<\/p>\n
Already by 2007, eight million files were being downloaded annually from PennSound<\/a>, the audio poetry site housed at the University of Pennsylvania and curated by poet Charles Bernstein. The question arises, then, as to what people are doing with all of these files. Listening to the audio file of a poetry reading is as distinct from attending the event as it is from reading a poem silently to oneself. While attending a reading, one can be mesmerized by the person of the poet interacting with the words. One looks for how the poet works his or her way into the language enunciated and projects this form of inhabitation out toward an audience, and also at how the audience engages with or turns aside from the performance. With an audio file of a poetry reading, though, there is no poet, no audience, and no possibility of locating oneself within the physical space of that reading. Listening to an audio file is an ambient activity, a steady flow of words taking place for a period of time in the presence of other files and applications on a computer desktop (or other device) and alongside ongoing events within the physical location of listening. In essence, an audio file is a form of ambient music. It creates an allover sonic environment that moves back and forth between the foreground and the background of awareness.<\/p>\n As chronicled by Mark Prendergast<\/a>, ambient music\u2019s history begins with experiments in aural texture by Mahler, Satie, Debussy, and Ravel, continues with the generation of noise and electronic sounds in Var\u00e8se, Cage, and Rock and Roll, and comes into its own with Minimalism, Techno, Electronica, sampling, and remixing. Its main elements are timbre and texture, repetition and rhythm, and the electronic generation of sound. Brian Eno, one of its most articulate practitioners, calls it \u201ca drift away from narrative and towards landscape, from performed event to sonic space.\u201d When it settles into the background, ambient music provides a programmed sonic environment in which other events can take place. When it moves to the foreground, ambient music\u2019s textures become more prominent, so that particular sounds overtake the experience of the moment. Whether as background or foreground, ambient music creates a space to inhabit, a space less subject to rational thought than to the phenomenology of sensory and proprioceptive experience.<\/p>\n From a somewhat archeological stance, a listener can set aside the ambient quality of an audio file and listen to it forensically in search of clues that divulge a writer\u2019s thoughts about a poem or add to the genetic or textual history of its composition or dissemination. Most of the millions of files downloaded annually from PennSound are listened to not in this way but ambiently, the listener moving in and out of awareness while other activities take place. In many instances, these audio files enter an unplanned electronic mix, blending with other sources of sound on the computer or in the room. Having noticed the unique timbral properties to be found in poetry audio files, DJs have begun to mix them with sampled electronic music and programmable beats. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid<\/a> (Paul D. Miller), for instance, has taken many of the classic audio files of modernist poetry, such as Gertrude Stein\u2019s \u201cIf I told Him\u201d and \u201cA Valentine for Sherwood Anderson,\u201d Kurt Schwitters\u2019 \u201cAnna Blume\u201d and Ursonate, James Joyce\u2019s \u201cAnna Livia Plurabelle,\u201d and vocal texts by Antonin Artaud, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp, and Jean Cocteau, and mixed them together with contemporary forms of electronic music. The audio files he selects to remix have distinctive sonic qualities that lend them much more aural presence than a run-of-the-mill poetry reading.<\/p>\n Stein in particular has become a major progenitor of poetry audio files and of ambient poetry itself. Her famous Caedmon recordings, made originally in New York City (January 30, 1935) during her lecture tour of America, have a firm precision and an unfaltering rhythm. For today\u2019s listener these audio files cry out for blending with electronic beats; her stylistic hallmark of repetition with slight variation is the primary formal trait of much ambient music. Listening to an audio file of her reading is an inherently immersive experience, in which both the vocal qualities of her delivery and the repetitive verbal rhythms of her style create an all-over, highly textured environment. As what Eno calls a \u201clandscape\u201d or \u201csonic space,\u201d her writing refuses to yield itself to distanced contemplation; it demands inhabitation. In her \u201ccompleted portrait\u201d of Picasso, \u201cIf I Told Him\u201d (1924), for instance, she constructs a sound and rhythm environment by rhyming the phrase \u201cif I told him\u201d with the word \u201cNapoleon\u201d:<\/p>\n If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n After taking in the satiric intent of Stein\u2019s comparing Picasso to Napoleon and her sly speculation about how he might react to such a comparison, the listener settles into the primary activity of the portrait as audiotext, which is to evoke the sensuousness of ambient listening. Stein\u2019s portraits have been called \u201ccubist,\u201d but from the sonic perspective they are anything but angular, jagged, or juxtapositional. They are saturated with the pleasures of repeated and slightly modified sound in rhythmic divisions of durational length. In this sense, Stein can be seen as a progenitor of Minimalist music, as influential as her contemporaries Satie and Ravel. It is hard to imagine the groundbreaking Minimalist opera, Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, for instance, without the ambient verbal music of Gertrude Stein.