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There will be one poem read in my 1969 voice, and then I'll read something from the book following that. We're going to go from the beginning to the end but we're certainly not going to read all of them.

Marlatt's cadence picks up on "certainly not" and as she laughs, there is also laughter from an audience member close by.

The audience laughs.

Marlatt's laughter is reciprocated by the audience.

And I should say, by way of introduction, that the first part of these poems--it's in two sections, the book--were written in Bloomington, Indiana, when I was a young woman, married at that point, trying to figure out who I was. And studying comparative literature at the university there. And translating the first book of prose poems by the French poet Francis Ponge, and they're all poems about things, objects. It's called Le Parti pris des choses (On the Side of Things). And it taught me a lot about language. The second part of the book was written in Napa Valley, California, where I was teaching part-time in a highschool there and suffering a great deal as a result of that.

My then-husband was doing a practicum in clinical psych at the Napa State Hospital.

I was trying to figure out language, how to move in language. Language had become, thanks to the American poet Dee Alexander a very alive thing to me. Dee was a linguist, and he taught me a lot about the textures of language, how to think of language not in terms of how it relates to a thing--which Ponge certainly did not do--but how it relates to itself, musically, and in terms of meaning.

So these poems are all experimental in that sense.

i

that petal's veins
rift blue
pared with razor

edge
tired eyes against the
gold dust, daisies

in a jug dyes
slowly into water
seeping pink.

ii

moon drops
early

roused rocks
dry already a
fire fly

threats rain it
flickers
greenlight over
night
sink's
rust.

iii

white hood of a white
pickup parked on
green

trucks can be
steam risers, lettered
white

hollyhocks

of a sun a whirl,
cezanne, in a

tall tree.

iv

like it
flowers hai

l outside our
back door stars

saw as worm
clots trod

morning

glories in deeper
small shells.

made tenuous
love is not
the line's run into
fishwater pulls up

nothing, loses

whatever named tree
silk or wet sleeves
hustle sky

love a word
without roots, light
bends a line going under
water as forms do, that wait to be gript

provocative extent a
jerk
not to be measured

no
sky bends down shoulders'
force the
fluttery tree
burns against it

growth measured form
shoulders care for
such extent.

down be
low the river
blows

caught
in its stride ice
sharpened houses
fishing for

out
the house, love's
tyrranized yr mouth
throws up gates

hold?

if you think
so then let's
go or let

some rapid's in the ditch

yr cheek how
light pinkens on the in
side step
thru windows &

sun its starred
tongue!

the ways we've taken any
ways congeal &
glitter.

lynne who has been
shoveling snow

wet hair a cold the
cold gleams you wet
fortune's turned

yr card given
crystals reflect you
rains enrich
yr finger ex
tended wants to know

you type?

showing you my fingers do
walk their, speak hair caught
dropt water barrettes
better than a million
movies kept

when they tore off the
roof rain bowed the
tractor's claw dug walls fell
a pack of cards topt
the whole

hell

o face you aren't
accustomed to look at life
savers you
offered me lime
greens yr mouth

bird dropt in, linnet
how's yr new house?

In Bloomington we were living in Pigeon Hill which was a very poor part of town. It was the only part of town that as graduate students we could afford to live in.

There is the sound of soft laughter from the audience.

Lynne was a little girl who lived across the street in a house that only had a dirt floor. The house was eventually torn down, and this was a poem for her and her curiosity about typing. I don't think she'd ever seen anyone type before.

Okay, so two more from this period.

Actually, I think these are . . . yeah ok. I'm just going to read one.

moon accoutered
faces
home in on
field mist

wheels float the
pavement
pillows back

we can expect
crickets

but the windows
close to tight
sided lanterns

shield our ears our
inexplicable hurry

as moth furred faces
toward light

Ok, great.

"sun rises moon
rises too
in the east"

white
they stand long
leg'd in grass

their shadows in
star'd under
earth.

so
good the
morning ghostless
peaches here

bear room now
sun's
done jealousy
as a wreath

bread tastes
sweet, peaches
fur to
hands' feel

all that's ripe
is.

You never know, when you're preparing for a reading, you feel like reading one poem and then when you get up there, you feel like reading another.

Laughter begins from the audience before Marlatt finishes her sentence, louder than before, possibly from one person.

I'm just going to read the first part of another poem, "From Whose Dark." This is from the second part of the book, written in California.

i

these imprints
periods be
speak an anger
presses

keys

till such dark
holds the house
flares up a draft or

draught you spelt it
letting
in a wind no man
Stands the "trees

are all turning . . .
brown & yellow from the
draught"

as if the land were

an empty
hole with no
obscure fog
to mend it turns

integrate a
rime of hard like
lihoods these

days mean nothing looks
but looking out in fine
drizzles

draw me
to
the eucalyptus

leaves

i

who moves as she
can will or choose
the body of her

wordless downspine the

choice's non
existent place a
star vertebra's
sun does
glow/grow a pace

contractions measure

extent as the upshot of her
radiance/raindance/dalliance

timing of a sort
of pleasure

ii

her

means are made
light of

iii

energy coiled
at spine
tip you touch
hisses

heat
too in
friction

that I want & not
wanting turn
sinister
(half of the moon lies

but that's no star
light

all of a piece

iv

left is what I'm glad of some
times tired love
should be so mouthed about
this area of our
habitual pull, scarcely
luminous by such day dark is
what I love you in

after all given to
sun

in you (that, coming
stars in
eyes' night

v

gravity lies in
yr weight, mass, under
stand

pull exerts a continual
skin to skin weather in
ternal or out
(as you said it'd
orbit:

how little that is, love, I do
go from you.

this door I thought
went under
(ground being
no house, or

door that was a thought
caught, creeks, houseless
in the wind on weak
hinges
left a

jar's a limb one
live oak on
another.

Okay I'll just read one. This is a short one.

ab
sent ab
sunt

frogs in
short grass hands
turn off the hose

hop in
simul
taneous thot/

jumps you there
where it stays
hot nightlong

hours till dawn down
the dropt wind's audible
steps now as walnuts
hit
ground.

Well, that was . . .

This will be a poetry reading by Michael McClure and Allen Ginsberg from Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, June 16, 1976. 

…[Allen Ginsberg] was cofounder and codirector of the Kerouac School. Allen first laid eyes on Michael McClure… [inaudible]…that Kenneth Rexroth had advised him to visit in 1954 in San Francisco. But they did not officially meet until a party at Ruth Witt-Diamant’s for W.H. Auden later that year. They spoke for five or ten minutes at this party. Michael gave Allen his address and Allen visited him several weeks later with Jack Keroauc. Okay, that was in 1954. The famous Six Gallery reading—that was the name of the gallery, the Six Gallery; it was run by six artists—took place in 1955 and Allen read the first part of Howl, Michael read “For the Death of 100 Whales,” among other things. Since that time, Michael and Allen have frequently shared the stage with each other and jointly with others through the years. The second big historical reading in Berkeley in 1955, I think part of the “Poetry Apocalypse,” where Allen read his poem “America”—“American I am putting my queer shoulder to the wheel”—and Michael read his—what is this?—“Mantric Cadence Poem Called Light,” which is, uh, a repetition of the word “light” several hundred times. Towards the end of the poem, the words “elbow” and “nostril” appear.” 

Waldman and the audience laugh.

They read together in 1965, in Berkeley, as part of the Vietnam peace protests, and in February 1967, they read at the “Be-In” in San Francisco with Suzuki Roshi on the stage. They did three Timothy Leary benefits from 1965 to ’72, and there were numerous other ‘om orgies’ and ‘monster’ poetry readings and ‘return of the monster’ poetry readings in California. They picketed the Varig Airlines together for the Living Theater, and were among the original circumambulators of Mount Tamalpais. They read together at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church at the Bowery in 1974, and also at a benefit for his holiness Gyalwa Karmapa in San Francisco, also in ’74. So this reading is a continuation of some kind of poetic karmic link between these two poets, between Michael and Allen, so, we’re witnessing this [Waldman laughs]. Michael’s most recent books are Jaguar Skies, published by New Directions this year, and Rare Angel, published by Black Sparrow, and he tells me he’s recently revised his novel, The Adept, or he’s in the process of revising his novel, The Adept. Allen’s most recent book is First Blues: Rags, Ballads, and Harmonium Songs, published by Full Court Press this year. Welcome. 

The audience applauds.

I'm going to read a couple of poems in Beast Language which are actually from the early '60s and not the '50s, and then we're going to take a break—ten minutes or so.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in switch licour Of which vertu

That's Chaucer actually.

The audience laughs.

It makes a nice introduction. 

The audience laughs.

I LOVE TO THINK OF THE RED PURPLE ROSE

IN THE DARKNESS COOLED BY THE NIGHT

We are served by machines making satins of sounds.

