History Project Event

My new book on queer poetry in Boston and San Francisco, Never By Itself Alone: Queer Poetry, Queer Communities in Boston and the Bay Area will be out from OUP soon (index just completed!).

In the meantime, I’m delighted to be talking (virtually) about the project with Michael Bronski and Julie Enszer for Boston queer archive The History Project on Thursday May 23rd, at 22:00 GMT (UK)/ 12AM CEST (Central Europe)/ 18:00 EDT (US East Coast). I’m especially pleased to be able to share the space with Michael and Julie, due to Michael’s first-hand involvement with Boston’s Good Gay Poets, as well as his own scholarship of US queer history and culture, and to Julie’s extensive scholarship of the flourishing of US lesbian poetry and work as editor of Sinister Wisdom and of work by Pat Parker, Audre Lorde and others. Many thanks to them both for taking part, and to Tony Grima for organizing. More details here.

Pollini

Maurizio Pollini has passed: one of the final survivors of a generation of musicians for whom music and political radicalism were not alien to each other, a time in which Pollini could be booted off his own recital for speaking out against imperialist war, the generation in Italy of Nono and Abbado and the Italian Communist Party, which he joined at the beginning of the Years of Lead; the generation, too, of performers like Pollini who were committed, not only to the standard repertoire, treated in all its continuing complexity, rather than as mausoleum or ornament, but to the astringencies with which the modernism of the pre- and post-world war years still offers its challenges fifty, a hundred years on. What survives, the performances, all of them, the official releases and the bootlegs, the unrecorded recitals witnessed by capacity crowds: the tolling bells and flowing waves and hammer blows of Nono's sofferte onde serene, the gleaming un-sentimentality of a Chopin that, precisely by virtue of its unsentimentality, could move to tears; Stockhausen and Boulez and Beethoven and Schuman, reworked and refined in each performance in search of a core, not fixed but changing, always in motion. 

This afternoon I've been listening to a late '70s recital uploaded to Youtube--one of many, and one I'd not heard before. In Salzburg in 1977, Pollini plays Webern's Variations for Piano, Boulez's Deuxième Sonate, Schoenberg's Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, and a Beethoven bagatelle as encore. The Webern opens, played, as it's clichéd but true to remark with regard to Pollini, with a sense of architecture--the beauty of structure, of audible relation and ordering--but also of the pathos that Webern wrote into his expression markings, the condensation of huge feeling into seconds of time, tiny phrases, single notes or pauses. Then the Boulez, played with a speed beyond the limits of physicality or thought, precise at every instant, intoxicating, acerbically glittering; and the leanness of the Schoenberg little piano pieces, like the Webern, enormous in their miniaturism, what their composer called the "burning" associations and connections of feeling rendered precisely through precise articulation of what in its mood shies away from precision; calls from the edge, cries to the future heard from the past and brought into the present and to presence through a touch at once delicate and severe, hard, implacable; a performance that fully lives up to the demands out of which the pieces were written and to which such a performance returns them, questions without answers, or answers for which we don't yet know properly how to ask the questions, as their meaning shifts in time and what seemed graspable, that fire, in all its flawed and visionary expectation, fades away once more. 

   

I only saw Pollini live once, last June: his recital at the Southbank Centre had already been postponed once, alongside a number of other recent cancellations, and we worried it might not happen; but the event went ahead, and in the event, was probably his final public performance. I don't know if I'll know how to talk about this adequately, that sense of watching a performer who for years was a standard of absolute virtuosity--criticized for an overtly technical approach--yet who in his final decade, as ageing had its effect on something that could anyway only by some sort of super-human means by sustained, had instead been criticized for fluffs, flubs, the disintegration of technique, and whose recital was full of an un-intended drama. It was like no other recital I've seen, in all its confusion and perplexity and what won through: the failure of memory, from the start sudden moments of forgetfulness, like seeing an actor forget their lines onstage; the sudden exit from the stool, to return with a sheaf of scattered sheet music; but returning, in fact, so quickly to the piano that he had no time to order the pages, and, while still playing, kept having to turn to pages to find the place in the score, before finally a page turner was enlisted; and in between, or at some point in the proceedings I can no longer remember, as bridge or patch, a kind of treading water, a playing for time, the unexpected return of improvisation to the western compositional tradition in what sounded like remembered approximations of the pieces to be played, some other music from elsewhere, in the mind or memory, a kind of phantom understudy, dancing out of reach. Were we hearing the advertized Schumann Arabesque, had he switched to the Chopin, or was this in fact some approximation of both, or neither, coalescing before collapse? Playing too fast, or too slowly, phrases and articulation tumbling into each other, unsure if we were hearing errors or had simply been off course by the whole presentation, but whether they were there or not, hearing, as the recital went on, more and more, moments of clarity, whether emotional or technical it doesn't matter, a fierceness, a heaviness, and a cantabile singing that, particular in the Chopin, cut through. Perplexed by it all, we talked about the expectations we put on performers, the idea of the start, the vision of the solo virtuoso, the instrumental maestro, alone on the bare stage, those expectations projected onto them as conduit for the music, the pathos of their failure, as what had been criticized for being virtuosically inhuman became all too human and what transpired was not awed witness to the sublime but a kind of uneasy voyeurism, in which the emotions of watching, listening, expecting, hoping, identification and dis-identification tore at the fabric of the concert ritual that Pollini had so long embodied; not in the politicized way of the famous, interrupted on-stage declamations about Vietnam, but in the reflexes of watching and listening, what it is we come to the music, and to particular performers of it, to hear. In all its difficulty it was both un-representative--as coda, as a heroic if failed effort, at end-of-life, to sustain a peak of performance--yet also representative of the difficult and the challenge that Pollini always presented and represented, suffering waves, serenity, leanness and burning feeling and the last fade to a silence now final, the stage cleared, the piano lid closed, the stool packed away.

Of this 1979 performance of Mozart's B Minor Adagio, what more could be said? Clarity of memory, boundedness of the boundless: "At 57 measures, the length of the piece is largely based on the performer's interpretation, including the decision of whether to do both repeats; it may last between 5+1⁄2 and 16 minutes" (like that of Claudio Arrau). The openness of form and its limits: the repeat and the return as acceptance and defiance at once, in this piece of sober mournfulness. In the 1979 performance, the notes hang into the silence, the raising of the foot from the pedal, the sudden stop, the beginning again, in a kind of declamative whisper. Three years later, Pollini plays it a full three minutes faster; it falls limpidly to a different kind of whisper, a different kind of hush, very much the same piece, but in its emphasis like the change from a patch of sunlight to one of shade, from tragedy to a restrained sadness none the less effecting--perhaps even more so. And these are just the traces of something that was so much richer or deeper than any of the one performances that nonetheless condensed, almost every time, an aspect of that richness. Without performances like this the music, however written, would and could not live: with them its afterlife stretches to a still visionary horizon on which a view is opened every time they're heard, the promise they contain.

"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.)

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)

Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) (June 2023)

News of News (May 2023: Update Post)

“The Subject of Emancipation”: Trilce Translation Launch (May 2023)

Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton: Preview (April 2023: Update Post)

Latest (April 2023: Update Post)

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

Gaia: Two Orchestral Works by Wayne Shorter (March 2023)

News and Views (February 2023: Update Post)

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

The Goldfish Bowl: The Romantic Englishwoman (1975. dir. Joseph Losey) (February 2023)

IKLECTIK Gigs (January 2023: Update Post)

New from Materials (January 2023: Update Post)

Jackie McLean’s Cry (January 2023)

(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.)