<\/p>\n Another master of poetry as ambient music is John Taggart. In poem sequences like his \u201cMarvin Gaye Suite\u201d and \u201cRothko Chapel Poem\u201d he uses rhythmic repetition to structure blocks of poetry that partake of the immersive ambience of the audio file. The \u201cMarvin Gaye Suite\u201d (1991) begins with an evocation of one of the signature ambient moments in popular music, the opening to Gaye\u2019s \u201cWhat\u2019s Going On\u201d (1971), in which we are dropped in the middle of a crowd at a party, with no particular sound to focus on until a saxophone finally arrives to provide a platform for Gaye\u2019s first words, \u201cMother, Mother\u201d:<\/p>\n 17 seconds of party formulaics by professional football players The poem weaves together the sounds and words of Gaye\u2019s song with the responses of the poet, setting the poem within the song as part of its extended ambient condition. That is, the poem responds not as a separate aesthetic event but from inside the space of the song. It is a listening to and meditation on and reception of and response to the song, and as such cannot exist without it. If you do not hear this song or call it up in memory, the poem gives you very little space in which to move. As a work of writing participating in the ambient environment of the audio file of nine songs that make up Gaye\u2019s What\u2019s Going On, the nine poems of \u201cMarvin Gaye Suite\u201d imitate sounds, give responses (as in call-and-response), and open the songs out to myriad biographical, social, and musical contexts in which they continue to reverberate.<\/p>\n Although you must hear Gaye\u2019s song (at least in memory) in order for Taggart\u2019s poem to reach its full ambient resonance, Nathaniel Mackey has managed in his ongoing serial novel From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate (1986-) to create in language the phenomenological condition of living inside an imaginary improvisatory jazz band, The Mystic Horn Society (later named the Molimo m\u2019Atet). Within the novel, every thought expressed can be matched by instrumental articulations by the band, and every sound produced by the band can be heard as a thought entering into dialogue with earlier thoughts. Initially, we are taught by Mackey how to enter the ambient space of thought\u2013as-sound and sound-as-thought through a device similar to Taggart\u2019s residence within the songs of Marvin Gaye: the epistolary narrator N. can be heard describing in exquisite detail the thoughts, motives, and effects of specific moments in classic jazz recordings. N. lives so deeply into these recordings that he is able to portray the qualities of their sounds and relate a sound or a song to others within a huge interactive web comprised of jazz, soul, and world music. This ability may be a defining quality of the jazz buff, but Mackey transcends that designation by creating new, non-existent jazz audio files that the reader can experience and move around in. In the novel, N. presents his band as writing, rehearsing, and delivering actual songs, complete with names and dates of composition, which have never been heard. His descriptions of the mental, physical, imaginal, responsive, erotic, allusive aspects of making music in the complex society of a jazz band are so finely drawn and so linguistically labile (full of puns and sound slippage) that the reader enters into an ambient condition that is tantamount to hearing the non-existent audio file of the \u201csong\u201d Mackey has composed in language.<\/p>\n I would like to end this brief overview by pointing toward other recent explorations of the ambient qualities of poetry as audio text. Two prominent examples would be Tracie Morris<\/a>\u2019s marriage of sound poetry with the hip-hop aesthetic and Pamela Lu\u2019s invocation of ambient music as an entire world inhabited by characters in a novel. One of the most remarkable qualities of Morris\u2019s audio files such as \u201cProject Princess\u201d and \u201cSlave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful\u201d is her verbal dexterity in using voice to imitate electronic effects. In Pamela Lu\u2019s Ambient Parking Lot, a new work that explores the situation of the audio file audiophile, the characters of this poetically resonant \u201cnovel\u201d go to extraordinary lengths to document the ambient sounds of a parking garage, which they present as a new musical and political manifestation. (See also the ambient poetry and prose of Tan Lin, in particular his essay \u201cambient stylistics<\/a>.\u201d)\u00a0Morris and Lu compose out of sensibilities already saturated with ambient music and poetry audio files. Far from having a merely documentary function, poetry audio files themselves now provoke the composition of new works of writing meant to reside within the capacious realm of ambient music.<\/p>\n -Stephen Fredman, University of Notre Dame<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Already by 2007, eight million files were being downloaded annually from PennSound, the audio poetry site housed at the University of Pennsylvania and curated by poet Charles Bernstein. 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\nintro of 17 seconds of hey man what\u2019s happening and right on
\nparty of those gathered to be laid by the voice that lays
\ndon\u2019t have to be a jock to be gathered brought together for the lay
\nMarvin mixed over the party Marvin calls out twice to mother
\nsurely mother must be the answer forget about the father\u2019s tongue
\nif not one then the other not father unexpected relief of the other
\n. . .
\nand in the mean time it\u2019s right on baby it\u2019s right on right on
\nI\u2019m a witness I\u2019ll talk to him so I can see what\u2019s going on
\nwhat\u2019s going on party of those gathered brought together for the lay
\nparty of those gathered to be laid by the voice that lays
\n. . .
\n(Loop 216)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n