Each blot of sound is a bud or a stahr.

Body eats bouquets of the ear's vista.

Gahhhrrr booody eyes eers noze deem thou.

NOH. NAH-OHH

hrooor. VOOOR-NAH! GAHROOOOO ME.

Nah droooooh seerch. NAH THEE!

The machines are too dull when we are lion poems that move & breathe.

WHAN WE GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOR hann dree

myketoth sharoo sreee thah noh deeeeeemed ez.

Whan. eeeethoooze hrohh.

The audience applauds.

I was always afraid to recite this other one. Although I knew it by heart, I was afraid to recite it because I thought I might not be able to stop.

It's very mantric. And I thought I'd be giving a reading and they'll carry me away at the end. I'll still be going Grahhr! Grahhr!

The audience laughs. 

So, recently I was in one of John Lilly's isolation tanks and I thought, what a perfect time to do this thing I've always been afraid to do.

The audience laughs.

What difference would it make here? So I did, and I did know it by heart, but I think I'll read it here anyway.

SILENCE THE EYES! BECALM THE SENSES!

Drive drooor from the fresh repugnance,

thou whole, thou feeling creature.

Live not for others but affect thyself

from thy enhanced interior--believing what thou carry.

Thy trillionic multitude of grahh, vhooshes, and silences.

Oh you are heavier and dimmer than you knew

and more solid and full of pleasure.

Grahhr! Grahhhr! Ghrahhhrrr! Ghrahhr! Grahhrrr.

Grahhrr-grahhhrr! Grahhr. Gahrahhrr Ghrahhhrrrr.

Ghrarrrr. Ghrahhr! Ghrarrrrr. Gharrrr. Grahhrr.

Ghrahhrr. Ghrahr. Grahhr. Grahharrr. Grahhrr.

Grahhhhr. Grahhhr. Gahar. Ghrahhr. Grahhr. Grahhr.

Ghrahhr. Grahhhr. Grahhr. Gratharrr! Grahhr.

Ghrahrr. Ghraaaaaaahrr. Grhar. Ghhrarrr! Grahhrr.

Ghrahrr. Gharr! Ghrahhhhr. Grahhrr. Ghraherrr.

The audience applauds.

She has published ten volumes of poetry, which include such books as The Green Wave, The Turning Wind, Beast and View, U.S. 1, Theory of Flight, Body of Waking, Waterlily Fire, and The Speed of Darkness, amongst others.

She has published essays, a biography--she's working on a biography now. She has published a novel called The Orgy. She has published translations of the Mexican Writer Octavio Paz, and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof. She has published a number of children's books. And, what else can I say?

She is a New Yorker. She was born in New York, she lives in New York, and so forth. I now introduce Muriel Rukeyser.

The audience applaudes.

Thank you. It sounds peculiar when it's said that way, you know. It just means that I've been writing poems all along, and that sometimes there's been some prose or something--film, prose, whatever it is--that spills into the poem, that feeds into the poems.

And they lie all the time about the poems, to us, you know, about all of our poems. They say it's something very odd and rare, and people who do it are very odd. If a man does it, he's sexually questionable; if a woman does it, she's sexually questionable.

The audience laughs.

Besides, very few people do it. And it's all lies, you know.

There's a company in the United States that's made a fortune on the premise that everybody takes a snapshot at some time or other. And I would like to ask you--and this is apart from all critical standards, all criteria, all faculty and institutions, apart from any of that--I would like to ask a question: how many of you here has ever written a poem, would you put up your hands please?

The audience laughs.

Thank you.

I'm always nervous before I ask the question. I ask the question, now, in all rooms, no matter how few or many people there are, and if the universities would generally look around to see if the basketball team is there, but there's always the moment of silence, and looking around first. And then, generally, quite slowly, almost all the hands go up. Maybe four or five do not put up their hands. And if I wait around afterwards, and with any luck and favorable wins, the four or five people come up to me and will say something like: I was fifteen, it was a love poem, it stank.

The audience laughs.

The thing is, it's a human activity; we all do it. We lie about it, you know, and they lie about it to us. And, thanks now to the young, the poets, maybe, a few other people one could name together, maybe we don't lie so much--so much as we used to. Maybe we don't lie about this anymore.

Maybe we don't lie about sex, maybe we don't lie about poetry. They seem to lie a great deal about politics instead. It seems to shift around.

The audience laughs.

But, there are these, and the fact is: we all write poems. It is something we do. We come to this part of experience: You get a very, very rainy evening; why do poeple come and listen to poems? Or you've got some marvelous summer night; why do people come and listen to poems?

It's partly out of curiosity and looking at the person and I go to see: What is that breathing behind, what is that heartbeat, the breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms are set up, and the involuntary muscles and you see the person do it but beyond that, something is what we called shared--something is arrived at--we come to something with almost unmediated that is the poem among us, between us, there, we're reaching each other, you're giving me whatever silence you are giving me and it comes to me with great strength, your silence.

Somebody said "primadonna," you know, or I'm going give this to the audience and the conductor cause that's what you think--you're going to get it from the audience.

That's where it comes from, in a funny way.

So, this mediation, it is not a description, it is not only the music and it, although certainly the reinforcement of sound--the sound climbing up and finally reaching a place, the last word; the sound that begins with the first breathing, the breath of the title.

Keats doing "Ode to a Nightingale." We hardly ever say "ode." Nobody says "nightingale." But Keats, having said that, never has to say it again. It's a bird. You find it in these things. But, from the beginning--from the first moment--that is, the first breath, the thing that is made as, suggestion, breath, what my life has been, whatever that is- what your lives have been.

The last poem I'll read this evening is a group. The group is called "The Speed of Darkness."

They're short poems and I'll just pause between poems. There should be numbers doing up in back of me. One, two, three. I'll just pause. "The Speed of Darkness."

The audience laughs at Rukeyser's comment about slides going up behind her.

Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis. Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt. Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child. Resurrection, music, silence, and surf.

Rukeyser pauses between the first and second stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

No longer speaking. Listening with the whole body. And with every drop of blood. Overtaken by silence. But this same silence is become speech, with the speed of darkness.

Rukeyser pauses between the second and third stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Stillness during war, the lake. The unmoving spruces. Glints over the water. Faces, voices. You are far away. A tree that trembles. I am the tree that trembles and trembles.

Rukeyser pauses between the third and fourth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

After the lifting of the mist, after the lift of the heavy rains, the sky stands clear and the cries of the city risen in day. I remember the buildings are space walled, to let space be used for living. I mind this room is space this drinking glass is space whose boundary of glass let’s me give you drink and space to drink your hand, my hand being space containing skies and constellations. Your face carries the reaches of air. I know I am space my words are air.

Rukeyser pauses between the fourth and fifth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Between between, the man, act exact. Woman, in curve senses in their maze, frail orbits, green tries, games of stars, shape of the body speaking its evidence.

Rukeyser pauses between the fifth and sixth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

I look across at the real, vulnerable, involved, naked; devoted to the present of all I care for. The world of its history leading to this moment.

Rukeyser pauses between the sixth and seventh stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Life the announcer. I assure you there are many ways to have a child. I bastard mother promise you there are many ways to be born. They all come forth in their own grace.

Rukeyser pauses between the seventh and eigth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Ends of the earth join tonight with blazing stars upon their meeting. These sons, these sons fall burning into Asia.

Rukeyser pauses between the eighth and ninth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Time comes into it. Say it. Say it. The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Rukeyser pauses between the ninth and tenth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Lying, blazing beside me, you rear beautifully and up--your thinking face--erotic body reaching in all its colors and lights--your erotic face colored and lit--not colored body-and-face but now entire colors, lights. The world thinking and reaching.

Rukeyser pauses between the tenth and eleventh stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

The river flows past the city. Water goes down to tomorrow making its children. I hear their unborn voices. I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

Rukeyser pauses between the eleventh and twelfth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Big-boned man young and of my dream. Struggles to get the live bird out of his throat. I am he am I? Dreaming? I am the bird am I? I am the throat? A bird with a curved beak. It could slit anything, the throat-bird. Drawn up slowly. The curved blades, not large. Bird emerges, wet, being born. Begins to sing.

Rukeyser pauses between the twelfth and thirteenth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

My night awake staring at the broad rough jewel, the copper roof across the way, thinking of the poet yet unborn in this dark who will be the throat of these hours. No. Of those hours. Who will speak these days, if not I, if not you?

Rukeyser pauses after the thirteenth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Thank you very much.

The audience applaudes.

We wish to announce that the next reading will be by F.R. Scott, and that will be on February 14th--at the same time-- in the theater in the basement of this building. Thank you.

The audience speaks quietly as recording continues.

There will be one poem read in my 1969 voice, and then I'll read something from the book following that. We're going to go from the beginning to the end but we're certainly not going to read all of them.

