Martin Archer at
The Grapes, Sheffield
When Monk begins to read she
whispers the text. Where is that sound on the page? Is the text whispered?
Empirically not, of course; it’s written. But if I’m reading the text as I
listen, does it take the whisper into itself? Is the whisper now on the page as
part of my act of forming of the text? ‘Responding to a poem being recited
involves performing the particular performance of it that I am hearing,’ says
Derek Attridge. (Attridge 2004: 86) And that includes the whisper. There are
some theories of audition which think that this is so. I return to the
Christopher Middleton distinction between the exophone and the endophone with
which I end The Poetry of Saying more
than I thought I might. But even going down that avenue, which I won’t, other
than to nudge the sedan into the parking bay, where is the whisper: in the
reader, in the ears of the listener, or – more controversially on the page? For
a formalist reading this could involve problems unless we follow the model offered
by Attridge (usually the fount of contemporary literary wisdom). Responding to the Monk poem being recited
involves performing the particular performance of it that I am hearing. Responding to the Monk poem being recited as
part of a composition with Martin Archer involves performing the particular
performance of it that I am hearing on the CD. (My memory of seeing it being
performed is hazy and only contributes a general but largely visual impression,
I must admit, dominated by Julie Tippetts.) I have now listened to it several
times and now the performance is no longer ‘the particular performance of it
that I am hearing’, but is composite. (The same could be said of any piece of
recorded sound, from my own voice reading my latest poem, something I do to
check on sonic qualities I might otherwise miss, through to the Jack Bruce
album I played last night; actually my checking of his version of ‘I Feel Free’
against the Cream original is another kind of composite memory, the assessment
of variation.) Somewhere Attridge says that as long as I retain something of
the poem as a poem (not a paraphrase) then I retain something of its form.
That’s true here: the poem is unparaphrasable and the music has to remain
formal because music has no content (leaving the controversy of that statement to
one side for a moment).
Is there one form or are there two
forms here: the text and the music? The existence of the separate text is clear
but there is no separate music, either as performance notation or
post-performance description: it can’t exist like the words of ‘Round Midnight’
which I didn’t know for decades and which, when I did (thank you Mel Torme), it
altered my perception of other instrumental versions (Monk, Theolonious, and
Davis, Miles say), actually altered what I thought of as the melody by
separating it more clearly from harmonic structures which a jazz musician’s
improvisatory gestures might have blurred, certainly Miles, to form an
alternative melody, as it were.
Do we regard the entire piece we
hear – to reprise the information theory
of Yuri Lotman – as a multi-systemic artefact, where all elements operate with
some degree of autonomy from one another? He talks about ‘everything
contributing to the impact of the work upon the reader…. All levels may carry
meaning – not just lexical meaning but a full range of esthetic, ideological,
and cultural meanings’. (Lotman 1976: xv) That extension goes well beyond the
formalist reading I want to hold together (I want to exclude Julie Driscoll’s
‘look’ as the background to the CD; so does Julie Tippetts!). But it allows for
such a thought, or an approach that I might find usable to analyse this CD.
It would go something like this:
the ‘text’ for the sake of a multisystemic formal reading must include the text
on the page (since it is offered to us, in the book publication and in the
sleevenotes, however variant) and the music as it is heard on the CD (not as
separately notated, although I think Archer works directly on his materials
and, as with earlier work, incorporates acts of improvisation into the overall
poesis). It includes the performance of that text (here with the exophonic
presence of the author and another voice, one singing, the other speaking,
although that distinction is not held to rigidly, perhaps combines into a single
‘voice’ level for analysis), with the grain of the voice, and with every other
element of organised sound (to appropriate John Cage’s catch-all definition of
music. ‘Fusion and interaction are acts of risk, the clash of two (or more)
formal disciplines, formal practices, formal languages, that threaten (in
cybernetic language) to produce noise rather than message,’ I wrote earlier on
Monk’s poetics. And Monk sees the interaction herself as not one of harmony,
but of dissonance:
abstraction of
itterance
meaning
fighting for
dear
squalled in
sownd
To be simpler (and to remove
parentheses, like this one!)…
To be simpler: the ‘text’ of a
multisystemic formal reading must include the text on the page and the music as
it is heard on the CD, including the performance of that text, with the grain
of the voice, and with every other element of organised sound.
Fusion and interaction are acts of
risk, the clash of two (or more) formal disciplines, formal practices, formal
languages, and the effect may not be of systems working purposefully together
but of working against one another, each autonomous. The resultant complexity,
the interinanimation of its forms, are formed in a multi-sensory act of
readerly forming, so that the forming of it because its performance and the
trace of that event its meaning. As so often in this research, form becomes
content.
Print works cited
Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
Lotman, Yury, Analysis of the Poetic Text (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976).
Middleton , Christopher, Jackdaws Jiving (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998)
Middleton , Christopher, Jackdaws Jiving (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998)
accessed 18th March 2014
(For a full description of, and links to every post from, my The Meaning of Form project, click here.)
Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places
