[Wgcp-whc] Steve Evans minutes, Final Broadcast of the semester
Richard Deming
richard.deming at yale.edu
Tue May 19 14:43:24 EDT 2009
Dear All--
many apologies for the delay in getting out the minutes reporting the
visit of Steve Evans on Friday April 23. My thanks to Jean-Jacques
Poucel and Caitie Barrett for their thorough and illuminating
reporting on Adelaide Russo's discussion of the work of Michel Deguy.
Let me first give the minutes of Evans's visit and then close with
some announcements.
++++++++++++
Steve Evans, an important voice in the work being done on
contemporary poetics, joined us to discuss his seminal work on
phonotextuality. Evans's opening insistence is that recordings of
poets reading their poems are treated as somehow illustrating the
poem, and are not considered as texts in and of themselves. Given
the proliferation of recordings, Evans suggests that the time of
seeing these recordings as somehow adjunct is past and that
considering them as texts opens a valuable field of inquiry in ways
that combine developments in performance studies, sociology, and
literary studies. The proliferation of recordings means that what
were transient, ephemeral events--readings--are now captured in time,
but that their very presence suggests that the recordings offer
something that people are interested in. The interest alone serves
as a point of entry for thinking about what cultural function the
recordings serve.
Evans suggested that the recordings provide a historical record of an
event by providing documents that can serve to indicate who were
present at given readings. It also indicates patterns of an
audience's immediate reception. What lines or asides were marked
with laughter? What kinds of gestures elicited response? Were
proper names used? Thus, one might ask, is there a distinction
between what listeners in an audience in San Franscisco respond to as
opposed to listeners in New York? These aspects can offer ways of
reading given social formations and comparative listenings can
provide evidence for how different types of audiences respond in
different ways to different factors. Do the poets change their
reading strategies depending on the place, time, event, and overall
context of the reading? An additional question would be to ask where
and how recordings and events occurred--were they at halls or in
people's living rooms? Have these sites changed over time? Moreover,
with the ubiquity of recordings online, what need is there for people
to go out and attend readings?
Are there differences in a poet's reading style or timbre over time.
For instance, Evans has noted that as certain women poets matured
and gained stature, their reading styles became more authoritative
along ways reflective of masculine reading styles in terms of
delivery (for instance, by deepening their reading voices. Evan's
use of tools that illustrate a spectral analysis provided evidence
for this sort of line of inquiry.
Evans also offered a phenomonological (albeit somewhat grim) point
about the recordings: the soundfiles offer a record of the "dying
animal" (paraphrasing Jean-Luc Godard's,that is any human body. The
recorded voice when compared against recordings over time demonstrate
the change and shift over a period of years and deacades of the body
itself. Evans also suggested that comparative listenings allow for
the charting of a genealogy of sorts in terms of what clear
performative markers of either artistic coteries or even aesthetic
forebears seem to be conjured in a poet's delivery?
Over the course of our discussion, we raised the question of how the
discrepancies between a poems' "score" on the page and its being read
by the author complicates our understanding the authority of the
text. Can one be said to be "definitive"? On what grounds? Also,
the point was made that the recordings could offer possibilities for
teaching close reading in terms of words that a poet emphasizes in
his or her recording.
What makes all of these questions that much more intricate are the
temporal, circumstantial, and environmental factors that bear on the
moments when a poet reads his or her poems. Yet, Evans seems to be
suggesting, these factors need not be bracketed off but instead serve
to unfix perceived notions (or habitualized thinking) of the
continuity or stability of how we understand textuality.
As is clear, Evans continually opened up this burgeoning filed in
terms of the questions and issues that it engenders. Continually,
Evans pointed to the ways that thinking of phonotextuality can offer
not simply extensions of existing critical methodologies but
challenging old approaches and offering implicationS of how
technology continues to shape and reshape our understanding of what
constitutes textuality.
The whole group was impressed with Evans's facility and erudition and
we all thank him for his provocative insights.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This will be the final report of the academic year. It has been a
very successful year and our online list of members connected to WGCP
far and wide is nearly 200.
How can one keep in touch with the activities of the WGCP? Well, we
now have a blog--this just went up and we'll be making use of it next
year. http://wgcp.wordpress.com/
Our thanks to all supporting members, all visitors to the group this
semester, and specific thanks to our sponsors the Whitney Humanities
Center and the Beinecke library and the respective staff and
directors of the institutions. And many thanks to my fellow
coordinators Nancy Kuhl and Jean-Jacques Poucel.
Now, let the summer hiatus begin. Until late August, this list will
be quiet.
Thus,
Richard Deming, Group Co-coordinator and tactician
END TRANSMISSION
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