People interested in contemporary poetry approach reading differently. Contemporary poetry uses many of the forms of reading described in the three historical examples (more often than not without awareness of precedents) and has invented quite a few more. Unfortunately, people who are not familiar with contemporary poetic practice find contemporary work incomprehensible because, due to their notions of reading, they don't know how to read it. If their ephemeralized reading habits are too deeply ingrained, explaining alternative reading methods will probably not help them -- teaching them a difficult new language, say Arabic or Hopi, might be easier. At this point it's impossible to say how much this will change in the future. Perhaps the self-destructive nature of speedreading and developments in technology will make reading for information's sake obsolete, and will return the act of reading to a form of art. Whatever the case, readers of poetry are not part of the mainstream and poets constantly develop ways of staying out of it.
One of the most positive things contemporary poets have going for them is the total lack of standardization at all levels of notation. In writing about Donne, I pointed out that standardized spelling reduced the sense of fluidity and magic in language. Many poets of the last two centuries have reacted to this on a gut level by simply not learning to spell "correctly" -- William Morris, W.B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound have been among their company. More recently, poets like bill bissett have completely rejected standardized orthography and have spelled by intuition and their sense of how the words sound, look, and feel. When bissett writes "seek / sum priva see its wintr fr reel now sins ystrday," notions of correct spelling are completely irrelevant. Though people inured to inflexible orthography cringe at this sort of thing, feeling that some immutable law of the universe has been violated, intuitive spelling returns poetry to its oral base: readers must work out the sounds of words to be able to read the poem at all.
In "The Prosody of Open Verse" (Open Letter, 5.2, pp. 5 - 13), bpNichol and Frank Davey provide an excellent catalog of notational devices in projective verse and its descendants. Visual poets and language centered writers have similar arsenals of notational devices. Though the notational devices are numerous, they are done largely by intuition or personal system and they do not seem to be tending toward any sort of standardization. One poet may mean one thing by a certain notation, another poet may use the same notation for a completely different purpose. Readers must try out several possibilities when reading a new work, actively participating in the realization of the poem, considering the text from several different angles, turning it over in their minds, testing it in vocalization, and becoming more familiar with it in the process. Ultimately readers will have to hear the poet read before they can come to a complete understanding of the notation employed.
After reading sketches of some of my visual poetry, Charles Stein and George Quasha asked me how I performed it and I read them a couple pages. They then did a two voice rendition of the same pages as they thought they should be performed. Their reading bore little resemblance to mine. Quasha and Stein are knowledgeable readers and extraordinary performers and in some ways their reading was better than mine. The important thing, though, is that all three of us ended up with a fuller appreciation of the work after we had been exposed to the two different readings. Even misreadings can expand the reader's sense of the poem, once the poet's intentions are understood.
During the sixties, concrete poetry had a tendency to be pictorial, trivially self-referential, and static. Works like the tiny masterpieces of Emmett Williams tended to get lost in the juggernaut of poems made up of the word "pine" typed over and over in the shape of a Christmas tree. The tendency of visual poetry now, however, is away from pictorial and mimetic representations in favor of gesture, motor stimulus, gestalt, and abstract archetype. Visual poetry, whether complex or minimalist, has become deeper, more capable of reaching more levels of thought, perception, and action, and, at the same time, more oriented toward performance, public or private. This can lead to multimedia performance, incorporating other arts, sometimes interacting with work produced by a number of people in a cooperative or collective effort.
Projective verse and visual poetry shade almost imperceptibly into performance art and sound poetry. The emphasis shifts from visual texts that can be performed to scores that exist primarily to shape vocalization but can also be read as images. A good example of a score that could find its way into an anthology of visual poetry is Jackson Mac Low's "Vocabulary Gatha for Pete Rose" [Fig. 7]. Readers seeing this piece in print can read it casually, as a piece of graphic art. After reading the performance instructions, they can do their own performances -- either single voice or with friends. They will probably appreciate the piece more if they have attended performances done under Mac Low's supervision, and most if they have participated in such performances themselves. If they have done this, they may be able to hear performances with their inner ears. Experienced performers can experience this in much the same way as musicians can hear music with their inner ear while reading musical scores. Though the reader may find the score visually interesting, that interest pales in comparison to the satisfaction of taking part in a performance of the work -- a satisfaction that can be carried over, to some extent, into silent readings of other Mac Low scores.
