(addendum to previously made "more ties" comments)
dja-phuth very likely has a musical mind. Hearing him vocalize non-verbally for a few moments as the finale-lagniappe to the Huth/Beckett event in Buffalo recently also suggests that his uncanny & non-translatable visual vocabularies have their aural analog in what he calls his “poemsongs.” Neither a scat singer nor quite an alternative universe omni-vocalist, dja-phuth nonetheless encodes structure, range, & the sound of surprise when he launches himself with full-throated near-abandon into poemsong. His voice at once lambent and without inhibition, he startles his auditors. Given that nothing he had intoned over the course of the previous two hours had even remotely prepped us for this, the effect was wounding in its exhilaration: Geoff, we hardly knew ye. Something caged spread forth & lifted, the both more sudden for all the subdominant near-mumbling of the earlier reading. The fact of poemsong’s non-translatability was more liberating in precise proportion to its resonant self-assurance: if dja-phuth doesn’t know exACTly what he is doing with these shaped outpourings, sleep take us all. As it was, the sleepers awakened, the digiridoo swallowed itself, & the ill-used hand drum tapped its own undersides in rueful glee.
As for those earlier readings, they confounded with their underachieving. At first I thought it rather a combination of the acoustic connundra of an echoing, vaulted, emptied-out, near cathedral-like space, coupled with my own inexorably decaying 65-year old tympana, that made so much of what I was trying mightily to comprehend for the most part roundly unintelligible. But yet, maybe, no... maybe there was more. Maybe it was that these two poets had never before read together, that they’d yet to find a register they could claim & share, could function within mutually & broadcast out from... the weird & wayward acoustics only exacerbated a lack of shared performative elan. A fair enough working hypoth, yet with this further delimiting factor: Huth is the vastly more experienced public presenter in the oral arena – over the course of the last decade, Beckett’s only presented in public twice, prior to Buffalo. The consequent odds severely favored disjunction, alas, as proved to be the case; their voices were not complementary, and, surprise – Beckett’s was both the clearer and, clearly, the stronger, UNTIL Huth’s amazing finale-as-breakthrough. Why?
My own retrospective sense is that Huth was inhibited: his respect & affection for Beckett the writer & thinker got the best of him. Huth occluded himself, in deference and, probably, without forethought. The effect was frustrating indeed. Huth got lost, while the erstwhile-shy Tom floated free. What to do?
I do suspect Geoff Huth to be an eminently unsentimental self-critic... he arranges for himself to be recorded, both visually & sonically, and he studies on the results. If these two are to continue as collaborative operatives in public tandem (a continuance greatly to be wished for, oh Yes) then they BOTH must study on, & compare notes about, the explicit evolution of their public presentations. The time for the unrehearsed is already past. This then, the hoariest of counsels: practice, practice, practice. Hmmm – easy for me to say, aye, yet it must be said: Rehearsal is not a dirty word. Practice despite their different schedules, lifestyles, the distances involved. Become as deliberately analytical of how they work together as they are critically astute in how poetry itself, that “small world,” functions beyond their own personal commitment to same. It’s one thing to shuffle their decks together in Western NY. Quite another to allow their poetics to sleep with the fishes in abysmal incoherence, losing not only some auditors on the break, but even the most sympathetic of us who stayed the course.
1 comment:
(addendum to previously made "more ties" comments)
dja-phuth very likely has a musical mind. Hearing him vocalize non-verbally for a few moments as the finale-lagniappe to the Huth/Beckett event in Buffalo recently also suggests that his uncanny & non-translatable visual vocabularies have their aural analog in what he calls his “poemsongs.” Neither a scat singer nor quite an alternative universe omni-vocalist, dja-phuth nonetheless encodes structure, range, & the sound of surprise when he launches himself with full-throated near-abandon into poemsong. His voice at once lambent and without inhibition, he startles his auditors. Given that nothing he had intoned over the course of the previous two hours had even remotely prepped us for this, the effect was wounding in its exhilaration: Geoff, we hardly knew ye. Something caged spread forth & lifted, the both more sudden for all the subdominant near-mumbling of the earlier reading. The fact of poemsong’s non-translatability was more liberating in precise proportion to its resonant self-assurance: if dja-phuth doesn’t know exACTly what he is doing with these shaped outpourings, sleep take us all. As it was,
the sleepers awakened, the digiridoo swallowed itself, & the ill-used hand drum tapped its
own undersides in rueful glee.
As for those earlier readings, they confounded with their underachieving. At first I thought
it rather a combination of the acoustic connundra of an echoing, vaulted, emptied-out, near cathedral-like space, coupled with my own inexorably decaying 65-year old tympana, that made so much of what I was trying mightily to comprehend for the most part roundly unintelligible.
But yet, maybe, no... maybe there was more. Maybe it was that these two poets had never before read together, that they’d yet to find a register they could claim & share, could function within mutually & broadcast out from... the weird & wayward acoustics only exacerbated a lack of shared performative elan. A fair enough working hypoth, yet with this further delimiting factor: Huth is the vastly more experienced public presenter in the oral arena – over the course of the
last decade, Beckett’s only presented in public twice, prior to Buffalo. The consequent odds severely favored disjunction, alas, as proved to be the case; their voices were not complementary, and, surprise – Beckett’s was both the clearer and, clearly, the stronger, UNTIL Huth’s amazing finale-as-breakthrough. Why?
My own retrospective sense is that Huth was inhibited: his respect & affection for Beckett the writer & thinker got the best of him. Huth occluded himself, in deference and, probably, without forethought. The effect was frustrating indeed. Huth got lost, while the erstwhile-shy Tom floated free. What to do?
I do suspect Geoff Huth to be an eminently unsentimental self-critic... he arranges for himself to be recorded, both visually & sonically, and he studies on the results. If these two are to continue
as collaborative operatives in public tandem (a continuance greatly to be wished for, oh Yes)
then they BOTH must study on, & compare notes about, the explicit evolution of their public presentations. The time for the unrehearsed is already past. This then, the hoariest of counsels: practice, practice, practice. Hmmm – easy for me to say, aye, yet it must be said: Rehearsal is not a dirty word. Practice despite their different schedules, lifestyles, the distances involved. Become as deliberately analytical of how they work together as they are critically astute in how poetry itself, that “small world,” functions beyond their own personal commitment to same. It’s one thing to shuffle their decks together in Western NY. Quite another to allow their poetics to sleep with the fishes in abysmal incoherence, losing not only some auditors on the break, but even the most sympathetic of us who stayed the course.
-Razul
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