I’m sorry it’s taken so long to put this all together—we pushed ourselves a little towards the end in getting the performance (which happened last Friday, March 28) together, and since then, apart from taking a little while to recover from the exhaustion, we’ve also been doing some unrelated things, trying to think through what happened a little, and have been gathering together and ordering all the stray lines that may have been missed (I believe we have them all). At any rate, we’re deeply, truly grateful to all of you for taking the time to contribute these lines. First:
Please do a quick search for the lines you have contributed, and if you find them missing from these lists, do let me know.
All these lines are unsigned, and are essentially under a license that should protect them and all their derivatives from copyright, for all time. (Although I think you can attribute your name as “organiser” or something, on a derivative, if you like.)
2. These lines were presented as part of “I Heard it is One of Many Possibilities”, which is the poem I put together, with a selection of the lines, for performance by five voices [in this case, these voices were Danish Husain, Monica Mody, Annie Zaidi, Priya Sen, Iram Ghufran and myself] as part of “What Have You Heard?”, on the afternoon of Friday 28th March in Delhi, as part of the KhojLive Performance Art festival. My task was to put together and orchestrate a coherent poem that would last about 9 minutes. Given the time limit, I knew I wouldn’t be able to use all the lines of both the I Heard and It Is lists, but I did try to represent something from every contributor, although in practice I missed some of you—because I’d slipped up in typing in a few lines, or because your lines came after the poem was finally finished, after an all-night session, at 7 am on the 28th of March.
3. For the time being, we plan to continue accepting lines for this strange little archive (see 5d below); lines that, as per the invitation form, are one sentence long and begin with “I heard” or “It is” (the latter describing something in the writer’s immediate environment). So let people know. All future entries should be sent to the following email address: ihearditis [at] gmail [dot] com .
4. This project was one element of a longer, hour-long performance put together by Sophea Lerner and myself that presented “a suite of site-specific, pre-composed and improvised poems, sound objects and audience interactions exploring and unveiling disconnections and echoes around time, place, language and voice, using a toolkit of poetry, performance and sound art practices.” This included, among others, the piece, “What Is Live”, a composition of sound and words that involved playing back recordings of the (outdoors) performance space at different times of the day, “dueling” with an earlier, improvising version of myself, and making a connection between the idea of “live” and “dead” spaces in sound theory and the solitude of writing in anticipation of an audience who would somehow “reflect back” the way a live space reflects sound. We should have the recording of the whole performance up at some point.
a) What do you think is going on here?
b) What kind of histories / precedents can this kind of practice (a mass-coordinated exercise in formal restraint by several writers, a concert of unsigned lines then arranged into a poem) be located in, and what kind of future might it have?
c) What do you think of how we have handled attribution? We decided to keep it completely anonymous for various reasons—because that was how we had started this exercise, because we didn’t want to start a guessing game on which poet had written which line, because we wanted to free up the ownership of the archive as much as possible, and so on. Another option we could use for future projects is to list all the contributors alphabetically. What’s your opinion on this?
d) Should we close contributions (at what point) or should we continue accepting contributions? Ie., to what extent should this be a restricted time-based performance?
e) How might it be done differently and how might it be done better?
Thanks & yours ever--
2 comments:
I don't know if this qualifies as a critical comment, but reading through this, I kept thinking what would be fun to try would be to arrange the lines completely at random - using a random number generator of some sort - then read them aloud to an audience along with a more deliberate arrangement and then poll them (the audience, not the lines) to see a) which one they liked better b) whether they could tell the 'human' poem from the computer generated one. It would be an interesting experiment in how much of the meaning of the poem is intended and how much is simply imagined by the reader.
I'm also curious to know why you chose to isolate the two sets of lines into separate sections. I could imagine it would be interesting to set up the dialog between them, mixing them together.
To point b), the one thing I was reminded of (aside from Whitman) was Silliman's Ketjak. Silliman isn't using lines contributed by others, of course (at least I don't think he is) but what he is doing is taking a set of lines and arranging and rearranging them in changing patterns to see how different juxtapositions bring out different meanings as well as how those variations tie back to the whole. That could be an interesting way to go with this collection.
Of course, if you really wanted to be ambitious, and could find enough people to participate, you could try converting the main poem you've created into a poem sequence, each poem starting with one line from the poem and ending on the subsequent line (and, possibly, including other lines from the collection in between).
Hi F-- interesting comments as always. Will look into Ketjak-- thanks.
About isolating the 2 sets of lines-- I'm not sure if you're talking about the poem ("I Heard It Is One of Many Possibilities") where I rearranged some of the lines for performance...? In that one, the first section is only I Heards, the second section mixes both, introducing the It Is as a second theme but keeping the I Heard...? So it's a kind of musical choice. The lines at phonebox.org, on the other hand, are merely a comprehensive listing of the archive, catalogued for ease of use.
About the interesting spinoff idea you have, I think that would start more peacemeal. Perhaps you might launch it? The thing is, at the length of a single line, it's very hard to tell the difference between the line contributed by a 7 year old, say, and the lines by practicing poets with years of reading, experience and practice behind them. Further more, each individual self is snipped to just a flicker. This makes it easier to put together. These are the elements that would change and become more (perhaps interestingly, I don't know) problematic when people are asked to write whole verses...
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