Marlatt's cadence picks up on "certainly not" and as she laughs, there is also laughter from an audience member close by.

The audience laughs.

The texture of the laughter tells us about the situatedness of this reading. It's a small, packed room with over 70 people. The room seems to shape these moments of audience reciprocity as ones of intimacy: audience members are close together and close to Marlatt. This particular reading occurred at a record store in Kelowna, BC, called Milk Crate Records which was open for 8 years before it was required to vacate its location with less than a month's notice in 2019. The situatedness of the event in time and circumstance as well as space shapes the sense of intimacy that is audible in the recording.

Marlatt's laughter is reciprocated by the audience.

And I should say, by way of introduction, that the first part of these poems--it's in two sections, the book--were written in Bloomington, Indiana, when I was a young woman, married at that point, trying to figure out who I was. And studying comparative literature at the university there. And translating the first book of prose poems by the French poet Francis Ponge, and they're all poems about things, objects. It's called Le Parti pris des choses (On the Side of Things). And it taught me a lot about language. The second part of the book was written in Napa Valley, California, where I was teaching part-time in a highschool there and suffering a great deal as a result of that.

My then-husband was doing a practicum in clinical psych at the Napa State Hospital.

There is uptalk at end of the sentence.

There is uptalk at the end of French-language title.

In listening to her revisit this time, we hear a change in her vocal delivery when Marlatt talks about her younger self: she uses more uptalk, or high rising terminal, in this early biographical narrative than she does in other portions of the recording. Today, uptalk is most often identified as a feature of the speech patterns of young women and girls (see Warren 2016), but this vocal feature didn't become predominantly associated with young women until the last couple of decades. There is an interesting overlay, here, of a newer trend in young women's vocal style onto Marlatt discussing her youth. For us, it indicates discomfort and a recollection of the uncertainty and unhappiness Marlatt describes. The echoes that this discomfort has with contemporary gendered speech reveals Marlatt's situatedness to us as listeners who interpret her speech patterns through our own context.

I was trying to figure out language, how to move in language. Language had become, thanks to the American poet Dee Alexander a very alive thing to me. Dee was a linguist, and he taught me a lot about the textures of language, how to think of language not in terms of how it relates to a thing--which Ponge certainly did not do--but how it relates to itself, musically, and in terms of meaning.

There is an extended o sound in "move."

In this discussion of Ponge and Alexander, Marlatt turns to a discussion of language in which she performs the poetics of embodiment that her poetry would come to be known for. The drawn out-vowel sounds in verbs that stretch the rhythms of her speech and then condense into direct and indirect objects. What Marlatt performs is a retrospective narrative of her development as a poet, away from objects and towards what language and bodies do. Rather than becoming legible in narrative events, she performs this development through her shift in vocal delivery that increasingly adopts the social voice, the self-reflexive "unique voice that signifies nothing but itself."

There is an extended i sound in "alive."

So these poems are all experimental in that sense.

In this recording from 1969, Marlatt's vocal quality is at turns precise and rounded, articulating sharp consonants and mouthing the vowels of her poem. This delivery is at once part of the conventions of poetry voice at the time and part of the oratory style Marlatt would have developed through her association with such teachers, mentors, and peers as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Dee Alexander, Mary Ellen Solt, the TISH writers and others at the Writers Workshop, UBC. The background of the recording is quiet, almost muffled.

i

that petal's veins
rift blue
pared with razor

edge
tired eyes against the
gold dust, daisies

in a jug dyes
slowly into water
seeping pink.

ii

moon drops
early

roused rocks
dry already a
fire fly

threats rain it
flickers
greenlight over
night
sink's
rust.

iii

white hood of a white
pickup parked on
green

trucks can be
steam risers, lettered
white

hollyhocks

of a sun a whirl,
cezanne, in a

tall tree.

iv

like it
flowers hai

l outside our
back door stars

saw as worm
clots trod

morning

glories in deeper
small shells.

There is the sound of rustling pages.

As Marlatt switches to reading in 2019, her delivery leaves more space between words and less sharply delivers consonants. The portion of the poem that she reads is conversational, which further softens a now conversational vocal delivery.

made tenuous
love is not
the line's run into
fishwater pulls up

nothing, loses

whatever named tree
silk or wet sleeves
hustle sky

love a word
without roots, light
bends a line going under
water as forms do, that wait to be gript

provocative extent a
jerk
not to be measured

no
sky bends down shoulders'
force the
fluttery tree
burns against it

growth measured form
shoulders care for
such extent.

down be
low the river
blows

caught
in its stride ice
sharpened houses
fishing for

out
the house, love's
tyrranized yr mouth
throws up gates

hold?

if you think
so then let's
go or let

some rapid's in the ditch

yr cheek how
light pinkens on the in
side step
thru windows &

sun its starred
tongue!

the ways we've taken any
ways congeal &
glitter.

There is the sound of rustling pages.

As the tape from 1969 switches on we hear the writer brush against the microphone in that recording.

As the reading switches between 1969 and 2019, we hear sounds like movement and clunking, alongside changes in sound that differentiates between 1969--a recording made on open reel in a room that is more muffled by upholstery--and 2019--a slightly clearer digital recording in a crowded room. One sound, pages rustling overlaps with these changes in the sound quality of the recording.

lynne who has been
shoveling snow

wet hair a cold the
cold gleams you wet
fortune's turned

yr card given
crystals reflect you
rains enrich
yr finger ex
tended wants to know

you type?

showing you my fingers do
walk their, speak hair caught
dropt water barrettes
better than a million
movies kept

when they tore off the
roof rain bowed the
tractor's claw dug walls fell
a pack of cards topt
the whole

hell

o face you aren't
accustomed to look at life
savers you
offered me lime
greens yr mouth

bird dropt in, linnet
how's yr new house?

In Bloomington we were living in Pigeon Hill which was a very poor part of town. It was the only part of town that as graduate students we could afford to live in.

There is the sound of soft laughter from the audience.

Lynne was a little girl who lived across the street in a house that only had a dirt floor. The house was eventually torn down, and this was a poem for her and her curiosity about typing. I don't think she'd ever seen anyone type before.

There is the sound of a clunk and static sound from the microphone with soft rustling.

Okay, so two more from this period.

There is uptalk after the word "more."

There is the sound of soft rustling.

Actually, I think these are . . . yeah ok. I'm just going to read one.

moon accoutered
faces
home in on
field mist

wheels float the
pavement
pillows back

we can expect
crickets

but the windows
close to tight
sided lanterns

shield our ears our
inexplicable hurry

as moth furred faces
toward light

Ok, great.

Marlatt seems to silently signal to the audio technician to begin the recording.

"sun rises moon
rises too
in the east"

white
they stand long
leg'd in grass

their shadows in
star'd under
earth.

so
good the
morning ghostless
peaches here

bear room now
sun's
done jealousy
as a wreath

bread tastes
sweet, peaches
fur to
hands' feel

all that's ripe
is.

You never know, when you're preparing for a reading, you feel like reading one poem and then when you get up there, you feel like reading another.

Laughter begins from the audience before Marlatt finishes her sentence, louder than before, possibly from one person.

Marlatt ends in lilting laughter that echoes the laughter in the audience

I'm just going to read the first part of another poem, "From Whose Dark." This is from the second part of the book, written in California.

i

these imprints
periods be
speak an anger
presses

keys

till such dark
holds the house
flares up a draft or

draught you spelt it
letting
in a wind no man
Stands the "trees

are all turning . . .
brown & yellow from the
draught"

as if the land were

an empty
hole with no
obscure fog
to mend it turns

integrate a
rime of hard like
lihoods these

days mean nothing looks
but looking out in fine
drizzles

draw me
to
the eucalyptus

leaves

There is the sound of rustling pages.

i

who moves as she
can will or choose
the body of her

wordless downspine the

choice's non
existent place a
star vertebra's
sun does
glow/grow a pace

contractions measure

extent as the upshot of her
radiance/raindance/dalliance

timing of a sort
of pleasure

ii

her

means are made
light of

iii

energy coiled
at spine
tip you touch
hisses

heat
too in
friction

that I want & not
wanting turn
sinister
(half of the moon lies

but that's no star
light

all of a piece

iv

left is what I'm glad of some
times tired love
should be so mouthed about
this area of our
habitual pull, scarcely
luminous by such day dark is
what I love you in

after all given to
sun

in you (that, coming
stars in
eyes' night

v

gravity lies in
yr weight, mass, under
stand

pull exerts a continual
skin to skin weather in
ternal or out
(as you said it'd
orbit:

how little that is, love, I do
go from you.

this door I thought
went under
(ground being
no house, or

door that was a thought
caught, creeks, houseless
in the wind on weak
hinges
left a

jar's a limb one
live oak on
another.

