![]() ![]() Caedmon continues to publish spoken word as an audio imprint of HarperCollins, but its vinyl days are long gone. Alessandrelli’s collection included recordings by Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Robert Frost, among others. Today, Caedmon is considered the seed of the audiobook industry. His library included a raft of albums from Caedmon Records, the first label to publish spoken word with an album by T. He began the laborious task of packing up the hundreds of vinyl records he’d accrued since he first began collecting as a sophomore in high school. in 2013, planned to move back to Portland, where he’d completed his M.A. It was founded by the poet Jeff Alessandrelli, who, having graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with his Ph.D. Ironically, those same tremulous voices inspired the launch of Fonograf Editions. The caste of poetry being firmly defended by shaky, tremulous, high-toned voices.” Everything you hated about poetry would be there in those recordings. “Gertrude Stein would sound like Margaret Rutherford in Groucho Marx movies. “Every time I heard a poet whose work I liked, I would be deeply disappointed and appalled by their voice,” Myles said, referring to their limited exposure to spoken-word records. “I have to pee.” In a word, it’s sloppy-with purpose. “I’m gonna catch up,” Myles says, just before the player stops. The last track on the album is nothing more than trees creaking in the wind, recorded on Myles’s phone during an outing with friends in Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains. The recording captures everything: the mulligans, the false starts, the mispronunciations, the pages dropping to the floor, the sips of water. “I think I’m just gonna read that one again.” Reading their poem “Sorry” on the first track, they trip on the line “let me hold your shoulders back so you look arrogant and beautiful”-restart, trip again, sigh, and mumble, “Fuck, this is so hard.” They finish, but not well. “It was like having your picture taken when you weren’t posing,” Myles says. ![]() In fact, they had already recorded the poems in a studio at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics before Fonograf approached them they didn’t know they were cutting an album at all. In true iconoclastic fashion, they refused to edit the album, to submit it to the glossy production process that marks most professional recordings. We were discussing Aloha/irish trees, a collection of their poems, new and old, released last May by the vinyl-only poetry press Fonograf Editions-a nod, Myles said, to a musical tradition of bootleg recordings. I think we forget how radical it is to have human speech taken away from the human body.” “The notion of sound taken away from the signifier, which was a new thing when we first started making sound recordings. “The name for it is really great: acousmatic sound,” Myles told me. An ethereal dissonance lingers between the intimacy of the material and the distance of its creator. And yet to hear Myles reading their poems on vinyl-the static and silence between poems, between lines, their voice quickly swallowed by the studio walls-is a ghostly, lonely experience, like reading a trunk of old letters from the recently deceased. To read Eileen Myles in print is, of course, to read a poet who’s very much alive, whose aliveness seems to jump off the page. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |