Sunday 17 March 2024

"The holes in history": Tyrone Williams














The poet and scholar Tyrone Williams passed away this March: a bitter blow indeed. Williams had recently taken up a post at SUNY Buffalo after decades at Xavier University; throughout this time, he exemplified the model of the poet-critic or poet-scholar, writing longer and shorter pieces on the work of the past and present that must have numbered in the hundreds, keeping abreast of the teeming world of small press poetry with enthusiasm, warmth and rigour, teaching, appearing regularly at conferences and on panels (we shared a Zoom stage at ALA just a few weeks before he passed, in a panel on Calvin Hernton, organised by Lauri Scheyer). Williams’ strengths would require pages to enumerate in full: the laconic precision of his verse, its apt negotiation of vernacular and vehicular, of the mendacities of US politics and the tenacity of the lives that survive despite it; the wealth of his critical eye and his critical imagination. As noted when Williams’ work was discussed on Jacket 2's Poem Talk (a show he also frequented as guest), “these densely allusive poems” contain “layers of referentiality; yet the layers overlap, are torqued, punned, entendred, homophoned, and doubly and triply and quadrupally historicized — sometimes in one word or phrase, conjuring social, geographical, historical, juridical, psychological, musical, poetic, theoretical registers.” And perhaps that allusiveness--which is not the same as elusiveness--manifests that same generosity, that movement outward--toward others, toward the world--as well as inward--toward the close detail of the text, towards having one's head in a book--that characterised his way of being, in writing, in the world.

Of all of his many pieces, I’ve perhaps most often returned to a short essay published a couple of years ago at Big Other, ‘Reviewing: Ethos and Praxis’, in which he wrote on the role he saw criticism as playing. Williams writes of “thinking beyond the limits of the profession, thinking, that is, of one’s avocation above and beyond one’s vocation, beyond the ever-expanding market and public relations overload, beyond even the end of one’s life.” As he notes, this is a sentiment “espoused often enough by poets, usually in the form of a cliché (I’m writing for my future audience of readers).” But in his case, it took a deeply-felt practical dimension, a contribution to the development and sustenance of poetry community, of the mutual support of poets for other poets, and of an expansion beyond the small world of the small press and the small scene towards a genuinely expanded sense of a readership--even if that expanded sense can sometimes, for better or worse, be more wishful than real. “Having chosen a profession that allows me time to read and write,” Williams observes, “I’ve tried to balance my own reading and writing ambitions with some semblance of a commitment to a larger reading and writing community. It isn’t the best of all possible worlds—that would have been earning a living as a songwriting lyricist while reading and writing poetry in my “spare” time—but it has been a pretty good one.”

Commenting on Williams’ poetry for Poem Talk, Herman Beavers remarked that Williams “sings the holes in history”. Williams’ generosity, his sense of the relation of poetry and community, poetry and history, is something we all could learn from. And I hope that some of his body of critical writing might be collected in book form sooner or later. For now, his diligently-maintained website, Heretofore, contains a wealth of information. And there are short obituaries at Big Other here and from Xavier University here

***

--I have a short track track on a Bandcamp release, edited by Will Montgomery, of sound works by poets responding to lines from Tom Raworth’s Ace. Available here: https://selvageflame.bandcamp.com/album/attention-moves

--And an interview conducted a couple of year ago with Aaron Shurin is out in the latest issue of The Poetry Project Newsletter, focusing on his recently republished Ubound, but traversing his whole career from Fag Rag through to the Poetry Wars and to the poetics of today. (A New and Selected Poems is forthcoming next year.)

Monday 1 January 2024

Blog Posts in 2023

A True Account (November 2023: Update Post)

Moral Clarity (October 2023: On Gaza)

News of News of News of News (September 2023: Update Post)
News of News of News (July 2023: Update Post)


News of News (May 2023: Update Post)

Latest (April 2023: Update Post)
In other news... (April 2023: Update Post, Lorenzo Thomas, Karen Brodine...)


News and Views (February 2023: Update Post)
“Myths and Dreams”: The Rolling Calf/Pat Thomas (February 2023)

IKLECTIK Gigs (January 2023: Update Post)
New from Materials (January 2023: Update Post)

(Not so many posts this year, the writing mostly elsewhere. I’ll try to come back to/keep this up this blog though. A hidden corner somewhere, a pile of notes.)

