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Sound poetry: Penn Kemp and the metamorphosed ear
"We have loaded the work with strengths and energies that helped us to rediscover the evangelical concept of
the "word" (logos) as a magical complex image. (Hugo Ball cited in Ken Norris, The Little Magazine in Canada: 1925-80)
The most resonant possibilities for poetry as a medium can be realized only when the performance of language
moves from human speech to animate, but transhuman, sound: that is, when we stop listening and begin to hear;
which is to say, stop decoding and begin to get a nose for the sheer noise of language (Charles Bernstein,
My Way: Speeches and Poems )
you are this that you see
assume my name my mantle
become me now (Penn Kemp, from Trance Form)
I listen to Darkness Visible: A Sound Opera by Chris Meloche and Penn Kemp as I write. Then I listen primarily
to write. Beginning with verses gets you as far as the page only, always typographically and spatially incomplete,
even if it's the verses of Penn Kemp's Trance Form, from which comes the song opera's divisions into 'mattermater',
'moonphase', 'familiars' and 'bonepoems'. And even if the most text-dependent segments of Darkness Visible
(available at 94.9 CHRW- Gathering Voices) are the apantomancy of "familiars" and the erotic "bonepoems"
chant. Concrete poetry with the potential to turn into sound text does more than convert words into living
performance: it knocks the text-as-king view off its throne, the illusion that the textual is supreme, more
ready to hand than invisible sound, and opens up a rich store of literary interpretation accessible only to
the ear. And this, again, even though most of the work is scored off the text.
It's my view that a Penn Kemp sound opera metamorphoses the ear, by which I mean she's not just making meaning but making song: and not
just the song of chant, incantatory and almost mystical, but that of natural processes themselves. The text, even as wildly liberatory
and open-ended as contemporary linguistics theory admits, can never be that fluid, 'multiform'. In fact, to make darkness visible, by
which she means to restore the materiality of lived experience to poetry, is the audio text's primary impetus: particularly in the way
it metamorphoses voice into any living thing imaginable. As she's said in a "ditch" interview (used with permission here), "Sound Opera
is what I call my narrative genre-bender of poetry, music and sound. It is a new form I developed in performance and recording with
collaborators in a desire to lift poetry off the page to the stage." Bending more than genre, in fact, but the very space of poetry.
Apantomancy in "familiars", for example, means a divination by animals, a vision of ecstasy induced by communion with the turtle, lion,
and tiger. But it's transformative vision, with poet-shaman herself turning into turtle into lion into tiger, speaker induced, at each
stage, to "follow slowly sluggish with change/to unclean green brackish water/rolling off our great horn shells". "" (from
the Latin familiares ) suggests also rituals of intimacy with the "green brackish" processes of every imaginable life form. Sound
opera gives a kind of materiality to that ritual of intimacy, using modulated and rhythmic properties of voice to recreate a
virtual divination for the ear. David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous, a work that is in significant respects a prose
commentary Kemp's style of audio text, speaks of a "human speaking [that's] necessarily tuned...to the various nonhuman
calls and cries that animate the local terrain." (140)
It's Kemp's sound opera that gives voice to the non- (or perhaps trans-) human world: for in poetry become augury "the snaky
way/becomes my trail/becomes my antler". What's heard (or even imaginable) in both segments of Darkness Visible is the res ipsa
of voice and the natural world to which it sings. And it can do that because it seems the ear (rather than the "thinking eye",
as poet Ron Silliman puts it) has been preset (perhaps through evolutionary design) for registering formal properties of sound,
engaged primarily in what Charles Bernstein calls the "iconicity" of language, both written and verbal. (My Way: Speeches and
Poems 295) It's hard to describe how this living reenactment of living process is heard in sound opera except as just this
"ability of language to present rather than represent or designate." (295, Bernstein's emphasis) Meaning recreated as a type of performance (299).
In "bonepoems" the dark side of natural processes become starkly visible and audible, voices pitched into many roles, expertly
ranged from keen to languorous chant to sexual play and release: from "overunderoverunderoverunder" to "quickbonequickbonequick"
to "when soft flesh/withers". Here's a sound poem attuned not just to the physical but the mythological and linguistic. Instead
of conjoined female choric singing (as in "familiars") there is a more haunting and sensuous male-female interplay: the male's
monodic pursuit to female's dithyrambic teasing that results not in apantomancy but Tantric sex, a ritual of intimacy with
nature's unrelenting and insatiable other. Kemp's voice, in particular, is a type of babbling (of plosives and aspirates)
that in Lacanic terms alludes to the preverbal rhythmic speech of the female. Scripted meanings appear always intersected
by the darker background male, a pattern of pursuit typified in Persephone and Diana mythologies.
If ever there was a Derridean binary worth unpacking, it's the text/performance one but suffice it to say criticism has
leant too heavily towards the visual poem, regarding sounds alone as derivative and of secondary importance. Again Charles
Bernstein, among the most elegant sound poetry theorists, makes the case for the semantic integrity of sound poetry:
Indeed, the drift of much literary criticism of the past two decades has been away from the auditory and performative aspects of
the poem, partly because of the prevalent notion that the sound structure of language is relatively arbitrary. Such elements as
the visual appearance of the text or the sound of the work in performance may be extralexical but they are not extrasemantic.
When textual elements that are conventionally framed out as nonsemantic are acknowledged as significant, the result is a proliferation
of possible frames of interpretation ( 281)
The enchanting rhythms of a sound opera make the need for textual competence not just irrelevant but even otiose, as though
the critic's drone were a violation of the text's true sacredness in performance. To hear the poem, and access it through
use of pitch, timbre and breath pause only, is to re-encounter in it the language of the "poet-shaman", the oral text's
essential fluidity and, as Hugo Ball says in epigraph, "magical complex image": its potential for aural metamorphosis in
a way that is not visual or figurative but genre-bending.
