Apologies for cross-posting
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Writers Forum announces its seven hundred and fiftieth publication. It is
WORD SCORE UTTERANCE CHOREOGRAPHY co-edited by Bob Cobbing and Lawrence
Upton. 156 pages featuring 42 poets ISBN 0 86162 750 4 Price L6.50 plus
postage. Preface by Bob Cobbing + "Word Score Utterance Choreography" by
Lawrence Upton and "A thing or two upon the page" by Robert Sheppard +
selected book list. The printer has undertaken to get it done in time for a
launch on 24th October.
Payments to New River Project, 89a Petherton Road, London N5 8QT. Payments
in sterling please.
NB We are hoping to organise a better way for people to be able to order it
Below is the text of Upton's piece, stripped of its formatting to ensure
everyone can read it.
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WORD SCORE UTTERANCE CHOREOGRAPHY
What is a poem?
Don't answer that.
What isn't a poem? Read on.
I assume that there was utterance before writing. I assume that some, at
least, of that utterance was pleasurable - pleasurable for the utterer or
the auditor or both... There are birds singing in my garden - a thrush on a
stout high branch is stringing complexities of notes in what seems to me
joy. Joy in birds may be different to joy in humans, though I doubt it, but
I am sure that it is there in birds, that birdsong and the utterance of
other creatures often goes beyond mere assertion. Surely the same use of
voice has always been with Homo Sapiens even if I am wrong about the rest of
the creatures.
To say that an act of utterance is, perhaps firstly, pleasurable is not to
deny that it is communication as well... The instigation and communication
of pleasure is a primary act; if we all spent more time making pleasure, if
only for ourselves, we might undermine each other and ourselves less.
And then we had writing, scripts of one sort or another. Is script a
notational system for utterance?
I think that often it is not, because it is inadequate for the purpose; but
it may give an indication of what the utterance may be. However, the
performance, if it is to follow the script, requires intelligent informed
reading.
What we can say of any script is that it is other than the utterance
referring to it. A script is partly a hyper-utterance system. With a script,
we can, to some extent, escape death: Ovid, dead 2000 years, speaks to me
often though the signal to noise ratio is poor; and, of course, I cannot
speak back. With a script we may begin to simulate our presence with
another. We may read what others we have never met have written.
But scripts, as I have said, are limited. Timbre is lost. Accent is
problematic. Tone and intention may only be indicated by elaborate and
unwieldy means. Over time, pronunciation and stress change and words'
meanings are modified. Body language is lost.
So much of our received and transmitted information is non-verbal and/or
visual, should we not make use of non-verbal and visual material in our
poetry?
Why not modify and extend the written language / script / notational system?
And, at the same time, why not perform similar operations upon our concept
of what constitutes the spoken language? Let us recognise the importance of
what we say which does not use recognisable words, grunts, sighs and so on,
gestures and less easily perceivable signals. A film camera extends it and
we are happy, and the wiser for it. Our language, English, Spanish, French
or whatever it is, is only part of our total potential utterance.
As we extend our concept of language to include all the possibilities of our
utterance, let's allow pictures. Illustrations if you like, but, better than
that, perhaps the texts can be bade to tell their own pictures. Evocatively
and pictographically. Prompts. Doodles. Cartoons. Some visual poets work in
that area, extending meaning and the means of meaning, but limiting the
performed utterance to the process of reading. There is much fine work of
that sort.
Emboldening, italicising and underlining are widely acknowledged to have
significance in linear texts though many poets eschew it. I wonder why?
Musicians make their lives easier by writing instructions on scores,
extending the notational system. Why shouldn't poets? Can that basic
formatting not be expanded? Larger type, louder voice? What about type at an
angle to the vertical? What is the difference between the hand-written text
and the printed or typed text? What difference does a deliberate smudge make
to a text? What might be done with variations in the grey scale? What might
be done with variations in the grey scale! The text... does the text have to
be a text? I read that in Mecca the sky line seen from certain angles writes
There is no God but Allah and Mohamed is his prophet. I hope that's true.
The text could be the room around you. The text might include other
performers. The text could be your own body. Alphabet soup anyone?
About 100 years ago, Picasso and Braque saw this from another similar angle
and put words into their fields of vision. Why should not poetry contain
painterly material?
If poetry can be set to music, then music can be held (as you hold someone
you love rather than as you hold a prisoner) in a poem, and be, in certain
cases, inseparable from it.
Hypertext demonstrates the viability of this idea; but this work, whatever
it is, and among other things it is visual poetry, has been available to us
as a possibility all the time; and here is a whole book of it. A hole book,
because some of the work it contains is only partly in the book; the rest of
such works remains potential, in the book, and must be performed beyond the
book to be realised, made kinetic.
Not all the poets in this book would agree with what I am saying. There's
glory for you.