Thursday 2 November 2023

A True Account


A True Account, a book of poems, recently came out from The 87 Press, with cover art by the great Candace Hill-Montgomery. Here's the write-up:
A True Account collects works written between 2013 and 2020, published by a variety of small presses in the UK and the US. Here are variously refracted the student movement, austerity, general election, referendum, the crisis of 2020 or 2019 or any year you care to name; the Massacre of the Innocents, the housing question, the October Revolution in November; Sappho, Mingus, Storm Ophelia; Rukeyser, Rilke, Rodefer; the aesthetics of resistance, the insistence of history: luxury and voluptuousness, peace and pleasure, beauty and order, the questions that still remain unanswered and the problems that remain unsolved. “Wanting poetry to save my life, to shame my life, as LONG as the WORLD is WIDE, and as WIDE as the WORLD is LONG.”

“Lyrically gorgeous and real poetry. This book is a bright spot in a bleak time.” - Peter Gizzi 
You can get the book here, and I'll be launching the book in person in London at Cafe Oto on December 8th.













--Also out, a cassette release of me reading my 2014 long poem The Problem, The Questions, The Poem on Ben Hall's cassette label Ornette Coleman Fiend Club--available here





















--Jazz poetry primer in The Wire.


















--On Christian Wolff in Artforum. This piece came out just days before the disgraceful firing of AF's editor David Velasco over the publication of the 'Open Letter from the Art Community to Cultural Organizations' against the ongoing mass murder in Gaza, and the subsequent resignation of Zack Hatfield and Chloe Wyma, whose editorial guidance over the pieces I've published in Artforum over the past few years has been exemplary. An open letter of October 27th, criticizing the actions of AF's owners, Penske Media Corporation, can be found and signed here.

***

Meanwhile, in person, for those of you in or around Berlin, I'll be giving two talks in December, both at the Freie Universität: on Monday, December 4th I'll be giving a lecture on Amiri Baraka and the Advanced Workers (details here), and then the following Tuesday, 12th December, I'll be giving a seminar on my current project on free jazz, Survival Music (Room 319, John F Kennedy Institut for American Studies, Lansstraße 7-9, 14195 Berlin, 2pm-4pm). And this month, at the kind invitation of Dimitra Ioannou, I'll be giving a talk at the A Glimpse of Festival, critical institute for Arts and Politics, Politechniou 8, 104 33 Athens, Greece, on the weekend of November 25th/26th.

Monday 23 October 2023

"Moral Clarity"

A friend points out that there’s been a lot of talk going round in the past few weeks about “moral clarity”. We all know, or should, where that phrase comes from, and that in reality it’s part of a vast and ongoing campaign of distortion, dissimulation, disinformation and the defense of the wholesale murder of the Palestinian people. Ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing. To say that, to know that, that’s moral clarity.

Wednesday 6 September 2023

News of News of News of News

Some recent writing:


















--On Krzysztof Penderecki for Bachtrack.


















--On Don Cherry and Peter Brötzmann's work with children for the Don Cherry special in The Wire's September issue. (The issue also has reviews of a live performance by Edith Steyer's John Carter project, of the latest instalment in Wild Up's Julius Eastman project, and of Angel Bat Dawid's Requiem for Jazz and the latest in the Red Hot series, themed around Sun Ra's 'Nuclear War'; more reviews, of the A L'Arme Festival and of Klangraum Dusseldorf, in the October issue).
















--Liner notes for The Art of Noticing, one of the CD releases recorded at Eddie Prevost's Bright Nowhere concerts last year.


















--The Calvin Hernton Selected Poems is now in the world from Wesleyan UP, with the first review in from Publishers Weekly here.

Details of in-person and on-line launches to follow...

--Finally, I've updated my Soundcloud page for the first time in around a decade with some recordings from the past few years: https://soundcloud.com/david-grundy



Sunday 2 July 2023

News of News of News


A short essay called ‘ “Key to a Savage Sideshow”: The Magazines of the Occult School of Boston’ up at Post-45 in a Little Magazines feature edited by Nick Sturm, focusing mainly on the one-shot Boston Newsletter assembled by Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, John Wieners, Stephen Jonas and Joe Dunn one Boston summer. The issue also contains some fantastic pieces including Iris Cushing's piece on the first issue of Umbra magazine. Great to see Umbra scholarship continuing to develop and Iris’s piece will be very useful for those who haven't managed to see a copy of the magazine itself.