A score of this sort must be relatively easy to follow and use. It is not necessarily meant to be performed by professional performance artists but by sympathetic and knowledgeable members of the audience. The distinction between artist and audience blurs in this sort of performance. Other scores may be more cryptic. A score like the page from "16 Part Suite" by the Four Horsemen shown in [Fig. 8] is a good example of this type of notation. It was developed for the use of a single performance group. The Horsemen weren't thinking about how it might be read by other people at the time of composition, they were simply using the form of optophonetic scoring developed by Raoul Hausmann as a working method. I doubt that anyone else using it would end up with a performance anything at all like that of the group that originally developed it. Nonetheless, it can be read as a work of graphic art as long as the reader understands that it was composed for a different purpose. Other performances that it might inspire could be just as meaningful as the Horsemen's and the Horsemen themselves might have been able to further develop their own performance from such a reading. Readers already familiar with live performances of this piece might find their understanding of it deepened by seeing the score, somewhat like the original readers of the Aztec books found their oral poetry enhanced by visual images.
The amount of lexical material in a score, the number of words and letters, need not be great: many scores are for minimalist interpretation, somewhat like the music of Philip Glass or Steve Reich, and some scores have no words or other forms of traditional notation at all. Some Horsemen scores fall into this category, but probably the supreme master of nonlexical scoring is Bob Cobbing. It seems that Cobbing can use virtually anything as a score, though the scores he has published are almost always visually impressive, capable of standing alone as works of graphic art.
Poetry evolved from song and still has close ties to the parent art. Poets often write with melodies in mind, and some poems still get set to music. Many poets base their work on larger musical structures; some, like Theodore Enslin, have had rigorous training in music and their knowledge of musical form shapes their work on all levels. In the case of sound poets, it's often a matter of semantic quibbling whether you call the work music, song, or poem. In Mac Low's "Vocabulary Gatha for Pete Rose," the same notation can be used for speaking voice, singing voice, or musical instrument, and other poets have written pieces to be performed in conjunction with music. Like music, poetry is essentially an art of time. The sense of timing a poem creates is its rhythm and that rhythm is one of its most expressive characteristics. "To read Donne you must measure Time, and discover the Time of each word by the sense of Passion," wrote Coleridge -- he could have said the same thing about his own poetry, or that of Arthur Sze or The Four Horsemen or Rosmarie Waldrop or Toby Olson or Louis Zukofsky or Daphne Marlatt or Clark Coolidge or the original singer of Beowulf. The sense of timing in a poem can vary from the timing of discrete units, such as the clues in Anglo-Saxon riddles or the accretions of examples in Pound's Cantos, to the sense of time implied by spatial deployment in visual poetry, to the sense of time implied by regular meters. You can find songs meant to be delivered more rapidly than normal speech (Carmen Miranda comes to mind) but these are usually comic, and the general tendency of song has been to progress less rapidly than ordinary speech. Sound itself is a function of time: you hear different pitches by different rates of vibration. If you play a 33 1/3 r.p.m. record at 78 r.p.m., you will not be able to hear the music on the record. Not only will the notes come too short and too fast and the rhythm be altered, the increased speed will have changed the pitch of the notes. This is one of the reasons that contemporary verse must fight the speedreading tendencies of the times. Many forms of notation in contemporary poetry tend to slow reading down, to encourage the reader to dwell on small units of language, or at least to perceive the words in real (i.e. spoken) time.
The sort of song that poetry evolved from was dependent on an audience. Though some critics have claimed that contemporary poetry has no audience, this is patently false. The audience may be small, but this may also be one of its strengths. Donne actually wanted a small audience. Serious contemporary poets can get to know one another relatively easily, and at the numerous readings, festivals, etc. that have occurred during the last two decades, poets have been able to make contact with many (in some cases a majority) of people interested in their work, and to talk to them on a personal level -- the party after the reading can be as important as the reading itself. Readers depend on these performances in order to understand the notation used by poets. In many cases, such as performances of Jackson Mac Low's Gathas, there isn't a clear distinction between author and audience: the author is the central figure; a number of people who would ordinarily sit passively listening join in as performers; and they, in turn, take cues from the rest of the people in the room. Some poets have developed performances that include the audience, leaving no room for passive spectators -- Pauline Oliveros has done a great deal in this area.
