JOHN M. BENNETT Engages
Sound
Rituals by Jim Leftwich and Billy Bob Beamer
(mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press, 2018)
[First published as the FOREWORD in the
book]
Jim Leftwich and Billy Bob
Beamer call these complex and playful poems Sound
Rituals. In a letter, Leftwich says,
“I got the title from an article about a Cecil Taylor performance from the
1980s. In some of his live recordings,
he seems to build the structure for his improvisations during the performance
itself. Certain kinds of poems can be
written that way as well....In a sense, the writing of a poem is always a sound
ritual, and the collaborative writing of a poem is even more so.” These poems function, then, not only as sound
poems, but as everything that can happen in poetry: they are visual, surreal,
lyrical, political, thoughtful, expressionistic, intimate, literary,
collaborative, improvisational, and much else.
The sound or sonoric dimension, nevertheless, is quite strong, and is
present in the rhyming, in the echoing of vowels and consonants, and in the practice
of transduction or homophonic translation.
The “ritual” aspect of these works perhaps refers to the way they were
created, as a specific process between two people – a collaboration – but it
also suggests a way to read or perform them:
as a kind of multivalent incantation, an ambiguous text that provides
new meanings and resonances every time it is accessed.
“Sound Ritual Number 55”
exemplifies many of these characteristics.
It opens with the phrase “masks of sound/and tarotic unrest” which seems
to refer to speech as a mask emitting signs to be interpreted, “under a
curvilinear seaside”. That is, as a
proteic interpretation, ever-changing.
That idea is reinforced by the reference, a few lines down, to the
astrologer and alchemist Paracelsus, one of several specific cultural
references, such as “Popeye”, “Hercules”, and “Bird” (Charlie Parker comes to
mind). The poem also plays with words,
for example in the neologisms “herculuckier” and “buzzcouping”, and plays with
sounds: “scoups/snoops/couping”, “buzz/fuzz”, “Paraclete/Paracelsus”, and
“sound/unbound/unwound”. Flies become
birds in an alchemical frenzy! There is,
in addition, a sense of place in this poem, a sense of sea and wide spaces, and
of voices that open and expand into that space. It is fascinating that those voices seem light
and positive, even while being “praise-songs of the heretics/burning at their
stakes”. This is one of the most
striking things about this book, that in spite of the historical and
contemporary horrors of which it is strongly aware, it is so confident and
life-affirming. Leftwich says that this
apparently paradoxical aspect of this book, and its “improvisational,
processual, often letteral poetry can provide a situation, and a process” which
could function “for both writers and readers” presumably as a way of finding a
kind of understanding of the world and the mind that creates and/or perceives
it.
These unique and
wonderfully flexible poems can, and should, be read and contemplated by a
reader in his or her solitude, but they would also, it seems to me, make
marvelous performance texts, which could be performed by two or more
persons. In fact, some kind of choral
performance, with many voices, would concord with the very nature of these
works, which seem to have been created by a plurality of voices, voices very
much in consort with each other.
January 2018
*****
John M. Bennett has
published over 400 books and chapbooks of poetry and other materials. He has
published, exhibited and performed his word art worldwide in thousands of
publications and venues. He was editor and publisher of LOST AND FOUND
TIMES (1975-2005), and is Founding Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at
The Ohio State University Libraries. Richard Kostelanetz has called him
“the seminal American poet of my generation”. His work, publications, and
papers are collected in several major institutions, including Washington
University (St. Louis), SUNY Buffalo, The Ohio State University, The Museum of
Modern Art, and other major libraries. His PhD (UCLA 1970) is in Latin
American Literature. His latest books are Select Poems, Poetry Hotel
Press/Luna Bisonte Prods, 2016; The World of Burning, Luna Bisonte Prods, 2017;
Poemas visuales, con movimientos con ruidos con combinaciones (with Osvaldo
Cibils), Deep White Sound, 2017; and The Sweating Lake, Luna Bisonte Prods,
2017.