Annotations for Voice: Speaking

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Ok, great. [softly]

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.

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. 

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

Well, that was…

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 going up and back of me: 1, 2, 3. I’ll just-- I will pause. “The Speed of Darkness.”

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.

That's Chaucer actually. It makes a nice introduction.

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! 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. [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.