At present, poetry is largely a participatory rather than a spectator art. A large percentage of the audience for poetry is made up of writers, performers, and other artists. Readers often read not simply to be moved or entertained or instructed or morally uplifted, they read to improve their own art. This encourages them to read more closely, more critically, more intensely than they might otherwise do. Younger poets tend to imitate poets they admire and their imitation is a way of intimately identifying with the work that is most important to them. This sort of imitation is not unlike the copying of Donne's contemporaries, of scribal monks, of Chinese calligraphers, and of Aztec book painters. Experienced poets also learn from and identify with the work of their peers: any poet is potentially part of a given poet's audience, even if the two poets are going in different directions or working in different modes.
A large portion of the audience for contemporary poetry gets involved in publishing the work of other poets. They may only act as a magazine's assistant editor for a short time, or they may edit their own magazine, or run their own presses. For some, this becomes a way of life. Poet-publishers tend to read manuscripts carefully and critically in determining whether or not to publish them and put a great deal of effort into the means of producing those they decide to publish. This type of activity tightens the bonds between poets, opens channels of communication with whatever larger audience there may be, gives the editors a sense of proportion in terms of nature, size, and scope of their audience, and, again, given the intimacy with the text encouraged by copying. Publishing requires commitment and encourages the poet-publisher to be textual analyst, literary critic, and graphic designer. Working with layout, type, perhaps presswork and binding, has suggested new kinds of notation and presentation and has inspired work that would otherwise not have been done. The method of production a poet- publisher uses often affects or reflects her or his work: offset publishers often write differently from letterpress printers. The mimeo format of d.a. levy publications continues to be an integral part of the outlaw urgency of the work, even though levy's been dead for many years. The austere design and impeccable typography of Elizabeth Press Books underscores the restrained precision of the poets published in that series. The limited press runs and personalized distribution of most poetry publishers creates a sense of intimacy and fellowship not unlike that created by the circulation of manuscripts in Donne's time.
Book art may negate notation on the level of individual words and replace it with notation by size or shape of page, materials used, form or content of book as whole entity. The reading of such a book may depend heavily on gesture, and the book may in turn be incorporated into performances including other forms of notation [Fig. 9]. The book art movement seems to have originated in the small scale cottage industry environment of alternative presses and luxurious artists' studios and can draw from all current types of poetry.
At present there are at least twenty major schools of poetry functioning in North America, each with dozens of subgenres. No group dominates, so poets at the present time enjoy more freedom than they ever have in the past. Members of some schools can be dogmatic and exclusionist, and members of one clique can become extremely bellicose toward another coterie, but few, if any, can limit their interests to members of their own group. Hence poets belonging to one clan can be influenced by members of another -- in fact, some poets switch allegiances at times, and many function in several schools at once. The cross-fertilization among these groups produces all sorts of hybrids, sometimes showing a great deal of what biologists call hybrid vigor. We should note that what poets work against is often as important as what they work with, and even bitter antagonisms can lead to positive action. As well as producing hybrid vigor, interaction among schools seems always to exert an influence on notation, keeping it from becoming rigid or consistent, and opening up new possibilities.
Contemporary readers read in a number of different ways for a number of different purposes. Sometimes the text dictates their manner of reading, sometimes their needs recast the text. A sequence of reading might be: 1, casual examination of the text -- in the case of visual or sound poetry this might involve scanning the page for a point of entry, a place to begin; 2, closer examination of the text, including tentative determination of how its notation works; 3, close reading of the text once a method of reading has been established; 4, hearing the poet read, live or on tape or record; 5, reconsidering the text in light of the poet's reading. All of these except 4 would probably include at least some vocalization on the part of the reader. Going beyond this, the reader could branch off in several directions: A, making use of something learned from the text; B, rejecting the text in whole or in part; C, getting people together for a performance of the work, soliciting work from the author for a magazine or anthology, or setting up a reading for the author; D, establishment of personal relations with the author, which could lead to interaction on a number of levels. Of course, there are other sequences readers could follow: the reader could begin by hearing the poet read or attending a performance of her or his work and then turning to the text; the reader could find something lacking in her or his own work and cast about for a solution, coming upon the text in the process, and so on.
However a poem is read, readers can employ all their faculties in reading and the possibilities of interaction with the poem are virtually endless. At the same time, notation is not a static body of convention, but a nexus between large areas of contemporary practice.
This essay was written in 1983, and published in Open Letter Fourth Series, No. 7, Spring, 1984. Coach House Press, Toronto.
Copyright © 1984 and 1996 by Karl Young.
Go to Karl Young's web site, Light and Dust, or Grist the group of sites of which it is a part, where you can find more poetry and criticism, including work by contributors to Postypographika, Fabio Doctorovich, Clemente Padín, and Harry Polkinhorn among them.