By the end of the recording, Marlatt's vocal delivery has lost much of the self-conscious performativity of the beginning. Even in these moments of situated voice, where she addresses the audience, she is focused on the poems that she sorts through and the decision of what to read. In this moment, we hear the reading voice begin to overtake speaking, situated, and social voice. It may be that Marlatt is more tired, or perhaps more comfortable in front of her audience. But what we hear is also the ways that written poetry, which she holds in her hands, becomes her object of attention. It would be tempting to interpret this shift within a conventional approach to literary audio, given primacy to the pre-existing textual artwork. However, we think instead that we hear the material object of the poem begin to shape Marlatt's performance and embodiment. There is a compelling resonance, then, with the contrast between object and action that Marlatt sets up near the beginning of the recording. The mediated object of the written poem is shaping the action of reading, not just the sounds that Marlatt articulates, but her situatedness within a room and her relationship to audience.

Okay I'll just read one. This is a short one.

ab
sent ab
sunt

frogs in
short grass hands
turn off the hose

hop in
simul
taneous thot/

jumps you there
where it stays
hot nightlong

hours till dawn down
the dropt wind's audible
steps now as walnuts
hit
ground.

In this final poem, Marlatt seems to blend the past and present reading conventions that we have heard in the recording. The poem she chooses demands the precision and round, assonant vowels most prominently featured in the 1969 clips. But it is brief poem, and her 2019 reading is also present in a softness and spaciousness which which she delivers the poem. Here, in a social voice, Marlatt is perhaps aware of her own voice across time.

There is the sound of soft laughter and rustling.

Well, that was . . .

Marlatt's final words, possibly addressed to someone sitting beside her, are cut off.

This will be a poetry reading by Michael McClure and Allen Ginsberg from Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, June 16, 1976. 

…[Allen Ginsberg] was cofounder and codirector of the Kerouac School. Allen first laid eyes on Michael McClure… [inaudible]…that Kenneth Rexroth had advised him to visit in 1954 in San Francisco. But they did not officially meet until a party at Ruth Witt-Diamant’s for W.H. Auden later that year. They spoke for five or ten minutes at this party. Michael gave Allen his address and Allen visited him several weeks later with Jack Keroauc. Okay, that was in 1954. The famous Six Gallery reading—that was the name of the gallery, the Six Gallery; it was run by six artists—took place in 1955 and Allen read the first part of Howl, Michael read “For the Death of 100 Whales,” among other things. Since that time, Michael and Allen have frequently shared the stage with each other and jointly with others through the years. The second big historical reading in Berkeley in 1955, I think part of the “Poetry Apocalypse,” where Allen read his poem “America”—“American I am putting my queer shoulder to the wheel”—and Michael read his—what is this?—“Mantric Cadence Poem Called Light,” which is, uh, a repetition of the word “light” several hundred times. Towards the end of the poem, the words “elbow” and “nostril” appear.” 

Waldman and the audience laugh.

They read together in 1965, in Berkeley, as part of the Vietnam peace protests, and in February 1967, they read at the “Be-In” in San Francisco with Suzuki Roshi on the stage. They did three Timothy Leary benefits from 1965 to ’72, and there were numerous other ‘om orgies’ and ‘monster’ poetry readings and ‘return of the monster’ poetry readings in California. They picketed the Varig Airlines together for the Living Theater, and were among the original circumambulators of Mount Tamalpais. They read together at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church at the Bowery in 1974, and also at a benefit for his holiness Gyalwa Karmapa in San Francisco, also in ’74. So this reading is a continuation of some kind of poetic karmic link between these two poets, between Michael and Allen, so, we’re witnessing this [Waldman laughs]. Michael’s most recent books are Jaguar Skies, published by New Directions this year, and Rare Angel, published by Black Sparrow, and he tells me he’s recently revised his novel, The Adept, or he’s in the process of revising his novel, The Adept. Allen’s most recent book is First Blues: Rags, Ballads, and Harmonium Songs, published by Full Court Press this year. Welcome. 

The audience applauds.

I have excerpted the first half of the performance. The annotations pick up with Michael McClure's reading at 58:42 in the original recording.

I'm going to read a couple of poems in Beast Language which are actually from the early '60s and not the '50s, and then we're going to take a break—ten minutes or so.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in switch licour Of which vertu

McClure reads the first three and a half lines of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, drawing laughter from the audience. It was a regular habit of McClure's to recite these lines before public performances of Ghost Tantras. The gesture "suggest[s] the origins of his poetry in early English verse," as Michael Davidson notes (86). On the day he shot the USA Poetry episode at the San Francisco Zoo, McClure also recited Chaucer to the tree kangaroos, for whom "beast language was not right" (Kahn 340). Several months after the reading at Naropa, on November 25, 1976, McClure recited from the opening of Chaucer's prologue on stage at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom during The Band's famous farewell concert, immortalized in Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz (1978).

That's Chaucer actually.

The audience laughs.

It makes a nice introduction. 

The audience laughs.

I LOVE TO THINK OF THE RED PURPLE ROSE

McClure reads Ghost Tantra 51 (51). As in many of his printed poems, McClure centers the Ghost Tantras down the page's middle, an aesthetic strategy Davidson regards as beastly in its own right: "McClure compares the physical shape of his poems to biological organisms. Instead of returning to the left margin, the line asserts itself boldly as a free image, connected to the other lines like ribs to the spinal column" (86). In light of McClure's performance, Davidson's observation that this meaningful shapeliness makes the line not "a score for the voice" but "a separate object among other objects" takes on curious significance. By what means can we account *both* for the line's printed objecthood *and* the sonorous objecthood captured and audible, in this instance, on digitized tape? Even more to the point, how can we account for the historically-specific performance of McClure's recitation--his expressive re-citation of a printed text on June 16, 1976, the dynamic relation between page and speech, his "reading voice"? I have taken advantage of the fact that McClure's recitation precisely reflects the printed version to respect the poem's printed lineation in my transcriptions below. Ideally, the critical act of reading and listening simultaneously will evoke the tension at the heart of McClure's reading voice.

IN THE DARKNESS COOLED BY THE NIGHT

We are served by machines making satins of sounds.

Each blot of sound is a bud or a stahr.

Body eats bouquets of the ear's vista.

Gahhhrrr booody eyes eers noze deem thou.

NOH. NAH-OHH

hrooor. VOOOR-NAH! GAHROOOOO ME.

Nah droooooh seerch. NAH THEE!

The machines are too dull when we are lion poems that move & breathe.

WHAN WE GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOR hann dree

myketoth sharoo sreee thah noh deeeeeemed ez.

Whan. eeeethoooze hrohh.

The audience applauds.

To listen for the social voice is to apprehend the lived histories telescoped in a performer's embodied vocal expression. As McClure moves in and out of beast language, letting the phonemic order of English dissolve into long vowels wrapped in deliciously indulged alveolar approximates and glottal fricatives, he means for us to hear the body, as it were. More particularly, though, we hear the 43-year-old male-gendered body that spent its childhood between Kansas and the Pacific Northwest and its adulthood in countercultural California.

I was always afraid to recite this other one. Although I knew it by heart, I was afraid to recite it because I thought I might not be able to stop.

It's very mantric. And I thought I'd be giving a reading and they'll carry me away at the end. I'll still be going Grahhr! Grahhr!

The audience laughs. 

So, recently I was in one of John Lilly's isolation tanks and I thought, what a perfect time to do this thing I've always been afraid to do.

The audience laughs.

What difference would it make here? So I did, and I did know it by heart, but I think I'll read it here anyway.

The reference to John Lilly, the neurophysicist-turned-cetologist-cum-“cosmonaut of heightened consciousness,” is curiously overdetermined (Burnett 14). Emerging from the same incipient “culture of feedback” that would come to characterize ecological thought in the 1970s, McClure’s beast language parallels, in an eccentric key, the experimental work Lilly had begun in the late 1950s on the intelligence of bottlenose dolphins and possibilities for interspecies communication, as documented in Man and Dolphin (1961) and The Mind of the Dolphin (1967) (see Belgrad 138-73). And yet at the same time that he was researching dolphins, Lilly was also responsible for major contributions to the field of sensory-deprivation research, including the invention of the water-immersion isolation tank. Lilly’s The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique (1977) was published the year after McClure’s reading. It includes the logs of “scores of men and women volunteers,” from Gregory Bateson to Burgess Meredith, “who have recorded their extraordinary experiences” in a Malibu facility with five isolation tanks. Though McClure is not featured in the book, it seems likely he made the trek, and this presumption entails an irony worth pausing over. For Lilly, the isolated flotation tank is a therapeutic means of probing interior experience by cleaving mind from body: “For a businessperson, a scientist, a professional of any sort, this is a boon: to be able to think, free of physical fatigue of the body. The method allows one to become free within a few minutes” (22).

SILENCE THE EYES! BECALM THE SENSES!

