied from: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Lights/7323/philadelpho.html

A Report on Transfurism, Gerald J. Janecek

A small group of Neo-Futurists or, as they call themselves, "transpoety" or "transfuristy," has appeared on the scene in the Soviet Union and has produced a body of individual and collective works that are, while acknowledgedly in the spirit and tradition of the original movement, of sufficient quality, quantity, and originality to merit critical attention. They have been mentioned briefy in "Samizdat Art," by R. and V. Gerlovin (1986:157), and there are some important materials on them in Kuzminsky's Blue Lagoon Anthology 5B (1986:508-65), but the present study will evidently be the first extensive survey of their works.
The core of the group consists of Ry Nikonova [Anna Tarshis] and Sergei Sigei [Sigov], who lived in Ejsk on the Asov Sea until 1998, and Boris M. Konstriktor [real surname: Aksel'rod] from Leningrad. Sigei and Nikonova, who are married, originally hailed from Sverdlovsk, where in the 1960s they had been part of a group called the "Anarfuts" (Anarcho-Futurists) which had published a handmade magazine Nomer (Number). The couple moved to Eisk in 1974. In 1979, they were joined by Konstriktor, who had formerly been an Acmeist. For more on their history by Sigei, see Kuzminsky (1986:546-61). The works by this group that have been made available for study include a number of initial and recent issues of the group's journal Transponans, separate collections by Sigej and Nikonova, a cassette tape entitled "Slushaite, kushaite" (Listen, eat!) with members of the group reciting their works, and a catalogue from the group's exhibition in 1984. Sigei is also the author of a recent article on Oberiu published abroad (Sigov, 1986). Since the journal, begun in 1979 and now numbering over thirty issues, is perhaps their most impressive achievement, we will begin with it. [Figure 1]

Following accepted practice to avoid legal repercussions, each issue of the journal is expressly produced in only five copies. The front material in issue No. 1 (50 pp. plus appendix) states that Transponans was founded in 1979 under the editorship of Sigei and Nikonova and regularly prints the works of the "Transpoets," who include, in addition to the editors and Konstriktor, A. Nik. [N. I. Aksel'rod, formerly of Leningrad, now in Western Europe] and the Leningrad poet Vladimir Erl'; that it will also include the works of other contemporary avant-gardists; that in its "publications" section it will print previously unpublished poetry by avant-gardists of the 1910s-30s with the help of Erl', N. Khardzhiev, and T. Nikol'skaia; and that it will publish a variety of theoretical/critical articles on questions of avant-garde poetry and art. Most of the first issue's over fifty pages of typescript are given over, in typical Futurist fashion, to numerous manifestoes, statements of critical position, and classifications of literary devices, authored mainly by Nikonova. These closely resemble standard Futurist principles, but are milder and more practical in tone. One brief statement with some originality to it (at least from the perspective of Futurism) is Nikonova's "Stat'ia o seriinosti" (Article on Serialness), which has elements of Pop Art in it, though its sources are evidently different. It is concise enough to quote in full:

in 1963, having seen a "serigraph" by Ben Shahn, I experienced something like a creative jolt, consciousness of the set task came later. for about 10 years I unconsciously had been striving to classify the elements of human nature and its external profile into segments, in literature: movements, sensations, games, etc. in art: eyes, hands, rears, bellies, lips, breasts, etc. as though all this was prepared in the factory of nature in a massive quantity precisely in detail. the style of 20th century civilization is massiveness of production, the necessity of classifying products. what strikes the eye is not the face, but the crowd, and in the crowd what surprises and tires one is the similarity of elements. in order to kill something, it is necessary to create it and so I also am drawing my series "homo-eye" and "human rears", trying to find special qualities in the mass. but I also shuffle the elements which have been provided by nature in a certain, but not the only possible order. for example, teeth on the forehead, lips on the forehead, lips in the hair, eyes on the neck, etc. this, in my view, corresponds to an unseen reality. (:14)
Nikonova follows this by an extensive "teoprakt" (:15-28), which details devices of literary practice that are in effect a catalogue of "sdvigi" (dislocations) from the Futurist canon, e. g., "emancipation of conjunctions. one can link words in a sentence by any particles" (:15), or "everything new is better than Mozart, but not every change leads to something new" (:19).
The actual poetry selections are comparatively brief, ten pages of short poems by Sigei and Nikonova (:29-39). Sigei's four poems, dated 1976-77, are done by hand with a marker and a ballpoint, necessitated in part by their inclusion of old Slavonic letterforms, such as A, and other graphic elements. One of these, "In honor of Vasilisk Gnedov," consists of a long blank space between two parentheses, plus sketched-in hands, some zaum' words, and wavy lines. Nikonova's poems are more varied, ranging from a surrealist "microplay," "Only for Rembrandts," to miniatures full of wordplay à la Xlebnikov, such as the following poem:

Stradaniem
Miem
Stradam
Uniem
Vym' (:38)
(By suffering/Ging/Suffeg/Oring/Vig)

The body of the issue ends with short review of books by Erl' and Boris Vantalov (Boris Aksel'rod]. Since these reviews are at times not very complimentary, the copy at hand appends a footnote dated 1983, which explains what might seem an odd situation, in which the journal criticizes its own associates, by pointing out that only after these reviews were written did a close relationship with Erl' and Vantalov develop. Clearly this copy is a later reprint of the first issue, which explains also why it was possible to list the complete contents of the next 16 issues of Transponans as an appendix (quite valuable since only one other of these issues was available; helpful also is the Supplement to No. 19 in which the contents of Nos. 1-19 are reviewed in annotated form). The cover of this issue is a linocut by Sigei, and the original issue also evidently included a few pages of additional material by M. Tarshis and Sigei that were omitted in the reissue.
Judging by the No. 19 Supplement, succeeding issues concentrate much more on literary works, the contents of No. 2 consisting mostly of poems by Sigei (some from as early as 1963-64) and Nikonova, with two contributions by Valerii D'iachenko. Theoretical portions deal with books in new shapes (sculpture, vases, bracelets, etc.) and in "vandalized" form, i. e., cut in half with a hole in the middle, and with collages. No. 3 (1979, 65 pp.) was the only original issue of this first large group available for examination. This issue, with an original hand-colored ink drawing by Tarshis (Nikonova) on the cover, is clearly a first edition, not a later reissue, and contains the first contribution by Boris Konstriktor, a panegyric in prose to his typewriter titled "Rech' v zashchitu samogo tebia" (Speech in Defense of You Yourself). This is followed by three brief plays by Tarshis from 1977-79. The first, "Startsy" (Elders), is an absurdist mystery-play parody with an extensive list of characters with tag names who mostly emit incoherent exclamations. The cover drawing seems to be related to this play, since it depicts two whimsical figures, one of whom appears to be a monk. The second play, "Sfericheskii teatr: Zritel' i vechno" (Spherical Theater: Spectator and Eternally), is rather the description of a theatrical happening than a play as such, since it contains no dialogue but only a scenario in which balloons with ropes tied to them are used to wrap and annoy the spectators, until one of them leaves, upon which a shot is fired off-stage, indicating the spectator's suicide. The play ends in darkness, the ropes are detached from the balloons, there are fireworks, and fruits are served to the audience. The third pay, "Migmalion," a take-off, it seems, on Pygmalion, also has no dialogue, but only aimless movements by the hero in the magma of the earth's center at some prehistoric time. The contributions by Sigei, 16 short poems, show him to be very much in the Khlebnikovian mold with his neologisms, plus phonetic spellings and a certain amount of anti-aesthetic imagery. Perhaps the most original device he employs is the formation of neologisms by syllable overlap, e.g.:

rybezdna zhelanii lunizmennykh
liubezdna zhelannykh rybolei
liiuduiu grustonnuiu kazhet mne (:30, 1975)
Vantalov contributes a short prose on the current lamentable state of culture in the city built by Van'ka Kain, i. e., Petersburg. This is followed by Tarshis' "Skheme rasskazov" (Scheme of stories), which is a one-page matrix of three male and three female characters (heading the columns) and three numbered "thoughts" (the rows). In each space in the matrix is a brief, sometimes one-word statement from the respective character out of which we can build a collective situation to which the statement is a contribution, in the manner of Il'ia Kabakov's conceptualist paintings and albums. The remainder of the issue contains several short pieces by Tarshis and one long, ponderous one by Sigei, most striking in these being the surprised report by Tarshis after a tour of the Leningrad art exhibitions, official and unofficial, in the summer of 1979, that the official exhibits (Chestniakov, Drevin) turned out to be more interesting than the unofficial ones (Maslov, L. Bogdanov, Sterligov and his school). This view is supported by Sigei's essay, which rambles enough to include as its most interesting material some extensive selections of poetry by A. Nik.
The next available issue of Transponans skips far ahead to No. 21 (Feb.-Mar., 1984). In the interim, judging by the information in the bibliographies already mentioned, the journal has grown in scope: it has more contributors, more pages, a greater variety of materials and physical properties. These features are fully reflected in No. 2 (21), which has works by over a dozen writers, 180 pp. using both sides of the paper, materials ranging from original drawings and collages to first publications of archival documents and photographs. The format remains chiefly carbon-copy typescript but, in addition to the art just mentioned, includes poems typed and/or collaged onto round or leaf-shaped pages, and even a composition by Sigei on a sequence of diagonally cut pages, and a strip in which the interplay of the page shapes and word segments pasted on them is part of the fun of the work. The first item in the issue is a Futurist/Dadaist "opera" (fragments) by Konstriktor and a certain Dzonsi Gei, who seems to be a cross between John Gay of Beggar's Opera fame and Sergei Sigei, and is titled "Zizhn' za Ttsara" (Life for Tzara), which in turn results from replacing the hero of Glinka's opera, Ivan Susanin ("Life for the Tsar" was its original title), with the Dada leader Tristan (referred to in the text as "Dristan") Tzara. The work is a hilarious pastiche of avant-garde foolishness, in which, by the way, Igor' Terent'ev and Il'iazd [Il'ia Zdanevich] also put in cameo appearances. There are poems and some prose by Igor' Bakhterev (the last surviving Oberiut), Nikonova, Sigei, Konstriktor, Boris Kukriakov, Konstantin Zvezdochetov (a member of the Moscow group Mukhomory (Toadstools), A. Al'tshuler, L. Aronzon, and Kari Unksova. The Publications section contains the authoritative text for Kruchenykh's poem "Velimir Khlebnikov in 1915" (n.d.), a selection of poems by Vasilisk Gnedov from 1913 to 1973, and a section "Vokrug Kharmsa" (Around Kharms) edited by Vladimir Erl', which incudes previously unpublished poems by Kharms, Zabolotskii, Oleneikov, and N. A. Tiuvelev, and K. Vaginov's second afterword to his novel Kozlinaia pesn' (Goat Song), all of these accompanied by an introduction and annotations. Erl''s active involvement in the journal began, by the way, with No. 5 (1980), to which he contributed some poems and curated a prose piece by A. Vvedenskii. His association with the Transpoets evidently began after they attended his 1979 lecture on Kharms (Transponans, Supplement to No. 19:20). Following "Vokrug Kharmsa," a Translations section provides Russian translations of poems by Hans Arp, Anselm Hollo, Franz Mon, and Gerhard Rühm, which were clearly chosen as consonant with the journal's orientation. The remaining sections-Theories, Bibliography, Criticism, Chronical, and Declarations-are of less interest in this issue. The first contains a rehash of the use of extraliterary materials (signboards, laundry lists, etc.) among the Futurists; the next "reviews" works by members of the group, many of which seem to be self-reviews, and inexplicably includes a list of what appear to be rules or declarations by Erl' in which letters are deliberately omitted in every word, making the whole thing an exercise in zaum'; the Criticism section has useful annotations to the poetry of Al'tshuler and Aronzon that appeared earlier in the issue, plus an introduction and examples of poems by Dmitrii Prigov written on leaf-shaped pages; chronicled in the next section are public Leningrad poetry evenings in Feb.-Mar., 1984, in which S. Stratanovskii, S. Magid, A Dragomoshchenko, V. Krivulin, and, in a separate event, E. Shvarts read from their works; and finally a brief declaration that argues that futurism is not dead, because some Greek has stated that invasions by the Varangians (read: futurists) periodically repeat themselves. All of this is valuable more as documentation of literary history than for its own intrinsic merit.

The next issue at hand, No. 5 (24) (Sep.-Oct. 1984, 137 pp), is the first one to impress by the more or less uniform high quality of its contents, beginning with the cover drawing by Vladimir Ufliand, which depicts a branching tree of the Russian alphabet growing from the ground of a variety of mystical symbols. [Figure 2] The frontispiece is a letter collage list of names of famous literary figures grafted to each other:

Rabeleikin
Giugogol' [Hugo/Gogol
Bodlermontov [Baudelaire/Lermatov
Rabindranat
Pinkerton
This is identified in the table of contents as a "collective-declaration-parody by the group of 'Atomists' on surrealist 'genealogies,' Moscow, 1930." The first regular item in the Theory section is Vladislav Len's "Tree of Russian Verse," which presents a chronological collage-diagram-genealogy of the period 1955-80s in which major poets and trends of those decades are related by a color-key to what are seen as the three main roots of these poets' work, namely, Kluiev, Kruchenykh-Khlebnikov, Mandel'stam-Pasternak. The diagram has a legend in which the various figures and groups are clearly identified. Although, as Nikonova says in her appended note, opinions may be expected to vary on the designations, names, and groupings, I think even the most well-informed observer will find useful data in the "tree." The Practice section contains substantial poems by Lev Kropivnitskii (from 1962-81), Nikonova, Konstriktor, and Sigej, plus a few poems each by Feofan Buka, Igor' Bakhterev, and A. Nik. Most striking in this section are Nikonova's "gesture poems" in which individual words or phrases are accompanied by a sketch of a person or a hand making a gesture that is linked to the verbal material in some mysterious way. This genre has been extensively developed by Nikonova, and is the focus of several of her solo books, which will be discussed below. Nikonova in these and other works here shows herself to be the most protean and inventive of the group, while the others are content to cultivate the traditional futurist garden, nevertheless with respectable results. The Criticism section contains two long critiques by Nikonova, one on No. 3 of the Leningrad samizdat journal Obvodnyi kanal (:65-93), and a second on Genrikh Sapgir's "Poema-predosterezhenie s tvoim uchastiem BYT' MOZHET," 1981 (:94-99). The first article surveys in detail the contents of the given journal, which includes poetry by Dm. Bobyshev, O. Okhapkin, Iu. Kolker, Likhtenfel'd, E. Pudovkina, I. Tailov, and Arno Tsart, prose by Vl. Alekseev, Ev. Zviagin, A. Oniplok, and Laviniia Voron, and criticism by A. Stepanov, St. Iurev, and K. Mamontov, and takes a jaundiced view of most of it. Nikonova, taking a cue from Kruchenykh, points out instances of "kaki," i.e., similes using "kak," but referring also to the anal eroticism of "kaka," thus holding such cliched poetic devices up to scorn, and she generally attacks lack of originality in any form, unless it imitates futurism. She finds an absence of theoretical principles in the journal's criticism and a lack of visual interest in its design. On the other hand, the Sapgir poem fares well, and she singles out for praise its most futurist features, such as passages of phonetic or morphological zaum'. Most interesting and, perhaps most valuable, is the Bibliography section in which Sigei describes and presents excerpts in Russian transcription of Iliazd's monumental Poèsie du mots inconnus (Paris, 1949), one of his greatest book-works and the first international collection of transrational poetry, with lithographs by Picasso, Braque, Miró, Legér, et al., and poems (mentioning only the ones presented in Transponans) by Artaud, Ball, Beauduin, Bryen, Iliazd, Poplavskii, Schwitters, and Seuphor. In the Publications section, Kruchenykh's "arabeski iz gogolia" (arabesques from gogol) from his late period (date not given) is presented. The Chronicle section briefly lists performances by the Transpoets in 1984 and gives a short interview with Bakhterev on them. The issue ends with a wonderful photograph of Bakhterev and Sigei standing before the latter's abstract portrait of the former at the Leningrad non-conformist exhibition "Facets of the Portrait" (Sep. 17-Oct. 8, 1984). Since this issue also announces the appearance of a supplement, Feofan Buka's Kruchenykhiada, let us briefly go to it.
Feofan Buka, which must be a pseudonymn, is described as being "Kruchenykh's closest friend" (Transponans No. 24:122), but is otherwise mysterious. According to Gennadii Aigi, Kruchenykh did not usually associate with the other poets, Nikolai Glazkov being the only contemporary he recognized. However, judging by the dates of Buka's poems in this collection (1943-63), it is possible that his friendship with Kruchenykh simply predated Aigi's acquaintanceship with Kruchenykh (Transponans No. 30 has a photo showing Buka and Kruchenykh making merry together). The collection, edited and designed by Sigei, consists of nearly 200 short poems by Buka to Kruchenykh, the majority of which, ironically, are traditional syllabo-tonic rhymed quatrains with only a certain amount of verbal exuberance, despite their constant hymn of praise to the great Futurist-zaumnik. Of course, Kruchenykh's own poetry of this period was notably more conservative than it had been in the heyday of Futurism. Nevertheless, the poems are lively and seem to have been written for various occasions (birthdays, holidays, visits), and doubtless pleased the recipient by their mock-epic playfulness. Particularly amusing are the various metamorphoses of Kruchenykh's name scattered throughout: Kruch, Kruchik, Krykh, Chertenykh, Zvuchenykh, and even Khynechurk. The design of the collection is attractive: the typescript of Buka's poems is periodically interrupted by bright, dynamic (perhaps one could even say lyrical) letter collages done on alternating light blue and terra cotta construction paper on full pages or one-third page strips with scattered words from Kruchenykh's zaum'. Pieces of the famous "Dyr bul shchyl" are spaced throughout and thus create a kind of structure for the whole. [Figure 3]