Also Umbra-related, my review of the Lorenzo Thomas Collected edited by Aldon Nielsen and Laura Vrana is out from Tripwire--online and it will also be out in the next print edition. I wrote this a few years ago--pre-Covid--so it’s nice for it to finally be out, with many thanks to David and Caleb.

A longer essay, ‘ “The Arc of Struggle”: Poetry and Defeat in the Work of Sean Bonney’, is out in‘No Future: Poetry of the Current British Crisis’, a special issue of Études anglaises edited by Dan Katz.

And the Multiple Melodicas set from Cafe Oto earlier last month is up at Douglas Benford's Soundcloud page: Douglas, myself, Georgina Brett and Steve Beresford all playing multiple melodicas, multiply. Recording thanks to Billy Steiger.

Monday 5 June 2023

Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023)














Kaija Saariaho has passed away at the age of 70. Saariaho passed at the crest of a wave of public attention. Last month her work was celebrated in a BBC ‘Total Immersion’ weekend at the Barbican Centre, while not far away at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, her opera Innocence received its long-delayed UK premiere. (The 2021 Aix performance can be viewed in its entirety on Youtube). 

Innocence, on which I’ve been writing a separate piece, is an extraordinary work, exploring multi-lingual experience, the legacy of violence, and the seething contradictions of present-day Europe, in a music that never feels forced in its treatment of contemporary themes, a music of dramatic power and aural luminosity that consistently resists dramatic cliché. And perhaps it’s her operas that will stand out in the tributes to come: certainly, they brought her the kinds of attention rare for composers of new music, particularly ones who choose not to restrain or compromise their musical language. L’Amour de loin, Adriana Mater, the oratorio La Passion de Simone and Innocence are extraordinary works by any standard, condensing the lessons of her prior work, with its exploration of the varieties of orchestral electronic and instrumental colour, and adding the architectural question of music’s relation to the word. 

That question--the relation of music to word--is, perhaps, both the abiding formal question and the great theme of these works, as they ask how to bear witness, to give testimony, to express what corrodes or exceeds the bounds of expression, whether that’s through the lens of courtly love, in L’Amour, war, in Adriana and Simone, or the contemporary spectre of acts of mass violence Innocence. The way these works go about the process is far from grandiose: instead, Saariaho has invariably favoured smaller ensembles, chamber dramas of one or two--a trend bucked in fascinating and complex ways by the social webs and layerings of past and presence in Innocence--from which these bigger canvases can be woven. Again, both a formal and a thematic analogy suggests itself, as throughout her career, particularly in her orchestral music, small-scale relationships and details build up to huge, sprawling masses of sound, the parts darting back and forth between each other and between the whole. 

In any case, the Saariaho family’s decision not to reveal the details of the illness until after her passing has admirably kept the focus on her work, freed from the sometimes distorting traces of valedictory regard. For what’s clear is that the work she was producing almost until her death was not so-called ‘late work’. It was, to be sure, mature, achieved, contemplative, and all the other aspects one might aspect from late style, but so was all her music, from the beginning. This was not, in other words, a work of ruminative looking-backwards, of retrospective rumination or reckoning; or it was so only inasmuch as Saariaho was always concerned with the multiple valences of time, her music looking in all directions simultaneously, dissolving and suspending time while immersing us in its midst. Below is a review of the Total Immersion concert I wrote last month, posted here in tribute.

Kaija Saariaho ‘Total Immersion’ Concert
Barbican Centre, Sunday 7th May 2023
Anu Komsi, Anssi Karttunen, BCC SO/Sakari Oramo


For the final concert in a day of performances of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s work, the BBC Symphony Orchestra came together to play four orchestra pieces spanning three decades, offering readings of rare radiance and clarity. From 1989, Du Cristal, the earliest work on the programme, is one long sustained, not-quite climax: an extraordinary array of textures shimmering and hovering on a brink of controlled delirium. With notes piled up on top of one another to create dense layers, the orchestral sound is massive, sometimes overwhelming, yet at the same time it feels as if something is being contained: a seething mass, a great, explosive force constantly on the edge. This effect of suspended movement is emphasized by five percussionists on an array of overlapping tuned metal—glockenspiel, crotales, triangles, tubular bells, xylophone, vibraphone—and multiple, booming kettle drums, with a synthesizer, harp and piano acting as a kind of additional rhythm section. Yet, particularly when witnessed live, what stands out if Saariaho’s care for individual detail: the fortissimo trill of a piccolo sounding out over the whole orchestra, a miniature choir wailing clarinets, the whole work ending, magically, on held harmonics from a single cello. 