Drive drooor from the fresh repugnance,

thou whole, thou feeling creature.

Live not for others but affect thyself

from thy enhanced interior--believing what thou carry.

Thy trillionic multitude of grahh, vhooshes, and silences.

Oh you are heavier and dimmer than you knew

and more solid and full of pleasure.

Grahhr! Grahhhr! Ghrahhhrrr! Ghrahhr! Grahhrrr.

Grahhrr-grahhhrr! Grahhr. Gahrahhrr Ghrahhhrrrr.

Ghrarrrr. Ghrahhr! Ghrarrrrr. Gharrrr. Grahhrr.

Ghrahhrr. Ghrahr. Grahhr. Grahharrr. Grahhrr.

Grahhhhr. Grahhhr. Gahar. Ghrahhr. Grahhr. Grahhr.

Ghrahhr. Grahhhr. Grahhr. Gratharrr! Grahhr.

Ghrahrr. Ghraaaaaaahrr. Grhar. Ghhrarrr! Grahhrr.

Ghrahrr. Gharr! Ghrahhhhr. Grahhrr. Ghraherrr.

The audience applauds.

The announcer introduces Rukeyser.

She has published ten volumes of poetry, which include such books as The Green Wave, The Turning Wind, Beast and View, U.S. 1, Theory of Flight, Body of Waking, Waterlily Fire, and The Speed of Darkness, amongst others.

She has published essays, a biography--she's working on a biography now. She has published a novel called The Orgy. She has published translations of the Mexican Writer Octavio Paz, and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof. She has published a number of children's books. And, what else can I say?

She is a New Yorker. She was born in New York, she lives in New York, and so forth. I now introduce Muriel Rukeyser.

The audience applaudes.

Thank you. It sounds peculiar when it's said that way, you know. It just means that I've been writing poems all along, and that sometimes there's been some prose or something--film, prose, whatever it is--that spills into the poem, that feeds into the poems.

And they lie all the time about the poems, to us, you know, about all of our poems. They say it's something very odd and rare, and people who do it are very odd. If a man does it, he's sexually questionable; if a woman does it, she's sexually questionable.

Rukeyser's focus on the lies of poetry and "if a man does it, he's sexually questionable; if a woman does it, she's sexually questionable," is informed by her own queerness and how she uses silence to create new forms of speech. In the context of her later poem, "The Speed of Darkness," spaces between stanzas are not empty but embody this queerness as they employ silence to refuse conventional poetic forms. Too, these silences further reenforce the "questionable" nature sexuality made present in her poetry, demonstrating Rukeyser's resistance to the import of spoken word.

The audience laughs.

Besides, very few people do it. And it's all lies, you know.

There's a company in the United States that's made a fortune on the premise that everybody takes a snapshot at some time or other. And I would like to ask you--and this is apart from all critical standards, all criteria, all faculty and institutions, apart from any of that--I would like to ask a question: how many of you here has ever written a poem, would you put up your hands please?

The audience laughs.

Thank you.

I'm always nervous before I ask the question. I ask the question, now, in all rooms, no matter how few or many people there are, and if the universities would generally look around to see if the basketball team is there, but there's always the moment of silence, and looking around first. And then, generally, quite slowly, almost all the hands go up. Maybe four or five do not put up their hands. And if I wait around afterwards, and with any luck and favorable wins, the four or five people come up to me and will say something like: I was fifteen, it was a love poem, it stank.

The audience laughs.

The thing is, it's a human activity; we all do it. We lie about it, you know, and they lie about it to us. And, thanks now to the young, the poets, maybe, a few other people one could name together, maybe we don't lie so much--so much as we used to. Maybe we don't lie about this anymore.

Rukeyser's repeated discussion of lies and lying--such as her call to not lie about the humanity activity with which poetry is concerned--is embedded with what she feels is forced into silence. Her poetry foregrounds the human activity unsaid in lies by using silence as a container for speaking and audibly revealing new moments for speech and rhetorical action.

Maybe we don't lie about sex, maybe we don't lie about poetry. They seem to lie a great deal about politics instead. It seems to shift around.

The audience laughs.

But, there are these, and the fact is: we all write poems. It is something we do. We come to this part of experience: You get a very, very rainy evening; why do poeple come and listen to poems? Or you've got some marvelous summer night; why do people come and listen to poems?

It's partly out of curiosity and looking at the person and I go to see: What is that breathing behind, what is that heartbeat, the breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms are set up, and the involuntary muscles and you see the person do it but beyond that, something is what we called shared--something is arrived at--we come to something with almost unmediated that is the poem among us, between us, there, we're reaching each other, you're giving me whatever silence you are giving me and it comes to me with great strength, your silence.

Rukeyser speaks to the shared experience of poetry and silence, saying that "you're giving me whatever silence you are giving me and it comes to me with great strength, your silence." In this evocative moment, she locates silences as a relational activity that gains force and meaning in the shared experience of betweenness and other-than-spoken word. Too, the listening-audience creates these silences; the listener "gives" silence meaning through presence and attention.

Somebody said "primadonna," you know, or I'm going give this to the audience and the conductor cause that's what you think--you're going to get it from the audience.

That's where it comes from, in a funny way.

So, this mediation, it is not a description, it is not only the music and it, although certainly the reinforcement of sound--the sound climbing up and finally reaching a place, the last word; the sound that begins with the first breathing, the breath of the title.

Keats doing "Ode to a Nightingale." We hardly ever say "ode." Nobody says "nightingale." But Keats, having said that, never has to say it again. It's a bird. You find it in these things. But, from the beginning--from the first moment--that is, the first breath, the thing that is made as, suggestion, breath, what my life has been, whatever that is- what your lives have been.

The last poem I'll read this evening is a group. The group is called "The Speed of Darkness."

They're short poems and I'll just pause between poems. There should be numbers doing up in back of me. One, two, three. I'll just pause. "The Speed of Darkness."

The audience laughs at Rukeyser's comment about slides going up behind her.

Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis. Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt. Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child. Resurrection, music, silence, and surf.

Rukeyser pauses between the first and second stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

No longer speaking. Listening with the whole body. And with every drop of blood. Overtaken by silence. But this same silence is become speech, with the speed of darkness.

Rukeyser pauses between the second and third stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Stillness during war, the lake. The unmoving spruces. Glints over the water. Faces, voices. You are far away. A tree that trembles. I am the tree that trembles and trembles.

Rukeyser pauses between the third and fourth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

After the lifting of the mist, after the lift of the heavy rains, the sky stands clear and the cries of the city risen in day. I remember the buildings are space walled, to let space be used for living. I mind this room is space this drinking glass is space whose boundary of glass let’s me give you drink and space to drink your hand, my hand being space containing skies and constellations. Your face carries the reaches of air. I know I am space my words are air.

Rukeyser pauses between the fourth and fifth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Between between, the man, act exact. Woman, in curve senses in their maze, frail orbits, green tries, games of stars, shape of the body speaking its evidence.

Rukeyser pauses between the fifth and sixth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

I look across at the real, vulnerable, involved, naked; devoted to the present of all I care for. The world of its history leading to this moment.

Rukeyser pauses between the sixth and seventh stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Life the announcer. I assure you there are many ways to have a child. I bastard mother promise you there are many ways to be born. They all come forth in their own grace.

Rukeyser pauses between the seventh and eigth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Ends of the earth join tonight with blazing stars upon their meeting. These sons, these sons fall burning into Asia.

Rukeyser pauses between the eighth and ninth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Time comes into it. Say it. Say it. The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Rukeyser pauses between the ninth and tenth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Lying, blazing beside me, you rear beautifully and up--your thinking face--erotic body reaching in all its colors and lights--your erotic face colored and lit--not colored body-and-face but now entire colors, lights. The world thinking and reaching.

Rukeyser pauses between the tenth and eleventh stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

The river flows past the city. Water goes down to tomorrow making its children. I hear their unborn voices. I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

Rukeyser pauses between the eleventh and twelfth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Big-boned man young and of my dream. Struggles to get the live bird out of his throat. I am he am I? Dreaming? I am the bird am I? I am the throat? A bird with a curved beak. It could slit anything, the throat-bird. Drawn up slowly. The curved blades, not large. Bird emerges, wet, being born. Begins to sing.

Rukeyser pauses between the twelfth and thirteenth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

My night awake staring at the broad rough jewel, the copper roof across the way, thinking of the poet yet unborn in this dark who will be the throat of these hours. No. Of those hours. Who will speak these days, if not I, if not you?

Rukeyser pauses after the thirteenth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Thank you very much.

The audience applaudes.

We wish to announce that the next reading will be by F.R. Scott, and that will be on February 14th--at the same time-- in the theater in the basement of this building. Thank you.

The audience speaks quietly as recording continues.

There will be one poem read in my 1969 voice, and then I'll read something from the book following that. We're going to go from the beginning to the end but we're certainly not going to read all of them.

Marlatt's cadence picks up on "certainly not" and as she laughs, there is also laughter from an audience member close by.

The audience laughs.

The texture of the laughter tells us about the situatedness of this reading. It's a small, packed room with over 70 people. The room seems to shape these moments of audience reciprocity as ones of intimacy: audience members are close together and close to Marlatt. This particular reading occurred at a record store in Kelowna, BC, called Milk Crate Records which was open for 8 years before it was required to vacate its location with less than a month's notice in 2019. The situatedness of the event in time and circumstance as well as space shapes the sense of intimacy that is audible in the recording.

Marlatt's laughter is reciprocated by the audience.

And I should say, by way of introduction, that the first part of these poems--it's in two sections, the book--were written in Bloomington, Indiana, when I was a young woman, married at that point, trying to figure out who I was. And studying comparative literature at the university there. And translating the first book of prose poems by the French poet Francis Ponge, and they're all poems about things, objects. It's called Le Parti pris des choses (On the Side of Things). And it taught me a lot about language. The second part of the book was written in Napa Valley, California, where I was teaching part-time in a highschool there and suffering a great deal as a result of that.

My then-husband was doing a practicum in clinical psych at the Napa State Hospital.

There is uptalk at end of the sentence.

There is uptalk at the end of French-language title.

In listening to her revisit this time, we hear a change in her vocal delivery when Marlatt talks about her younger self: she uses more uptalk, or high rising terminal, in this early biographical narrative than she does in other portions of the recording. Today, uptalk is most often identified as a feature of the speech patterns of young women and girls (see Warren 2016), but this vocal feature didn't become predominantly associated with young women until the last couple of decades. There is an interesting overlay, here, of a newer trend in young women's vocal style onto Marlatt discussing her youth. For us, it indicates discomfort and a recollection of the uncertainty and unhappiness Marlatt describes. The echoes that this discomfort has with contemporary gendered speech reveals Marlatt's situatedness to us as listeners who interpret her speech patterns through our own context.

I was trying to figure out language, how to move in language. Language had become, thanks to the American poet Dee Alexander a very alive thing to me. Dee was a linguist, and he taught me a lot about the textures of language, how to think of language not in terms of how it relates to a thing--which Ponge certainly did not do--but how it relates to itself, musically, and in terms of meaning.

There is an extended o sound in "move."

In this discussion of Ponge and Alexander, Marlatt turns to a discussion of language in which she performs the poetics of embodiment that her poetry would come to be known for. The drawn out-vowel sounds in verbs that stretch the rhythms of her speech and then condense into direct and indirect objects. What Marlatt performs is a retrospective narrative of her development as a poet, away from objects and towards what language and bodies do. Rather than becoming legible in narrative events, she performs this development through her shift in vocal delivery that increasingly adopts the social voice, the self-reflexive "unique voice that signifies nothing but itself."

There is an extended i sound in "alive."

So these poems are all experimental in that sense.

In this recording from 1969, Marlatt's vocal quality is at turns precise and rounded, articulating sharp consonants and mouthing the vowels of her poem. This delivery is at once part of the conventions of poetry voice at the time and part of the oratory style Marlatt would have developed through her association with such teachers, mentors, and peers as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Dee Alexander, Mary Ellen Solt, the TISH writers and others at the Writers Workshop, UBC. The background of the recording is quiet, almost muffled.

i

that petal's veins
rift blue
pared with razor

edge
tired eyes against the
gold dust, daisies

in a jug dyes
slowly into water
seeping pink.

ii

moon drops
early

roused rocks
dry already a
fire fly

threats rain it
flickers
greenlight over
night
sink's
rust.

iii

white hood of a white
pickup parked on
green

trucks can be
steam risers, lettered
white

hollyhocks

of a sun a whirl,
cezanne, in a

tall tree.

iv

like it
flowers hai

l outside our
back door stars

saw as worm
clots trod

morning

glories in deeper
small shells.

There is the sound of rustling pages.

As Marlatt switches to reading in 2019, her delivery leaves more space between words and less sharply delivers consonants. The portion of the poem that she reads is conversational, which further softens a now conversational vocal delivery.

made tenuous
love is not
the line's run into
fishwater pulls up

nothing, loses

whatever named tree
silk or wet sleeves
hustle sky

love a word
without roots, light
bends a line going under
water as forms do, that wait to be gript

provocative extent a
jerk
not to be measured

no
sky bends down shoulders'
force the
fluttery tree
burns against it

growth measured form
shoulders care for
such extent.

down be
low the river
blows

caught
in its stride ice
sharpened houses
fishing for

out
the house, love's
tyrranized yr mouth
throws up gates

hold?

if you think
so then let's
go or let

some rapid's in the ditch

yr cheek how
light pinkens on the in
side step
thru windows &

sun its starred
tongue!

the ways we've taken any
ways congeal &
glitter.

There is the sound of rustling pages.

As the tape from 1969 switches on we hear the writer brush against the microphone in that recording.

As the reading switches between 1969 and 2019, we hear sounds like movement and clunking, alongside changes in sound that differentiates between 1969--a recording made on open reel in a room that is more muffled by upholstery--and 2019--a slightly clearer digital recording in a crowded room. One sound, pages rustling overlaps with these changes in the sound quality of the recording.

lynne who has been
shoveling snow

wet hair a cold the
cold gleams you wet
fortune's turned

yr card given
crystals reflect you
rains enrich
yr finger ex
tended wants to know

you type?

showing you my fingers do
walk their, speak hair caught
dropt water barrettes
better than a million
movies kept

when they tore off the
roof rain bowed the
tractor's claw dug walls fell
a pack of cards topt
the whole

hell

o face you aren't
accustomed to look at life
savers you
offered me lime
greens yr mouth

bird dropt in, linnet
how's yr new house?

In Bloomington we were living in Pigeon Hill which was a very poor part of town. It was the only part of town that as graduate students we could afford to live in.

There is the sound of soft laughter from the audience.

Lynne was a little girl who lived across the street in a house that only had a dirt floor. The house was eventually torn down, and this was a poem for her and her curiosity about typing. I don't think she'd ever seen anyone type before.

There is the sound of a clunk and static sound from the microphone with soft rustling.

Okay, so two more from this period.

There is uptalk after the word "more."

There is the sound of soft rustling.

Actually, I think these are . . . yeah ok. I'm just going to read one.

moon accoutered
faces
home in on
field mist

wheels float the
pavement
pillows back

we can expect
crickets

but the windows
close to tight
sided lanterns

shield our ears our
inexplicable hurry

as moth furred faces
toward light

Ok, great.

Marlatt seems to silently signal to the audio technician to begin the recording.

"sun rises moon
rises too
in the east"

white
they stand long
leg'd in grass

their shadows in
star'd under
earth.

so
good the
morning ghostless
peaches here

bear room now
sun's
done jealousy
as a wreath

bread tastes
sweet, peaches
fur to
hands' feel

all that's ripe
is.

You never know, when you're preparing for a reading, you feel like reading one poem and then when you get up there, you feel like reading another.

Laughter begins from the audience before Marlatt finishes her sentence, louder than before, possibly from one person.

Marlatt ends in lilting laughter that echoes the laughter in the audience

I'm just going to read the first part of another poem, "From Whose Dark." This is from the second part of the book, written in California.

i

these imprints
periods be
speak an anger
presses

keys

till such dark
holds the house
flares up a draft or

draught you spelt it
letting
in a wind no man
Stands the "trees

are all turning . . .
brown & yellow from the
draught"

as if the land were

an empty
hole with no
obscure fog
to mend it turns

integrate a
rime of hard like
lihoods these

days mean nothing looks
but looking out in fine
drizzles

draw me
to
the eucalyptus

leaves

There is the sound of rustling pages.

i

who moves as she
can will or choose
the body of her

wordless downspine the

choice's non
existent place a
star vertebra's
sun does
glow/grow a pace

contractions measure

extent as the upshot of her
radiance/raindance/dalliance

timing of a sort
of pleasure

ii

her

means are made
light of

iii

energy coiled
at spine
tip you touch
hisses

heat
too in
friction

that I want & not
wanting turn
sinister
(half of the moon lies

but that's no star
light

all of a piece

iv

left is what I'm glad of some
times tired love
should be so mouthed about
this area of our
habitual pull, scarcely
luminous by such day dark is
what I love you in

after all given to
sun

in you (that, coming
stars in
eyes' night

v

gravity lies in
yr weight, mass, under
stand

pull exerts a continual
skin to skin weather in
ternal or out
(as you said it'd
orbit:

how little that is, love, I do
go from you.

this door I thought
went under
(ground being
no house, or

door that was a thought
caught, creeks, houseless
in the wind on weak
hinges
left a

jar's a limb one
live oak on
another.