Issue No. 25 (Nov.-Dec. 1984) of Transponans is in many ways the grandest of them all, in the usual format, but with a damask flower-print fabric cover and 343 pages of text, plus numerous photographs, collages, and even several original art works. [Figure 4] In addition to writings by the usual contributors, it includes a theoretical essay by Il'ia Kabakov, "An author looks at his work twice" (:11-14), a long, semi-zaum' poem by Bakhterev, "LU" (1954-84) (:85-101), and a beautiful lithograph by An. Vasilev for Kruchenykh's (and Khlebnikov's) "A Game in Hell." Important in the Publications section is presentation of the complete text of Kruchenykh's "slovo o podvigakh gogolia" (The Lay of Gogol's Feats, 1943-44) (:60-80) with valuable commentary by Sigej. In the Commentary to Practice section, Sigei also provides a useful explanation of his and others' poetry of word fragments (otkusy), to wit: the fragments present provide an initial semantic impulse, while the absence of a full word allows (forces) the reader to fill in the gaps in a variety of ways (:147-49). The Bibliography section presents Sigei's "retelling" of A. N. Chicherin's Kan-Fun (1926), a key text in Constructivism. Chicherin, a hero of the Transfurists, provides a surprise link between the group and the present writer, when on p. 313 of this issue Nikonova refers to my brief article on Chicherin (1981:48-49) and quips: "now even the Americans have discovered him, while the journal Transponans has been propagandizing for him as early as 1979." Give us time; we Americans are a little slow on the uptake. It is, nevertheless, amazing that Soviets can keep so well informed about even minor happenings in the West. In this section on Criticism, Nikonova provides nearly a hundred pages of tedious, tendentious, but useful reportage and comments on recent art exhibits and unofficial publications. Finally, the issue includes excerpts in photographic form of a collective work, IR FAER, in which the Transpoets and Dmitrii Prigov have taken a book of poems in Ossetian by the Ossetian poet Khetagurov with illustrations by M. Tuganov, dating evidently from the Stalinist period, and transformed it by blotting out words, adding lines and drawings to both text and illustrations, with affects ranging from the absurd to the mystical (:205-16). Irfaerism has been succintly defined by Sigei as "using a ready-made form with the goal of creating a new ready-made form" (Kuzminsky 1986:552). Evidently the Irfaerists saw themselves as a new movement, because they elsewhere issued a manifesto (Transponans No. 18, 1983, excerpted in the 1984 exhibition catalogue) and saw themselves as operating together on this basis, though only ephemerally, it seems. [ Figure 5]

After this tour de force, the next issue (No. 26, Jan.-Feb. 1985, 90 pp.) could not help but be less profuse. It contains only two sections, the usual Practice (:5-76) and Criticism (:79-89), and only two pages of graphic interest: a simple collage and a page with cut-out circles by Konstriktor. The works in the first section are on a consistently high level and present some new names: Genrikh Bufarev with poems in a Khlebnikovian neologistic vein; Leon Bogdanov, who is focused on in the next isue; and the Moscow Conceptualist Andrei Monastyrskii with a prose text describing the happening "Muzyka vnutri i snaruzhi" (Music inside and out). Criticism deals with the works of Konstantin Kuz'minskii in an appreciative but not reverential tone. Issue No. 27 (Mar.-Apr. 1985, 162 pp.) regains full scope with a greater variety of contributors and materials. Nikonova's exuberant visual materials (collages, transparencies, cards strung on a rick-rack, and a folded "Fan of Space") are particularly notable. [Figure 6] Sigei experiments with lettering done with solvents on a photograph negative. Konstriktor's poems and collage-drawings done on what seem to be bibliography cards for various German books are more interesting than usual. [Figure 7] And an additional sample of Leon Bogdanov's works is presented. Bogdanov, a Leningrad avantgardist and the subject of a critical essay by Nikonova, is known to her only through his works and is described as having passed through the usual influences of "Zen and Steiner, Lao-Tse and Chakrama, Khlebnikov, insanity, pornographic abstract, 'stream of consciousness', épatage, and the 'dreams' stylish in the 60s" (:98). The amorphousness and variety of his works are praised. Indeed, the relatively limited number of works presented in this and the preceding issue show a range of styles and methods from surrealism to minimalism. His compositions date from the 1960s to at least 1974, but it is unclear whether he is still alive and writing at present. As usual, the Publications and Bibliography sections present valuable materials, in this case the complete text of Kharms's "Mikhaily" (Michaels, 1925) and the final version of Vvedenskii's "Elegiia" (Elegy, 1940) from the authorial manuscript held by N. Khardzhiev.

Given the active visual qualities usual in the editors' works, it was only inevitable that the journal should eventually break out of its quadrilateral strait jacket. The next and final issue that comes to hand, No. 30 (Nov.-Dec. 1985, 153 pp.), does so vigorously. Each of the major sections has a different page shape: Practice-square with a triangle cut out of the middle of one edge to form an M shape; Theory and Criticism-an isosceles triangle; Publications-strips; Translations-a rectangle. All of these extend beyond each other at some points. Inside, the various texts are fitted to the page shape, making the original typing a rather complicated task, no doubt, but the reading a visual and tactile delight. The most interesting work in the Practice section is perhaps Nikonova's "pa de katet" (Pas de cathéte, 1985), which is a series of 63 variations on two initial themes: "1 KILL ME, BUT DON'T TOUCH MY DRAWINGS (Archimedes)" and "2 THE SQUARE OF THE HYPOTENUSE IS EQUAL TO THE SUM OF THE SQUARES OF EACH OF THE TWO LEGS (Pythagoras)." These themes are then submitted, both separately and in combination, to numerous visual, graphic, and semantic transformations which incorporate drawings in colors and variations of every imaginable sort. The final variation reads as in [Figure 8].

One square of one hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two legs, if you don't kill me. But don't meanwhile touch my two gray damp drawings, for I am one and you are one, but the people are many.

Judging by the catalogue of the group's 1984 exhibit, Boris Konstriktor is the author of six books of poems from 1980-83, but, since none of these individual books is available, an impression of his work must be gotten from his contributions to Transponans. His contributions to No. 30 are characteristic. His poetry is rather artificial; that is, he usually takes some design or compositional concept and applies it abstractly and dryly to his material, often with predictable or uninteresting results. A better than average case here is his poem "A girl and death" (1985), which begins as follows:

ne podvedesh' glaza
ne vyjdesh' zamuzh
ne uidesh' zamuzh
ne rodish' rebenka
ne poluchish' kvartiru
(if you don't lower your eyes/you will not get married/if you don't get married/you won't have a baby/if you don't have a baby/you won't get an apartment)

The negative contingency statements become rigidly ordered, are usually stated twice-once as the result of the preceding contingency, the second time as the new contingency-and tend to recur in the course of a lock-step logical progression toward the conclusion:
ne poluchish' po morde
ne vyidesh' zamuzh
ne vyiesh' zamuzh
ne poznaesh' zakony
ne poznaesh' zakony
ne budesh' mertvoi
ne budesh mertvoi
ne stanesh' zhivoi
ne stanesh' zhivoi
ne budehs' mertvoi
(if you don't get hit in the face/you won't get married/if you don't get married/you won't get to know the laws/if you don't get to know the laws/you won't be dead/if you aren't dead/you won't become alive/if you don't become alive/you won't be dead)

The instructional tone of a parent to a daughter and the awful implications of inescapable contingencies reveal a social tragedy, but the mechanical form is too repetitive (through 65 lines) and becomes monotonous, thus diluting the impact of the conclusion. On the other hand, Konstriktor's collages are invariably interesting and inventive.
Genrikh Sapgir, the Moscow avant-garde poet who has been an occasional contributor to previous issues, appears in photographs here and seems to have become as active a presence as Bakhterev has been. The excerpt from his 1963 book Molchanie (Silence) fits in well with the others' works, and he joins the three in a collective poem "ekh trakh bakh" (July, 1985). The triangular Theory and Criticism section contains two interesting essays by Nikonova and a tribute to Bakhterev by Sigei. In the first essay, Nikonova points out that in previous literary practice the visual orientation of the writer and the reader were identical, with letters ordered in lines to be read from left to right. But this is no dogma, and if a reader feels the urge, he can read from right to left or diagonally. In fact, a text that permits varied reading strategies is more perfect than one that is "monotonously oriented." In her own work, she has passed from spontaneous visuality to a phase where visuality is a consequence of the verse "construction." She illustrates this point with examples of her "vector" poems where repeated letters are aligned vertically, and the whole is enclosed in a grid of lines and boxes that highlight correspondences. She notes further that if one is operating, for instance, with the abstract phonations of zaum', then it is inappropriate to use the standard layout of traditional literature. In the second essay, she describes in detail the layout techniques in her vector poems. A brief example that will serve for both essays is the one-word poem "otsutstvie" (absence), which in vector form looks like this:


The Publications section provides poems by Malevich and Kharms and a photograph of Kruchenykh with Feofan Buka, and the Translations section includes a re-Russianization of an Italian translation of a play by the Tiflis dadaist N. Salimov and, unaccountably, extensive exerpts from Sigei's Notebook with some useful documentary material. Issue No. 31 has the same vari-shaped pages but was unavailable for examination. In sum, Transponans, in the issues surveyed and evidently also in those which are known only by bibliographical description, maintains a firm avant-garde stance that carries on and develops the Russia avant-garde "tradition" of the 1910s and 1920s, the influence of which has been thoroughly assimilated. Writings by the editors predominate, occasionally monotonously, but also with flashes of invention. Other consonant contributors are brought in whenever available, creating the impression of a small but active and growing creative enclave. Documentary materials supplied from the earlier period as well as descriptions of current activities have significant historical value and make the journal important for that reason alone. The visual features of many of the issue are remarkable. Because the journal is hand-produced, certain things could be done, such as collages, hand-lettering and -coloring, cut-outs, etc., that would be proscribed by mass production. As with many of the productions of the original avant-garde, each copy is not only automatically a bibliographical rarity, but also an individual work of art. The fact that such a task could be carried on for more than thirty issues is a tribute to the editors' stamina and dedication. At the same time, and perhaps most remarkably despite the main editors' (Sigei and Nikonova's) provincial base in Eisk, they maintain close contact in particular with Leningrad (obviously with the help of Konstriktor, who is married to Nikonova's sister), but also with Moscow and the international scene, making Transponans not just local in scope, but all-Union and in fact an organ of international avant-garde activities.
Along with the opportunity to study issues of Transponans came that to look at solo publications by Sigei and Nikonova. Sigei's talent as an artist is evident in his individual booklets, which often have marked and varied visual contents. Several of them, though described as books of "poems," are in fact collections of drawings. "Stikhi dlia skomorokhov XVI-XVII vv." (1985, poems for minstrels of the 16th-17th centuries, 12 pp.) contains an explanation on the cover that these are poems in body movement that will be performed by the minstrels at the Last Judgement. Inside are diagrams for such dances using stick figures written in black crayon. Another booklet in this series, "stikhi dlia balerin Bol'shogo teatra SSSR" (1985, poems for ballerinas of the Bolshoi Theater of the USSR, 12 pp.), contains elaborate and fanciful diagrams for balletic movements with directions in French. And a third, "stikhi dlia matrosof, vladeiushchikh flazhkovo-bukvennoi signalizatsii" (1985, poems for sailors who know flag-letter signals, 12 pp.), has poems made up of drawings of flags in what would appear to be the international maritime flag code, but I was unable to decipher them using the standard flag-letter correspondences. Perhaps the Soviet code differs. Another work of 1985, untitled, is an album of ten folded sheets on the left side of which is a photo, usually of the author, with portions of it cut out and then inked. The right side contains the impressions that result when the sheet is folded, to which in many cases are added the pieces cut from the photos. Later items in the series become progressively more complex, the last two even having verbal elements. Yet another work, "pal'aplai dei" (n.d., 8 pp.), is a series of zaum' poems stencilled in large, crude letters over abstract white paper cut-outs.

Other works are in the tradition of the futurist manuscript book. [Figures 9 and 10] "Vseza" (n.d.) contains 23 pages of neologistic poems (1969-73) written carefully in green ink with collaged letters and strips of colored paper added. "Tsaroko X v izvlecheniiakh" (n.d., Tsarocco X in extractions, 16 pp.) consists mainly of Khlebnikovian poems written in black india ink or blue ballpoint on paper ovals, which in turn are pasted on stiff paper pages of varying sizes. Sometimes Sigei uses archaic or fanciful letterforms that are made to look like objects ("p" [ll] is a woman's head with a hat on it, while "v" [B] is decorated to resembled a pair of breasts seen from above), or he adds doodles, creating the effect of a rebus and making reading an interesting challenge. Another, "Ekhona pikto i drugie stikhi dlia glazomozga i glaza 1969/1982" (Echoon picto and other poems for eye-brain and eye 1969/1982), is indeed a work of art with four dozen original manuscript graphic poems in black ink on fine art paper using verbal, pictorial, and diagrammatic elements in myriad unique and sometimes very elaborate combinations, each page of which is interesting in itself and which together create an overwhelming impression of visual inventiveness. This is perhaps Sigei's masterpiece and shows off his original talents to best effect. [Figure 11]

The remaining books, collections of poems in straightforward typescript, are less impressive, revealing Sigei to be a close imitator of the futurist canon without much added of his own. There are three mostly-typescript books, "EKKA RTA, 1969-76" (n.d., 18 pp.), "mashinopisnyi cobr vybr No. 3, 1963-1981" (1981, typescript sel wks No. 3, 66 pp.), and "doitel' golovnoi arfy" (c. 1984, milker of the head harp, 103 pp.). In these, one can see that he remains close to Khlebnikov, but one might further note that if Khlebnikov is the model, then it is incumbent on his followers not simply to repeat his experiments but to go on to use these newly established methods to produce significant works. The focus here is rather on the application of devices, which have now been named and classified, to miscellaneous materials. In this respect, the third collection, whose title is evidently a combination of "Doitel' iznurennykh zhab" (a series of poems by David Burliuk, 1914) and Tufanov's =C8olova arfa (1917), is more interesting than the other two, because its contents are more varied, including several long poems, such as "solovem idi razbojnicat'" (1971, go rob like a nightingale), which combines a folk subject with judicious avant-garde techniques to good effect, together with shorter conceptual works and prose, though the latter is usually indistinguishable from the poems except for the layout. However, I think it is appropriate to give the poet the last word, for which the following short poem from "sobr vybr No. 3" may serve:

tselubna tselunna
guby khliabit iziumrot
ona resnichit grud'iu kholm
ona lisichit ukhom um
i beshit ro
al' rvet tsarlo
bashen bro (:45)
(salubrar salunar/a lip's oraisnald throughs/she eyelashes the hill with her breast/she foxes mind with ear/and furies the mo/or tears the twarlo/of towers thro)

Ry Nikonova, also an artist, has come across consistently as the most interesting and innovative contributor to Transponans. This impression is borne out by her solo collections, of which, fortunately, a substantial number were available for study. Her "gesture" poems and "vector" poems, both mentioned above when encountered in Transponans, are the subject of separate collections. Judging by various references scattered throughout the materials, gesture poems emerged as an attempt to create a poem essentially wordless, though it might have a few minimal verbal elements, the focus of which would be a movement of the hands and arms. The roots of such poetry, if not its direct inspiration, are in Vasilisk Gnedov's famous "Poem of the End," which was performed by its author with a silent gesture, and whose published version consisted of a title and a blank space (Gnedov 1913:no. 15). Ideally, of course, such performance poems should be recorded on videotape, a medium doubtless not readily available to the author; attempts were made to capture a poem in a still photo (tararam poetra, back cover). However, the main graphic medium chosen was a diagrammatic sketch of hands in positions or implied movements. A collection of these is "Partitura zhesta" (1984, Gesture score, 13 pp.), but rather than being an attempt to outline the gesture involved, the diagrams of hands, letters, and arrows take on an independent visual essence of their own, such that in many instances it is hard to imagine how the given sketch could be converted to a real gesture.
Logically, the hand diagrams might become abstracted into arrows, but it appears that the real genesis was the reverse. "Vector poems," in which arrows with various straight or curved trajectories are combined with letters and geometric shapes, preceded the gesture poems, and the latter resulted from an attempt to perform the vector poems at public readings. Nikonova's collection of vector poems, "PIAI-----EZIIA" (1983, Paae-oetry, 98 pp.), is dedicated to Gnedov, another hero of the Transfurists and an associate in the mid-1970s, and is prefaced by an explanation that the poems arose from "a sensation of energy and direction (1979)," and were originally thought of as purely visual objects, but then the question of performance arose. The idea of performing such works by means of gestures led to a consideration of the boundary between art and non-art, and the preface ends with the following intriguing example:

when a poet eats an apple on stage, it must be clear that this is a poet and the apple is a line of poetry, otherwise this is not culinart but simply a cafeteria or a scene in a play.
Nikonova here and elsewhere shows herself to be a clear-eyed theoretician as well as practitioner (for more on culinart, see Kuzminsky 1986:550-51). The given collection contains an extensive series of vector poems from 1981-83 with myriad possible combinations of visual and verbal elements hand-colored in marker and pencil. Nikonova's improvisatory inventiveness comes through when, in instances where the marker color has bled through the absorbent paper to the other side, she takes advantage of this patterning to create another work on the reverse side. And in one instance an exhausted carbon paper produces an illegible second copy of a poem which is allowed to follow its original from the preceding page like a nearly inaudible echo. "Foro" (1983, 14 pp.) [Figure 12] is a brightly colored collection of vector poems with the added element that the central square on many of the poems has been cut out so that portions of succeeding poems are revealed through the hole created, producing a layering and a sense of depth.
Another logical step is to take regularly composed poems and bring out their constructive, architectural features by visual means, as illustrated above by the rearrangement of the word otsutstvie. "BB" (1985, 62 pp.) is a collection of poems from 1963-85 which have been submitted to such treatment. Naturally, only poems with substantial numbers of repeated letters or words are amenable to such architectural transformation, but these include quite a few of Nikonova's earlier poems, and it is interesting to see the results. In essence, what happens is that repetitions in the poem, which are picked up by the ear unsystematically and form part of the sound orchestration and "music" of the poem, but which are hidden from the eye by the usual non-constructive positioning on the page, are made to seem (or are revealed to be) prime organizing features of the poem by a layout that fully reveals all such repetitions. The architectural designs that result can be either classically simple or quite complex, depending on the repetitiousness of the given poem; and no two designs are identical, since the sound structure of each poem is unique. In addition to aligning repeated elements vertically, Nikonova uses vector arrows to link repeated letters that could not be aligned vertically because of other, more important alignments. Furthermore, the repetitions the author chooses to highlight by vertical alignment are not always the obvious or predictable ones. As a result, the visual patterning of columns, boxes, and arrows is often elaborate and interesting in its own right, furthered by Nikonova's addition of coloration, rounded and triangular edges, and purely geometric elements. In some cases, the letters and words are simply aligned vertically, without the use of lines, allowing one to compare this "naked" layout with the lined/boxed design. In the former, the verbal elements are foregrounded, while in the more frequent latter situation, the verbal elements tend to be submerged in the geometric grid design, and an effort is required to extract them so as to get at the semantic level of the poem. In the latter case, a high degree of defamiliarization is certainly present. As an example of medium complexity, the following poem will perhaps serve:


The remaining collections by Nikonova that come to hand are anthologic in nature, surveys of her work in various styles from one vantage point or another. "Tararam poetra. Izbrannoe iz stikhov 1959-1985 g. g." (1985, Tararam of poetr. Selected poetry 1959-1985, 41 pp.) is a basic chronological survey of her poetry and is highly useful for an appreciation of the progress of her creativity. The earliest poems display her roots in surrealism and the absurd:
Bogi den' rozhdeniia Iisusa
prazdnuiut.
Perepilis' do ochelovechivaniia . . .
Obkurili nebo papirosnymi tucami.
Poplevali na zemliu dozhdichkom.
Kazhdyi po ocheredi . . .
Iisus chto-to pokhabnoe pogremel.
Khokhochut bogi . . .
Zhdu . . .
Skoro na zemliu pustye butylki padat'
budut. 1959
(The gods were celebrating Jesus' birthday. They were getting drunk to the point of becoming human . . . They smoked up the sky with cigarette clouds. They spat to earth like rain. Each taking a turn . . . Jesus thundered something obscene. The gods guffaw . . . I'm waiting . . . Soon empty bottles will fall to earth.)

The irreverent playfulness of this early poem is characteristic of Nikonova's work throughout. By the late 1960s, formal concerns are more prominent and a broader orientation toward futurist devices and zaum', e.g.:
Veliki po razmeram
Porazm
Porezm
Porezum
1969

(Great in measure: Inmeasr/Inmusr/Inmusir)

Experiments along these lines continue through the 1970s until the arrival in the early 1980s of the vector, gesture, and constructive poems already discussed.
Another collection, "Izbrazuzy. Rasskazy 1965-1981" (1983, Selelories, Stories 1965-1981, 66 pp.), traces in the sphere of prose roughly the same path from absurdism and automatic writing in the 1960s to increasing abstraction and focus on devices in the 1970s onward. Since stories are supposed to have a plot, a specifically prose formalization is the story "schema" (described above), which produces a minimalist outline of a plot. This would be the prose equivalent of a constructive poem. Indeed, many of the same devices are here applied to "prose," resulting in works that are indistinguishable from vector poems or sound poems. The final "story" in the book, "Piat' tochek" (1983, Five periods/dots), is perfectly minimalist in its graphic simplicity, consisting predictably of five dots scattered about a page that is otherwise blank except for the title and date.

Unquestionably, Nikonova's most impressive achievement and one which shows off her protean talents most clearly is the two-volume compendium of "systemic poetry," Tonezharl' (1985, n. p.) in six "books" with a total of over 600 pages and well over 1,000 poems. It is designed as an exhaustive manual to illustrate the manifold avant-garde techniques used and developed by Nikonova and her colleagues. Perhaps the briefest way to give an idea of its scope would be to list the table of contents, but even that would take up several pages, and the terminology would sometimes be unfamilair. Suffice it to say that the full range of methods ranging from realism through hallmark devices of futurism (zaum', absurd, dislocations [sdvigi]) to contemporary orientations (minimalism, conceptualism) and to new Transfurist methods and, finally, transitional forms (literature and science, music, painting, theater, "civilization"), are all covered and exemplified from the author's own works. Whether there are any masterpieces among these examples is another question, but let me quote two poems characteristic of different systemic approaches. The first is the title poem, from the section "Co-existence - Polyphony - Trialogues/Relays":


(ITSNOTAHITY/2 1 3 /If/B/and if/R/Donkeys/P/But didn't live/C/Ipsif/G/Its not hit/Y)
The second comes from the section on "Non-integrational conglomerates" from a larger section on combinations of styles and devices. It is a beautiful little lyric with emphasis on mellifluous sound. I quote it in its original, non-constructive variant:
Dozhdli lili
Sedela melkoroza
Selo lilovo selo
I volos ros na rozy rost
I mokryi golos pel
(The rainils poured/the pettyrose turned grayhaired /The village settled violetly/And a hair grew on the rose's growth/And a moist voice sang)

Nikonova herself admits that inevitably some devices are more congenial and productive for a given artist than others, and some devices are illustrated only briefly and weakly. Judging by the relative quantities of illustrations, her favorites obviously include the ones we have already discussed. Quite a few poems here and anthologized elsewhere come in more than one variant, and it is instructive to compare the varying effects of different layout practices. Many of the poems were given new constructive-architectural variants in 1985. Nevertheless, an impression is created of the immense richness of possible techniques open to the contemporary poet, and one comes away wondering why the average poet is content with such a narrow repertoire of devices. I dare say that, were this work to be published in readily accessible form, it would soon become a standard reference manual on modern poetic craft.
The cassette tape "Listen, eat!" brings out another facet of the group's activities-audio-performance features of poetry-and here it should be pointed out that a hallmark of the group's work in all spheres is making use of the perhaps unexpected advantages of whatever medium is being employed at the moment. In bookworks, the necessity of hand-making the books is turned to creative advantage in collages, cutouts, coloring, free layout, etc. On the cassette, which includes authorial recitations recorded in July, 1985, in roughly equal number by Nikonova, Sigei, and Konstiktor, assisted by at least one other woman (Nikonova's sister?), while some of the items are simply straightforward readings of various page-texts, most incorporate effects that depend on sound reproduction. These include pure sound-poems, such as Sigei's "a a a aa a a a," which, while it could be typed on paper and become a monotonous concrete poem scanned at a glance, in performance it becomes a rich and varied emotional experience, as intonation turns "a" into a question or an exclamation, and further vocal adjustments turn it into a laugh, a dog bark, or a musical pattern. Other poems have sound-effects either included or as their entire substance, such as pouring water, paper tearing, dropping or tapping of objects, sounds from radio programs, and noises of various kinds produced by the mouth (heavy breathing, gargling, spitting, animal sounds). In such cases, a visual medium would be nearly helpless, and sound reproduction is vital. Once again, Konstriktor tends to be predictable, Sigej interesting, and Nikonova the star. The most impressive work, Nikonova's "Feminofobs," is a brilliant, eleven-minute series of variations on two themes: "1) Kuritsa ne ptitsa, 2) Tsvetaeva ne Mandel'stam: (A chicken is not a bird; Tsvetaeva is not Mandelshtam), analogous to the set of variations in Transponans No. 30, but here focusing on sonic rather than visual features, though one can imagine a printed version also. Variations range from semantic transformations to pure sound effects (such as eating noises interspersed with word fragments), and in a number of places a chorus of voices is employed.

