Listening as Learning: Documenting Preverbs: Part III

activities extracurricular to making poetry records, no. 3C

Note: this essay originally appeared in the volume Zero Point Poiesis: George Quasha’s Axial Art (New York: Aporeia, 2022; Burt Kimmelman, ed.) [Part I] [Part II]

Collegiality aside, Quasha’s message highlights a number of potentially valuable outcomes from our recording project. Human interactions that involve “engaged listening” are a rarity, and we are in a situation where we need to invent and manifest “ways of listening”—which for me has evolved into cultivating instructive ways of listening. I value the entering into a “poetic world” in such a way, having the experience and instruction “of being spoken to.” Having worked on several extensive single-author recording projects, Quasha’s sense of an “expanded field of listening” agrees with me.<13> I experience an informative, genuine, human outcome while being stimulated by sophisticated, wise literary creations and perspectives. If I hadn’t realized the preverbs’ thoughtful underpinnings, their “opportunity for variable in-process reflective reading-listening” (cf. above), I certainly was well-aware of their capacities by this juncture.

As Quasha says, in one of the preverbs from Glossodelia Attract, “My work is not experimental, I am” (72). His active engagement of Eastern spirituality—over the course of nearly a half-century, including t’ai chi, meditation, and healing arts—sets him apart from most everyone else I come into contact with, and informs his poetics in most interesting ways. Like the preverbs, Quasha embodies openness regarding his own diverse nature.

To be sure, apart from matters I have already discussed, there is to be had an understanding of how the carefully phrased swoosh of language in his lines, the effect of it, expressively parallels the experience of his axial paintings. The overall trans-medial unity in his work more than interests me. Despite their differences in form, the fluidity of his poetic language is so very like the swerves of paint he creates instantaneously, purely intuitively, in his axial paintings. It is particularly in this sense that he is a trans-medial artist whose in-the-moment compositional approach pulls into a unity different strands of his work. I am impressed by how much energy his demanding approach adds to the output.

“Overall, I see lack of authoritative modeling as a positive fact in poetry,” Quasha has written in an essay of his he titled “Healing Poetics,” which sets out his praxis, “not only for the good of diversity,” he continues, “but for the trust it encourages in conscious poetic process itself. No doubt we would have to betray poetry to pin it down” (Poetry in Principle 34). Reciting his preverbs, Quasha isn’t simply going through the motions of reading a text he has previously read and perfected. Rather, his effort is to make each line a new experience for himself—through which a unique vibrancy is transmitted, in each poem. This is a powerful experience to be present for, to receive the communication.

The relevance of his remark, “Tape recorder joins typewriter as instrumentation of the muse,”<14> which I uncovered forty years later, is even greater, more salient now, possibly more than ever. It rings in a most valuable potentiality—one of wide-ranging benefit given the portability of our technologies. As someone who has an exorbitant amount of direct experience with sound recording and audio production, I concur with his prescient observation, while I am inclined to add that the recorder is not only potentially a muse; it is also a most valuable, instructive tool.

Listening to poetry, in many cases, slows down the process of reception, which opens the possibility of more time to think inside the formations of language, what is being said and done there—and the particular experience of the poem as a listener receives it. The first-hand experience of hearing a poet’s voice traverse the course of a book (in Quasha’s case a series of books) instructs and inspires me as much as, if not more than, reading the work on the page.

Rhinebeck, New York / July 2019

<notes>

13 Other projects of mine have included collaborating with Peter Lamborn Wilson and Charles Stein, for instance, including on their respective author pages at PennSound, and with Andy Clausen on Audible.

14 In Quasha’s 1977 essay “Dialogos: Between the Written and the Oral in Contemporary Poetry” (New Literary History 8: 488, 1977); reprinted in Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg, eds. Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics, 461-74 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).