By the end of the recording, Marlatt's vocal delivery has lost much of the self-conscious performativity of the beginning. Even in these moments of situated voice, where she addresses the audience, she is focused on the poems that she sorts through and the decision of what to read. In this moment, we hear the reading voice begin to overtake speaking, situated, and social voice. It may be that Marlatt is more tired, or perhaps more comfortable in front of her audience. But what we hear is also the ways that written poetry, which she holds in her hands, becomes her object of attention. It would be tempting to interpret this shift within a conventional approach to literary audio, given primacy to the pre-existing textual artwork. However, we think instead that we hear the material object of the poem begin to shape Marlatt's performance and embodiment. There is a compelling resonance, then, with the contrast between object and action that Marlatt sets up near the beginning of the recording. The mediated object of the written poem is shaping the action of reading, not just the sounds that Marlatt articulates, but her situatedness within a room and her relationship to audience.

Okay I'll just read one. This is a short one.

ab
sent ab
sunt

frogs in
short grass hands
turn off the hose

hop in
simul
taneous thot/

jumps you there
where it stays
hot nightlong

hours till dawn down
the dropt wind's audible
steps now as walnuts
hit
ground.

In this final poem, Marlatt seems to blend the past and present reading conventions that we have heard in the recording. The poem she chooses demands the precision and round, assonant vowels most prominently featured in the 1969 clips. But it is brief poem, and her 2019 reading is also present in a softness and spaciousness which which she delivers the poem. Here, in a social voice, Marlatt is perhaps aware of her own voice across time.

There is the sound of soft laughter and rustling.

Well, that was . . .

Marlatt's final words, possibly addressed to someone sitting beside her, are cut off.

This will be a poetry reading by Michael McClure and Allen Ginsberg from Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, June 16, 1976. 

…[Allen Ginsberg] was cofounder and codirector of the Kerouac School. Allen first laid eyes on Michael McClure… [inaudible]…that Kenneth Rexroth had advised him to visit in 1954 in San Francisco. But they did not officially meet until a party at Ruth Witt-Diamant’s for W.H. Auden later that year. They spoke for five or ten minutes at this party. Michael gave Allen his address and Allen visited him several weeks later with Jack Keroauc. Okay, that was in 1954. The famous Six Gallery reading—that was the name of the gallery, the Six Gallery; it was run by six artists—took place in 1955 and Allen read the first part of Howl, Michael read “For the Death of 100 Whales,” among other things. Since that time, Michael and Allen have frequently shared the stage with each other and jointly with others through the years. The second big historical reading in Berkeley in 1955, I think part of the “Poetry Apocalypse,” where Allen read his poem “America”—“American I am putting my queer shoulder to the wheel”—and Michael read his—what is this?—“Mantric Cadence Poem Called Light,” which is, uh, a repetition of the word “light” several hundred times. Towards the end of the poem, the words “elbow” and “nostril” appear.” 

Waldman and the audience laugh.

They read together in 1965, in Berkeley, as part of the Vietnam peace protests, and in February 1967, they read at the “Be-In” in San Francisco with Suzuki Roshi on the stage. They did three Timothy Leary benefits from 1965 to ’72, and there were numerous other ‘om orgies’ and ‘monster’ poetry readings and ‘return of the monster’ poetry readings in California. They picketed the Varig Airlines together for the Living Theater, and were among the original circumambulators of Mount Tamalpais. They read together at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church at the Bowery in 1974, and also at a benefit for his holiness Gyalwa Karmapa in San Francisco, also in ’74. So this reading is a continuation of some kind of poetic karmic link between these two poets, between Michael and Allen, so, we’re witnessing this [Waldman laughs]. Michael’s most recent books are Jaguar Skies, published by New Directions this year, and Rare Angel, published by Black Sparrow, and he tells me he’s recently revised his novel, The Adept, or he’s in the process of revising his novel, The Adept. Allen’s most recent book is First Blues: Rags, Ballads, and Harmonium Songs, published by Full Court Press this year. Welcome. 

The audience applauds.

I'm going to read a couple of poems in Beast Language which are actually from the early '60s and not the '50s, and then we're going to take a break—ten minutes or so.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in switch licour Of which vertu

McClure reads the first three and a half lines of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, drawing laughter from the audience. It was a regular habit of McClure's to recite these lines before public performances of Ghost Tantras. The gesture "suggest[s] the origins of his poetry in early English verse," as Michael Davidson notes (86). On the day he shot the USA Poetry episode at the San Francisco Zoo, McClure also recited Chaucer to the tree kangaroos, for whom "beast language was not right" (Kahn 340). Several months after the reading at Naropa, on November 25, 1976, McClure recited from the opening of Chaucer's prologue on stage at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom during The Band's famous farewell concert, immortalized in Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz (1978).

That's Chaucer actually.

The audience laughs.

It makes a nice introduction. 

The audience laughs.

I LOVE TO THINK OF THE RED PURPLE ROSE

McClure reads Ghost Tantra 51 (51). As in many of his printed poems, McClure centers the Ghost Tantras down the page's middle, an aesthetic strategy Davidson regards as beastly in its own right: "McClure compares the physical shape of his poems to biological organisms. Instead of returning to the left margin, the line asserts itself boldly as a free image, connected to the other lines like ribs to the spinal column" (86). In light of McClure's performance, Davidson's observation that this meaningful shapeliness makes the line not "a score for the voice" but "a separate object among other objects" takes on curious significance. By what means can we account *both* for the line's printed objecthood *and* the sonorous objecthood captured and audible, in this instance, on digitized tape? Even more to the point, how can we account for the historically-specific performance of McClure's recitation--his expressive re-citation of a printed text on June 16, 1976, the dynamic relation between page and speech, his "reading voice"? I have taken advantage of the fact that McClure's recitation precisely reflects the printed version to respect the poem's printed lineation in my transcriptions below. Ideally, the critical act of reading and listening simultaneously will evoke the tension at the heart of McClure's reading voice.

IN THE DARKNESS COOLED BY THE NIGHT

We are served by machines making satins of sounds.

Each blot of sound is a bud or a stahr.

Body eats bouquets of the ear's vista.

Gahhhrrr booody eyes eers noze deem thou.

NOH. NAH-OHH

hrooor. VOOOR-NAH! GAHROOOOO ME.

Nah droooooh seerch. NAH THEE!

The machines are too dull when we are lion poems that move & breathe.

WHAN WE GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOR hann dree

myketoth sharoo sreee thah noh deeeeeemed ez.

Whan. eeeethoooze hrohh.

The audience applauds.

To listen for the social voice is to apprehend the lived histories telescoped in a performer's embodied vocal expression. As McClure moves in and out of beast language, letting the phonemic order of English dissolve into long vowels wrapped in deliciously indulged alveolar approximates and glottal fricatives, he means for us to hear the body, as it were. More particularly, though, we hear the 43-year-old male-gendered body that spent its childhood between Kansas and the Pacific Northwest and its adulthood in countercultural California.

I was always afraid to recite this other one. Although I knew it by heart, I was afraid to recite it because I thought I might not be able to stop.

It's very mantric. And I thought I'd be giving a reading and they'll carry me away at the end. I'll still be going Grahhr! Grahhr!

The audience laughs. 

So, recently I was in one of John Lilly's isolation tanks and I thought, what a perfect time to do this thing I've always been afraid to do.

The audience laughs.

What difference would it make here? So I did, and I did know it by heart, but I think I'll read it here anyway.

The reference to John Lilly, the neurophysicist-turned-cetologist-cum-“cosmonaut of heightened consciousness,” is curiously overdetermined (Burnett 14). Emerging from the same incipient “culture of feedback” that would come to characterize ecological thought in the 1970s, McClure’s beast language parallels, in an eccentric key, the experimental work Lilly had begun in the late 1950s on the intelligence of bottlenose dolphins and possibilities for interspecies communication, as documented in Man and Dolphin (1961) and The Mind of the Dolphin (1967) (see Belgrad 138-73). And yet at the same time that he was researching dolphins, Lilly was also responsible for major contributions to the field of sensory-deprivation research, including the invention of the water-immersion isolation tank. Lilly’s The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique (1977) was published the year after McClure’s reading. It includes the logs of “scores of men and women volunteers,” from Gregory Bateson to Burgess Meredith, “who have recorded their extraordinary experiences” in a Malibu facility with five isolation tanks. Though McClure is not featured in the book, it seems likely he made the trek, and this presumption entails an irony worth pausing over. For Lilly, the isolated flotation tank is a therapeutic means of probing interior experience by cleaving mind from body: “For a businessperson, a scientist, a professional of any sort, this is a boon: to be able to think, free of physical fatigue of the body. The method allows one to become free within a few minutes” (22).

SILENCE THE EYES! BECALM THE SENSES!