The 1984 exhibit of the group's works contained 58 bookworks, most of which, the catalogue points out, were manuscripts existing perhaps in a single copy. The catalogue, in addition to containing abbreviated verisons of a variety of manifestoes and theoretical texts, plus two Irfaerist re-made ready-mades by Sigei (a dissected prianik label entitled "it was I who ate Vladimir Erl''s prjaniks" and a tomato juice label decorated in black marker entitled "Ry Nikonova's megaphone"), lists eighteen solo works by Nikonova, none of which has been included in this survey, and twenty-two works by Sigei, only one of which (Ekhona) has been included. Therefore, there is much yet to be seen, so generalizations about either poet's total achievement are provisional, particularly in the case of Sigei. Nikonova's achievements in toto are probably better represented by the materials surveyed, and they seem to be less indebted to a single model than Sigei is to Khlebnikov. Nikonova's work has clearly moved the front forward, which is less clear in the case of Sigei and the other Transpoets. I am speaking here mainly of the Soviet-Russian context. Since context is all-important to the Conceptualist, it might be noted in fine that the work and activities of the Transpoets are quite daring in the Soviet context, even if they might be seen as standard avant-garde fare in the West.

As Coda: from Sergei Segei's Handbook
Copyright © 1998 by Gerald Janecek

Above copied from: http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/janecek/janecek2.htm



manifesto for a new poetry visual and phonic, Pierre Garnier

1962

Once we lived safely beneath our stratum of air. Now we are waves spouting in the cosmos. How can we expect our words to remain wrapped up in the atmosphere of the sentence?

Let them be reunited, like ourselves, to cosmic space--word constellations on the white page.

Every word is an abstract picture.

A surface. A volume.

A surface on the page. A volume when spoken.

Gamier emphasized the necessity for a break with the old rhythms:

The rhythms of poetry have succeeded in deadening the reader's mind.

We listen to the purring of Racine but do not understand it. In poetry we become aware of the universe--for it to be based upon the enumeration of feet is an absurdity.

It makes no difference whether FER or AVION have one or two syllables. What counts is their meaning, the space which the words themselves occupy upon the printed page,

the vibrations they set up in fact the volume which they enclose-immense and horizontal in the case of FER, infinite but with a note of disquiet for AVION

The structure of the sentence would also have to go:

The structure of the sentence has caused the same damage as the rhythms of poetry. What a difference there is between: "The tiger is coming to drink at the river bank" and the single name: TIGER!

The poet is left with words stripped of all worn out structural trappings:

Words are as hard and as scintillating as diamonds.

The word is an element.

The word is a material.

The word is an object.

For those who know how to look at them, some words possess a remarkable topography.

TRANSATLANTIQUE, for instance, rocks and seas, peaks and abysses--why, even the moon cannot be any richer in craters and parched valleys, in rhythms and beauties.

Words are the visible aspects of ideas just as the trunk and the foliage are the visible aspects of a tree.

Underneath are the roots, the ideas.

We must grind our well-worn language to dust--in other words, make the individual words scintillate.

We must do away with imprecise terms, adjectives, for example--or again use them as nouns, as substance, that is to say, as material.

But the word cannot be set on the page unless it is in harmony with the atmosphere of the poem.

What is more, the value of each word is modified by the fact that the poem belongs no longer to a flux but to a static system.

above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/pierregarnier_manifesto.htm

Manifesto of Polypoetry, Enzo Minarelli

1987

1. Only the development of the new technologies will mark the progress of sound poetry: the electronic media and the computer are and will be the true protagonists.

2. The object "language" must be increasingly investigated in its smallest and largest parts: the word, basis of sound experimentation, takes the characters of multi-word, broken into its inner body, restitched at its exterior. The word must be able to free its own manifold sonorities.

3. The exploitation of sound has no limits. It must be carried beyond the border of pure noise, a signifying noise: linguistic and oral ambiguity has a sense only if it completely uses the instruments of the mouth.

4. The recovery of the sense of time (the minute, the second), apart from the laws of harmony and disharmony, because only through editing is the right parameter of synthesis and balance found.

5. Language is rhythm. Tone values are real vectors of meaning: first an act of rationality, then an act of emotion.

6. Polypoetry is devised and realized for the live show; it gives to sound poetry the role of prima donna or starting point to link relations with musicality (accompaniment or rhythmic line), mimicry, movement, and dance (acting or extension or integration of the sound text), image (television or slide projection, by association, explanation or alternative and redundancy), light, space, costumes, and objects.

Above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/enzominarelli_manifestoofpolypoetry.htm

A Taxonomy of Sound Poetry, Dick Higgins

I - For Starters, a Sub-History

Most sound poets and observers of the contemporary scene approach sound poetry as if it were a purely contemporary phenomenon, but this neoteric view simply does not hold up. It is true that some kinds of sound poetry are new in the sense of being without formal precedent. But just as "concrete" and other recent visual poetries have their analogues going back into folklore or into (for example) the Bucolic Greek poets, so sound poetry too has its close analogues. This is natural, since it is natural for anyone who is interested in poetry to try, at some point, isolating the sounds of poetry from other aspects of it and to try out the making of poems with sounds more-or-less alone; only if such an experiment were totally artificial could something so basic as a poetry of sound alone be entirely without precedent. But, to start our investigation, let us consider sound poetry not (as might be tempting) by some tight definition that gave a climactic structure to the argument of the critic or poet who offers it-the revelation-of-the-here-to-fore-unknown-truth kind of discussion-and simply use "sound poetry" as, generally, poetry in which the sound is the focus, more than any other aspect of the work.

Three basic types of sound poetry from the relative past come to mind immediately: folk varieties, onomatopoetic or mimetic types, and nonsense poetries. The folk roots of sound poetry may be seen in the lyrics of certain folk songs, such as the Horse Songs of the Navajos or in the Mongolian materials collected by the Sven Hedin expedition.1 We have some of this kind of thing in our own culture, where sound poetry fragments are apt to be used at the ends of stanzas, such as the French "il ron ron ron petit patte à pont" in "Il était une bergère," or the English "heigh down hoe down derry derry down" in "The Keeper." Similarly, in Black American music there is a sound poetry tradition, possibly based originally on work calls, which we find metatacized into the skat singing styles of the popular music of the 1930's, in the long nonsense-like passages in Cab Calloway's singing of "Minnie the Moocher," for example.

In written literature, by contrast, most of the sound poetry fragments are brief, onomatopoetic imitations of natural or other sounds, for example the "Brekekex ko-ax ko-ax" of the frogs in Aristophanes' drama, or the "jug jug jugs" of the birds among the Elizabethans. This use of sound has no semantic sense to speak of, although, on occasion, its freshness consists of possible overlaps between nonsense and sense. Even some recent sound poetry has an onomatopoetic element. For example, my own Requiem for Wagner the Criminal Mayor is above all a structural piece, but its sounds resemble the fighting of cats and also the so-called "Bronx cheer" of traditional calumny.

Some of the most interesting sound poetry is the purely nonsense writing of the periods in Western literature when nonsemantic styles and forms were not supposed to be taken in full earnest. One of their delights is the art with which they parody the styles of their authors' native tongues. Try this English example, for instance, from the Victorian, Edward Lear:

Thrippsy pillowins,

Inky tinky pobblebookle abblesquabs?

Flosky! beebul trimple flosky!-Okul scratcha-

bibblebongebo, viddle squibble tog-a-tog, ferrymoyassity

amsky flamsky ramsky damsky crocklefether squiggs.

Flunkywisty poom.

Slushypipp.2

While not set up as verse and therefore not exactly sound poetry, this text is from the period when prose poems were re-developed, and it tropes the style of a conventional polite letter of its period quite admirably. Another well-known example from its time would be the nonsense words in Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky --'Twas brillig in the slithy toves. . ." and that kind of thing. The protagonist is equipped with a "vorpal" sword, and speculation on that kind of sword has been abundant ever since. When I was a child I had a science fiction magazine in my possession-long since vanished-in which two genius children invented a "vorpal" sword to protect themselves against an invasion of creatures from another dimension, and there are currently even a literary magazine in California and an art gallery in New York City named-what else?-Vorpal. Thus though no meaning has ever been assigned definitively to "vorpal," the word has become familiar as a sort of empty word, significant for its lack of meaning and for its harmony in a sentence of other, more semantically significant English words.