Twenty years on, the cello concerto Notes on Light is more conventional in its format, yet its effect still imparts a magical strangeness. With Anssi Karttunen the redoubtable soloist, over the five, run-on movements, the feel of the piece is pensively ecstatic or ecstatically pensive, the orchestra sympathetically twitching with or in alternation with the soloist who alternates motivic lines and ethereal harmonics. From a brief silence emerge held building chords gradually layered, gentle dissonances, underscored by repeating plangent piano chords and whispering cymbal washes. At times the characteristics of the cello writing seem to extend to the entire ensemble, the effect of downward turning pitch slides and bends, giving the effect of something winding down: a slackening pulse, a slowing heart rate, the gentle exhaling of breath. A work of gentle fluctuation, as opposed to the translucent massiveness of Du Cristal, the piece is once again alive with morphing organic colour and constantly shifting refracting texture, beams and waves and swells, a whole other world.

Written in 2020, Saarikoski Songs was the most recent work on the programme: it was here given its UK premiere by its commissioner, the extraordinary soprano Anu Komsi. The texts by Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski—Communist, bohemian, translator of both Joyce’s and Homer’s Ulysses—offer nature poetry shadowed by pantheistic assurance and the threat of destruction. It’s hard not to read their words as dire warnings of the ecological catastrophe or the threats of war in the contested borders of and beyond Europe (as a Finnish war child, Saarikoski was evacuated to Sweden). “The forest is an academy obliterated by barbarians”, writes Saarikoski in the first text, ‘The Face of Nature’, reversing the cliché of “nature red in tooth and claw” by which human governments project social destruction onto nature, thus justifying their own actions. Across the world the Amazon rainforest burns: wordless melismatic syllables reach for high vibrating notes, twittering, rhapsodizing or lamenting, the orchestra aswirl on sustained tremolo or a doubled motif, a woodblock tap or rustle of bells, low, sliding strings, an unexpectedly lush string chord, as the soprano momentarily becomes “the song of birds lost in the extinction”. The subsequent settings are sardonic (‘Everyone from now on will have their own’), tenuously rhapsodic (‘All of This’), bitingly tensile (‘Bird and Sanke in Me’), and finally raptly mysterious (‘Through the Mist’), closing out on a final series of wordless held soprano notes and a final glockenspiel note which seems to condense the entire work into a single, miniature chime.

For me, it’s the closing piece Circle Map, that, along with Du Cristal, is the real highlight here. Written for the largest ensemble configuration of the night, this 2012 work sets poems by Rumi in their Persian originals. It is not, however, a conventional song cycle in the manner of the Saariskoski songs. Rather, recordings of the poems by Arshia Cont were electronically treated by Saariaho and her husband, composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière: broadcast on speakers surrounding the audience, they are both integrated into the orchestral texture and stand outside like a kind of radiant alien object (think the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001). Once more we hear swirling harp, tuned percussion, motifs that rise and fall into hushed held chords stretched like thin wires; plangent brass underscored by low piano rumbles, the orchestra as a swooning, swooping, shimmering entity full of rich inward song. The treated voice is a deus ex machina, not the meditative swooping soloist of the previous works but instead coming as if from the outside with the thrill of the integrated unknown, as the orchestra accompanies the echoing pitch cadences of speech translated to simultaneous monody. A film is projected over the stage, showing a hand tracing out script overlaid with superimpositions of computer-generated abstracted calligraphy along with the subtitled text. Close one’s eyes, however and far richer inner worlds emerge, attesting to music’s capacity to alway be more than the visual, more than speech. As one of the poems puts it, “whatever circles comes from the centre”. And that could be a principle for Saariaho’s music as a whole, its swirling still points, animated suspensions, its glittering clarity and mesmeric power.