So that as I listen and write I also intuit poet Penn Kemp as "sonosopher" and medium for transformation; and through chant,
oftentimes the sound opera's primary channel, I sense the constellations of language, myth, dream and sexual play. As she says
herself (in the same "ditch" interview), "Experienced viscerally in the present moment, [the sound opera's] dominant verb for me
is 'to play'." An organic work (in the Coleridgian sense) springing out of natural processes: vegetative and meteorological, mineralogical
and somatic. In fact, arising out of and back into nature's animate and nonanimate processes. The ear registers meanings of languishing
streams, of turtle speech, and sanded objects strewn along a careless trail to "centre island" (the antlered syntax of the Canadian
'experience'). And not just figuratively for the eye but "magically" for the ear.
Voice reconfigures textual silence into music, almost ex nihilo (and so again Ball's "evangelized concept of the 'word'"). I'd
even dare to valorize ancestral dream over waking rationality when I encounter poet and sound poetry through the very dynamics
of primitive oral composition. As Ken Norris says, "Primitive sense and sacred time are being reawakened", both in a single
listening experience. (The Little Magazine 137) Kemp talks of "restor[ing] poetry to the power of its aural origins around
a Neolithic fire." To the ear encountering the mystical ménage of sound and poetry for the first time, the sound poem seems
free of the constraints of traditional verse, not having to rely on the more formal conventions of metrical verse because
of its inherent affinities to the pre-literate, the aural, Neolithic.
The sonic text is liberatory, freeing listener from syntactic constraints on a page; even if it begins or works with text,
the concrete poem from which the sound opera derives, as though its libretto, the experience is also an essentially transmogrifying
one in the way the text converts visual into sound structure. Sound poetry is a form that doesn't impose unnatural order on content:
it rather allows that content to sing (and unwind into) its own stories. I will say the inner screen that replaces the neutral
page becomes the highly charged one of transfigured shapes, objects and the new contextual alignments they create. Silliman
thought, in The New Sentence, that by allowing the prosodic to escape from prose the new sentence can emerge, the poet's prose,
but he didn't go far enough. Unleashing 'prosody' takes you not to prose but back to the "speech" of what Kemp calls "MotherWorld's
enChantments" and her "seasonal song cycle of ecco poetry"): the shaman's chant, the sonosopher's dialogue with the place where all
of nature's water, earth, air divinities interweave.
In Kemp's sound poem Flux, Flash, Flood, some of which is reproduced below, poets reciting in unison change the text not into lexemes
(intelligible bits for the eye) but words charged with sound,words becoming not just signifiers but harbingers of the inevitability
of natural (gynecological) change. There are none here of the usual letter or word permutations exploited for their rhythmic potential
(at least not to the same obvious extent as in Trance Form): the "Flux, Flash, Flood" is strictly libretto to the audiotext's sound
opera. The way for poet to register directly the concreteness of menopause is to present straightforward text augmented by sound,
not reflecting about but with the inevitability of life-processes: the only artifice is perhaps that of the strong choragic female
voice of Antigone, Elektra or Sappho, embattled but self-reliant still in the face of old age. And the easy enjambments, nearly
uniform stanzaic arrangements and assonance and alliteration (as in the title itself) make it nicely amenable to sound technique.
The subject of hot flushes never arises
in our conversation. Are we ashamed
to admit the extraordinary, the poet
as heating system gone berserk in
the everyday climacteric, proclamation
of sweat the race is conditioned to?
A fever of estrogen deprivation confuses
my cooling system. Where else would the therm-
ometer measure a Hermes of despair, a message
of ruin, a riot of theorems that do not compute?
In Kemp's Night Orchestra (Track 11) the voice, electroacoustically overlaid and expertly enhanced, foregrounds the poem
even more strongly than in "Flux, Flash, Flood": pitch, intonation and vocal intensity create in the listener's inner
space a poetry of the primal (and sacred) and never just its representation. What the poem can ordinarily do on page only
through manipulation of sound and sense, here a solo voice does alone through sound, never the messenger of linear messages
but always sinuous and deep.
Deep in summer
stillness, an electric
hum of air conditioner
in B flat flat monotone
entrains my body
monotonous
Heat produced to cool
my neighbours thrums
the outside air, heats
up our collective night.
Mechanical multitudes
self-replicate in chorus,
relentless fridge and clock.
Again, metamorphosis is the key to Kemp's sound poetics, genre-bending, aural, Neolithic . It's perhaps the musical upper
limit of speech as envisioned by American Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky in "A" - 12, up to this point in Canadian experimentalism
perhaps only ideally realized; or the apotheosis of bill bissett's own return to a primitive Ur-speech through a distinctively new
pictographic reconfiguration of language (as in the case of his experimentalist magazine Blew Ointment), and then, of course, through
his own pioneering sound experiments.
True to the impetus of Ganglia, the Toronto-based magazine bpNichol first published for concrete and sound poetry (see Pauline
Butling and Susan Rudy's Writing in our Time: Canada's Radical Poetries in English 1957-2003, 65), Kemp's sound operas fan
out like nerve endings into air, earth, wind and night, registering fluid ecstasy, parturition or vegetal loneliness: animal,
human and inorganic in a kind of sound collage that's genuinely avant-garde. Associated though she was with the first group
in Canada to experiment with sound poetry, "The Four Horsemen" comprising bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, Paul Dutton and Rafael
Barreto-Rivera, Kemp's sound performances are not meant (as theirs was) for radical 60s-type critique. For her it was "an
expression of pleasure in word play: mishearings, trope and the fun of standing cliché on its head." ("ditch" interview)
Conrad DiDiodato
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Email: Conrad DiDiodato
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