Similarly, in Christian Morgenstern's "Gespräch einer Haussechnecke mit sich selbst," from the famous Galgenlieder, a snail asks if it should dwell in its shell, but the word fragments progress arid compress into strange, decidedly ungrammatical constructs; these use a sort of inner ear and inner grammar of the German language which reveal a great deal about the sounds and potential of that language:3

Soll i aus meim Hause raus

Soll i aus meim Hause nit raus?

Einen Schritt raus?

Lieber nit raus?

Hausenitraus-

Hauseraus

Hauseritraus

Hausenaus

Rauserauserauserause ...

which Max Knight has translated as follows:

Shall I dwell in my shell?

Shall I not dwell in my shell?

Dwell in shell?

Rather not dwell?

Shall I not dwell,

shall I dwell,

dwell in shell

shall I shell,

shall IshellIshallIshellIshallI...

Of course in German the last five words can be perfectly compressed into one invented word each, which cannot be done to the same extent in English. This illustrates not only the uniqueness of the German language but also the unique relationship between successful sound poetry and the effective use of the linguistic potentialities in any given language.



II - When sound poetry becomes conscious of itself as just another genre

At some point around the time of the First World War it ceased to be assumed that sound poetry could only be used for light or humorous works or as interludes in otherwise traditional pieces, or as something so unique that each poem appeared to be the first sound poem in history-assumptions that seem to underlie most early sound poems. The sense of pioneering was replaced by the sense of potential mastery, and a tradition of sound poetry was precipitated. Implicit in this development is the even more radical aesthetic shift which seems to have begun at this time (and to have become even more pronounced recently, since, say, the late 1950's) that it is no longer de rigeur that a poem must attempt to be powerful, meaningful or even necessarily communicative (a main assumption of the 18th and 19th century poetries). I have developed this observation more fully elsewhere, 4 but basically my argument is that poetries which used means which, while not unknown, were not usually taken seriously in the West, especially visual as well as sound poetry,5 could now be accepted as valid possibilities and genres.6 Thus the parole in libertà (1909) of the futurist F. T. Marinetti or the dada lautgedichte of Hugo Ball ( 1917), both of which flourished at this time and both of which, while they may include elements of humor, are not particularly intended as divertissements as is, for instance, the Edward Lear piece I cited. The cycle since then is a sort of arc of increasing acceptance of these genres as our mentality has shifted from the normative art of power in the late 19th century towards an art of experience and paradigm today. As a measure of just how much a Ball lautgedicht (a work which probably seemed quite esoteric at the time of its composition) is accepted, one can point to the use of Ball's "I Zimbra" in its surprising appearance as the lyrics to a recently popular song by the punk rock group, The Talking Heads.7 The punk rock song, like Ball's poem, opens with "Gadji bera bimba dandridi," which is not even anchored in the parody of any one language but is purely without reference to any known language. This in turn evokes the possibility of an artificial invented language, an idea which was also explored at this same time in the Russian Iliazd's "zaoum" or the German Stefan George's "lingua romana" pieces. In our taxonomy, then, works in an artificial or non-existent language will be the first class of modern sound poems.8



A second class comprises works in which the joy or other significance of the work lies in the interplay between the semantically meaningful lines or elements and those which are probably nonsense. It is thus related to the first class, and such pieces often use found materials collaged into the text, as it were, so that one gets either a shock of recognition or a momentarily heightened sense of immediate, concrete reality. These works parallel, conceptually, the early collages of Picasso or Braque with their inclusion of newspaper fragments among the forms on the canvas, or the use of photographs by the dadaists and such Bauhaus figures as Moholy-Nagy, or the objets trouvés of Marcel Duchamp. That traditional critics can still be puzzled by such works is indicated by the titles of the contributions to a 1972 issue of Text+Kritik devoted to the writings of Kurt Schwitters, the German near-dadaist who flourished in the 1920's and later. Sample titles: "Kurt Schwitters' Poem 'To Anna Blume': Sense or Nonsense?" or "On the Function of the Reality Fragments in the Poetry of Kurt Schwitters," etc.9 Another such device, though not one that fits into sound poetry, would be the "newsreel" passages of John Dos Passos' USA trilogy, which I only mention as a parallel paradigm.

A third class might be called "phatic poems," poems in which semantic meaning, if any, is subordinate to expression of intonation, thus yielding a new emotional meaning which is relatively remote from any semiotic significance on the part of words which happen to be included. If, for example, one were to wail the words "blue" and "night" repeatedly over a period of time, the initial function of those words to establish a frame for the wail would soon become unimportant by comparison with the musicality of the wail itself and the residual meaning of the two words would come to seem more like an allusion than a conveyor of meaning. One would have, in effect, an invocation without anything specific being invoked. This is precisely the effect which one gets from the recently re-discovered recording by Antonin Artaud of his "Pour en finir avec le jugement se dieu," which was originally recorded in the late 1940's a short time before the poet's death, broadcast (causing a great scandal), and then lost for many years until Arrigo Lora-Totino unearthed it in the archives of Radiodiffusion Francaise.10 Here Artaud uses more-or-less conventional words, but they are, as I have suggested, essentially allusions-or perhaps illusions, since so few can be understood anyway. Instead Artaud's emphasis is on high sighing, breathing, wheezing, chanting, exclaiming, exploding, howling, whispering and avoiding.

Poems without written texts constitute a fourth class. They may have a rough schema or notation that is akin to a graphic musical one (and there are those who regard a magnetic tape as a sort of notation), or there may be some general rules, written out like those of a game, which, if followed, will produce a performance of the work. But by comparison with the role of the written text and the heard result in traditional poetry or in the previous sound poetries that we have discussed (except, perhaps, the previous class, the phatic poems), they are relatively unnotated. Highlights in this class would be Henri Chopin's explorations of the voice by means of microphone and tape recorder, François Dûfrène's very phatic crirhythmes series (which, perhaps, constitute a transitory class between the phatic poems and the un-written-out ones), or the highly sophisticated tape recorded poems produced in the recording studio by such artists as the Swedes, Bengt Emil Johnson, Sten Hanson and others." A very large portion of the recorded literature of sound poetry, especially in Europe, is of this type, presumably because of the inherent close connection between such works and audio recording as an industry. Although this is also the class in which most American sound poetry falls, the American literature tends to be aesthetically naive by comparison to the European (and Canadian) works. The artists seem ill at ease with the very "performance" of their "texts." For example, there are some ten records in the Poetry Out Loud series edited by Peter and Patricia Harleman, which seem somehow like an extension of the beat poetry of the 1950's with its heavy jazz influence, its anti-formal bias and its dogmatic insistence upon the freshness of improvisation.12 There exist also similar records edited and produced independently by John Giorno, whose work tends to sound improvised even when it is not. These have isolated fragments of rich material, but most are heavy-handed in their unformed iconoclasm. Fortunately, even in America, there are exceptions such as the works of Jackson Mac Low, Richard Kostelanetz and Charles Stein which are not of this sort.

The fifth class is the notated sound poem, which comprises the largest volume of sound poetry to date. By "notation" here I am referring to the normative sort of musical notation, in which there is some kind of correspondence between space, time, word and sound and some form of graphic or textual indicator of these elements. Some of these notations closely resemble musical notations and have elaborate scores, such as the work in the 1940's of the lettriste Isidore Isou or the monumentally complex works that came out of Germany in the 1950's, such as Hans G. Helms' Golem or Wolfgang Harig's das fussballspiel/ein stereophonisches hörspiel, a page of which is reproduced herewith:


Harig's das fussballspiel ("the soccer game") is, as its cover proclaims, "a stereophonic radio play," the word for which is, in German, appropriately enough, "hörspiel" or "hear-play." The resources called for on the depicted page alone are one chorus which evidently is working in unison here with a second and third chorus, a man and a woman. The work was first broadcast by Sudwestfunk in Stuttgart on April 11, 1966.13

However, it could also be argued that any text, when it is taken as a work of art by a person who does not understand the meaning of its words, is conceptually transformed into a sound poem of this class. For example, in February 1960, during a now-legendary performance of some "Happenings" at New York's Judson Church, Claes Oldenburg (who later became celebrated as a pop artist) read aloud to his American audience from a Swedish translation of The Scarlet Pimpernel. Since Oldenburg's Swedish is excellent, what the audience heard was all the phatic and phonetic materials of the Swedish language. Once the spectator gave up trying to understand the semantic meaning of the words, the result was fresh and meaningful on another plane.