I see no reason to be limited to words alone in poetry any more than we
should limit ourselves to particular pronunciations of words. It depends
what kind of communication you want. It depends to what degree you want to
tell the linguistic sea not to flow... Our utterance of texts from the past
is to a greater or lesser extent guess work because we can no longer hear
the original utterance; we only have some marks on pages and walls and our
deductive ingenuity. In translation, we may compromise much of the sound /
music for the sense and vice versa.
I do not want to make non-verbal expression mandatory for poets, merely to
extend the permission for such use to take place. A fellow poet who had
witnessed a performance in which I participated remarked that he had at
various times made all the sounds I had made; but only, as he put it, in the
bedroom; and, he went on, it had not occurred to him, nor did he feel ready,
to make such sounds before an audience. I took this as praise and as an
encouragement to persist.
Our repertoire of non-verbal sounds is extremely interesting. Analysis of it
would, I am sure, support the belief that pain and pleasure, and love and
hatred, have close kinship.
I do not think that there is an equivalence between any set of marks and any
set of sounds except one that we impose. Little is further from my desire
than to propose a crude synaesthetic system. The audible utterance and the
visible mark / gesture are signs of our responses and signs to which we may
respond, no more.
Performance of the same text may vary quite widely from day to day and
performer to performer. To some this might be seen as a weakness or failure,
but I welcome it. Let us give poetry, from those who wish to, physicality
and the frailties and/or variety of physicality.
The variation between performances of visual texts is likely to be far wider
than one would expect of a linear text... I mean of course a verbal text. Or
do I mean a lexical text. What is the distinction? A microphone will capture
it all whether or not the utterances are in the lexicon; and we have far
less trouble with new (to us) non-dictionary exclamations than we do with
words the dictionary knows and we do not.
In going beyond the dictionary and widely accepted conventional forms, we go
nearer to some extent to communication, being able to ignore the Babel
obstacles. It depends what manner of communication you wish to effect.
I could bog you down with definitions and precise terminology here; instead
I am underlining words on which I might be terminologically attacked, and
some words on which an attack is long overdue, and leave you to read the
dictionary when you have time!
With visual poetry you don't have to start at the top left hand corner of a
page and work down towards the bottom right hand corner. You just start, not
anywhere, somewhere. It's like not having to stay on the pavement. It's like
being where you want be when you want to be - though as a maker you will
soon find that the visual poem inflicts its own constraints; you do not have
freedom. But you can walk through old walls and sometimes hear and see the
sounds rising from the page and hear what is marked there without it being
performed.
Visual poetry encourages us to be calligraphic with our voices and bodies,
and somewhat musical with what we see, making the performance at once more
abstract and more concrete than a performance based on linear lexical text.
Much of what is going on here may not be writing as that is often
understood. It is not painting or drawing, but it is near them. And so with
music. And so with much else. It may be writing.
If we don't have its name yet, so much the better. No one has dominion over
it; it has no nationality; but it is international;
In the beginning was the word for a continuation is an utterance; it is that
it is
What is a poem
Each editor brought a notional list of poets to the making of this book.
Perhaps it was a list of prejudices though I would prefer to think of it as
a list of hypotheses. I was pleased at how easy it was to agree to a list in
common. Subsequently there were additions to that list; but always our
intention was to make available to users of this book another insight.
This book is not intended to define a school nor to provide you with a list
of the best or most significant poets. It may do one or even both, but that
would be a complete accident. There are no real bests, only lists of them;
and significance can be a beam in the eye.
In this book is a selection of poets chosen to give a sense of the variety
of approaches that is possible. We had very limited space and could not
include all that we enjoy.
Faced with the question, put to us sometimes by audiences and generated by
our own deliberations, What is the relationship between the marks on the
page and the sounds one makes when reading the page, here, in this book, is
an answer, a set of answers, providing the beginnings of an answer.
Use this book to increase your understanding of this kind of work and then,
if you wish, build your own pantheon. If this book introduces you to poets,
then so much the better, because many included here are too little known in
this country...
(Personally, beyond the aims stated, I am most unhappy that we have been
unable to locate the Swedish poet Bengt-Emil Johnson for whose work on the
page and in the ear I have the greatest respect. He has contributed
immensely to the extension and enrichment of poetry and I regret that it has
not been possible to demonstrate that here..)
A potential bibliography is huge. We offer instead a handful of references,
believing that they are sufficient to whet your appetite and start you
searching out your own sources of information.
It is the editors hope that you will pay attention to what it is the makers
themselves say they are doing, rather than relying on what others say,
including us. Try to hear recordings and see performances. Experiment with
the techniques yourself because by doing so you will appreciate the richness
and complexity they can generate.

Lawrence Upton
(c) Lawrence Upton, 1998





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