Drive drooor from the fresh repugnance,

thou whole, thou feeling creature.

Live not for others but affect thyself

from thy enhanced interior--believing what thou carry.

Thy trillionic multitude of grahh, vhooshes, and silences.

Oh you are heavier and dimmer than you knew

and more solid and full of pleasure.

Grahhr! Grahhhr! Ghrahhhrrr! Ghrahhr! Grahhrrr.

Grahhrr-grahhhrr! Grahhr. Gahrahhrr Ghrahhhrrrr.

Ghrarrrr. Ghrahhr! Ghrarrrrr. Gharrrr. Grahhrr.

Ghrahhrr. Ghrahr. Grahhr. Grahharrr. Grahhrr.

Grahhhhr. Grahhhr. Gahar. Ghrahhr. Grahhr. Grahhr.

Ghrahhr. Grahhhr. Grahhr. Gratharrr! Grahhr.

Ghrahrr. Ghraaaaaaahrr. Grhar. Ghhrarrr! Grahhrr.

Ghrahrr. Gharr! Ghrahhhhr. Grahhrr. Ghraherrr.

The audience applauds.

The announcer introduces Rukeyser.

She has published ten volumes of poetry, which include such books as The Green Wave, The Turning Wind, Beast and View, U.S. 1, Theory of Flight, Body of Waking, Waterlily Fire, and The Speed of Darkness, amongst others.

She has published essays, a biography--she's working on a biography now. She has published a novel called The Orgy. She has published translations of the Mexican Writer Octavio Paz, and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof. She has published a number of children's books. And, what else can I say?

She is a New Yorker. She was born in New York, she lives in New York, and so forth. I now introduce Muriel Rukeyser.

The audience applaudes.

Thank you. It sounds peculiar when it's said that way, you know. It just means that I've been writing poems all along, and that sometimes there's been some prose or something--film, prose, whatever it is--that spills into the poem, that feeds into the poems.

And they lie all the time about the poems, to us, you know, about all of our poems. They say it's something very odd and rare, and people who do it are very odd. If a man does it, he's sexually questionable; if a woman does it, she's sexually questionable.

Rukeyser's focus on the lies of poetry and "if a man does it, he's sexually questionable; if a woman does it, she's sexually questionable," is informed by her own queerness and how she uses silence to create new forms of speech. In the context of her later poem, "The Speed of Darkness," spaces between stanzas are not empty but embody this queerness as they employ silence to refuse conventional poetic forms. Too, these silences further reenforce the "questionable" nature sexuality made present in her poetry, demonstrating Rukeyser's resistance to the import of spoken word.

The audience laughs.

Besides, very few people do it. And it's all lies, you know.

There's a company in the United States that's made a fortune on the premise that everybody takes a snapshot at some time or other. And I would like to ask you--and this is apart from all critical standards, all criteria, all faculty and institutions, apart from any of that--I would like to ask a question: how many of you here has ever written a poem, would you put up your hands please?

The audience laughs.

Thank you.

I'm always nervous before I ask the question. I ask the question, now, in all rooms, no matter how few or many people there are, and if the universities would generally look around to see if the basketball team is there, but there's always the moment of silence, and looking around first. And then, generally, quite slowly, almost all the hands go up. Maybe four or five do not put up their hands. And if I wait around afterwards, and with any luck and favorable wins, the four or five people come up to me and will say something like: I was fifteen, it was a love poem, it stank.

The audience laughs.

The thing is, it's a human activity; we all do it. We lie about it, you know, and they lie about it to us. And, thanks now to the young, the poets, maybe, a few other people one could name together, maybe we don't lie so much--so much as we used to. Maybe we don't lie about this anymore.

Rukeyser's repeated discussion of lies and lying--such as her call to not lie about the humanity activity with which poetry is concerned--is embedded with what she feels is forced into silence. Her poetry foregrounds the human activity unsaid in lies by using silence as a container for speaking and audibly revealing new moments for speech and rhetorical action.

Maybe we don't lie about sex, maybe we don't lie about poetry. They seem to lie a great deal about politics instead. It seems to shift around.

The audience laughs.

But, there are these, and the fact is: we all write poems. It is something we do. We come to this part of experience: You get a very, very rainy evening; why do poeple come and listen to poems? Or you've got some marvelous summer night; why do people come and listen to poems?

It's partly out of curiosity and looking at the person and I go to see: What is that breathing behind, what is that heartbeat, the breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms are set up, and the involuntary muscles and you see the person do it but beyond that, something is what we called shared--something is arrived at--we come to something with almost unmediated that is the poem among us, between us, there, we're reaching each other, you're giving me whatever silence you are giving me and it comes to me with great strength, your silence.

Rukeyser speaks to the shared experience of poetry and silence, saying that "you're giving me whatever silence you are giving me and it comes to me with great strength, your silence." In this evocative moment, she locates silences as a relational activity that gains force and meaning in the shared experience of betweenness and other-than-spoken word. Too, the listening-audience creates these silences; the listener "gives" silence meaning through presence and attention.

Somebody said "primadonna," you know, or I'm going give this to the audience and the conductor cause that's what you think--you're going to get it from the audience.

That's where it comes from, in a funny way.

So, this mediation, it is not a description, it is not only the music and it, although certainly the reinforcement of sound--the sound climbing up and finally reaching a place, the last word; the sound that begins with the first breathing, the breath of the title.

Keats doing "Ode to a Nightingale." We hardly ever say "ode." Nobody says "nightingale." But Keats, having said that, never has to say it again. It's a bird. You find it in these things. But, from the beginning--from the first moment--that is, the first breath, the thing that is made as, suggestion, breath, what my life has been, whatever that is- what your lives have been.

The last poem I'll read this evening is a group. The group is called "The Speed of Darkness."

They're short poems and I'll just pause between poems. There should be numbers doing up in back of me. One, two, three. I'll just pause. "The Speed of Darkness."

The audience laughs at Rukeyser's comment about slides going up behind her.

Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis. Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt. Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child. Resurrection, music, silence, and surf.

Rukeyser pauses between the first and second stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

No longer speaking. Listening with the whole body. And with every drop of blood. Overtaken by silence. But this same silence is become speech, with the speed of darkness.

Rukeyser pauses between the second and third stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Stillness during war, the lake. The unmoving spruces. Glints over the water. Faces, voices. You are far away. A tree that trembles. I am the tree that trembles and trembles.

Rukeyser pauses between the third and fourth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

After the lifting of the mist, after the lift of the heavy rains, the sky stands clear and the cries of the city risen in day. I remember the buildings are space walled, to let space be used for living. I mind this room is space this drinking glass is space whose boundary of glass let’s me give you drink and space to drink your hand, my hand being space containing skies and constellations. Your face carries the reaches of air. I know I am space my words are air.

Rukeyser pauses between the fourth and fifth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Between between, the man, act exact. Woman, in curve senses in their maze, frail orbits, green tries, games of stars, shape of the body speaking its evidence.

Rukeyser pauses between the fifth and sixth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

I look across at the real, vulnerable, involved, naked; devoted to the present of all I care for. The world of its history leading to this moment.

Rukeyser pauses between the sixth and seventh stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Life the announcer. I assure you there are many ways to have a child. I bastard mother promise you there are many ways to be born. They all come forth in their own grace.

Rukeyser pauses between the seventh and eigth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Ends of the earth join tonight with blazing stars upon their meeting. These sons, these sons fall burning into Asia.

Rukeyser pauses between the eighth and ninth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Time comes into it. Say it. Say it. The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Rukeyser pauses between the ninth and tenth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Lying, blazing beside me, you rear beautifully and up--your thinking face--erotic body reaching in all its colors and lights--your erotic face colored and lit--not colored body-and-face but now entire colors, lights. The world thinking and reaching.

Rukeyser pauses between the tenth and eleventh stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

The river flows past the city. Water goes down to tomorrow making its children. I hear their unborn voices. I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

Rukeyser pauses between the eleventh and twelfth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Big-boned man young and of my dream. Struggles to get the live bird out of his throat. I am he am I? Dreaming? I am the bird am I? I am the throat? A bird with a curved beak. It could slit anything, the throat-bird. Drawn up slowly. The curved blades, not large. Bird emerges, wet, being born. Begins to sing.

Rukeyser pauses between the twelfth and thirteenth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

My night awake staring at the broad rough jewel, the copper roof across the way, thinking of the poet yet unborn in this dark who will be the throat of these hours. No. Of those hours. Who will speak these days, if not I, if not you?

Rukeyser pauses after the thirteenth stanza while reading "The Speed of Darkness."

Thank you very much.

The audience applaudes.

We wish to announce that the next reading will be by F.R. Scott, and that will be on February 14th--at the same time-- in the theater in the basement of this building. Thank you.

The audience speaks quietly as recording continues.