Another such development is the use of a work which was presumably designed for an experience in some other medium in poetry, to produce a sort of intermedial translation. For example, there is the intertextual and intermedial relationship of sound poetry and concrete poetry. Concrete poetry is, quite roughly, the genre of visual poetry which uses writing or the letters of the alphabet presented visually or systemically, as opposed to visual poems which are photographic, environmental, conceptual, temporal, etc.14 Concrete poetry became a widespread phenomenon in the 1950's and 1960's. However, occasionally the need to perform concrete poetry "live" would arise. So when the poets would be asked to read their work aloud, they would often use the printed texts by analogy to musical notations, thus transforming them into notated sound poems. So close is the connection between sound poetry and concrete poetry, in fact, that many artists have done both and, in fact, one of the first phonographic recordings of sound poetry as such, the 1966 -konkrete poesie/sound poetry/artikulationen," by its very title indicates the near-identity of sound and concrete poetry; some of the artists included, such as Ernst Jandl, Franz Mon and Lily Greenham, are known in both areas, and Ms. Greenham has toured in Europe and North America with her live performances of concrete poetry translated into sound poetry.

Finally, within this fifth class there is another hybrid, sound poems which are also radio plays, or which seemed designed to be heard not as a unique experience but as part of something else, so that the sound of the words is accompanied by the meanings from some different area of experience. One hears the text with only half one's attention, as one hears most radio broadcasts with only half one's attention; this is more or less inherent in the nature of radio, that one plays it while watering the house plants, while driving through heavy traffic, or while sorting out the addresses in one's address book. My own Le petit cirque au fin du monde and Ommaje are of this subclass. The first is a "hear-play" written in French, a language I do not speak well, so that the errors in it are part of its texture, and it was broadcast repeatedly over the public address system at the University of Vincennes by Jean-Jacques Lebel's students during the May 1968 insurrection in France, a perfect environment for that piece.

These, then, are the five relatively modern classes of sound poetry:

1 works in an invented language,

2 near-nonsense works

3 phatic poems,

4 un-written-out poems, and

5 notated ones.

Obviously some of the modern works being generated today still fall within the three classes I described earlier in older sound poetry:

1 folk varieties,

2 onomatopoetic or mimetic pieces, and

3 nonsense poetries which trope their own languages.

For example, there is no doubting the modernity or avant-garde credentials of the Toronto-based group, The Four Horsemen, whose members perform both separately and together. In their performances they allude constantly to folk or popular culture, to the extent of wearing the kind of elaborate, almost psychedelic clothes associated with rock and roll groups-and they even trope the style of rock and roll to the point of listening to each other take riffs and solos and playing off each other as any tight rock group would. Their presentations are deliberately popular and light-spirited in order to minimize the gulf that usually exists between performer and audience in the new arts. Yet, formally this work belongs to two of the oldest of sound poetry traditions-the folk and nonsense traditions. In no way does this work to the detriment of their achievement, but rather it serves to remind us of something very deep within us which sound poetry expresses clearly when it is at its best-the love of the sound of poetry.



III - Some Boundaries and Non-Boundaries of Sound Poetry

Now that we have examined some eight classes of things that sound poetry is, it might be fruitful to turn our attention briefly to some things that sound poetry either is not, or is not yet.

One thing that sound poetry is not is music. Of course it has a musical aspect-a strong one. But if one compares typical sound poetry pieces with typical musical ones, music is usually the presentation or activization of space and time by means of the occurrences of sound. This is the nature of the most traditional Mozart piano pieces or Irish unaccompanied airs as of the most innovative John Cage musical inventions. But any poetry relates space, time and sound to experience. Thus sound poetry points in a different direction, being inherently concerned with communication and its means, linguistic and/or phatic. It implies subject matter; even when some particular work is wholly non-semantic, as in the microphonic vocal explorations of Henri Chopin, the non-semantic becomes a sort of negative semantics-one is conscious of the very absence of words rather than, as in vocal music, merely being aware of the presence of the voice. Thus, for the sound poet certainly and probably for the audience as well, the creation or perception of a work as sound poetry has to do with questions of meaning and experience which are not essentially musical. We identify what we are hearing more than we would if we were listening to music. We are very concerned with just who or what is saying or doing what.

Some of the things that sound poetry has not yet become are intermedial. Intermedia are those formal, conceptual areas of the arts which fall between already accepted media, such as visual poetry falling between the visual arts and poetry. However there is always a tendency for intermedia, experienced with increasing familiarity, to become themselves new media. Thus, taking sound poetry no longer as an intermedium but as a medium, it would be exciting if the sound poets would explore these three new intermedia: (1 ) those between sound poetry and linguistic analysis, (2) those between sound poetry and sculpture, to produce profoundly three-dimensional poetic constructs and not merely analytical ones, and (3) between sound poetry and the environment.

In the first of these new intermedia, we could use electronic means to apply the analyzed sounds of one language to the conceptual structure of another to see what aesthetic effects would be made possible. We could write English with the transformations of German. We could generate new categories of what the linguists have called "illegal" sentences-sentences that have no possible correspondences in the physical world (e.g., Noam Chomsky's famous "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"). All sorts of new macaronics would be worth exploring-puns and mixtures among different languages, not to be humorous but to expand our experiences.

In the second new intermedium poems would appear in situations and points of space, and would move towards other situations and points of space in an exciting way. Masses of sound and word, physical presence of more words-these things would enable new poetic structures to enter into our experience.

Finally, the third intermedium could exist in environments and situations which we do not normally regard as poetic. We could have poems for sauna baths, for sunsets, for the experiencing of elections from among the apple trees. We could use aspects of these places that would aestheticize our relationships to them, as, traditionally, a prayer was supposed to spiritualize our relationship to its circumstances-a prayer for night time, a prayer for those who were lost at sea. There is a lot to be done in these areas and more.

Barrytown, New York

October 2nd, 1980



FOOTNOTES

1 Henning Haslund-Christiansen, The Music of the Mongols: Eastern Mongolia (1943; New York: Da Capo Press, 1971).

2 Edward Lear, The Complete Nonsense Book (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1934), p. 10.

3 Christian Morgenstern, The Gallows Songs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 28-29.

4 I have developed this argument more fully in three parts of: Dick Higgins, A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes Towards a Theory of the New Arts. Second Edition. (New York: Printed Editions, 1979), pp. xi, 3-9, 93-101, and also in: Dick Higgins, George Herbert's Pattern Poems: In Their Tradition (New York: Printed Editions, 1977), pp. 18-19.

5 The early history of visual poetry is my subject in the work listed in footnote 4, above. Its bibliography will also be useful for anyone seeking to explore the matter farther. For a similar discussion of sound poetry, but one which continues into modern times as well, the best such article in English is that of Stephen Ruppenthal and Larry Wendt, "Vocable Gestures: A Historical Survey of Sound Poetry," in Art Contemporary 5 (1978) [ La Mamelle, Inc., P.O. Box 3123, San Francisco, CA 941191 , pp. 57-8, 80-104. A large study of the subject by Henri Chopin is due to be published shortly in France, which should help fill in the gap in historical scholarship in sound poetry.

6 For an example of a naïve attack on visual poetry, see Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature (New York: Holt & Williams, 1872), v. 4, p. 54. Another such attack is in Joseph Addison, Spectator 58, many editions.

7 The Talking Heads' "I Zimbra" is on their album, Fear of Music (New York: Sire Records, 1979), SRK 6076.

8 Many excellent examples of such work are given in Eugene Jolas, "From Jabberwocky to Lettrisme" in Transition Forty-Eight (1948), v. 1, n. 1, pp. 104-120.

9 Text+Kritik (1972), n. 35/36, pp. 13 and 33.

10 Arrigo Lora-Totino, ed., Futura/Poesia Sonora (Milano: Cramps Records, 1979), 5206 304. This seven-record set contains a large book of notes with many materials that are unavailable elsewhere.

11 Recordings of highlights of seven of the International Sound Poetry Festivals, held at Stockholm from 1968 to 1975, can be found on five records from Sveriges Radios Förlag, RELP 1049, 1054, 1072, 1073 and 1074, and on two from Fylkingen Records, RELP 1102 and 1103.

12 Poetry Out Loud (St. Louis, MO: Out Loud Productions, 1971 to 1977).

13 Ludwig Harig, das fussbalspiel: ein stereophonisches hörspiel (Stuttgart: Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 1967).

14 I say "roughly" because, for purposes of discussion, I am ignoring the sub-genre of concrete poetry which is either calligraphic or is written in non-legible writing. Many fine anthologies of concrete poetry have appeared. For example, one of the largest, one which is technically out of print but which is often found, is Emmett Williams, ed., An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (New York: Something Else Press, 1967).

15 Anastasia Bitzos, ed., konkrete poesie / soundpoetry / artikulationen (Bern: Anastasia Bitzos, 1966). Ms. Bitzos produced at least one other such record as well. There also are several records of Lily Greenham's sound poetry translations of concrete, for example: internationale sprachexperimente der 50/60er jahre / international language experiments of the 50/60ies [sic] (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Hoffmann, ca. 1970).

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